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Build a Kingdom. Rule the Nile. Live Forever

Pharaoh is a Simulation Game developed by Impressions Games and published by Sierra in 1999 and part of the City-Building Series. It's a sequel to the Caesar games. As its name implies, the game is set in Ancient Egypt, and in campaign mode it follows the exploits of several dynasties throughout history. You'll get the chance to construct massive Mastabas and Pyramids, battle against the Nubians, cultivate the fertile banks of the Nile, and even have to appease the various Egyptian gods to avoid retribution and receive blessings, or, alternatively, curses.

It received a minor Expansion Pack, Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile. Both can be purchased on GOG.com.

Triskell Interactive and Dotemu developed a Videogame Remake called Pharaoh: A New Era, released on 15th February 2023. The remake promised to maintain the Original Flavour (including re-recording the soundtrack and adding a few new ones by Louis Godart), but for the most part, recreated the game from scratch in Unity.


This game provides examples of:

  • 0% Approval Rating:
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
    • Buildings are built instantly, but they can't actually produce anything until they have workers and materials.
    • Labor is taken from the workforce as a whole - shut down an industry and all those previously working there will be employed elsewhere, regardless of the nature of employment.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: "To the marsh we march, for the reed we need."
  • Almighty Janitor: The Pharaoh will entrust the building of his new capital and eternal resting to a mere Royal Architect - simply because you (and your descendants) are just that good at city building.
  • Alternate History:
    • The game is more-or-less historical from the era of the Naqada culture and Thinite confederacy prior to 3000 BC until approximately 2000 BC, and the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty. At that point, the player's dynasty takes control of the throne of Egypt and holds it for the rest of the game, into what our history records as the Eighteenth Dynasty; the last missions you play in the vanilla game are clearly intended to represent the exploits of Ahmose I, who reigned in the mid-sixteenth century BC.
    • The Cleopatra expansion quietly retcons the notion of a single dynasty holding Egypt for half a millennium, and the first mission has you building a tomb - the very first tomb - in the Valley of the Kings for Thutmose I, Ahmose's grandson from the historical Eighteenth Dynasty. From then on, every Pharaoh is historical. However, the game does revisit alternate history, as the very last mission in the game is the Battle of Actium. The win condition is a victory by the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra. In our history, Octavian won the battle, and went on to become Rome's first emperor and the first of the Roman pharaohs.
  • Ambidextrous Sprite: Even buildings. The Sphinx is the most noticeable (it ends up doing a 180), and only mastabas are exempt.
  • Amusing Injuries: When working on an obelisk, stonemasons will occasionally fall off the scaffolding.
  • Anachronism Stew:
    • You use the Gregorian calendar, despite being in Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians used a three-season calendar (Ahket, Peret, and Shemu), each with four months numbered ordinally, and years were reckoned by the reign of the current Pharaoh (say, the 30th year of the reign of Ramses II).
    • Bazaars as we know them would not arrive in Egypt until Arab conquests that took place hundreds of years after the latest dates in the game. Granted, similar concepts were documented in ancient Egypt by historians like Herodotus, but the word itself is actually a medieval Persian word that no Egyptian in any pre-Arab era would know.
  • Ancient Astronauts: Actually a cheat code in the Expansion Pack. It gives you significantly faster monument construction.
  • Ancient Egypt: The game takes place in Egypt and its sphere of influence during the three milleniums that predate the Christian chronology. The expansion ends with the Roman interventions in Egypt in the late first century BC.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: In Cleopatra's final level, you train Roman soldiers rather than the usual infantry.
  • Annoying Arrows: Archers are very underpowered, and become mostly useless after chariots are invented. Charioteers for their part can also function as mounted archers, but they are much more effective charging and in melee.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Invading armies can be lured to head straight for your soldiers instead of destroying infrastructure.
    • When a request for a large amount of goods comes in, they don't care whether you produced the good or imported it, allowing you to respond to the request much faster. For some reason, the Pharaoh doesn't just make the request of the city with the surplus...
    • The first time you go into debt, you will receive a 'rescue gift' from Pharaoh/your nomarchs, which becomes nearly essential on Very Hard. One mission - and only one mission - denies this to you.
    • It's possible to set up independent industrial areas (usually quarries) that don't need to be connected to the main road. This allows stone haulers and trade caravans to reach it faster by moving diagonally, and lowers crime (thieves can only rob public buildings if there's a road connection between their home and the building).
    • If you can't build military buildings, there will be no attacks on the city. Of course, just because you get military buildings doesn't mean you will be attacked, either....
  • Anti-Hoarding:
    • Strongly averted, as keeping at least one stockyard full of whatever your city produces (that's one stockyard per resource) is very much a necessity, in order to respond to the increasingly unreasonable requests made by other cities. It helps that resources stored this way don't spoil despite being left out in the Egyptian sun for years.
    • Hoarding is even encouraged through the salary mechanic: by paying yourself a small salary every month (the game informs you that taking money from the city and into your family's coffers is embezzlement), you can accumulate money that can be used in later levels in an emergency or bribe your way to a higher Kingdom rating, although the price of the bribes doubles every time. The only steps taken to prevent this are to reduce your salary to zero once you've completed all mission objectives, and making the Kingdom rating collapse if you give yourself a higher salary than your rank allows.
  • Antony and Cleopatra: The Cleopatra expansion's final mission challenges you to change how the play ends.
  • Apathetic Citizens: The apothecary's walker only cares about whether a malaria outbreak's likely; the architect also speaks only of buildings in poor condition, despite having the full allotment of soundbites.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: There can only be 6 legions of 16 units and 6 warships total on a map. Transports have no such limitation.
  • Artificial Insolence: The survivors of demoralized companies will flee back to their forts. Giving them an order will result in the company taking a few steps outside the fort and immediately retreating back into it.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • The enemy forces can be distracted and lured away by baiting units, as their pathfinding, target acquisition and overall cohesion is not their strongest point, fortunately. It's fair, as tacticals exploits are usually the only way to beat them in some circumstances, as their superior numbers and might would make them otherwise unbeateable.
    • Cart pushers and enemy regiments do not take into account that being caught on the rising flood plain is deadly.
    • In the remake, destination walkers will commit suicide in the Nile because the pathfinding allows the usage of roads that are underwater due to the flood.
  • As You Know: The briefing in the Cleopatra expansion's final two missions tells you, taking the role of Cleopatra, about her past encounters with Caesar and Antony.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Manors and Estates give ridiculous amounts of tax money and greatly improve the Prosperity rating, but their hundred-plus inhabitants are taken out of the workforce and take up a lot of space. As this level of housing requires dozens upon dozens of workers to support, they tend to devolve very quickly.
  • Badass Family: Your family rose from humble village elders to a Pharaonic dynasty - but you still take orders from people (be it anonymous bureaucrats, or your own Grand Vizier).
  • Badass Preacher: With the upgrades to the Temple Complex of Seth or Ra, their priests will attack robbers.
  • Bag of Spilling: With an exception or two in the expansion, nothing from one level carries over to the next.
    • It quickly becomes thoroughly ridiculous in the Cleopatra expansion. You have to build Alexandria three times (named Alexandria, Ptolemy's Alexandria, and Cleopatra's Alexandria) from the ground up. You keep the landmarks from the previous iterations of the level, except everything else has completely vanished.
      • Alexandria is in 331 BC; the mission directly after, Ptolemy's Alexandria, is in 305 BC. Alexandria (the first one) ends in 319 BC, and 314 BC if you govern for five more years. So the capital of Egypt became entirely deserted in nine years? Seems legit.
      • The introduction to the second Alexandria mission only enhances the hilarity; the advisor proudly proclaims that "Alexander's great city continues to thrive", and "the city has become a powerful commercial hub". A city with no buildings or residents is clearly a thriving one indeed.
