Video Game / Zeus: Master of Olympus

Zeus: Master of Olympus (2000) is the Ancient Greece installment of the City-Building Series.

Players seek to build up their city-states while fending off attacks from rival cities, ferocious monsters, and even gods while calling on the greatest heroes of Greek Mythology to help them.

The stand-alone expansion, Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, puts the player in charge of Atlantis.

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This work provides examples of:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Staffing a building is now instantaneous, requiring only road access and allowing storage buildings to be placed in out-of-the-way locations.
• Allohistorical Allusion: One Atlantis mission has you build a colony on Thera, during which a mountain spits lava. The eruption of the volcano under Thera is one of the more plausible inspirations for the myth of Atlantis.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • It's possible to have Perseus and Hercules (Perseus' great-grandson) running around at the same time.
  • Achilles (the youngest of the heroes in The Trojan War) and Ulysses appear during the founding of Atlantis and several generations later, despite Troy being founded by Atlantean refugees in the game's chronology.
  • Atlantis is founded in 3500 BC in the game, and yet Hera complains about Poseidon being granted patronage of the continent by citing the competition between him and Athena for Athens.
• Another Side, Another Story: The adventure "Two Worlds Collide" is the second half of the earlier Atlantean adventure "Atlantis Reborn", but now you're playing as the Greeks, based in Mycenae,
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Buildings are instantly staffed, finally negating the need for low-level housing in the Industrial Ghetto or waiting for a recruiter to wander past housing.
  • Sanctuaries can be targeted and damaged in combat, but fortunately they can be repaired as if undergoing construction.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • The first Atlantis campaign ends with Atlas, now an immortal, going to Olympus.
  • An astronomer wishes he could get turned into a constellation... so he wouldn't be so hungry.
  • Priests try to convince the livestock they're sacrificing of the great destiny in store for them.
• Action Girl:
  • Atalanta, who single-handedly takes on giant monsters.
  • Building Artemis' temple gives you two companies of huntresses for free. While they can't be used for hunting, they can be used to aid in defending the city, conquering rival cities or answering a friend's request for troops without risking your own expensive troops.
  • Atlantean tower guards are female, and disturbingly happy to use their flamers on the enemy.
• Actually Four Mooks:
  • Some gods will go to a resource alone and return with a line of human carriers behind them.
  • Going by the loading screens, some monsters actually attack in hordes rather than the single specimen that appears on the game map.
• Aerith and Bob: Walkers are either named after famous ancient Greeks (Thucydides, Plato), have Greek names (Phillipos), or have a Shout-Out with a Greek-ish suffix (Dirtyharricles, Ungryungryippos)...
• The Alcoholic: Both Dionysus and the agora's wine seller are permanently sloshed.
• All Your Powers Combined: Zeus can bestow any structural blessing from the other gods, and his sanctuary has the same oracular function as Apollo's.
• Alternate History:
  • Thanks to an inhabited continent in the middle of the Atlantic, the Americans are discovered centuries before schedule, making Mayans and Phoenicians trading partners.
  • The Greco-Persian wars end with Persia subjugated and turned into a vassal state.
• Amazon Brigade: Building Artemis' sanctuary gets two of them for free, while actual Amazons are recurring enemies based in Themyscera.
• Angry Guard Dog: Cerberus will tear into criminals and enemies... if he's on your side. Otherwise he's right back into Hell Hound territory.
• Apathetic Citizens: While walkers next to a giant monster will react with appropriate fear, they do their jobs nonetheless.
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: Every level in the mini-campaign "The Sinking of Atlantis" will tell you that, well, Atlantis is going to sink, and are you sure you want to proceed to the next level?
• Arrows on Fire: In Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, upgrading the defensive towers with orichalcum results in this.
• Artificial Insolence: Repeatedly requesting aid from other cities (especially military or joint strikes) very quickly causes you to lose favor with them, requiring lots of time and bribery before you can ask again (presumably to avoid the player abusing the mechanic). On the other hand, it leads straight to Gameplay and Story Segregation when the entire point of a colony-founding mission is to set up a strong military outpost to fight back against an oppressive empire... who then refuses to help you.
• Asshole Victim: No one mourns when Bellerophon falls from his horse on his way to Olympus. Even when he survives the fall, no one wants anything to do with him.
• Atlantis: Here, it's a respectably-sized continent right in the middle of the Atlantic, close enough to Europe and South America that it allows trade between the Mayans and the Phoenicians. Poseidon's first campaign has you build it from the ground up, while two campaigns end with its destruction (one of them firsthand).
• The Atoner: The Atlanteans react with horror at having destroyed the Atlantean centaurs, which they saw as Always Chaotic Evil barbarians, when they had fine cities of their own - including shrines to Poseidon, their own patron god. The Atlanteans swear to never attack except in self-defense afterwards (as they continue to expand eastwards and westwards, you're eventually told this only applies to people on the actual continent of Atlantis).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Sanctuaries are high-appeal buildings that provide divine favor and can provide you with otherwise-difficult to obtain resources. Unfortunately, they're also huge, take a lot of time, marble, wood and sculptures to build, need a lot of workers, and if your city produces fleece, cheese or cattle, will require constant monitoring and replenishing of your flocks as priests take animals for sacrifice. Even worse is what happens if you run out of animals to sacrifice: the priests will start sacrificing food instead (by burning it), meaning you risk starving your population.
