History VideoGame / EmperorRiseOfTheMiddleKingdom

Contrary to most other city builders, the focus of ''Emperor's'' gameplay is less building up a large, populous city, but instead is on building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to maintain a city. Players must keep their people supplies with food and goods from markets, and also build religious shrines, medicinal buildings, entertainment schools, and inspector and sentry towers. These buildings spawn "walkers" that patrol the city administering their servivces to houses they pass by. As your people are given what they need, they'll renovate their houses into larger houses that can accomodate more people, and their demands shift from basic necessities like food and water to luxury services like entertainment and tea.

Finally, you are not alone in the world. There are rival cities out there and just like you they need to maintain the needs of their people. With friendly relations, you can establish trade routes to export exceed goods and import things you need, can give and receive gifts of goods, and maybe even agree to a military alliance. If things go hostile, your rivals will demand things of you, send spies to sabotage your city and steal your goods, and even rally a military force to invade and conquer you. Fortunately, you can do all of these things back to them. You can be TheGoodKing who forms TheAlliance with friendly neighbors, or you can be TheEmperor who forms TheEmpire by conquering rivals one by one.[[note]]Of course, in the name of historical accuracy, you'll probably end up being that second one most of the time.[[/note]]

''Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom'' (2002), also known as simply ''Emperor'', is the sixth game of the VideoGame/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.

You also have to deal with your neighboring cities and kingdoms, who more often than not are unfriendly. 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.

** Soldiers instantly respond to orders, and will depart to conquer a city instantly regardless of their actual location relative to the city limits. However, they still have to actually walk to the city exit before the army icon on the map will begin to move, and you can watch that icon move across the map over the next few months as they head to the enemy city. Spies act the same way when you dispatch them to an enemy city.
** Spies and Messengers likewise spawn from your administrative city and move to the city entrance to begin travel to their city of operation. For messengers, though, what happens when they get to the city limits depends on the type of message. If you're demanding something of a rival, the rival will instantly be notified as seen by their city history, but if you're giving them a gift or sending a trade request, you can watch the messenger move towards the city on the world map, and they will respond to the message instantly when the messenger arives. Send a demand and a gift at the same time and usually, despite this variance, the city will respond to both message at the same time, when the gift messenger arrives.
** Cities that make demands to you will not acknowledge you sent them what they asked for until a month or two after the fact, but they will acknowledge that you responded on time even if by the time they respond the time limit would have passed.

* InterfaceSpoiler: The menu shows coverage sections for entertainment and religion facilities long before you get access to them, and clicking on a house will tell you what they need to evolve, which may be a resource or building you don't have yet.

** Elite housing provides ten times more taxes than commoners... occupying four times the space and three times fewer people, who don't enter the workforce. And then there's all the demands they have...

* WrittenByTheWinners: PlayedForLaughs. As far as the narrators are concerned, whatever rulers you are serving at the time, regardless of what they are actually doing, are virtuous and wise... right up until they get deposed by someone who doesn't like them, in which case the same narrator will sneer at the past ruler and denounce them as an insidious and weak poser.

* WrittenByTheWinners: PlayedForLaughs. As far as the narrators are concerned, whatever ruler you are serving at the time, regardless of what they are actually doing, are virtuous and wise... right up until they get deposed by someone who doesn't like them, in which case that narrator will sneer at the past ruler was an insidious and weak usurper.

* ArtificialStupidity: The walkers that carry and fetch goods are completely incompetent. They're liable to go across the map to gather a resource they can get from a warehouse just two tiles away from their spawn building, and will sit outside a full warehouse and complain it has no room when there's an empty warehouse right next to it. They also lack moderation when delivering resources to several places that need them, resulting in instances like, say, one tax office gets 4 loads of paper while another sits empty, or a bronzeware maker having 4 loads of clay with no bronze while another bronzeware maker next to it has 4 loads of bronze and no clay.

* KickTheDog: Whenever a foreign city sends an emissary to your city, you have the option to allow them in, turn them away, or ''execute them''. This has no practical purpose but to piss off your rivals, but you can do it.

** Soldiers instantly respond to orders, and will depart to conquer a city instantly regardless of their actual location relative to the city limits. However, they still have to actually walk to the city exit before the army icon on the map will begin to move, and you can watch that icon move across the map over the next few months as they head to the enemy city.
** Messengers have this or not depending on the type of message. If you're demanding something of a rival, the rival will instantly be notified as seen by their city history, but if you're giving them a gift or sending a trade request, you can watch the messenger move towards the city on the world map. Send one of either message at the same time and usually, despite this variance, the city will respond to both at the same time, when the gift messenger arrives.
** Cities that send demands to you will not acknowledge you sent them what they asked for until a month or two after the fact, but they acknowledge you responded on time even if they only gave you a month to do so initially.