    • The main exception is that you can give yourself a salary, which will pass on to your descendants. Normally this isn't too important, as the main use for personal funds (giving gifts to other rulers to boost your kingdom rating) has their costs based on a percentage of your funds, you can give some of your money to the city coffers, thus quickly gain a ton of money if you feel like sitting around for several years growing filthy rich.
    • In an example of Developer's Foresight, your salary is reduced to zero if you choose to keep governing after winning (to prevent you from greatly increasing your salary for a few years, safe from the threat of losing).
      • Of course, in most missions there's nothing preventing you to delay indefinitely the completion of a mission by, say, delivering only 9 out of 10 linen rolls to a monument... for the next 100 years, all the while receiving your salary.
    • In the "Valley of the Kings" and "Ramses II" campaigns, you have to build the city of Deir el-Medina four times, but at least the scenarios do contain the tombs built in the previous missions. In the remake however, the missions start with a clean map, with the tombs not present at all!
  • Been There, Shaped History: Your in-game family is apparently responsible for building several Egyptian capitals (such as Memphis, Thebes and Alexandria), in addition to constructing all of the famed monuments (Djoser's stepped pyramid at Saqqara, Snefru's bent pyramid, Khufu's Great Pyramid and the Sphinx at Giza, etcetera).
  • Biblical Bad Guy: "Ramses in the Valley" has the advisor warn you of a rebellious movement spreading through the workers. During the mission, you get plagues of frogs, locusts, hailstorms and rivers of blood. Hmmm... (These plagues are explicity credited to "a man that was once raised in the court of our Pharaoh" - aka Moses.)
    • The mission even gives you a Dark Reprise of the briefing's usual music.
  • Big Fancy House: The higher-level houses, as well as your dynasty's mansion.
  • Birth-Death Juxtaposition: In the beginning cutscene, the narrating Pharaoh tells his son that he was born just as his father was being prepared for the afterlife.
  • Black Comedy: The embalmer tends to deliver this. Comes with the job really.
  • Blasphemous Boast: Averted with the Priest of Ra, who says that only the afterlife is better than your city.
  • Blood Knight: Set's priests will be the only ones happy about an incoming invasion.
  • Bolt of Divine Retribution: Or rather Plague of Divine Retribution if you don't worship Bast enough. Seth and Ptah will set forts and storage yards on fire, and Osiris takes away floodplain farms.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Sing the praises of the humble roadblock, for it prevents the nightmare of walkers going anywhere they please.
    • Bast; she is hardly ever the Patron God, but her blessings are invaluable, and hardly ever useless (unlike Ra's Kingdom rating, Osiris improving a perfect flood or Ptah filling already-filled Storage Yards).
    • Ra's major blessings are a big boost in Kingdom rating or prices on exported goods for a year. Useful, yes, but in the long run far less good to have than his minor blessing, which causes trade cities to trade more often for 12 months. This gets you more money than usual anyway, but more importantly, nearly doubles the amount of importable goods a year, very important on levels with monuments requiring huge amounts of building materials.
  • Bread and Circuses: Throwing festivals and making sure there's enough food can keep your citizens from leaving or revolting, usually due to your incompetent leadership.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: In-Universe. If your kingdom rating isn't high enough, you can send expensive gifts, paid for with your own money, to make it rise. However, the less you wait between sending bribes the lower the increase (and the price of the gifts double every time).
  • Brick Joke: "Mothers all over the kingdom name their children after you" to "Mothers use your name to frighten their children" at high and low kingdom ratings. One has to wonder what happens to the poor children now bearing your name...
  • Build Like an Egyptian: Often the goal of a campaign includes building certain pyramids.
  • But Thou Must!:
    • When famished neighbouring cities start begging you for food, you better provide. If you don't, then they won't trade with you products that your citizens need, thus preventing you from reaching high prosperity, thus preventing you from completing your mission. If you have the heart to refuse them? Too bad, your popularity drops, the people of Egypt begin to doubt your patriotism, and if you don't repair their opinion of you, Pharaoh will send his army against your fair city.
    • Taken to ludicrous levels in the final level of the main game. You get requests as early as three months in to the mission.
    • In the Egyptian Civil War, you must support the southern Inyotef dynasty. This is despite Henen-nesw, the northern claimants to the throne, being a Custom Mission, tagged with "So You Wanna Be Pharaoh?".
    • Cleopatra's Alexandria has recurring luxury goods requests from Rome. Compliance nets you gifts of weaponry from Rome; refuse, and you get invaded by Roman legionaries, the toughest units in-game. Tough choice.
    • The Hyksos invade Khmun early even if you save Rowarty. This was corrected in the remake.
  • Catch-22 Dilemma: A recurring situation where your housing starts devolving because it no longer has access to some services, most often because of a worker shortage. When housing devolves, several citizens are kicked out, reducing the workforce even further, causing the housing to fall to an even lower level, and so on. The only way to fix the situation is to increase the workforce and improve the services, which can only be done by getting new workers to move into the area...
    • Even worse when conditions are so bad people are leaving of their own accord, since there's no one immigrating to the city.
  • Cats Are Superior: Bast. This is Ancient Egypt we're talking about, after all. She is the most helpful of the gods.
  • Chokepoint Geography: Averted. While you can build defensive chokepoints, the enemy can and often will simply go around them, and that's not even getting into the problem of waterborne troops.
  • Choosy Beggar: One of the more difficult and recurring requests is when another city faces a famine and begs you for food (if you ignore it or let the deadline pass, your Kingdom rating takes a severe hit). The problem is that only a single type of food is counted for the request, often in huge quantities (i.e. 2000 figs or 1600 fish or 3200 pomegranates), and it has to be from the food kept in storage yards (for exportation) instead of granaries (for local consumption), leading to supply-chain problems as you shift goods around and keeping entire yards full of food that won't be eaten or sold just in case it's needed later. Fortunately, later games in the City-Building Series simply ask for food without specifying which kind, which is then taken from the total food stocks.
  • Civil War: Halfway in the game, between Lower Egypt (Northern) and Upper Egypt (Southern). Naturally enough, your side (the southern city of Waset/Thebes) is cast as the good guy.
    • Possibly justified- at several times, the guy giving you the pre-level exposition is stated to be a high-ranking official. It's perfectly possible he's an Unreliable Narrator. Indeed, the only time the Pharaoh himself (Mentuhotep II, in this case) gives you instruction is prior to Menat-Khufu or Kebet.
      • Further justified in that the northern leaders are Hyksos, not Egyptians - and naturally, they were invaders. (Also, a world in which they succeeded in permanently conquering Egypt would be a very Alternate History indeed and would derail the historical campaign.)
  • Comically Small Bribe:
    • Inverted: The costs of sending gifts to Egypt is a percentage of your total savings (up to half!), while the amount your kingdom rating goes up by does not (and sending multiple gifts in quick succession decreases it as the recipients grow used to them), so it's more of a Comically Huge Bribe.
    • The cost of festivals increases over time as the city grows.
  • Comic-Book Time: Your character's descendants succeed you after every level... except your character is seemingly immortal during the level, which can last for decades. If you take long enough on a mission, it is quite possible to end the current mission after the starting date of the next mission.
  • Command & Conquer Economy: The citizens show very little initiative. Not only do you have to build everything for them except housing (which you merely designate plots for), they do not even go to the market themselves to buy food and goods; a peddler has to walk past. Owing to the vagaries of the walker system, you risk losing a lot of workers to an entire street being deserted due to a priestess failing to walk down it sufficiently often. Obviously, the Egyptians going to the temple themselves is out of the question.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Enemy regiments can traverse through the floodplains, while the player's can only walk on its roads. However this is often a disadvantage for the AI, because the computer won't do anything to avoid being drowned in droves when the flood comes.
