RETROSPECTIVE
Revisiting Pharaoh
An enchanting 1999 real-time strategy game that thrives on micromanagement
Pharoah starts off simple enough. Create jobs and homes to attract settlers. As their shabby shanties develop, so does your empire. Ensuring that your subjects have access to the resources they need is the name of the game here. But unlike most real-time strategy games, Pharaoh isn’t about meaty battles or raising cannon fodder. It forces you to juggle between dozens of resources and hazards while keeping your citizens from revolting. But watching a bustling Egyptian empire break out from its cocoon and transform is a joy to witness. Bear in mind though, it only takes one slip up for your thriving society to end up in a crypt.
It’s a familiar take on the formula passed down from Caesar III, albeit with a much-needed change in scenery. The pacing is often merciless, with seasonal floods and the ire of the gods keeping you on your toes at every turn. Be mentally prepared to restart missions, over and over again.
Your dynasty awaits.
Humble beginnings
Pharaoh’s campaign missions revolve around a ruling family in charge of a series of cities, handling ever-increasing demands, and earning respect over time. Every level has a specific goal you need to achieve, and often come with a deadline. Fail to meet it and the Pharaoh lets his massive army loose on the specks of dust that make up your little settlement. While it is better than a mission failed screen, few things test your patience like a horde laying waste to something that took years (in-game time of course) to build. Objectives can range from reaching culture level goals (fountains, statues, you get the gist) to brewing beer (no kingdom would be complete without beer). Sometimes you’ll be tasked with creating monuments; timeless relics that live to this day. Those who don’t want to be held back by these targets can head to the sandbox mode for an experience free from annoying regal neighbors and time limits.
Getting started isn’t all that hard. Place a couple of housing posts and settlers will show up. But it isn’t long before the difficulty is ramped up to 11, threatening the peace your subjects enjoy. Handy visual overlays for stats like fire risks, crime levels, desirability, and more let you keep tabs on what each home has access to, and what it needs to expand. As the quality of life improves, your townsfolk expect more from you. From a clean water supply to religious duties, their demands grow over time. Keeping them happy is key for homes to be upgraded into ones that can hold more people. This is crucial because building placement is haphazard as it is. The more spread-out your establishment is, the tougher it is to protect it from hazards. And I’m not talking about floods or enemy armies.
The Nile’s annual floods are a whole different ball-game. But they do bring in rich harvests. And yes, they bring man-eating hippos as well.
Mission Impossible
Fire is common in Pharaoh. So are plagues (some things are better left in the past). And the way the game introduces them to you is no less burdensome than the rest of its mechanics. Build a gold mine, they said. Get some gold, they said. But what they didn’t tell me was that an architect’s post keeps them from collapsing. It doesn’t take much to guess how I figured that out.
While I like hand-holding as much as any other veteran of the genre, it’d be nice if Pharaoh didn’t punish me with a trial by fire before telling me how to prevent said trial in the first place. And constructing posts that maintain buildings after I’ve already cluttered the streets with homes? A tough ask. Players who play the game at a bristling pace will find themselves knee-deep in debt or calamity, or both.
Good luck stuffing a police station between the gardens of your elite class.
While Pharaoh gives you a handful of advisors who tell you about the problems your empire faces, it largely expects you to figure things out for yourself. Clicking on citizens gives you information about their whims and fancies. While immigrants initially don’t worry about much, watch as their demands increase like those of antsy children. Food and water is just the start. Concerns like education, health, religion and entertainment quickly enter the picture of papyrus. Soon, you’ll be juggling a variety of industries based on what the latest trend is.
Colorful pottery? Consider it done.
Walk in the park
Speaking of resources and hazards, Pharaoh relies on a convoluted walker system to protect your kingdom from threats. A police station deploys a policeman (the boys in blue) to patrol the area, a water carrier brings water from wells to homes, so on and so forth. While other games just need you to place a building, here you have to keep in mind the paths connecting homes and the buildings that serve them. Run by a shoddy AI system, walkers have no minds of their own. By sheer misfortune, they can choose to ignore some paths entirely, leaving wide swathes of your kingdom prone to disaster even with the right building at the right spot. While you can place roadblocks, it just blocks everyone, nullifying any semblance of utility they might have had otherwise. Counter to intuition, this means that less spread-out roads help your walkers do their duty better.
Watch helplessly as a Fire marshal casually walks away from smoldering huts. But alas, this is no Hollywood flick.
This game might have straightforward win conditions, but the number of ways to lose a mission far exceeds one’s imagination. No matter the amount of blood and tears put into designing a city, things rarely go according to plan. Impressions Games must have been into sarcophagi and mummies and it shows.
Who’s the Pharaoh now?
While the Cleopatra expansion brings in hordes of locusts, the base game still has a couple of divine tantrums up its sleeve. In addition to the pesky and demanding Pharaoh nipping at your heels, you also have to appease the gods. Fortunately, you need to concern yourself with only a few out of the five gods in Pharaoh’s Egyptian Pantheon in every mission. Serve them well and you’ll be blessed with boons based on their domain, but ignore them and there will be consequences. A booze festival from time to time really gets them in the mood. But falling Kingdom Ratings or a barley/beer shortage (good heavens) could spell disaster for your fledgling populace.
What is the Kingdom Rating, you ask? It’s as simple as hieroglyphics.
It’s effectively Caesar III’s favor system, but worse. It plummets if you suffer from debt, fail to assist allies with military aid, or are unable to fulfill the Pharaoh’s demands (he’s more omnipotent than the gods in this game). Fail to meticulously plan your city and your treasury will simply fail to keep up with your expansion plans. And Debens (the game’s currency) are rather hard to come by in the first place. If you don’t have gold deposits near your city (cue gold mine collapse), your best bet is a trade route. Or taxes.
Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but boy is this game difficult. A quick fix isn’t going to change things. Worse, it can lead to a mass exodus of citizens with their carpets rolled-up, heading to lands with better prospects. This leads to posh dwellings downgrading to their former shanty days, making things even worse. But a waiting game to accumulate resources is no feasible strategy either.
The Pharaoh and his hounds are rather strict with their non-negotiable deadlines and win conditions.
Combat is an afterthought
While you can create soldiers and arm them, combat is never the focus during missions. The diversity in the military units you can draft is a far cry from combat-heavy strategy games like Age of Empires but this works in Pharaoh’s favor. The game keeps things simple and battles depend only on the number of soldiers on the winning side. Even walls and defensive structures are secondary in nature. Thank the gods. Players have enough on their hands as it is.
Micromanagement is an acquired skill. It isn’t something you’re born with. And it will either absorb you or frustrate you to no end. From calling the game “Far-o-ah” when I first bought it to writing about Pharaoh over a decade later, the gaming landscape has not sat idle. Rival franchises have developed several quality-of-life improvements that overshadow the sheer complexity of Impressions Games’ classic.
Nonetheless, Pharaoh’s intricate systems and vibrant palette paint a powerful picture of an ant colony under your care; a premise that is hard to put down. But whether it rises like the sun-god Ra in his boat across the sky or sinks into the marshes of the Nile is up to personal preference. The maddening walker system and the taxing demands the game places on the human mind cannot be dismissed. If you’re into slow-paced games with complex interlinked systems that reward attention to detail, it doesn’t get more old-school than Pharaoh.
There’s a fine line between frustration and a solid challenge, and Pharaoh sure knows how to shuffle on it while juggling a dozen props all at once.
