History VideoGame / EmperorRiseOfTheMiddleKingdom

** Wondering why Sun Tzu is the only Confucian hero during the Qin campaign? Because in real life the Qin outlawed the study of Confucianism, burning his books and killing their scholars. Sun Tzu only got to stick around because for purposes of gameplay your noble housing needs access to Confucian worship, and he's only treated as a Confucian hero for gameplay purposes. In real life Sun Tzu had nothing to do with Confucius or his teachings; in fact, ''The Art of War'' advocates the usage of spies and espionage in warfare, which traditional Confucians disagreed with since they found such tactics dishonest.

** Hand in hand with the below instances of ProtagonistCenteredMorality, your allied cities ''really'' shouldn't be addressing your character as rudely as they do, when in many of the campaigns you're a city administrator personally serving the Emperor.

** Wondering why Sun Tzu is the only Confucian hero during the Qin campaign? Because in real life the Qin outlawed the study of Confucianism, burning his books and killing their scholars. Sun Tzu only got to stick around because for purposes of gameplay your noble housing needs access to Confucian worship, and he's only treated as a Confucian hero for gameplay purposes, in real life Sun Tzu had nothing to do with Confucius or his teachings.

* BearsAreBadNews: Gobi Bears rank up with Tigers as one of the worst wildlife types, actively seeking out walkers they see and chasing them to kill them, inevitably being drawn to the city limits in doing so.

** Infantry are MightyGlacier combined with ZergRush: they have the best armor and decent hit points, a good melee attack, and train in groups of sixteen to provide numerical superiority.
** Crossbowmen are FragileSpeedster: They attack from range with powerful missiles, but have the lowest HP and are terrible in melee combat.
** Calvary are JackOfAllStats: They move fast, have strong attacks, and decent HP and armor.

* AwesomeButImpractical: Carved Jade fetches the highest price of any commodity at 230 strings for 100 units, but Jade always has to be imported, and at 90 strings a unit that cuts the profits of Carved Jade to a more modest 140 strings. Not to mention you need someone to supply you Jade and someone to sell the carvings to.
** BoringYetPractical: That said, the entirety of the Zhou campaign has you with two trade partners in every city, Anyang and Qufu. One sells Jade, the other buys Carved Jade, so for the whole campaign you're given a simple way to make a decent amount of cash with little investment in space or workers.

* BoringYetPractical: A pair of salt mines can produce enough salt to keep the entire city supplied, and seasonings of salt count as an additional food supply for purposes of food quality.
* ChekhovsGunman: Those Nomad Camps in the north? Just another city, in fact they quickly become hard to negotiate with, not that there's much to make trade worth it. They're eventually a minor nuisance, best to forget about them and just build up an army in case they attack. Fast forward to the last campaign -- Mongolian Empire? OhCrap.

** Any demands for troops will likely come with a month or two of advance notice, but even if you send your forces immediately they may not arrive in time, and how ''dare'' your soldiers be late when they were so sorely needed! Sometimes you can also refuse to send forces, perhaps because ''you don't have any to send'', and your ally will succeed in whatever they needed the troops for without them, no thanks to you. Of course, if you're getting attacked and request military aid from an ally many months in advance (again, perhaps because you don't have an army of your own, which is possible on numerous maps), they're liable to take their sweet time responding, or will just refuse.

You also have to deal with your neighboring cities and kingdoms, who are more often than not friendly. You can trade with them, send them gifts, maybe get some in return if they like you, and eventually form an alliance -- or you can rally an army and march on their city to conquer them and make them your vassal. Either way, it's gonna take a lot of work.

The single-player campaign spans millennia of Chinese history as the player acts as various historical figures, some addressed by name, others are just a flunky to TheEmperor of the time building his city for him. As time progresses through the campaign, technologies (and resources) become outdated and are replaced with different technology, such as iron smelting replacing bronze smelting, bronze and iron each being used by different industries. Objectives often demand the player produce a set amount of a commodity within a year, get a certain population level, or conquer neighboring cities. You also get to build famous monuments, from stock temple complexes and palaces to Su Song's clock tower, the Grand Canal, and inevitable, the Great Wall of China.

* PaperThinDisguise: It usually isn't too difficult to spot spies in your city. Hint -- it's the random herbalist/water carrier/taoist priest wandering through your industrial sector. Subverted if they disguise themselves as inspectors, which are omnipresent in cities and thus rarely look out of place.

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* GameplayAndStoryIntegration: Paper/Iron Smelting/Lacuqerware/etc has been discovered! Time to integrate it into your city because the old stuff just won't do anymore.
** Wondering why Sun Tzu is the only Confucian hero during the Qin campaign? Because in real life the Qin outlawed the study of Confucianism, burning his books and killing their scholars. Sun Tzu only got to stick around because for purposes of gameplay your noble housing needs access to Confucian worship, and he's only treated as a Confucian hero for gameplay purposes, in real life Sun Tzu had pretty much nothing to do with Confucius or his teachings.
* GameplayAndStorySegregation: No mineral deposits for smelters means no raw materials for weapon crafting, but your hunters and sentries, guardsmen and woodsmen seem to find metal for their bows, crossbows, spears and axes just fine. And even if you don't have stone quarries a lot of your buildings, including city walls, obviously use carved stone. Falls under AcceptableBreaksFromReality -- if you actually needed Stone to build every building that looked like it was built of stone, the game would be nigh unplayable.