  • Could Say It, But...: A deleted line from the bazaar buyer.
    I won't complain about this city. ... But I could!
  • Critical Staffing Shortage: A game mechanic and quite possibly the single biggest headache in the game.
    • Services that have less than full staff work slower, and since housing and industry depend on these services walking past, this creates a Catch-22 Dilemma: housing is devolving because the lack of services, so people are kicked out. This lowers your population, and in turn the amount of available workers, which means services suffer, which means devolving housing, which... Compounded by the fact that some buildings don't work at all with even a single worker missing, to the point where the game considers that up 5% unemployment (out of thousands) to be fine, a mere 10 workers is a major cause for alarm (when it's quite common to see shortages in the hundreds).

      Thankfully, there are several Acceptable Breaks from Reality to deal with this: workers are taken from the workforce as a whole, so closing a mine frees up workers for farming or training musicians, you can order entire sectors to be fully staffed at the cost of others, and you only need a single house near the industry to get workers to it instead of a fully-supported neighborhood.
    • One level starts you off with a pre-built city on the brink of destruction, made worse by the fact that the various worker categories have been ranked (so some industries have zero workers and others still don't have enough).
    • Thankfully averted by the remake which gives the option of using a global labor pool (as with Zeus and Emperor): simply placing buildings gets them immediately (if partially) staffed.
  • Cultural Translation: You can choose to use either the Ancient Egyptian or Classical Greek city names. The Classical Greek is what we are used to, but - fittingly - the Egyptian is set as the default.
    • Some cities actually don't have Classical Greek names. Itjtawy, for instance, because it is currently undiscovered.
    • Note that this applies only to city names, not to the names of people (including Pharaohs), so Khufu (Cheops) is always named Khufu whether you build his pyramid in Rostja or in Giza.
    • On the other hand, Egypt is always called Egypt by everyone even though it's based on the Greek name (Aigyptos, via Latin Aegyptus). The Ancient Egyptian name for their country was kmt, usually rendered in Modern English as Kemet.
  • Cut and Paste Environments: Subverted in the Alexandria campaign, where the map remains broadly the same, but some parts of the coastline change (a land bridge gets built in the thirty year-gap between the first and second levels, to make building the Pharos easier) and the available resources and meadows change from level to level.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle:
    • War chariots literally mow regular infantry units under their wheels.
    • Military units against nearly anything else, policemen and hunters only slow them down but can't kill them unless present in overwhelming numbers.
  • Curse of the Pharaoh: Subverted, where not only do tomb robbers face no consequences for getting into a tomb unopposed (they steal the grave goods stocked inside), you get penalized for it via a hit to the Kingdom rating. Fortunately, as there's only one access point to the tombs, you can line a chokepoint with police stations to ensure the thief gets caught before getting to the tomb.
  • Cycle of Hurting:
    • Some housing lots become this during times of worker shortages, evolving quickly thanks to a walker moving by, then devolving when he doesn't come by often enough. Especially obvious with the multi-square housing.
    • In miltary missions, defeating an enemy but suffering enough loses makes the subsequent invasions all the more difficult, as the replenishment speed of regiments won't likely meet the challenge presented.
    • In the remake, before 1.5.0 version (October 2023 update) going into debt can quickly lead to a game over, as a debt of 1000 debens will roughly generate additional 3000 debens of expenses in a year due to the exhorbitant interests, and you automatically lose when you are 5000 in the red.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The remake goes from right-click to left-click to select buildings and walkers. And by default, it has pause set for Space rather than P.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The monument construction foreman is impressively sarcastic in his reports.
    I suppose these bricks are going to magically assemble themselves. That must be your plan, since you haven't built a bricklayer's guild.
    No peasants have reported for work today. I'd find out why, if I were you. Maybe your work camps are more like sleep camps.
    With no carpenters to builds ramps, I hope you're planning on a very short monument.
    Do you expect this monument to be built by gods from the sky? Build more work camps immediately!
  • Decisive Battle: Several times, with the game ending with the Battle of Actium in Cleopatra. The local battles usually involve you building a heavily fortified city in a strategic point with poor resources, constantly besieged by the Nubians / the Hyksos / the Sea People / what have you, with losing leading to the unopossed enemy demolishing your city until their morale drops and they leave. Every battle Pharaoh tells you to send reinforcements for is apparently this, as defeat becomes your fault (you should have sent better/more troops), and depending on the scenario configuration, a trade route you might need to complete the mission objectives could become unavailable if you don't win the battle.
  • Despair Event Horizon: The advisor who gives you your mission briefings sounds absolutely devastated in Iunet and On when Khufu takes the throne.
  • Developer's Foresight: Your salary is fixed at a certain quantity of debens per months, no matter how well the city is doing. The game informs you that you can't just shovel money from the city to your own account, as that would be embezzling. Try to go above your allocated amount, and your kingdom rating is lowered (so, if you are Royal Governor, don't take a Pharaoh's salary). Annoyingly, this means that by the end of the mission, you can be making thousands of debens each month and have nothing to do with them, as you aren't embezzling fast enough.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: Towers are not easy nor cheap to set up, costing about half the price of a fort each, requiring a section of thick wall to be built upon and direct road connection with a recruiter, in addition to the usual labor access. Once they are manned, their volley fire is quite deadly if and when their spears connect with a target. It's a very viable strategy to simply use your field forces (including hordes of policemen) to function as bait and fodder to expose the enemy to tower fire.
  • Disaster Dominoes:
    • Fires can draw firefighters from any part the city, leaving their sectors unpatrolled for a while, which can result in additional fires if they lacked redundant coverage, and a situation that can spiral out of control.
    • Defeated companies (and trying to give orders to panicked regiments) will decrease the morale of the rest of your regiments, which can result in your line of still-fighting armies rolling up like a carpet one by one. You can also exploit this mechanic against the enemy to defeat it more easily.
    • Low city sentiment will affect the poorest slums first, triggering emigration and making their habitants vacate those houses. If a considerable amount of industrial employement depended on those houses alone, the ensuing unemployement will make the situation even worse, specially if the block was isolated and no alternative, existing source of workers is near, as inmigration won't be an option for a long, long time.
  • Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Your fledgling city can manage without any places of worship... for a short while. Continuing to deny the gods the temples they demand (the number of which depends on current population) results in plagues, destroyed industry, destroyed Nile farms, sunken reputation and trade contracts, and destroyed forts. The only one you can safely ignore is Osiris if you've decided to use soil farms only (which yield less than Nile farms, require more workers, and have bizarre pathing requirements).
  • Do Well, But Not Perfect: Building a very efficient city often leads to huge (un)employment problems in the long run when population goals start to require several thousand people. The game encourages a Keynesian approach where duplicate services or even unnecessary public works (like, say, giant tombs for the ruler) are needed to soak up the unemployed, since neighbourhoods of idle rich citizens can only curb the problem up to a certain point. On the other side of the spectrum, a very stable population will age, decreasing the workforce as times goes by, which encourages evictions to renew the labor pool without increasing the size of the city.
  • Dynamic Difficulty: The difficulty can be changed at any time from the mission briefing.
  • Earthquakes Cause Fissures: One custom mission (NAFTA) has an earthquake strike, causing unremovable fissures. It just happens to hit in the place you've most likely placed the pyramid complex you have to build.
  • Egopolis: Bubastis is named for Bast, the patron goddess for that level.
  • Entitled Bastard: The scribe walker produced by high-end housing, in spades.
    Plague could break out at any time! I hope it stays in the poor parts of town.
    How can so few workers properly cater to my needs?
    Look at all those idlers. Why don't they get jobs?
    These festivals would be so much better if they were by invitation only!