  • A hippodrome more than 200 stades long brings in 500 drachma a month - but not only is it a pathing nightmare, it also causes your citizens to dislike you as you're evidently more obsessed with the races than their well-being.
  • Heroes have very heavy requirements (such as 32 of a resource, large armies, or even a functioning sanctuary or two) before you can summon them. Fortunately, monsters can eventually be killed by regular troops or, more rarely, by an outmatched hero. In addition, Apollo will single-handedly defend the city from monsters if you build a sanctuary to him (and is the only god to do so, as the other gods consider it beneath them).
  • If you let monsters run amok until the final level of a campaign, you can then use multiple heroes for the last map.
  • It's possible to have enough high-level housing to have an army consisting entirely of horsemen/chariots. Quite aside from finding the space to house them, sending them all on campaign leaves you with only static defenses and invites attack from other cities.
  • A sanctuary to Ares grants the ability for the man himself to participate in an invasion, guaranteeing victory of a city on your behalf. The cooldown on this is also so long that you're probably only using it once a campaign, and Ares may randomly use it on his own anytime you invade someone.
• Awful Wedded Life: Hera is clearly running off the sitcom-wife script.
  If you don't know why I'm attacking you, then I'm not going to tell you!
• Badass Boast:
  • "I'm Perseus, and I cannot be stopped."
  • "With Atalanta here, you have nothing to fear!"
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Apollo is the god of arts and healing, who wanders the city blessing cultural buildings so they produce more walkers and perform better. He also singlehandedly defends the city from invading monsters, and if you piss him off he'll unleash plagues on your city, and by cursing culture/science buildings ensure your housing will collapse in no time flat.
  • Dionysus is a permanently drunken, fun-loving guy who increases you wine production and even gives you some if prayed to, but if angered he'll unleash madwomen on the city, curse the wineries, and send walkers to eternal drunkeness.
  • Demeter, goddess of agriculture. Sounds like a pushover, right? Except that she's the 4th-strongest Olympian, meaning if she's pissed at you, you need Hades, Poseidon or Zeus (or Hera, in Atlantis) on your side to stop her from going around destroying crops and agoras.
• Blasphemous Boast: Victorious competitors claim to be stronger than Hercules.
• Blatant Lies: Priests looking for sheep/goats/cows to sacrifice tell them "I won't hurt you... much".
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: While Zeus (and other gods, and monsters) spew lightningbolts/fireballs, the cheatcode "Fireballs from Heaven" lets you send a fireball against anything you want gone. Including monsters, gods (yes, Zeus included) and even rocks, which are otherwise unremovable.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Hermes doesn't provide resources, summon giant monsters to defend the city or fight invaders... but he makes delivery walkers go faster and traders come by more often, in addition to fulfilling requests for you.
  • Atlas speeds up monument construction by providing needed supplies and workers (and often does so on his own).
  • Paying off invading armies is a lot faster and easier than fighting them. It can even be cheaper than caving to the attackers' demands.
• Bread and Circuses: Averted to a degree in Poseidon: While making a hippodrome brings in money and boosts your popularity, building one that's too big causes you to lose popularity among your citizens (clearly you're more obsessed with racing than their needs).
• Break the Haughty: Gods that want a sanctuary get a bit undignified as the available slots fill up. Although Artemis doesn't seem to get the idea of being flattering.
  What other god will join you in the hunt?
• Buxom Beauty Standard: While pretty much all the goddesses are well-endowed, Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, has the largest pair.
• Call-Back: One of the actor school lines in Zeus is "Has anyone seen my spear? How can I be a Spear Carrier without my spear?". In Poseidon (which doesn't use actors), a spearman wonders if anybody might need his extra spear.
• Celebrity Paradox: Theater put on plays by classical Greek playwrights (such as Oedipus Rex), when the subject of those plays are walking around.
• Cessation of Existence: Cities are sometimes wiped off the map with the message "It is as if it had never existed."
• Challenge Seeker: "I am HERCULES, and I'm ready for a challenge. What have you got?"
• Cultured Badass:
  • Top-level residents have access to theater, philosophy, and personal trainers, in addition to serving as hoplites or cavalry. Atlanteans have science instead (librarians, astronomers, museums and inventors), and serve as spearmen or charioteers.
  • Hercules and Atalanta both require high levels of culture/science in the city and around their halls before they can be summoned.
• Curbstomp Battle: Sometimes a summoned hero will run into his monster before he's made it to his hall. The monster dies instantly (as opposed to the three or four hits it normally takes without being able to harm the hero).
• Curb-Stomp Cushion: Rampaging gods/monsters can only be repelled with a stronger god/the right hero, but they only target certain buildings (specific to each god/monster) that can be replaced quickly enough. Other heroes and weaker gods will also slow them down slightly.
• Creator Backlash: In-Universe example; one of the enemy gods in the mini-campaign "The Sinking of Atlantis" is Atlas himself.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Downplayed. While heroes are only good against two monsters each and are useless against gods, they can be sent alongside your armies.
• Crossover Cosmology: Averted: The Mayans in the Poseidon expansion worship Hephaestus as their great god. Revealing his actual rank in Olympus makes him attack you.
• Daddy's Little Villain: The Chimera, of all monsters, seems to have this personality.
  Mommy Echidna and Daddy Typhon will be proud of their little girl when I destroy this city!
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • Attacking a full-strength city is usually suicide, it's better to continuously raid them for supplies and chip away at their strength.
