YMMV / Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

• Best Level Ever
  • The Qin campaign, especially the second mission — you're told in the briefing that you rule all of China, you're given an absolutely massive map to build your capital city in (and for the first time of the campaigns, the map is so big it can't all fit in the minimap), and you'll come back to this map for the final mission to build the Terracotta Army.
  • "Millennium", the third level of the Song-Jin Campaign. In-story you've fled the sacked capital of Kaifeng and are building your power at Chengdu to retake the city. What does Chengdu offer? All five food crop types along with salt marshes; hemp, tea, silk, and laquer orchards; iron ore, clay, and wood for crafting; and the map is very large and completely flat with only a couple of rivers affecting how you can lay out your city. In short, Chengdu lets you build almost everything in the game engine and gives you a large open area to build in. One wonders why you'd want to go back to Kaifeng after settling down here.
• Breather Level
  • The fifth level of the Han campaign. The Han missions often require several years of heroes, building a monument, and/or a large population. The fifth mission though is laughably easy. Your objectives are 2500 yearly profit, 5 trading partners, and a population of 1600 people. You begin with two trading partners already and can just immediately send out envoys to other cities asking for trade routes and odds are high three of them will agree, and among those partners many of them buy Carved Jade and Silk, so you can buy up Jade and Silk in your first year and then sell it off in the second year to clear your profit margin. As for the population objective, 1600 people is actually a very small city and attainable with only Attractive Cottages (read: only requires Plain Food and Hemp). All in all, it's very reasonable to expect to finish the mission in just two years.
  • The Grand Canal mission of the Sui-Tang campaign. The objective is very straightforward: build a section of the Grand Canal and have mere 100 people in Heavenly Compounds (so just 5 of those). All the construction resources are on site, you have access to varied food and easy money from exports, while it's completely safe.
  • The penultimate mission of the Sui-Tang campaign. The objectives are demanding; build the Large Palace monument, have eight animals in menagerie, and 200 people in Heavenly Compounds. The thing is that the mission takes place in Chang-an, a city you'd built in the first mission of the campaign, and in doing so probably made a sprawling city with a substantial elite housing district already. It's possible the menagerie and housing objectives are already partially complete when you begin the mission, so you just need to build the Large Palace, which is not a very large monument and the map is very large with plenty of resources to put towards the project.
• Broken Base: The feng shui mechanic. Some players like it for adding a dimension to strategic city planning not found in most other city builders, and forcing them to change up their map layout and not getting complacent using the same set-ups every mission. Others dislike being arbitrarily penalized for placing buildings where they see fit, especially when some buildings (such as the Inspector's Tower) are required everywhere yet require very specific feng shui. On some maps this means that maintaining 100% feng shui requires severely limiting where you can build, and occasionally maintaining 100% feng shui is not only difficult but literally impossible. There are penalties for ignoring feng shui, but that ironically leads to another criticism: the penalties are so weak and irrelevant that it's too easy to just ignore the system completely, rendering it redundant. The player would have to literally try to get feng shui so bad to the point that it actually matters.
• Catharsis Factor: In the previous series, if your neighbor demands something while insulting you, all you can do is bear their insult and maybe prepare your defenses in case they take major offense and invade your city. Here you can do the same plus the option of sending your army to conquer said neighbor. In short, The Computer Shall Taunt You? Do Not Taunt Cthulhu.
• Designated Hero: As any history major can tell you, many of the the rulers you're working for aren't looked back upon too fondly by today's historians, but when you're their loyal city administrator they are universally virtuous and wise. Also, as far as the mission briefings are concerned, anyone who isn't a part of China and doesn't serve the Emperor loyally is a barbarian and should not be trusted.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final level of the game is pretty much more of the same — build a monument, have 72 months of heroes, a population of 6,000 people, and 250 people living in Heavenly Compounds. The only difference is the very aggressive and powerful Mongolian Empire that's likely to launch an invasion or two, but you can make them an ally to take them out of the equation.
• Game-Breaker: Many Heroes come with benefits that snap the difficulty of a mission in two.