** Several levels happen along the Silk Road, with little natural resources and a high annual income as a requirement. The best way to make money is to buy silk from China and sell it more expensively to the West.

** "The Budding of Buddhism" needs three years of heroes and a temple complex to complete. As the name implies and the narrator tells you, you're supposed to celebrate the Buddhist Guan Yin... but there's nothing preventing you from using the Daoist goddess Xi Wang Mu to reach both objectives.

* MundaneUtility: Offer sacrifices to the heavens. Entice a PhysicalGod to manifest in your city. Put it to work blessing you with free materials and extra-productive buildings. Rinse and repeat.

** Buildings that spawn service walkers, like religious shrines, inspector towers, and so forth, will only have their walkers walk so far before they return to their spawn building. However, on the return trip they will always take the shortest path back, disregarding gates and roadblocks to get back. Clever city planning can exploit this to effectively double their patrol zone. For example, a herbalist walker will walk 30 tiles before returning to their shop; build their patrol path in a loop 58 tiles long, and when they hit their 30th tile they'll keep walking along the other side of the loop since it is the shorter path back.

** AI cities will often laugh in your face if you demand something of them, even if it's something they produce in surplus and you have previously sent them dozens of units of goods they need. Conversely, when the AI demands something of you, they will be outraged if you don't comply, even if there's no reasonable way for you to get what they want in time. For instance, they'll demand crops that are out of season, or commodities you simply can't produce, and expect you to pay up with as little as two months of notice.

* 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 where they aren't even on the map, until the last few missions where they reappear, now named... '''Mongolian Empire'''? OhCrap.

* LoopholeAbuse: Buildings that spawn service walkers, like religious shrines, inspector towers, and so forth, will only have their walkers walk so far before they return to their spawn building. However, on the return trip they will always take the shortest path back, disregarding gates and roadblocks to get back. Clever city planning can exploit this to effectively double their patrol zone. For example, a herbalist walker will walk 30 tiles before returning to their shop; build their patrol path in a loop 58 tiles long, and when they hit their 30th tile they'll keep walking along the other side of the loop since it is the shorter path back.

* HollywoodSpelling: Some city and people names are spelled phonetically instead of how they ought to be spelled. Somewhat justifiable since they're all in Ancient Chinese, and a lot of such names probably can be translated into direct English in different ways.

* TooDumbToLive: AI cities never learn that if you've got a standing army as large as the game allows, maybe they shouldn't make unreasonable demands of you, or refuse and insult you when you demand something of them. They will do the latter even if your army just returned from ''conquering'' them and making them your vassal. As mentioned above, your rivals will demand resources of you with the warning if you don't comply they'll just march into your city and take them by force. It's almost always a hollow threat, but you the player have full right and ability to actually do it.

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: One mission has a rival city suggest a joint building project: a canal that will increase trade. At the end of the mission, it turns out the idea was to tie up resources and manpower in a pointless construction project... except now the canal really did boost trade.

** When a city is conquered, you can set the tribute to be whatever good you need if you have enough cash, including goods they need to import.

* ArtificialStupidity: The walkers that carry and fetch goods are completely incompetent. They're liable to go across the map to gather a resource they can get from a warehouse just two tiles away from their spawn building, and will sit outside a full warehouse and complain it has no room when there's an empty warehouse right next to it. They also lack basic common sense when delivering resources to places that need them, resulting in instances like, say, one tax office gets 4 loads of paper while another sits empty, or a bronzeware maker having 4 loads of clay with no bronze while another bronzeware maker next to it has 4 loads of bronze and no clay.

** 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, as well as the use of deception and trickery in general, which traditional Confucians disagreed with since they found such tactics dishonest. Fittingly, any spy he encounters will be reversed.

** 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, as well as the use of deception and trickery in general, which traditional Confucians disagreed with since they found such tactics dishonest.

* GenerationXerox: Some mission briefings mention your character for the mission is the descendant of your character in the previous mission several decades or centuries ago, and you're being called upon now to see if you have the same gift for city planning as your ancestor did.

* TriggerHappy: When a hero captures an animal and brings it back to the palace, overzealous sentries will shoot it down,no matter how harmless.

* VideoGameTime: The developers ''tried'' to line up new technology and the rise and fall of cities with the historical dates...but play a mission long enough and you'll be building, say, the Terracotta Army of Qin, a decade after their dynasty fell in real life.