  • Early Game Hell: Scenarios with early invasions are a challenge even for seasoned players that anticipate and prepare for its events from the start. You lack a solid economy to properly afford the step cost of the military infrastructure and the resources it requires. In addition, the slow recruitment system means the number of troops available to meet the enemy will be low, as the enlisting speed can roughly fill a regiment per year. To make things worse, if you stay in debt for more than two years in a row, your kingdom rating will plummet and Pharaoh will send his armies against your fair city.
  • Epic Fail: In a fire, you can occasionally see your water supply being burnt to the ground.
  • The Epic: The Rags to Royalty Generational Saga of your dynasty; from a humble village elder to the almighty Pharaoh.
  • Equipment Upgrade: In the remake, archers can be equipped with composite bows made from wood, and infantry can be given shields made from hides. These upgrades add a +5 bonus to their base combat value (10 and 15, respectively), somewhat reducing their inferiority compared to chariots (combat value 25).
  • Everybody Hates Hades:
    • Averted with Osiris, who's present in his role of Lord of the Inundation rather than the Underworld. Same goes for Anubis, who only gets an add-on to the Temple Complex of Seth that causes undertakers to use less linen when making mummies.
    • Averted with Set, one of the five available gods. However, he's definitely the least pleasant of them all: where other gods are pleased by your respect and devotion, he appreciates your fear and obedience. If pleased, he will watch over your soldiers and even strike down any invading warrior. If displeased, he sets your forts on fire.
  • Everybody Loves Zeus: The Sun god Ra holds power over the entire kingdom (in the campaign, especially after the Pharaoh declares him the king of the gods), which translates to him increasing your reputation, export prices and amount of goods traded if he's happy, and decreasing them if displeased. Having him as patron god allows you to have crimefighting priests and salaries lower than the national average.
  • Exposition Break: Between levels the state of the state is discussed. Since the screen also has goals for the next mission, it can be reread to help with a Now, Where Was I Going Again? problem.
  • The Extremist Was Right: You usurped the throne, but Egypt became the foremost civilisation on the planet under your family's rule.
  • The Famine:
    • An often-seen event throughout the campaigns is a city suffering famine and begging you for food. Annoyingly, they always demand a specific type of food (such as fish or pomegranates), and you have to set it apart from the food used for your citizens' use. Not responding is a good way to ensure your approval rating drops like a brick.
    • One of the events added to the expansion is a plague of locusts, who reduce all crops to zero before leaving. Hope you had enough left in storage...
  • Fake Difficulty: Some military scenarios are made artificially harder by not allowing the construction of defensive towers.
  • Fragile Speedster: Archers die quickly when engaged in hand-to-hand combat, but are very swift and can be used to lure and bait enemies, (including charioteers if properly micromanaged) so they can be defeated in detail.
  • Fertility God: As god of the Nile, Osiris is responsible for the fertility of floodplain farms, making them barren, withholding the Inundation or even destroying the farms if displeased, or making them double their production if prayed to. Constructing his Temple Complex also allows wood and papyrus to grow back faster.
  • Feuding Families: The Reunification of Egypt arc, between the rulers of Henen-nesw (Herakleopolis) and Waset (Thebes).
  • Final-Exam Boss: Subverted in Cleopatra: While the penultimate mission is to build up Alexandria into a Shining City, using every mechanic you've ever seen (and some new ones like the Zoo), the final mission merely requires you to defend against an invading army in a resource-poor area (and limits the city's growth by not giving you entertainment past the jugglers).
  • Firewood Resources: Averted, the trees are skinny, man-height and are brought back one log at a time, though they turn into planks when sitting in your storage yards.
  • Food God: Both Bast and Osiris fill this role.
    • Bast can provide additional food and goods to houses and decrease the rate those goods are consumed. If angered, she will do the opposite, as well as angering the people in general.
    • Osiris can increase the potency of the Nile's flooding and increase the size of the harvest. If angered, he will withhold the flood and reduce the harvest sizes if not destroy the floodplain farms outright.
  • Four Is Death: Missions 14 (Rostja) and 24 (Hetepsensuret or Rowarty) are the longest missions in the game.
  • Funny Background Event: In the remake, forts have several animations for the soldiers stationed there, like an infantryman ferociously headbutting a wooden training dummy, an archer trying and failing to bring down a bird, an archer trying to hit an apple on a trembling soldier's head, a charioteer trying to park in reverse, or two soldiers sparring with a sword in one hand... and holding a hobby horse in the other.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Events are scripted, and have no bearing on your actions - so you can answer a request for food from a certain city, for instance, and then have a scripted famine occur in that same city a month later.
    • In Thinis and Waset, you still answer to "Pharaoh" - despite the actual Pharaohs being the Henen-nesw rulers, whom you are fighting against.
    • In most levels, Pharaoh makes demands of your city for various reasons. Once you're Pharaoh... other cities keep making demands of you (and sometimes threaten to report you to Pharaoh).
  • Game-Breaking Bug:
    • In Thinis and some other levels, caravans will dump barley in your storage yards. Since it's not on the list of goods for that mission, you can't stop buying it, you can't turn it into beer since you don't get breweries, and it slowly fills up the yard instead of beer if you don't keep a constant eye on the yards and destroy them as they fill up.
      • In other missions it's plain stone. Which could have been useful, if it weren't for the fact that the monuments are made of brick and limestone.
    • Some buildings will spawn their walkers right on top of the road you blocked off to prevent their walkers spawning there.
    • The third mission (Perwadjyt) can't be completed on "Very Hard" because the way culture is calculated makes the ranking unreachable.
    • The 2023 remake created enough to count as their own locust plague:
      • Monuments can't be finished if the top of the monument goes past the edge of the map.
      • One bug involving the new battle system causes the game to automatically pause itself at the end of every single month for the rest of the mission (with the unintentional benefit that the city is impervious to attack, since battles no longer trigger).
      • Trade ships can become stuck in your waters, making trade stop, the resources of their city unavailable and the mission unwinnable.
      • Policemen and towers no longer target predators, so there is no way to deal with hostile animals beyond disabling them.
      • Towers are bugged so loading a saved game won't keep the improvements made to them or guards stationed there.
      • Storage yards occasionally don't detect demand of raw goods from a production facility. Demolishing the facility and rebuilding it or undo the action manually is needed to unstuck the situation.
      • Recruiters occasionally report there is no demand of forces so they don't supply soldiers anymore, despite the city having forts that are not full. The same happens with supplied idle shipyards despite the presence of wharfs without ships.
      • Monument construction occasionally get stuck due to bugs in the materials delivery system and the only way to progress is to demolish them and start over.
      • Upon release, Iken campaign mission was configured as sandbox without winning conditions, so the mission is Unintentionally Unwinnable even if you met the stated ratings. This was patched in the following weeks, with existing savegames being required to restart the mission from the campaign menu.
      • Trade routes can't be opened unless you have all the funds needed. Since commerce is the biggest source of income, the issue can lead to a quick game over if you budget is already tight.
      • Chains of scripted events don't trigger properly if the game has been reloaded at some point. This can make needed trade routes unavailable and the mission goals unattainable.
      • One map (Ptolemy's Alexandria) features bugs like spawning new requests for troops every single month that can't be responded to in any way, and sometimes causing the in-game date to loop endlessly (causing trade ships to simply enter the city and immediately exit).
      • Saves and autosaves are occasionally corrupted and unable to being loaded. The issue had to be addressed in a hotfix.
      • After 1 hour of gameplay, work camps stop sending farmers and you have to monitor the situation and reload the game to fix it and avoid an agricultural collapse.