  • Shen Nong can bless your farmhouses and hemp farms. This means each worker returning from fields will bring back 3 bundles instead of 1, regardless of how well the harvest went. If done right, this allows to fill few warehouses full of given crop in single harvest, gaining huge surplus for trade, gifts and even offerings for heroes. In missions requiring specific quota of food produced or stored, his presence removes any sort of challenge.
  • Sun Tzu (appropriately) makes military actions much easier. He halves the construction costs of forts and fortifications, makes it cheaper to hire spies, captures any disguised enemy spy he finds patrolling the city, reduces the travel time of armies, improves infantry morale, can bless a fort to double the training speed of troops, and when in combat himself he's one of the best offensive heroes. If you plan to attack an enemy, Sun Tzu can make or break the attempt.
  • Guan Di halves the building costs of all forts and weaponsmiths, he acts as a scholar for Confucian worship, he can bless a fort with free loads of Weapons, a Confucian Academy with free Paper, or a Mill or Warehouse full of Bean Curd. Finally, he raises the morale of Calvary companies, often the backbone of your army. In any pretty much any mission where you can call him, you'll probably end up using his services at least once, if only just to get hundreds of free weapons and foodstuffs.
  • Xi Wang Mu can bless a Jade Carver's Studio with a stock of raw Jade. Just build a row of carvers and send her down the path blessing them, giving you dozens of free units of one the most expensive commodities in the game for trade or offering as homage — which of course means that when her favor drops because you're putting her to work so much, you can just make another homage to keep her around a bit longer, then start paying her tribute with the same Jade she created for you. Oh, and while she's in your city your monuments build faster by virtue of workers doing more work before leaving, doing their work faster, and more workers being able to be on-site at once. This will save you months or even years of construction time.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Wild animals that attack walkers, namely salamanders, gobi bears, vultures, tigers, and alligators. They hunt down and kill walkers, and if they happened to be carrying any goods, those goods are gone. One mission has the spawn point for visitors to the map a few tiles away from where salamanders hang out; have fun watching immigrants and traders get eaten trying to pass them to get to your city. On many maps you can just build a couple of sentry towers near their respawn point and let the sentries keep them contained. Can't build sentry towers? Gonna have to arm some troops and march them out there.
  • Spies. Wondering why your stocks of weapons/ceremics/hemp seems to go faster than you use them? Stick a guardhouse by your warehouses; there's a spy running around stealing your goods.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The game handles things oddly if you conquered a rival while their army was on their way to attack your city. They still attack as normal, but bribing the army suddenly makes the city you just conquered no longer a vassal but a normal trading partner. Fighting them off keeps things normal, and surrendering makes you their vassal as expected. Meanwhile if you rebel against your lord and you defeat the army he sends to quell your rebellion, not only will you regain your independence, it's possible their city will become your vassal as a result. This even applies if you simply bribe the army.
  • Feng shui doesn't change on a building once it's been placed, so you can build a structure near a group of trees so it has perfect feng shui, then destroy those trees to change the feng shui of the surrounding tiles to something more buildings need, while the original building remains in balance.
  • On occasion, a city that asked for troops will tell you that they were too weak... and thanks you for it.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Crossbowmen are nearly useless. They come in groups of 16 and (obviously) are armed with crossbows, letting them engage enemies at range and set buildings on fire, but they're terrible in melee combat. However, calvary are also armed with crossbows for the same combat advantages, move much faster than crossbowmen, and are better in melee combat. The advantage crossbowmen have over calvary is their crossbows do more damage and fire further, but the calvary's superiority in all other areas outweighs those stats, and the calvary's crossbow fires faster anyway.
  • Among the heroes, Nu Wa and Guan Yin. Nu Wa is not very useful because her benefits focus on things the player will either already have established in abundance by the time they can call a hero (clay pits, hunters tents, fishing quays, irrigation, inspector towers), or they don't need an abundance of it (musicians, diviners). Guan Yin's benefits all center on city beautification, but unless the player is just getting fancy with their decorating, the basic gardens will usually be what is used and aren't very expensive, and her other benefits focus on wells, when water is the most basic thing every city needs and the player will certainly not need help with that by the time they call her. While she has some utility for halving the amount it costs to bribe away enemy armies attacking you, it's far preferable to build your own army to fight them off.