  • Attacking a monster with regular troops is very slow, but will eventually kill the monster at the cost of who knows how many replacement soldiers.
• Death or Glory Attack: It's possible to have your city's troops consist entirely of infantry and cavalry (meaning no rabble/archers). Sending them all against your enemies has a higher chance of success, but it means other cities instantly attack you due to having no troops to defend the city.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Conquered cities hate you at first not because you beat them but because you attacked them in the first place (attacking a rival gets you increased rep among other cities). Give them enough gifts/answer their requests, and they'll quickly give you their full loyalty.
• Demoted to Extra: Oedipus appears in the Thebes campaign... as your deputy, running Thebes while you're out founding colonies. His major achievement (killing the Sphinx) is given to Atalanta in the sequel. His other claims to fame go unmentioned.
• Deus ex Machina: The actor walker is probably meant to invoke this (as an actual ancient theater trope), wearing a winged costume and being seen caught in the machine that descends him from heaven. He fervently wishes for this trope when near a monster, too.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • Monsters can be brought down by regular armies, including rabble/archers. But it takes so long, it's only really viable on huge maps where the monster won't rampage through your town.
  • Orichalcum-enhanced towers can sometimes turn even attacking gods to stone.
• Dynamic Difficulty: In a roundabout way; in the colony mission of the first campaign, your city is attacked by Talos, who can only be defeated by Jason. However, the requirements to summon Jason are outrageous for a small map with few resources, and defeating Talos isn't required to complete the mission, or even expected, as the victory text assumes that you left Talos alone and he follows you back to Thebes, where summoning Jason is much more reasonable. However, it is possible, though very difficult, to fulfil the requirements for Jason to arrive and defeat the behemoth. Your reward for all of this? Since you were skilled enough to defeat Talos, the very next month after his defeat, Zeus himself will invade your city, destroying your palace and cursing your industries, presumably to punish you for Script Breaking. And then Talos follows you back to Thebes in the next mission anyway.
• Early Game Hell: The first level of a campaign greatly limits the buildings you can place, and on occasion doesn't even give you the means to make money, turning the whole thing into a Timed Mission until your funds run out.
• Einstein Hair: Atlantean inventors and astronomers.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Or rather, the glamorous are more elite. Professional soldiers are only produced by elite housing, and need a lot of resources to keep functioning.
• Energy Ball: Several gods have one in their hand, and use them to attack or bless buildings.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Subverted: Hades is one of the more useful gods, since he's lord of the Underworld - and all the silver inside it. His temple creates veins of silver ore, he wanders around the city making tax collectors produce double (gives new meaning to the saying "Death and taxes", doesn't it?), praying to him gets you even more money, and his Hell Hound goes around eating troublemakers. Conversely, when pissed off, he sends Cerberus at you or curses those same buildings, and worst of all, kills a large amount of walkers just by showing up.
• Exact Words: The Symphonia Ithikos prevents Atlanteans from raising arms against anyone except in self-defense, under penalty of divine retribution. Later levels clarify that this only applies on the actual continent of Atlantis, leaving you free to send your armies against Mayans, Phoenicians, and Greeks. On one occasion, two Atlantean cities declare war on you and each other, so conquering both is the victory condition.
• Failed a Spot Check: The maintenance building watchman is so intent on looking for fires from his perch that he doesn't notice his cloak is on fire.
• The Famine:
  • Famine in other cities is also an occasional event, but it's made easier by the fact that they ask for any kind of food and you can ask for food from any food-producing city, which they'll give if your relationship with them is high enough (including, in some cases, the city currently suffering from famine).
  • One mission sees your sources of importable food slowly dwindle until you're limited to the oranges you can grow and urchins, while the coastline keeps changing until your urchin collectors can't reach the urchin banks. The ending narration notes that everyone in the city is out of recipes for oranges.
• Female Gaze: Atlas is visited by Aphrodite as he's helping with construction work. Seeing a sweaty, gigantic, muscular man (if his statue is anything to go by) standing in front of an equally gigantic building, she declares herself impressed (with a self-satisfied Atlas lampshading that she could have been talking about him or the building).
• Fertility God:
  • Demeter's Sanctuary turns all the land around it to meadow, on which livestock, crops or farms can be placed. She'll also bless farms and can fill granaries with food if prayed to. She's also the fourth most-powerful goddess after the Big Three, so having her around can thwart quite a few invasions by other gods. Naturally, having her as an enemy will cause a lot of problems for agriculture-based cities.
  • Gods associated with a particular foodstuff (Poseidon for seafood, Artemis for wild game, Hera for oranges) or trade crop (Dionysus for grapes, Athena for olives) will bless their particular industry, making it more productive, and can provide large amounts of it when prayed to. Hera, Dionysus and Athena also provide groves for their crops, allowing your city to harvest a small amount every year.
  • Aphrodite isn't a fertility goddess in the usual sense (population only increases through immigration if you have the housing for it), but if you've suffered a massive population loss due to disease she can instantly replenish your population... for less than heroic reasons.
    Heavens! There aren't nearly enough people in the city to worship me!
• Fetch Quest: Many heroic deeds involve you attracting the appropriate hero to the city so they can go on a quest to get some item or other for a god.
• Fish Men: Oceanids are green-scaled creatures with underwater cities, though you never get to visit them.
• Forced Transformation: An angry Hera turns people into cows.
• Funny Background Event: Building animations all have Amusing Injuries happening to their employees, such as cheesemakers hammering their own hand or olive oil salesmen forever slipping on an oil patch. Greek triremes have a hoplite water-skiing behind them.
