Children of the Nile: Alexandria

I loved this game when it first came out and its still fun to play today.

I have been playing this game since 2006, it never dissapoints.

really relaxing game. Has a lot of AI issues though such as building your city on the wrong side of the river means you can't build monuments. I also had the brickmaker bug as well which is annoying and you have to restart. Otherwise the games great but its a bit too easy compared to pharaoh anyway. The game is also a bit crash prone as well which is a bit annoying. The main reason to play is for the visuals because the game does look absolutely wonderful. Pharaoh however is the better game and I recommend playing that if you want a challenge. But if you want to relax this is a good game for that.

One of my favorite go-to games. If you are looking for that right balance of complexity/casual, this is it. You can just sit back and enjoy watching your city grow slowly and at your leisure or min/max everything and soar through. Regardless of playstile, you will love it.

Good and quiet old city builder. Or at least it's DLC. Adding a new mini campaign focused on the rise of the city of Alexandria.

An underrated and probably unheard of city builder game. The game has a progression curve: start off small with just farmers and common shops, later expand the city's capabilities through craftsmen and later learned professionals who greatly increase the capability of the city. With that said, as the city grows so does its needs: initially the city does not need to care about things like religion or healthcare, but those become more important as the city grows. As such, it becomes imperative that as basileus to maintain schools to keep the graduates flowing, and likewise gain prestige to allow the city to have more professionals. Pros: Undemanding yet compelling challenges: It is covered in depth in the cons, but it keeps the player compelled enough to plan out the city and manage it a bit, and forces the player to think about building placements and later on, graduate management. The game starts off with several fundamental resources and builds up on it in a nice curve: start off managing food and wares, then bricks, then professionals, then materials for monuments and soldiers as well as foreign actions. While the challenge is enough to force the player not to go haywire from the beginning, the demands are typically reasonable enough that a minor dissatisfaction does not prevent the player from progressing. Availability of a world builder: World builders and modding capability vastly contributes to a game's life cycle (coming from an avid Civ V modder who is 5+ years into the game), and CotN has a world builder allowing the player to experiment and build worlds to their liking. This is more than I can say for many other games, and I'm glad that the developer added this feature to the game. Cons: The game is dated as heck - graphics-wise it's understandable and frankly if you're here you probably don't mind retro graphics. What is really a problem is its instability on the Windows 10 environment: it crashes often, and its crashes are difficult to recover from forcing the user to restart the computer. This is probably the biggest downside to the game in 2020. Demands can be a bit hard to fulfill - Religion tends to be a sour point because priests (who are the bread and butter of the mid-late game) are needed to tend to the shrines but also are needed to tend to the sick, the students and the dead: while shrines can swap to different gods without cost, the city often has people who want to worship different gods at the same time. As mentioned in the pros though, this alone usually isn't problematic enough to derail gameplay, although for perfectionists it can be a peeve to be unable to fulfill peoples' religious demands. Slow - Even on maximum speed things can be a bit slow, and sometimes one wants to make it even faster than the 2.5x speed setting for lull times.