• Narm: The narrators of the various mission briefings pause when stating the numerous city and character names. Coupled with the sudden changes in tone that come when they do this, it sounds like the voice actors either stumble over enunciating the names properly, or that some Mad Libs-esque editing was going on with the pronunciation of the names inserted after the initial recordings.
  • If English narrator has issues with pronounciation, the Polish localisation of the game brings it to a higher level. Each time a Chinese name is used, the narrator makes even bigger pause and the voice sounds like something from a vocalised translator, using English pronounciation of vowels at that. The fact everything else, including Latinised forms, is read fluently and without any issues makes it stand out even more.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Ancestor heroes. The other three pantheons have their heroes always at Contented at the least, but Ancestors will fall to Neglected, Unhappy and eventually Angry, and when they get Angry, they may decide to unleash a natural disaster on you as punishment for not paying them lip service. Keeping them happy requires regularly sacrificing goods to them and they like expensive stuff, turning them into a Money Sink that players must invest time into for their own safety like a divine protection racket. It also means that if you get them happy enough to visit your city, sending them around blessing production buildings (which is the main reason to summon heroes) will rapidly lower their mood past Contented, meaning that the hero is angry at you for abusing their gameplay mechanics.
  • Speaking of natural disasters, earthquakes. Droughts are barely noticeable on your farming and floods can be marginalized with careful city planning (or ignored entirely by just not building near the water), but there is nothing you can do to mitigate the effects of earthquakes. It is entirely possible for half your city to be obliterated in an instant killing half your population, your mill and warehouses to be destroyed and thus your stockpile of goods are lost, or even losing your entire industrial sector. Or, if you're really unlucky, all of the above. Not to mention all the money it's going to cost to rebuild it all. A bad-enough earthquake can basically reset all your progress on a map, and aside from keeping the ancestors happy to reduce the chance of it happening, there's nothing you can do to protect yourself from one.
  • Messages sent to other cities at the same time don't arrive in the same order you sent them. For example, say you send an ally gifts of goods to improve your standing with them, and after that send a messenger asking for a trade agreement or alliance treaty. More often than not they'll refuse the latter first, then receive your gifts and your standing improves to the point they would have agreed if they had responded to the trade/alliance request afterward. Now you have to send the request all over again and wait several more months for a reply.
  • The Gotta Catch Them All menagerie system is quite tedious and uninvolving. While there is a biome logic, many players just spam every other cities with every available animal until they get a new one. Rinse and repeat.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The game reintroduces many of the complexities present in Caesar III' and Pharaoh but dropped in Zeus:
  • Several types of foods are needed to fully evolve houses (and not just elite housing, the very basic types need at least two or three), and a fertility system is again present.
  • Taxation takes a while to be implemented (and requires resources)
  • The appeasement to the gods mechanics returns.
  • No free militia exists anymore and the slow recruitment process is again used.
  • Money is not carried over from one mission to the next, instead a fixed, limited budget is given at the start of most missions.
  • Wells and elite housing can only be built on grassland again.
• That One Level:
  • Nearly any level in a desert map. They usually have one small pond as a water source around which is the only grassy terrain on the map, so you'll be limited where you can build (Wells can only be built on grassy terrain and without water your housing can't grow past level one), you'll need to build multiple farms to get enough food to feed the populace because the land is arid, and your export options are often limited to ceramics, whatever metal you can smelt, and excess salt and crops (and not every desert map allows ceramics, metal, and salt production anyway). Finally, most missions in the desert obviously don't let you build woodcutting sheds, since of course trees are in short supply, and thus if you need Wood you'll have to import it. This includes tax collectors in early dynasties and steel smelters in later ones.
    • Particular mention to the seventh Han mission "Silk and Spice". You're in the desert and have the unfortunate timing to be the mission that introduces Steel, but just one mission before the game introduces Paper, so both tax collectors and smelters need Wood. But then comes the real monkey wrench — you need to build the Earthren Great Wall, which needs almost two hundred units of Wood. You'll have to spend the entire mission importing Wood from every trade partner that sells it, so you better move quickly to come up with exports if you don't want to go broke, and the mission will take a long time to complete since of course the Great Wall wasn't built in a year.