• Game-Breaking Bug: On occasion, a food buyer will continuously show up to a granary and disappear without buying anything, leaving the food shop empty, triggering the catastrophic collapse of the entire city as no food is delivered (and not caused by Critical Staffing Shortage for once). This is apparently caused by having too many direct walkers in the city.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Oceanid trade ships are no different from those of humans, despite the cities being underwater and their species being amphibious. The post-game exposition claims they do this to avoid freaking people out and make trading easier.
  • Oceanid armies have no need for transport ships and move underwater, meaning your frigates can't attack them. The Kraken, however, can.
  • The Odyssey campaign has several:
    • Penelope's trick with the tapestry is discovered not through a servant's treachery, but by the suitors wondering why their gifts of fleece keep getting refused.
    • The mission requirement for elite housing is presented as a way to get the suitors out of the palace.
  • Atlas sends Hercules to widen the Strait of Gibraltar. In-game, there's a flood that plows through the strait (at the start of the next level), widening it.
  • Some missions actually stick to the myths and not the gameplay:
    • Missions with a hostile Poseidon often feature him sending the Cyclops (despite his personal monster being the Kraken).
    • Similarly, one level has Athena claim the Hydra was Ares' pet, when normally she's the one sending it.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Loading screens and inter-mission exposition reveals that the heroes engaged in epic combat with the monsters. In-game, they close in then beat the snot out of each other until one drops. Particularly painful for Atalanta, who supposedly stunned the sphinx by answering its riddle so it didn't even see her shooting her arrows.
  • The centaur cities were supposedly razed to the ground by the Atlanteans... except that during the level they behave exactly as regular cities do, continuously sending tribute and being very polite about it.
  • One mission sends you to Egypt to teach the locals how to build pyramids. The flooding of the Nile is simulated by having tidal waves destroy any coastal buildings.
  • Anytime a previously-invulnerable city is weakened by the plot (Trojan Horse, Atlantean superweapon...), the only in-game explanation is that the city's leader has decided to greatly reduce his military.
  • It's entirely possible to react to a city asking for goods by requesting that very same good from them if they produce it (including food during a famine). Not only will they comply if they like you enough, you can then send part of their gift (which may have been in larger quantities than they asked for) back to earn their gratitude.
  • Winning a colony level usually only requires that you send a certain amount of local goods to the parent city. As there's usually several cities producing the necessary goods, you can simply ask them for the goods and send them over, with the task of actually organizing the productive infrastructure falling to your successor.
• Godhood Seeker: Poseidon's first campaign has king Atlas (a son of Poseidon) visit Olympus and eventually beg to live there. By the end of the campaign, he's ascended among the Olympians, and shows up in later campaigns as a worshipable god who helps out with monument building.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The gods wander around your city advertising their services to encourage you to build an expensive sanctuary to them. Naturally, there're more gods than available sanctuaries, so the unlucky ones get ever more desperate in their efforts.
• Grandpa God: The Big Three, naturally. Taken literally in Poseidon's Atlantis campaign, as he's the father of Atlas, himself the father of the player character.
• Handicapped Badass: Hephaestus is seen walking with a limp. This doesn't prevent him from rampaging around the city breaking storage yards.
  A lame immortal still has more power than you can imagine!
• Healer God: Worshipping Apollo helps prevent plague, but if he's hostile he'll send a plague and curse your infirmaries nd cultural buildings.
• Henpecked Husband: Zeus may be Top God, but even he fears his wife Hera.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Averted with Ares, Theseus, Achilles, Hector and hoplites, who always keep their face-concealing helmets on. Athena wears one that doesn't hide her face.
• Historical Fantasy: The game cheerfully mixes history and myth together. For example, the Athens campaign has you fend off the Persians in one level, then battle centaurs in the next.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: In basically every version of The Iliad ever, Hector is portrayed as an honorable warrior who serves his city with valor. In Zeus and Poseidon, Hector is a bloodthirsty demigod who wrecks everyone and everything unfortunate enough to cross his path (often at Aphrodite's command).
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • If you're not supposed to conquer a city before the game says so, it will resist every attempt made to conquer it although its strength will be reduced, so the only way to tell is to see a one-shield city defeating eight chariot companies, five triremes, three heroes and a War God.
  • Gods cannot be beaten by anything other than a stronger god (except, sometimes, Orichalcum-powered towers). You're almost always given the ability to build a sanctuary to a stronger god (sometimes Zeus) in the final levels, although the Sparta campaign doesn't and you'll just have to grin and bear it every time Athena comes calling.
• Horse of a Different Color: Greeks use oxen to carry heavy loads around, while Atlanteans use elephants.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The only game in the series to have them. Beginner (very easy), Mortal, Hero, Titan and Olympian (very hard).
• Idle Animation: A building with employees but no resources will show the workers lounging around and playing with yo-yos.
• Immune to Fire: Having a sanctuary dedicated to Hephaestus makes all buildings non-flammable. Unfortunately, because buildings are still susceptible to collapse, you still need maintenance outposts.
• Insistent Terminology: According to Athena, what Ares calls "ambush practice" is what most people would call "hide-and-seek".
• Instant-Win Condition: Colony missions only require you to have a certain amount of resources sent back to the parent city, as you're there to set up basic industries, one of which will be their tribute in following missions. In fact, you can simply ask around for the necessary resources and win in a few minutes.