    • Until it was patched in the 1.5.0 version, the interest rates on debt are much, much stepper in the remake; 25% per month vs a reasonable 15% yearly (1.25% monthly) of the original. A small debt of 1000 debens will cost the treasure an additional 3000 loss in interest alone in a year, and that's not taking into account the ensuing increased debt produced by the usury itself. It makes the Cycle of Hurting harder to manage while you are in the red, as you automatically lose when you go below -5000 instead of the suspended payments state of the original, where you can still recover by selling stored goods to traders.
  • Gods Need Prayer Badly: While gods need sacrifices or festivals almost constantly to keep them happy, ignoring them only makes them angry. Cue earthquakes, plagues, floods, failing crops... On the other hand, keeping them happy also brings benefits.
  • Grand Vizier: You hold this title for only one mission (either Menat-Khufu or Kebet), it having been granted to you by Mentuhotep II, who reunited the two Kingdoms of Egypt and founded the Middle Kingdom (this is also the only time in the game that the Pharaoh himself addresses you). He emphasizes that he considers you his most trusted and capable subject. In the very next mission, Ijtjawy, your dynasty has taken the throne at last - though amid rumours that you had usurped the throne, in the grand tradition of this trope. In fact, the first Pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty, which reigned from Ijtjawy, did indeed usurp the throne from Mentuhotep's descendant.
  • Grimy Water:
    • In the expansion, one of the curses is a river of blood, which will disable all wells and water supplies until it passes.
    • One of the random events is that citizens have taken ill from something in the water, illustrated by dead fish. If your health isn't well regulated, it leads to plague.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • In the very first mission of the campaign you are simply told to build houses. What the mission doesn't tell you is how many. If you decided that a handful is enough, especially since you can't build anything else, you end up stuck, as the mission won't progress any further until both sufficient number of houses and population are reached.
    • Certain buildings evolve in high desirability areas, which decreases their own negative imprint on said desirability, while also make them spawn walkers more often. The game doesn't explain any of it.
    • The pyramid complexes in some levels require you to have a causeway leading out to the water (and it cannot be a small creek either). This obviously limits where you can place them, so unless you check the Monuments list or a walkthrough before you start, you may wind up having to delete a number of houses or industries to squeeze it in. This also means everyone taking detour around the construction site, even if no actual work on the causeway started yet.
    • Your population actually does age. What it means that the same number of people living in the city will provide different number of workers throughout the years. Stall the mission long enough, and you will have a city populated entirely by octogenarians, who are too old to contribute to the workforce. And the only way around is is to raze down some houses and put them back in, with fresh, young immigrants. The remake adds the option of removing the age simulation, maintaining the worker population at 40% of the total population.
    • Despite the wording, military aid requests for "waterborne troops" can be fulfilled by warships alone, which are more effective that land units (two warships are usually enough to save the day and will return in good health, while 3 or more embarked regiments are needed to achieve the same result and will sustain some loses). The remake corrects this Loophole Abuse by requiring a combination of land troops and military transports to be sent.
    • Storage Yards (and granaries in the remake) don't need a direct road to connection to get goods. This is undocumented and very useful to make isolated, efficient blocks so deliverers don't walk to a distant storage or facility that accepts or consumes the goods and dock workers don't go through half the city to get an item from a far-away connected storage. The cartpushers with "get" orders will simply beeline cross-country to and from the source.
    • Bazaars buy food from a storage yard if the city is importing that kind of food. In the remake they'll buy food from a storage yard regardless, making granaries redundant or even unnecessary.
  • Hair-Trigger Temper: "Pharaoh is about to fly into a rage" because you haven't sent him whatever it was he wanted.
  • Hammerspace: Trade caravans can fill up an entire storage yard in seconds.
  • Harder Than Hard: The hardest difficulty setting is called "Impossible" in the internal files, but in-game it's just named "Very Hard."
  • Healer God: With the right upgrades to the Temple Complex to Bast, her priestesses can remove plagued citizens, preventing them from spreading the infection further (they don't replace physicians though). On the flip side, anger Bast and she'll send a plague.
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: You must name your dynasty to begin playing the game, and it even provides a list of male and female Egyptian names that you can choose, if you so wish. This is a tradition from Caesar which is then passed to Emperor. The game then refers to you as the current head of your dynasty, such as Nyarlathotep XIII.
  • Healing Hands: Priestesses of Bast can be upgraded to heal the sick if she's the patron goddess.
  • Heroic Sacrifice:
    • It is said of victorious troops that "their numbers may be diminished, but their sacrifice was for the good of Egypt!".
    • Despite having no chance of success, policemen will still move to intercept enemies, holding them up for a short amount of time.
  • Hold the Line: What police officers do while you (hopefully) order actual troops to deal with the threat.
  • Idle Rich: Scribes, who inhabit the most opulent houses, have no function in the city other than consuming lots of goods and paying lots of taxes. Downplayed in that if industry walkers are walking past manors and estates under a certain level, they are still able to access the labor force.
  • Industrial Ghetto: Placing any form of heavy industry near housing will quickly devalue the property and cause it to devolve unless you put a ridiculous amount of statuary nearby.
    • Building these often becomes a vital strategy due to the short distance the walkers looking for employees will walk. A small housing block (or even just a single house) placed adjacent to the industrial buildings will never evolve past a hut, but will supply the entire industrial area with workers.
  • Informed Equipment: Inverted in the remake: Infantrymen are shown with shields, but won't actually use them until you equip them at the fort.
  • Intrepid Merchant: The trade caravans.
  • Instant-Win Condition: As soon as all your rating, housing and population requirements are met, you win (though you can continue to govern on later missions). It's possible to leave the city on the verge of collapse thanks to this.
  • Instrument of Murder: The musician mentions beating the enemy over the head with her sistrum if you don't start looking into improving the city's defense.
  • Interservice Rivalry: The monument builders rely on one another to make progress, and the foreman is all too happy to snidely tell you which ones are slacking off. He gets rather passive-aggressive when building materials are stockpiled or production is ceased.
  • In the Blood: Twenty-four generations of your family are city-builders. They're so good at this, that they go from a village elder to the almighty Pharaoh.
  • Intimidating Revenue Service: Averted, citizens have no problem with paying their taxes, but won't do so until prompted by the tax collector. Though if they're set too high, they'll leave.
    Emigrant: I'm surprised they didn't tax me for leaving!
  • Jumping Fish: How fishing locations are marked.
  • Killer Rabbit: Compared to the lions, hyenas, and crocodiles that eat walkers, or the locusts that eat crops, how much harm can frogs do? Well, they can completely empty out your housing, reducing your production capacity to nil if the city's infrastructure doesn't collapse first.
  • Large Ham: Several walkers, especially if they're particularly happy about your management.
    Juggler: There's NO PLACE I'd rather juggle!
    • There's also a couple during festivals, particularly (again) the juggler.
    I LOVE WORKING THESE FESTIVAL CROWDS! EVERYONE'S SO HAPPY!!!
  • Level Editor: The original includes a scenario editor, but the remake does not.
  • Lightning Bruiser: Chariots are very fast and very deadly, outclassing any other kind of units. On the hardest difficulty, the chariots of the Hyksos and Hytites will anhiquilate whole companies of your own chariots in melee combat one by one if you don't provide them with plenty of support from other regiments and/or towers.
  • Loan Shark: In the remake, the debt interests are bugged before the 1.5.0 version and downright usury at 25% per month / 300% yearly, as opposed to the reasonable 1.25 per month / 15% yearly of the original.
  • Logic Bomb:
    • It's possible to end up with the game telling that your city both needs workers and that people hate you because you're not providing enough jobs. All the while armies of recruiters are trying to hire people who are fleeing the city as buildings are collapsing/catching on fire around them because no one's hired to tend to them.