  • The sixth mission of the Zhou campaign has you building the Earthen Great Wall, which will take several hundred units of wood, several hundred laborers, and will take many years to complete on its own. The other objectives are to produce ten Iron bars in one year and to rule one city, as this is the mission that introduces Iron and Calvary. These objectives on their own aren't too bad, but your rivals do all they can to make them worse — they will constantly demand large shipments of Iron from you with at little as a single month of warning, and they will invade you and will do so as early as the second year, so you'll need to be ready to fight back. This means quickly building up your industrial and military sectors, and also means you'll probably want Elite housing so you can build more than two forts. And again, this is on top of building the Great Wall, which will require several hundred workers in and of itself. Finally, while there is lots of flat terrain, the map is cut into three pieces by a river and the Great Wall, so you have much less room than you think to squeeze your housing, crop fields, forts, laborer camps, and industrial sector into. This makes for a mission that has you constantly invaded, forces you to build up your armor to invade them back, you'll need to field an extremely large workforce, and you have to work in inhospitable terrain to fit it all in.
  • The first mission of the final Song-Jin campaign. You're tasked to conquer four out of five rival cities. The catch is that your starting city, Kaifeng, has no supply of Steel, so you'll need to import it. Building a large military also pretty much means you'll need a fully built city to support elite housing, including importing food and Laquer since you need them to build up elite housing. On the offensive, the five rival cities will attack you, constantly, and when you conquer them they will rebel, so your armies will be away from the city for years putting down the rebellions. Finally, if feng shui is a concern, you'll find that the terrain is almost entirely grass with very few rocks around and only one area of arid grass in the corner, limiting where you can harmoniously build inspector towers and warehouses; your city isn't going to do very well without them, so you'll have to play your layout carefully ahead of time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The conquest of China by Qin Shi Huang is entirely glossed over; save for the first mission where you build the great canal a few decades earlier, the Qin campaign focuses on you building up the capital and expanding the empire after Qin Shi Huang has already united the country. One would think at least one mission could be gleaned from the Qin wars with the other states, and one could argue that such a mission is needed, as the Qin Campaign is only five missions long, and every other campaign (save for the tutorial campaign) is at least seven missions.
  • The Han campaign ends with the rule of Emperor Huandi approx. 146 CE and then covers the actual fall of the Han Dynasty in the ending narration several decades later. Then the Three Kingdoms period is skipped entirely, along with the Jin Dynasty and the Southern Song Dynasty, and the next campaign is the Sui Dynasty in 581 CE. This skips four hundred years that include arguably one of the most known to the West periods of Chinese history, the Three Kingdoms. The Jin are at least given a side-campaign in the map editor, but it only lasts three missions.
  • Sui-Tang campaign starts really strong, with all the ambitious projects of the short-lived Sui dynasty... and then the Tang part of the campaign kicks in, with just 4 missions, two of which are dedicated to the establishment of the dynasty itself. Both the wars with Tibet and the An Lushan rebellion are Great Offscreen Wars, the monumental projects of the dynasty are almost completely ignored and what is often considered to be the peak of Imperial China feels like a hastily tackled extension of the Sui campaign. To make it somehow even worse, the penultimate mission of the Tang part of the campaign gives you Chang'an, which you build yourself under Sui, and all there really is to do is build a Grand Palace monument, making the mission a breeze.
  • The final campaign covers the Song and Jin Dynasties (no connection to the above Jin) during their wars with the Khitan, the Jurchen, and eventually the Mongols. While the campaign shifts you from the Song to the Jin midway through, historically the Song imperial family escaped and established a new capital in the south, which would be known as the Southern Song Dynasty. However the game almost entirely ignores the Song once you begin playing as the Jin, only mentioning them briefly in an ending narration for one mission.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Monuments and their construction. While they made a welcomed comeback from Pharaoh, they aren't particularly varied or tough to build in most cases. There is only a handful missions that require specific monument to be built - and if you remove construction of sections of the Great Wall, the list is halved.

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