• Irrevocable Order: If you send your troops to attack a city, and the city decides in the meantime to ally with you, your troops still attack and you're reviled by everyone for being an evil backstabbing bastard.
• It Only Works Once:
  • If an attacking city destroys your palace, you can continue playing as their vassal. If you're conquered by someone else and the original conqueror returns and wins, you lose the level.
  • Summoning a hero only works once per level, if you finish the mission and return you'll have to wait for the hero's presence to be required again.
• Jerkass Gods: In full force. Many attacks by gods are only motivated by a god seeking revenge on another god (or a hero), and harming everything they hold dear... such as your city. And that's if you're lucky and the opening narration explains it, sometimes they just attack without giving you a reason.
  • This can be averted with a fully-completed (and very expensive) sanctuary for Zeus, as Zeus will chase off any attacking god.
• Kaiju: Every god has a monster they can unleash to guard/attack your city, though sometimes they attack on their own.
  • Zeus sends Cyclops.
  • Poseidon sends Kraken.
  • Hades sends Cerberus.
  • Artemis sends the Calydonian Boar.
  • Apollo sends Scylla.
  • Hermes sends the Minotaur.
  • Hephaestus sends Talos.
  • Aphrodite sends Hector.
  • Athena sends the Hydra.
  • Hera sends the Sphinx.
  • Ares sends a dragon.
  • Demeter sends Medusa.
  • Dionysus sends a Maenad.
  • Atlas sends the Chimera (instead of the usual three-headed monster, the Chimera consists of a giant lion in front, a goat's body in front, and a snakelike tail).
  • The Harpy (a giant bird with a woman's head) and Echidna (usually half-snake half woman, here a woman's head on a snake's body) attack on their own.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Rivals will cave to demands made of them if your military strength is greater than theirs.
• Larynx Dissonance:
  • The (male) narrator falls into this when reporting what various goddesses have to say. During the Trojan War campaign, he accidentally uses the Spartan narrator's voice for Aphrodite before correcting himself.
  • The Chimera and Echidna are voiced by men despite being female.
• Love Goddess: Aphrodite's blessing consists of instantly providing population to fill up vacant (that is, that was once occupied before plague, war or emigration emptied it) housing. She just can't stand the idea of having so few worshippers.
• Loyal to the Position: Fail to meet a request by your parent city and the deputy running it in your absence will tell you he's more loyal to the city than you.
• Madness Mantra: Walkers carried off by Dionysus and Aphrodite constantly repeat "Toga toga toga!"
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Hephaestus doesn't figure out Harmonia is the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite until twenty years or so after his wife went off to a beauty spa for nine months. When he does, he attacks the city.
• Manchild: If Athena is to be believed, Ares likes to play hide-and-seek with his priests and warriors.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Atlas has nine brothers, all twins.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: The "Fireballs from Heaven" command causes fireballs to crash onto the target area, replacing just about anything under it with rubble that can then be cleared away, including enemies, monsters, gods, rocky terrain, and earthquake cracks (which normally can only be partly neutralized by building roads). The only exception is lava, which becomes walkable terrain but still can't be built upon.
• Motor Mouth: Hermes (naturally) talks very fast.
  I'mHermes!Worshipme,andsomeofyourcitizenswilltastemyspeed!
• Ms. Fanservice: Goddesses, especially Aphrodite, tend to be very attractive and drawn with low necklines.
• Mundane Utility: Inverted with orichalc, which is used first as a building material to decorate monuments and then as a weapon.
• Narcissist: Aphrodite's blessing instantly creates people (if there's housing left over)... so she can have more worshippers.
• Narm: Invoked One outcome for the Pythian games is for your actors to reduce the crowd to tears. Unfortunately, they were performing a comedy.
• No Flow in CGI: Zeus' hair in the game's introductory CGI cutscene looks like a wig carved from stone.
• No Indoor Voice: The competitor walker is constantly shouting to be heard over the roar of the crowd. Even without a crowd.
• Non-Entity General:
  • The player character is the leader of a city, and only referred to as such (even gender is unspecified). In one Atlantis campaign, s/he is the child of Atlas or king Atlon, while another is Penelope's cousin.
  • Though never named, the player character of the Proetus and Bellerophon campaign is either king Iobates or his (unnamed) wife, the parents of Stethenoboea.
• Noodle Implements: The Odyssey campaign has Ulysses thank you for providing you with the materials to defeat various monsters. While the requirement of wine makes sense against the Cyclops (originally, Odysseus got him dead drunk before blinding him) and possibly against Scylla, the dozen-odd jugs of olive oil, high popularity and large amount of elite housing do not.
• Nostalgia Level: The Atlantis level where you build the first Egyptians pyramids plays like a revamped revisitation of Pharaoh with the new engine of Zeus and brings back other unique features like Nile floodings.
• Not the Intended Use: One of the cheats in the game allows to send fireballs to the clicked location. While it's there to deal with invading armies and monsters, the actual use most people have with it is bombarding inconvenient spots on the map, like a jagged rock or a post-earthquake fissure, which are then turned into regular rubble and can be permanently removed. This is particularly useful to increase accessability to ore-bearing rocks.
• Oddball in the Series: The tone and artwork are notably more cartoonish than in the rest of the series, with the narration, events and exposition usually relying on sarcasm, silly voices and tongue-in-cheek humor. Also, unlike the other games, Zeus doesn't use the name of a political, human leader (since Ancient Greece wasn't a unified entity) in the title, but goes with a mythological one instead. Several key mechanics are notably simplified, some of which get reverted in Emperor.