* MyRulesAreNotYourRules: The AI cities do not function under normal human ideas of ethics or fair trade. You can send them warehouses full of resources they need, but dare to demand something they produce in surplus and prepare to be laughed at. They in turn will demand things of you with often only a few months warning, and will be outraged when you don't give it to them, even if there is no reasonable way to get it in time (they'll demand resources you flat ''can't'' produce, or crops that aren't in season, for example).
** Any demands for troops will likely come with a month or two of advance notice, but even if you send your forces immediately they may not arrive in time, and how ''dare'' your soldiers be late when they were so sorely needed! Sometimes you can also refuse to send forces, perhaps because ''you don't have any to send'', and your ally will succeed in whatever they needed the troops for without them, no thanks to you of course. In summary, whenever it comes to interacting with rival cities, no matter what the issue is, it is ''always'' your fault.

* ShownTheirWork: It's obvious that as much as a historian will facepalm at the game's events, the developers did at least some research. For example, the Qin Dynasty ruler is referred to as Shi Huangdi, not Qin Shi Huang -- it was only after the Qin Dynasty that the name was shortened and prefixed "Qin", when other rulers named Shi Huangdi sprang up. And there's also the above mentioned fact of Sun Tzu being the only Confucian hero because the actual teachings of Confucius were outlawed under the Qin.

** Unless your objectives state you need so much of the population living in a certain level of housing evolution, or you're in a huge city needing a military and elite housing sector, it's best not to let your people move above Spacious Dwellings. Why? Unemployment rises surprisingly high, exponentially so since a comparatively small industry and agricultural workforce can sustain quite a large city. How do you get rid of unemployment? Well, you could destroy blocks of housing regularly and hit Undo make masses of people move out, though of course that's a short-term solution. For the long term, you can lower wages (which will create unrest), build city walls (which do not employ many people), or expand your industry and agricultural segments. This in turn will cause you to quickly run out of warehouse room as you produce far more than you consume, and if you don't have trading partners to sell your surplus goods to they'll just keep piling higher and higher.
*** Fortunately, large-scale sacrifices every month allow you to at least curb your excess materials, as well as earn favor from the heroes.

* FakeDifficulty: Some maps are difficult purely by not letting you build a particular type of building, like clay pits and kilns, or smelters, or hemp farms. This in turn forces you to import the resource year-round, or keep your housing evolution at the bare minimum. When you're sent off to the desert and can't building logging sheds to give your tax collectors what they need to do their jobs, you have to import Wood or watch your coffers wither, and then you need something to export because Wood isn't exactly cheap. This is sometimes given a HandWave that the environment is unsuitable to that type of commodity, sometimes not. And if your mission objective is to get a menagerie of animals, you might need five or even ''eight'' types, and there's only two in your city map. Guess where the others have to come from -- time to suck up to the neighbors, better hope they don't send you a species you already have.

* TheComputerShallTauntYou: Unless you're their best friend, AI city rulers will always sneer down at you, demanding things of you with the warning they're so mighty they could just march into the city and take them by force, so you might as well save yourself the trouble and just submit to them -- at which point they'll snicker you caved "like an obedient dog". And if you don't send it off by the deadline, they'll say that a "yak-brained fool" like you is lucky they're patient enough to wait a bit longer, but don't press your lucky further.

* AwesomeYetPractical: Many of the Heroes can turn the tide of a mission with one visit.
** Guan Yu is arguably the most useful hero of them all, able to bless forts to instantly fill their supply of Wood and Weapons to full, and blessing warehouses and mills full of Bean Curd. Build a dozen warehouses, get Guan Yu to visit, and send him down the path blessing them one by one to get hundreds of units of free food. The fort blessing is not to be overlooked either, since so many maps require you to import weapons or steel to forge weapons and either resource is very expensive.
** Sun Tzu instantly captures any spy he meets, and even if you don't know they're around you will be spied on a lot in later missions. Get him into the city and just have him patrol the roads between the residential and industrial districts, and watch the capture notices pour in.
** Xi Wang Mu. Jade costs 90 strings of cash to import? Xi Wang Mu can bless a jade carver's studio and fill it with jade. Repeat what you did for Guan Yu with a line of studios and you're literally creating money from thin air.
** Silk. In almost every mission at least one other city needs it, oftentimes more than one, so get those farms planted and start weaving, because silk trade is highly profitable and gifts of it are great ways to butter up an enemy. The Han campaign pretty much centers on this, the Silk Road to trade it to the far east is established and colonies made to facilitate easier trade along it, and the first briefing states plainly that bribing the Xiongnu with silks will help you to stay on their good side.

''Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom'' (2002), also known as simply ''Emperor'', is the sixth game of the CityBuildingSeries published by {{Creator/Sierra}}, this time set in Ancient China and developed by Breakaway Games. Contrary to a lot of other city builders, this one has a heavy focus on infrastructure -- very rarely is your goal just to build up a large population, you have to maintain it by keeping your people supplied with food, resources and luxury. Indeed, the industrial sector is the more complex part of the game, keeping up with the supply and demand needed to produce the items you need to build up your city, expand it, and making exports.

* DonutMessWithACop: The flavor text for the watchtower mentions your patrolling watchmen fortifying themselves with hot tea and sweet pastries bfore going on patrol.

''Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom'', also known as simply ''Emperor'', is another RTS game published by {{Creator/Sierra}}, this time set in Ancient China. Contrary to a lot of other city builders, this one has a heavy focus on infrastructure -- very rarely is your goal just to build up a large population, you have to maintain it by keeping your people supplied with food, resources and luxury. Indeed, the industrial sector is the more complex part of the game, keeping up with the supply and demand needed to produce the items you need to build up your city, expand it, and making exports.

* BagOfSpilling: Unlike the previous games in the series, any city you've already built will remain exactly as you left it if you wind up coming back to it during the campaign.

* EverythingsWorseWithBears: Gobi Bears rank up with Tigers as one of the worst wildlife types, actively seeking out walkers they see and chasing them to kill them, inevitably being drawn to the city limits in doing so.