    • It's possible to make more money from taxes (which vary from 0-25% of the wages) than is actually paid in wages. This is because of the absolutely obscene amounts of tax paid out by scribal housing (Manors and Estates); the trade-off is that they aren't part of the workforce.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Some invasion entry points are randomized, which affects some missions greatly on the hardest difficulty levels. Iken is considerably harder if the powerful Kushites enter from the southeast, hitting the settlement with the gold mining operations, which is hard to defend and can lead to losing the scenario.
  • Marathon Level: Rostja - otherwise known as Giza. Naturally, you are made to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Sphinx - but this takes at least sixty in-game years, longer than just about any other mission.
  • Mighty Glacier: The Infantry, like the Legionnaires in Caesar. They're really slow but very strong, and have the edge until chariots come into play. Kushite warriors are a prominent example, they can usually outmatch Egyptian foot troops in open combat, but are very sluggish and vulnerable to hit-and-run and kiting, diversionary tactics from archers.
  • Mook Chivalry: Units in melee combat will only attack one on one, leading to fifteen soldiers watching the remaining one fighting a Duel Tothe Death. Ranged units can fire at a single target as long as they're not attacked themselves.
  • Narrator: The missions are narrated by several different people, with one voice actor for each period of Egyptian history. The background music played as the narrator speaks also changes with the times. For the Cleopatra expansion, only one narrator is used, and the various music cues are chosen seemingly indiscriminately, although he does affect an "Egyptian" accent in the New Kingdom and Late Period missions, and then a "Greek" one for the Ptolemaic missions. Oddly, the narrator for the Saqqara mission (in which you build Djoser's stepped pyramid) claims to be Imhotep (the architect of that design), even though the same voice actor is used for all other Old Kingdom missions, set long before and after Imhotep's lifetime. The only other historical figure who serves as narrator is Pharaoh Mentuhotep II for the Menat-Khufu and Kebet missions, though he is played by a different voice actor than those used for most of the other missions (he had narrated the Predynastic missions at the beginning of the game, but he uses a conspicuously deeper voice for Mentuhotep).
  • Nerf:
    • In the remake, chariots now require copper as well as wood, which almost doubles their per unit cost so they're no longer the go-to, dirt-cheap Lightning Bruiser option that makes other units obsolete like in the original. They're still the overall best choice however, and the importing prices have not been updated to reflect the cost of the additional materials.
    • The toughest enemies that rely on chariots (Hyksos, Hitites) can be beaten with regular units of infantry and archers without catastropihc loses, while in the original they steamroll anything you throw at them in a stand up fight. Other tough enemies such as the Kushites are no longer The Juggernaut.
  • Nepharious Pharaoh:
    • Averted for the most part, unless you're really bad at answering requests (in which case Pharaoh will send his armies against your fair city). Trying to be this yourself generally gets you a game over.
    • Khufu, however, most certainly is. The advisor who gives you your missions sounds as if he's crossed the Despair Event Horizon in Iunet when Khufu takes the throne.note 
  • Neutrals, Critters, and Creeps: Wild animals can be found on nearly every map, serving as resources or hazards (and just hazards if game meat isn't an available resource). Hyenas, scorpions, lions, crocodiles and hippos will wander around the map and attack any walker they see, and only hunters, cops and soldiers can fight back against them. Gazelles, ostriches and flocks of birds serve as food sources but can only be gathered by hunters.
  • Nintendo Hard:
    • The average missions require somewhere between 3000 to 5000 citizens and decent economy, but some endgame missions require you to have 10000 citizens, high prosperity rating, palatial houses... while finishing a Grand Pyramid Complex. This can be a Guide Dang It! for some people.
    • The last mission of the Expansion Pack is not this, instead being an Alternate History version of the Battle of Actium. The one mission before it is quite complex, requiring 10.000 residents and a very thriving city.
    • Summed up nicely prior to Menat Khufu.
    Pharaoh Mentuhotep: I know I that I am asking much of you... but I also know that you are the only one in Egypt capable of doing what I have asked.
  • No Indoor Voice: Happy jugglers are loud.
  • Non-Appearing Title: Dunqul Oasis is never mentioned by name in the level's briefing. This is the only mission where this is the case.
  • No Recycling: Collapsed/burnt-out Granaries and Storage Yards take everything with them when they die. Particularly aggravating for the Storage yard, which consists of a flat lot for the goods and a shaded booth which would at best fall on the receptionist, and Shipyards, which are a ramp leading to the water and a place to hold the wood.
  • Not in My Backyard!: Houses won't evolve to the next level if close to unsightly buildings like bazaars and industrial buildings, despite the fact that they need those buildings to provide whatever goods and services are required to keep them at that level. Bazaars actually provide the best desirability if they're nearby but not next-door.
  • Number Two: You eventually become this to Pharaoh after he names you Vizier. He even tells you there's no one else he trusts more.
  • Numerical Hard: Increased difficulty increases the price of construction, in addition to enabling events that don't happen otherwise, like robbers and malaria.
  • Odd Job Gods: Minor gods provide benefits if they have an altar or oracle in the temple complex. Some empower their patron god's priests (Bast's become healers, Ra and Seth's become crimefighters), others can accelerate production or reduce consumption of goods.
  • One True Faith: Some gods may not be worshipped in certain areas, but every god always has the same purpose when worshipped. None of that Bast turning from sun god to housekitty god over the years here!
  • Palette Swap:
    • "Egyptian armies" look the same as your own, but with zebra-striped shields and red clothing.
    • When building a Sun Temple or Gatehouse, the decorations will match the level's patron god.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • Some missions only have one city that sells a certain good; if you fail a request to that city, the trade route will often shut down. This can lead to unwinnable missions, such as in Saqqara.
    • Slightly subverted with Rostja: if you fail the requests for troops to Dakuhr, you are unable to access some goods that are needed mainly for burial provisions, however after some time the trade route will open regardless.
    • Played for Laughs in some levels - the Dunqul Oasis, for instance, almost immediately gives you a request to send an obscene number of weapons to Buhen. It's just an excuse to shut down that trade route.
    • In Thinis, you begin with a pre-built settlement, with the Temple Complex to Osiris and your mansion already there. If they collapse, however, there is no rebuilding them, even if you're making thousands of spare debens per month.
  • Patron God: This is used as a game mechanic. Up to five gods can be worshiped at any time (Osiris, Ra, Ptah, Bast, and Seth), but only one is the patron god, who requires more temples and shrines than the other "local" deities to be appeased.
    • In the campaign, Ra is usually the main god (reflecting the shift in real-life Ancient Egyptian politics), desert missions usually involve warfare and so give Seth priority, Osiris is usually worshiped on Nile levels, etc.
    • The patron god can also have a Temple Complex built in their honor, which provides several benefits to associated industries (although some missions let you build a complex to local gods, but only one can be present one a map):
      • Osiris gives better floods, increases the regeneration rate of timber and reeds, and makes food last longer.
      • Ra increases the city's rating, lets his priests reduce crime rates and lowers the kingdom's average salary (allowing your city to pay lower wages without causing unrest).
      • Ptah speeds up production of raw materials and finished goods and lets educational buildings use less papyrus.
      • Bast makes entertainers more effective, lets her priestesses cure plagues and improves the city's health and mood.
  • Percent-Based Values:
    • Tax rates can only be set as a percentage, but how much you pay your workers has no influence on this.
    • Entertainment and education buildings all have a fixed value of how many citizens they can entertain, but this is then compared to the total number of citizens you have, with a Perfect coverage rating being given when they can service more people than there are in the city.
  • Perpetual Poverty:
  • The Plague: Caused naturally by not enough food and medical care, and supernaturally if you piss off Bast. Malaria works much the same way (on houses near water), but only on higher difficulties.