• Odd Job Gods: Some gods' blessings are related to their lesser-known domains as per mythology. For example, Poseidon blesses maritime industries, but also makes horses be produced faster (since he created horses), while Hades makes silver mines more productive (as everything from underground belongs to him).
• Offerings to the Gods: Once a sanctuary is built priests will regularly emerge to collect sacrifices. If a city has goats, sheep, or cattle they'll take those, otherwise grain or food.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Heroic quests beside monster slaying happen offscreen, with some lines at best about the outcome being given. Relief and conquest missions performed by your army receive the same treatment.
• Old-Fashioned Fruit Stomping: The working animation for the winery shows workers stomping around in the grape vat.
• Orichalcum: Known as orichalc, the ore appears as a red metal in the Poseidon expansion, used in defensive towers, warships, and monument decoration.
• Our Hydras Are Different:
  • The Hydra is a fire-spitting monster unleashed by Athena if she doesn't like you (although Ares sends it in one campaign), usually on marshy terrain, and is defeated either by building a Hero's Hall for Hercules or by sending lots and lots and lots of regular troops at it. It can talk, but has a bad case of Sssnake Talk.
    Our ssstinging bitessss are our giftsss to you!
  • Scylla is depicted with a similar structure (but with human heads on snake necks, and it's aquatic).
  • The intro cinematic shows Typhon as having multiple snake heads as well before being buried under a mountain.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different: The Sphinx, as a winged female-headed lion, is a monster sent by Hera who can be defeated by summoning Atalanta.
• Outdoor Bath Peeping: After being the victim one time too many, Artemis sics her pets on the world (Iolchus gets the Calydonian boar).
• Palette Swap: Subverted: Every monster has a unique appearance and preferred target type (food/industry/military/seashore buildings), but are functionally the same (a melee attack and fireballs).
• Patron God: As in the original myths, cities are often declared dedicated to a single god, which causes no small amount of resentment in other gods, who usually attack/sends monsters to your city. As the angry god is often higher on the divine totem pole than the patron god, it's often only in the last few levels of a campaign that you can finally do more than simply endure their attacks and use your own allied Top God to send them packing.
  • Each god protects a different industry (Poseidon blesses fisheries, Athena blesses olive growers, Artemis blesses hunters, etc.) and the city can build up to 4 temples to these gods to obtain different blessings from them.
• Plot Armor: Given to your enemies. Some cities simply aren't meant to be conquered until the game says so (the best way to find out is to send a huge army to attack a practically-defenseless city and watch them come back in defeat). In some cases, rival cities can be conquered through sufficient expenditure of troops, but by the next level the ones you weren't supposed to take over will go right back to being rivals.
• Power-Up Letdown: Gods who bless buildings don't care if that particular industry has been shut down.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality:
  • Attacking an ally is a heinous act that ensures no one wants to work with you. Attacking a rival? No problem whatsoever.
  • Two Poseidon campaigns play out the same events as Atlanteans and Greeks, the narrator of each proclaiming their side is in the right.
• Professional Butt-Kisser: Citizens, heroes, city leaders and even the narration are disturbingly prompt to shower you with praise for running a city without too many problems.
• Proud Scholar Race: The Atlanteans use science instead of art to improve their housing.
• Proud Warrior Race: The Spartan campaign revels in this. Note that despite their constant rivalry with Athens, their troops need exactly the same philosophers and actors to function.
• Resource-Gathering Mission:
  • Campaigns are centered on building up a single Greek city, interspersed with building colonies that will then provide the main city with annual tribute (usually the material you were sent to gather) and a trading partner. During the main missions, requirements will usually include storing certain goods for the colony (which are then given to you at the beginning of the level), while the colony requirements themselves are usually limited to sending back the requested amount of whatever trade good the city needed. Here the difficulty is not so much running out of resources as it is building up the infrastructure to collect them with any efficiency (along with natural disasters, demands from the parent city, attacks by rivals, monsters, gods...)
  • The demands for food by other cities are made much easier by the game now allowing you to send any type of food. If your relationship with them is good enough, it's even possible to ask for food from another city (yes, including the one begging you for famine relief) and send it on its way as soon as you receive it.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: She makes it a little easier to guess:
  What crawls on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, three legs at dusk, and screams in abject terror now?
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Atlas mentions a giant gopher, probably a prank on Hermes' part.
• Sacred Hospitality: The game puts you in the unenviable position of having to kill someone under your hospitality- in this case, Bellerophon. He turns out to be The Thing That Would Not Leave, so the next mission is to send him against the Chimera.
• Sadly Mythtaken: Hoo boy.
  • Among the Twelve Olympians, Hades (who wasn't considered an Olympian because he didn't live on Mount Olympus) replaces Hestia. Most of Hestia's purview is given to Aphrodite instead.
  • The tutorial subverts this, in that killing the Cyclops causes Poseidon (father of the Cyclopes) to get pissed off at you. In other missions, he's Zeus' special monster.
  • Poseidon's monster is the Kraken. Note that it's not the Giant Squid of Norse Mythology, it's a giant talking fish-man (closer to the actual Sea Monster killed by Perseus, named Cetus).
  • In Poseidon, centaurs are apparently a civilized race, responding with complete politeness when defeated. Those in Zeus are the usual drunken brutes, forever demanding that you send them wine.
