Emperor This is a strange game, starting from the genre. Like a balmy novel strategy game from the schedule in which Civilization combined with Sim CityIN Emperor It is distinguished from both city builders and a great strategy. Domesticity continues to grind the governance of the city from the beginning of the 20th century, in which workers stir when their city of 100 illiterate souls does not receive daily newspapers.
Running the city, immense or miniature (and all of them invariably become immense), is an act of balance with the sensitivity of the Slapstick comedy. Completing the production chain means excessive extending and destabilizing the entire economy, and the only medicine is excessive extension in the opposite direction. You will repair the crisis among workers, building a factory and employing a group of producers who need fancy novel luxuries, or will literally riots. You do what you can to remain placid and start the production of turntables that require novel factories and novel producers.
Congratulations, you just worsened the problem! Now you will definitely have to find this oil to improve in rubber, mix with other materials in novel factories and make a lot of radio for the working class, which now dominate in your city. The attempt to meet the needs of the group multiplied its members ten times and made a tax penalty for not fulfilling their additional needs.
Developer: Games of supervisors
Publisher: Supervisory games
Released: March 21, 2025
IMRP: USD 29.99
Production chain
You may think, based on the above scenario, that it is a city building game about society and its need, and not only employees and resources, such as many strategy games on the table. You can’t be further from the truth. Whatever about people in Emperor It is amusing abstract. Let’s look at the basic employee: a worker. They only need two luxurious goods to be joyful, and to maximize their tax production, clothes and newspaper. For now, let’s ignore clothes because we will be here all day.
How do you create a newspaper? Of course, the answer changes depending on what you understand by “Gazeta”, a type of population that will serve, and available technology. But it is EmperorSo, of course, we employ the industrial process from the beginning of the 20th century to serve the population of 100 people who probably cannot even read.
So how do you make a newspaper? Well, you need paper first. You actually need cellulose first. Actually, you need wood first and need a forestry to make wood. Not wood; The entire building is dedicated to the harvest and cutting of trees. Then you will need electricity (in this case a wonderfully effective windmill), followed by cellulose factory, then paper and then the printing press, and finally … wait, The printed press produces newspapers? So how do you make books? This is the best part, no!
What about the distribution and writing of the newspaper? This is not part of the industrial process, so in EmperorIt might not exist as well. To be straightforward, creating a newspaper is already complicated enough and I don’t ask you to be even more complicated. But it seems strange to keep the cellulose factory, not the part in which you fill the dead material with what makes it valuable. Cellulose is here only because the game is very interested in how one resource goes into a complicated industrial production system. Cellulose is an vital element of newspaper production, but also ammunition. Creating newspapers, not defending, is to throw out valuable synchronization between two production systems.
That is why employees are here as resources with extraordinary needs and functions covering the entire economy. They are present in arable fields and industry, both producers and consumers of luxury goods, which constitute many resources in the game, but do not feel human at all. The ostracogasization of employees’ involvement in the industry of their humanity penetrates the whole game. You will unlock jazz clubs long after turntables and radios, because jazz clubs seem more current, even though live music is obviously ahead of these technologies. Drinking water does not play any role in your city until you introduce chemical processes, despite the fact that people (and crops and forests) also need water.
In a sense, strangeness is part of the fun and Emperor He has a joke. Several films in the game are constantly making fun of it. What is not amusing is trying to stay behind this tower Jenga in an economic system with several tools that Emperor It gives you and a strict intercourse of time/performance he expects.
Chasing many years of growth
Emperor He expects great things from you. Always bigger things, always improving until you are moving forward, you might as well shorten the game. You will always need growth, even if you make an enemy completely incompetent. Let’s go back to our example of the newspaper earlier and take a closer look at cellulose. This material is extracted from wood and is used to create paper used in magazines, but it is also one of the ingredients that are in the creation of ammunition. Every few hours in the game these two production chains consume five cellulose. At the same time, the cellulose factory produces 24 bits of cellulose.
After building a cellulose factory, it will employ a lot of money and electricity to make too much cellulose. The only way to justify the cost is to make a lot of paper and ammunition, and then feed the first employees and second soldiers. In order not to waste newspapers, you need more employees, and these novel employees need work and other goods to meet their other needs. To employ ammunition, you need to go to create a militia, not waste militia, you need a war that requires many combined production chains, each as complicated as cellulose.
Achieving balance is extremely complex and, more importantly, unskilled. You are always driven by a novel type of employee with needs that you cannot satisfy, or a surplus of material that will be wasted. If you are approaching Emperor As a great strategic game with complicated production lines and conflict, which imitate the war for abrasion from the beginning of the 20th century, you will find yourself at home. If you are looking forward to the designer of cities embedded in the second industrial revolution, in which the internal policy and morale of employees are followed by a social class, it may not be for you.
What is missing kaiserpunk
I did not like that I am chasing my city and the Empire faster and the same as Emperor I would like me to do it, but I see how someone can love this constant pressure to improve. I can’t imagine anyone how to tolerate available tools to chase this type of performance.
Many of these problems are miniature things that can be fixed in the future, from bulky menu, without sorting or searching, to miniature miniatures acting as resource icons (you are trying to distinguish a worker from the manufacturer when there are portraits 20 Pixels square). These quality of life was lacking individually. Together, they make it really complex to act on simulation with a type of control and caution Emperor requirements.
From time to time, failures and strange audio errors do not sell a fantasy of a well -oiled system. If it wasn’t so criminal and complicated, it would be easier to forgive these problems. On the other hand, perhaps an exhaustive process of learning secrets and besides this system using imperfect information is a goal and suits the game about building a novel empire in the interwar period.
There is a lot to be done EmperorBut dealing with this will not always be pleasant. It depends on you whether this inequality on the way to fully mastering the system is a problem or point of the game.