  • Plague of Good Fortune: Happy gods can be annoying in their own way, like repeatedly interrupting you to tell you your kingdom rating has increased (when it's already maxed out) or filling up your storage yards with materials, preventing you from storing other products that are more urgently needed.
  • Power-Up Letdown:
    • The Temple Complex of Ra makes workers happier with less pay, which translates to... 2 debens lower than the average. Hooray.
    • Some divine blessings can be this. Ra (again) has an annoying tendency to increase your already-stellar Kingdom rating when you want him to cause other cities to increase trade.
    • The expansion has an option to let the gods increase monument progress instead of a blessing. It can be turned off, but if you want one, get ready to throw a lot of festivals.
    • Priests of Bastet, Ra, and Seth can be upgraded via their respective Temple Complex, but while Bastet increases city health and the other two reduce crime, both of those functions are already carried out by physicians and magistrates (and you need those to upgrade houses anyway). Bastet's priestesses also neutralize plague walkers, but preventing plagues in the first place is much easier.
  • Punny Name: Theme Naming for some occupations:
    • The police constables have names like Samspadehotep, Cuffner, Magnumhotep and Merydonut.
    • Two possible names for the tax collector are Takelot and Avaris (a.k.a Avarice), both names about Greed.
  • Pragmatic Villainy: Putting tax collectors in poor neighborhoods is best avoided, as they're more likely to be burgled and taxes levied are too low to bother. Quoth the tax collector:
    I hate collecting taxes from these run-down houses, it's hardly worth my time.
  • Ramming Always Works: Warships can use Arrows on Fire against ships and land enemies, but this is their most effective attack.
  • Real-Time with Pause: You can't build anything or give orders to troops while paused, however you can set the game speed to 10 percent, which is equivalent. The remake lets you build while paused.
  • Refining Resources: A key feature. There are a large number of different resources representing both raw and processed materials; a given map will only provide the natural resources to produce a few of the raw materials, while the processed goods are the ones your citizens want. To provide everything they need and make money, you have to build an economy on the resources you've got, build the appropriate industries to refine them, and trade for the goods you have no way of extracting/producing. At a pinch, it's possible to make an industry out of Refining Resources alone (and is in fact explicitly recommended by the narrator); importing flax, building Weavers and exporting linen at a profit, for example.
  • Resource-Gathering Mission: A variation. Many levels are based on the premise of the player character founding a settlement to protect a trade route bringing exotic goods or mine valuable resources, requests for which will regularly pop up. While the main one will usually be mentioned in the mission briefing, others can come out of the blue in ridiculous quantities.
    • Another common demand is for food during a famine, but because they demand a single type of food, it's possible for their request to go unanswered and your reputation to plummet because the city wouldn't accept fish or grain instead of figs.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction:
    • While construction itself is instantaneous, getting the building to actually fulfill its purpose takes time (to get enough workers and materials).
    • Averted with the monuments - unless you have the "Pyramid Speedup" option turned on, and even then it takes a while.
  • Robbing the Dead: The expansion adds Tomb Robbers who target monuments and steal grave goods rather than money. It's not as big of a loss, but your kingdom rating takes a hit. Made worse in the Valley of the Kings campaign, where the tombs are so far away you need to establish a defensive line of cops to stop them.
  • Score Screen
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
    • If you get really bad at managing the city (high unemployment, lack of food, high taxes...), your citizens will leave of their own accord.
    • Soldiers' morale drops steadily as they stay in combat. If it gets too low, they panic and run back to their fort.
  • Self-Deprecation: Some walkers will say the city's reputation is worse than a juggler's. One of them is the juggler himself.
  • Sequence Breaking:
    • Serabit Khadim's battles can be completely bypassed. You need a Kingdom of 80, a population of 2000, and nothing else - so just spam houses everywhere until you get a high enough population, send a gift to Egypt with your family savings, and get out of there before the first invasion.
    • The remake removing time limits from levels (both of the Timed Mission and Hold the Line varieties) mean you can end some levels very quickly, such as skipping the battle of Qadesh.
  • Self-Disposing Villain: In the Thinis mission, one of the main attacks from Henen-nesw in the Egyptian civil war often ends with most of the enemy army drowned by the Nile without the player having to fight them, as they enter the city from the north and usually walk directly and fatally through the floodplain.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The senet player references various games in nearly all his lines.
    People's health is in Jeopardy!. The risk of plague is great!
    This city's reputation is checkered at best.
    I ought to learn the warcraft.
    This city should clue in on the lack of entertainment.
    For most, finding work is a trivial pursuit that ends in failure.
    This city has a monopoly on my heart.
  • Shown Their Work: The timeline is very historically accurate... prior to your ascension, at least.
    • And the game even times your accession to the throne to match that of a real life usurper, no less!
    • The depiction of construction of large monuments is quite accurate, although simplified slightly by omitting some of the complex interiors. In particular, the method of site preparation for pyramids (including clearing the bedrock and leveling the site) are depicted consistent with current understanding.
    • The well-researched in-game documentation about aspects of the Ancient Egypt is rather compelling, presenting deep, condensed knowledge comparable to that of offline encyclopedias of the time (a pre-wiki era) such as Microsoft Encarta.
  • Silliness Switch: The cheat code Side Show causes hippos to dance. Wearing pink tutus. Amusingly enough, this doesn't make them any less dangerous.
  • Sigil Spam: At high Kingdom rating, "your name is carved into every public space".
  • Single-Issue Wonk: Some walkers have no lines that don't relate to their profession, like the apothecary. Others with unused lines reference their job every chance they get (according to the cop, the only way to improve the city when it's running well is if the bazaar carried donuts).
  • Smurfette Principle: The priestess of Bast, bazaar employees, musicians and dancers are the only female walkers in the game.
    • Bast herself also counts, being the only female deity.
  • So Okay, It's Averageinvoked: Walkers have this opinion of the city if it has some problems but functions alright overall.
  • Spiritual Successor: Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile.
  • Statistically Speaking:
    • Some service coverage is determined by the walkers going past houses (such as food sellers and physicians), but entertainment, culture and divine appeasement is determined by number of facilities, which are inconvenient to place. By endgame, you may end up creating a network of crossroads and venues and great rows of sanctuaries and temples out in the desert, all serving a five-person house to stop them from catching fire or collapsing. Your city will still be hailed as a cultural wonder and impress the gods with your devotion.
    • Unemployment below 5% is no problem, regardless of how many hundreds of people that represents. Short 10 workers? The Chief Overseer and Overseer of the Workers are pulling the alarm bell... and with good cause.
  • Stealth Pun: In Itjtawy - the first mission you are Pharaoh - the game says people believe you seized the throne. Itjtawy is Ancient Egyptian for "seizer of the two lands".
  • Sterility Plague: The only way to increase population is to build/upgrade new areas of housing for immigrants. Averted in the briefings, where dynasties are kept alive through relatives producing male babies.
  • Story Branching: In most missions of Pharaoh, you have a choice between a more military-focused and a more peaceful mission. In the end it's all about the economy, with military missions requiring an economy maximized as early as possible to appropriately met the scripted invasions, while the peaceful ones have overall bigger requirements but the urgency and time pressure tends to be lower. The final mission of Pharaoh, Rowarty (military) or Hetepsenusret (peaceful) is decided based on the choice you made in the previous one.
  • Super Drowning Skills: No one ever survives a ship sinking. Or getting stuck on the rising flood plain, for that matter (not even hippos and crocodiles).
  • Super Not-Drowning Skills: A Good Bad Bug occasionally causes construction laborers to literally Walk on Water (bypassing ferry boats, even when hauling loads of stone) to get to their destination.
  • Super-Strength: One storage yard carter can carry four blocks of stone, a load that normally requires half a dozen stone pullers.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: The stats of most enemies are rather balanced, but some enemies like the Kushites have low defense against ranged attacks and other like Mitani have low defense against melee attacks.