  • There are two entities named Atlas in Greek Mythology: the Titan (son of Gaia and Ouranos) holding up the sky and the first king of Atlantis (son of Poseidon), neither of which was a god. The game conflates the two after the latter ascends to Olympus.
  • Atalanta's only claim to monster-slaying in myth was participating in the hunt for the Calydonian boar (which Theseus kills in-game), here she kills the Sphinx (instead of Oedipus solving its riddle) and the Harpy (instead of Jason).
• Script Breaking: During the Trojan campaign, you cannot attack Troy until the war itself begins. When the war begins Troy receives a massive boost in military strength shortly into the mission, making it effectively unassailable without going through the rest of the campaign. However there is a short interval where you can invade and conquer Troy before they receive the boost. They will then remain your faithful vassal throughout the campaign, massively cutting down the number of invasions you'll have to face, while the story will continue to treat Troy as an enemy. In the final mission you'll even need to re-invade Troy despite them being a vassal in order to win the war.
• Sex Sells: Aphrodite is particularly unsubtle about the way her services work.
  Worship me, and no one will leave your city's embrace!
• The Show Must Go Wrong: The drama school shows the actor walker dangling upside down, tangled up in the mechanism that descends him from above. The theater uses the same animation.
• Shout-Out:
  • Just about every line issued by a walker refers to a character/monster from Classical Mythology or a famous ancient Greek (regardless of whether or not said famous Greek was even born at the time).
  • The actor school's line "Build me a pyre to roast my friends upon" is almost a literal quotation from Lysistrata, as are "For Athens' sake I will never threaten so fell a doom" and "If only they had been invited to a Bacchic reveling, or a feast of Pan or Aphrodite!" (and is indeed one of the women's lines, being spoken by Lysistrata herself).
  • "My advice to you is, get married. If you find a good wife, you will be happy. If not, you'll become a philosopher" is from Socrates.
  • "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation" is attributed to Plato.
  • The game's developer acknowledges in the manual a debt to late-night reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess for inspiration, which is evident in the game's much sillier, campier tone in comparison to Caesar III and Pharaoh. Certain snippets of Keith Zizza's score echo some of Joseph LoDuca's Xena themes, and the gods notably appear and disappear with the exact same visual and sound effects as they do in Xena.
• Silliness Switch:
  • "Mammaldrome" replaces the horsemen in a hippodrome with deer, wolves, boars and bulls.
  • "Cheese Puffs" puts cheesemakers in cheese costumes.
  • "Bowvine and Arrows" causes towers to shoot cows.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Avenues and Boulevards allow you to connect a building to a road while being one tile away, allowing them to keep road access while letting superintendants go on a longer route as they don't have to take a twisting path. And of course, prettying up the place.
• Skippable Boss: Curiously enough, the monsters don't always have to be killed (unless specifically required), only blocking off one area from urban development. In campaigns, leaving them alone until the last mission can actually be beneficial, as this leaves you with extra heroes for battle abroad (as heroes' halls disappear from mission to mission and can't be rebuilt unless a quest/monster requires their presence).
• Sssnake Talk: Sssscylla and the hydra, with ssssimilar lines to boot.
  "Ssssuffer my sssstingsss!" / "Our ssstinging bitessss, are our giftsss to you!"
• Small Name, Big Ego: The actor walker refers to himself as the finest actor in all of Greece. When returning from unsuccessful games, he wonders if the audience are becoming barbarians.
• Smash Mook: The Cyclops, who proudly proclaims himself one when selected.
  Smash smash smash! Bwahahahahahah!
• Sore Loser:
  • If your athletes didn't get first at the Nemean/Olympic games, they'll claim the sun was in their eyes or that the jury was rigged. Similarly, the actor bemoans Greece's descent into uncivilized barbarism if he didn't win the acting competition.
  • Several missions have gods attack your city because they weren't awarded ownership of it.
• Stellification: If your city doesn't have enough food in Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, the Astronomer expresses a wish to become a constellation so he wouldn't be so hungry.
• Suckiness Is Painful: According to the narrator, Hercules scaring off the Stymphalian birds was less the effect of his playing the castanets and more the fact that Hercules decided to dance the flamenco while doing so.
• Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome: Gods that were friendly in one adventure may become enemies in the next (and vice-versa).
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Heroes on their way to kill monsters will take the most direct route, instantly producing rafts if they need to cross water.
• Super-Persistent Predator: After Jason retrieves the Golden Fleece, the dragon that was guarding it follows him and attacks you (and gets there before Jason does).
• Super-Speed: Hermes' speed rubs off on traders and deliverymen so they can make more trips in a year.
• Super-Strength: One of Hercules' quests in Poseidon is to widen the strait that connects the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Atlas himself performs a similar feat after tricking Hercules into holding up the sky for a while.
• Superweapon Surprise: Very surprising: The Atlanteans, under Ares' guidance, are building a superweapon to deal with Greek threats once and for all. Unfortunately, Odysseus manages to infiltrate and fire the weapon at Atlantis itself, destroying the sanctuary of Poseidon, before sabotaging it so it can't be used again. It's used in the final level to weaken Mycenae, and in another campaign where it succeeds in destroying Atlantis.
• Support Party Member:
  • Building Atlas' sanctuary first greatly speeds up construction of other monuments.
  • Hermes makes walkers... walk faster, and sometimes answers requests without consuming your resources.
• The Starscream: Miss a deadline by a parent city, and your deputy tells he he's starting to think he might be better at running a city than you.
• Taken for Granite: The fate of people who run into Medusa or orichalcum-enhanced towers. This can include gods.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The trader does not mince words if you have a bad rep:
  Are you talking to me? You and your city are scum, and everybody in Greece hates you!
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Bellerophon turns out to be one, demanding sumptuous living quarters for himself in just about every level he's in (in the Biminis mission, you need to summon him on a tiny, cramped island that barely has enough resources for the city, so that he can go look for the Fountain of Youth for Aphrodite).
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Monsters can be defeated by using military units and very rarely by the "wrong" hero, but it takes so long you might as well develop the infrastructure needed to get the appropriate hero to the city so he can one-shot the monster.
• Tiny-Headed Behemoth: Hercules and the cyclops share this design.
• Top God:
  • The gods are arranged in order of strength, with Zeus naturally being at the top. However, he's not entirely invulnerable, as having Hera (the 4th strongest) around will cause him to flee (if he's attacking).
  • Aphrodite isn't a very high-level goddess, but she prevents Dionysus, Ares, Hephaestus and Hermes from attacking.
• Toplessness from the Back: Medusa appears like this on a loading screen.
• Uriah Gambit: The narrator suggests you use Bellerophon to conquer the Amazons and Persians, as they're said to be good shots.
• Unblockable Attack: Gods can't be prevented from rampaging around without a stronger god (and even then, defending gods don't always react immediately to the invaders' presence). Monsters can be attacked by troops and a different hero, but it takes a long time to kill one without the appropriate hero. Ares and Artemis' troops can be engaged as normal, however.
• Unreliable Narrator: The Atlantean narrator seems blissfully unaware that his actions might be interpreted as Blatant Lies by people unhappy with Atlantean expansionism.
• Unusual Euphemism: Aphrodite's title is "Goddess of the Tender Passions".
• Unwanted Assistance:
  • Hermes will sometimes fulfill a request with his own supplies whether you want him to or not, leading to rival leaders condescendingly thanking you for caving to their demands.
  • Tributes and offers of aid are often sent when you have no need of them, and building storage facilities or giving away surplus goods can be a major hassle. Despite the offended tone of the reactions to refusing the gifts, it doesn't affect intercity relations in any way.
  • You can do this to other cities by continuously sending them goods until they tell you to stop (even with money).
  • An In-Universe case during the Odyssey campaign, where the suitors figured out Penelope wasn't making any progress on her tapestry because their excessive gifts of fleece kept getting refused.
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • The "Open Play" adventures have no victory requirements for their final mission, meaning you just build until bored.
  • "The Mayan Adventure" has a single Undefeatable Little Village that will never be conquered, no matter how many huge armies you send at them, as the "Ruler has dismissed most of his military" event never triggers.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty:
  • Inverted with bribing armies. This is much faster than actually fighting, which cuts into your manpower, slowing down production for months, and frees you from having to maintain expensive troops. That said, if you maintain zero troops whatsoever (or have an all-elite army and send all of them to war) other cities will happily attack you.
  • Played straight with the auto-combat system in which troop movements are handled by the computer, usually resulting in entirely avoidable losses because the troops only go to their preset positions instead of defending outlying suburbs.
  • Honoring the gods can net you some very interesting blessings such as increasing trade frequency or instantly killing enemy armies. However, to prevent you from getting overly reliant on them there is a limit to how often you can pray/hold festivals per year. Furthermore, sacrifices regularly eats up your sheep/goats/cattle/food, which need to be manually replaced (there's no automatic warning that your livestock population is getting low, meaning your first hint is all your housing simultaneously devolving to hovels or shacks and the catastrophic loss of manpower that entails).
• Voice of the Legion:
  • Scylla speaks with multiple male and female voices.
  • Demeter usually has a refined accent. But if she's your enemy...
  At my bidding, fertile farmland will no longer be fertile, and all that is growing upon it, will die.
• Wacky Fratboy Hijinks: The College (which trains philosophers) prominently features a guy getting drunk, while the University (astronomers and curators) has two guys endlessly repeating the "Thank you sir, may I have another" scene from Animal House.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Theseus and Hercules.
• Walking Wasteland: If Hephaestus is an enemy, he sets buildings on fire just by walking past them.
• War God: Ares can be prayed to go alongside your soldiers, while Athena stays at home but boosts their ability.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Averted: Atlas regularly approves his child's achievements, and in fact ends the campaign claiming to be proud to be your father.
• Welcome to Corneria: Some buildings such as theaters and podiums have a few lines they endlessly repeat.
• We Need a Distraction: Hera comes up with a quest to aid the Atlanteans against the Zeus-sponsored Greeks: Have Zeus catch her and Jason in a compromising situation, distracting him long enough for you to fire a weapon against Mycenae.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It's never explained what happened to the Oceanids after Atlantis sank, preventing contact between Europe and America for centuries.
• Why Won't You Die?: Despite everyone's best efforts, Bellerophon just will not die. Even falling from a flying horse fails to do him in.
• The Worf Effect: For a War God, Ares is quite low on the ladder, and sending him on far-off campaigns isn't the surefire success it should be.
• Worthy Opponent: A title bestowed on you by rivals if their opinion of you increases (usually by winning pan-Hellenic games or attacking a rival).
• Your Size May Vary: Sculptures are taller than most buildings when in storage and in temples, but shrink to human-size while transported.

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