  • Take That!: A brewery with too few workers says it can't even produce "lite" beer.
  • Take That, Audience!: If you let your kingdom rating get too low. Going from object of ridicule to people using your name to scare children to thinking you cause disease to jugglers making fun of you to wishing you were eaten by jackals, among others.
  • The Battle Didn't Count: Naval battles in the remake. Even if you killed every enemy ship without losing one of your own, enemy troops still land and attack.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Pharaoh Khufu's ascension is predicted to bring disaster, and the narrator shares this opinion when giving you his mission, consisting of building two pyramids and a sphinx.
  • Too Dumb to Live: So, you're a farmer with a load of grain. There's no space in the granary, so you're just going to sit on the flood plain and wait for the water to come and drown you. What's that? Go to the mainland and wait for space to open up? Screw that! You're staying and drowning!
  • Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Even though it's often partially hinted in the mission briefing, you will often have no idea what product the neighbours will request you. On top of that, the military buildings are available on most missions, but are unneeded on some. And you can't settle up everything that fast. So have fun figuring out the requests, and restart the mission to suit them. Missions with tough early invasions like Dunqul Oasis, Khmun or Rowarty require you to maximize and focus your economy towards defense from the get go, and more often than not on harder difficulties, even replaying with advanced knowledge, you prepare too little too late and the enemy curbstomps your forces.
  • Timed Mission: King Tutenkhamen's tomb needs to be built on a restricted timescale. Also applies to other missions of Cleopatra and in the custom map Enkomi.
    • Subverted in the remake, which removed time constraints entirely.
  • Undying Loyalty: At 100 Kingdom rating, the entire population wants to serve you in the afterlife.
  • The Unfought: In the remake, if you manage to save Rowarty from the formidable Hyksos (the toughest enemies of the game) in the distant battle, you don't fight them in Khmun (or elsewhere anymore) at all. Downplayed in the original, where you get an early invassion from them but their dreaded chariots are a partial company at one quarter of their full size. Afterwards, you get more distant battles and they'll invade your city in full force from the isolated northeast riverbank, a small island where there is no reason to expand, so battling them is optional and usually a Self-Imposed Challenge.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable:
    • In Saqqara, if you don't accept an early gift of pomegranates, you will not get to trade with a city that sells wood, which is a necessary material for monument construction in the city (carpenters are shown building ramps and scaffolding). Since the city already produces a lot of pomegranates, and the gift comes before you've had much time to develop anything, this is a more easy unwinnable situation to end up in than most.
    • Also in Saqqara, if you don't praise Ra enough, he might make people sell less stuff to you. Including making the only town selling reeds - that you need to import to get papyrus - stop. No sending the grave materials to the pyramid, no winning. And to a less dangerous and more annoying extent, more tiles of houses for the same amount of people.
    • One mission has a city ask you for shipments of limestone, which you produce in great quantities since no one buys it. However, at one point they ask you for plain stone, which you can't mine for, but can't even import.
    • Failing to respond to a request may create this situation. Some trade routes are opened only when a request is fulfilled, and are otherwise inaccessible.
    • Perwadjyt, the third mission, is impossible to complete on "Very Hard" due to a glitch with the entertainment coverage system. Additionally, on harder difficulties, you might find yourself inadvertently going bankrupt, as it is impossible to turn a profit in that level.
    • Thinis, already hard enough as it is, has a diabolical trap. Eleven years in, you will receive a request for troops from Men-nefer. If you don't send soldiers, perhaps to protect yourself from the level's notorious invasions, the trade route will close down and you will lose your only source of papyrus. Papyrus, which is needed for the Common Residences explicitly mentioned in the mission requirements.
    • The remake has a bug that prevents finishing monuments if the "top" of their sprite reaches outside the displayed map when build too close to the edge of it. You will have to raze it and start over from scratch, even if it's a great pyramid complex or similar.
  • Units Not to Scale: All people and animals take up one square. Some buildings take up one square. Firefighters are bigger than the fire station that spawns them, while most of the production buildings were not built for the twelve-foot-tall giants working in them.
    • And of course there's the ferry in danger of capsizing if it carried a single man, let alone the half-dozen men hauling stone blocks four at a time on big wooden sledges.
  • Ungrateful Bastard:
    • Sometimes it feels like your citizens are all this, see Not in My Backyard!.
    • Occasionally your Kingdom rating falls for no reason but that the people of Egypt are displeased. Sometimes it evens gets a "despite" tacked on in front to really rub it in.
  • The Usurper: Twice over. You become Grand Vizier because you supported the usurping Inyotefs in the Civil War, and it's hinted that you stole the throne after the Inyotef Pharaoh Mentuhotep died.
  • Veteran Unit: Your military units start as "Green" and become "Skilled" with enough combat experience or after going through your war academy. They gain experience and more levels ("Veteran, "Masters" "Elite" "The best") the more they fight, becoming more deadly and resilient. The presence of Seth's Temple Complex grants an additional level to new recruits. In some scenarios it's vital that you level-up your units as you can only field six regiments since the enemy comes in overwhelming odds and some units such as war chariots literally stomp normal units.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: Every time there's a famine or invasion elsewhere in the kingdom, you can send food to starving citizens or soldiers to fend off the attack. Although if the reinforcements are too weak you get the blame.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: See above, but note that not responding to these requests lowers your kingdom rating far worse than simply a request for goods.
  • Video Game Delegation Penalty:
    • The overseer of Commerce will automatically adjust the minimum amount of goods to remove from sale if a request is made for them (though this amount can be manually set). While this works fine for most trade, he has an annoying habit of informing you that you have enough goods to fulfill a request just after the deadline passes, and considers that building materials should be imported in absurdly huge quantities (while some monuments do require a minimum amount of materials to be placed, the bigger ones don't need the entire stock to be present to be built, as this would require covering half the map in storage facilities).
    • 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 you can only hold two festivals per year.
  • Video Game Time: The later levels can take decades to finish, with centuries not uncommon.
  • Walking Wasteland:
    • Houses hit by plague create a special walker, who walks the streets infecting every house he passes unless stopped by an Apothecary or upgraded priestess of Bast.
    • If your Kingdom rating is too low, "it is widely believed your presence causes malaria".
  • Walk on Water: See Super Not-Drowning Skills.
  • Wasteland Elder: You, in the early missions: the lowest rank is "Village Elder", and most of the missions are set in the desert.
  • World Music: The game's soundtrack is eclectic, with influences from Arabic music (particularly in the guitars), African music (in the percussion, including the famous "thumb piano"), and (as best as can be approximated) actual Ancient Egyptian instruments (the famous trumpet of Tutankhamen can be heard in several tracks).
  • Worthless Yellow Rocks:
    • Sort of. Gems and jewelry can usually be exported, but jewelry is only the fifth-most profitable export item after chariots, weapons, and even linen and papyrus (the game says this is because it's a very common luxury good, as opposed to ivory or incense). You still need two kinds of luxury good to get the best houses though.
    • Zigzagged with gold. Completely averted in that, as noted by the game, a city lucky enough to have this resource will be rolling in money. However, when a city demands goods you can't simply give them the equivalent cost, you need that amount of resources (and all the required infrastructure) or they won't take it. And since importing the stuff often doesn't work fast enough your kingdom rating can fall despite the millions in your treasury. And since bribing your way back up the social ladder is determined by your savings, not city funds, you can't even compensate for the loss immediately.
  • Wretched Hive: Building these is generally a bad idea, since it encourages people to leave, increases crime and gives little in tax revenue. On some levels where Culture or Prosperity isn't an issue, however, it may be the best action.
  • You Have Failed Me: And then Pharaoh sends his armies against your fair city.

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