YMMV / Zeus: Master of Olympus

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Given how clunky combat is both in manual and automatic mode (not to mention the disruption to your economy), it's much simpler to simply bribe enemies on your doorstep to go away.
• Demonic Spiders: Oceanid troops aren't particularly tougher than other troops, but they can't be targeted until they emerge from the water, unlike waterborne troops which can be taken out by sinking their transport.
• Funny Moments: During the Odyssey campaign, Penelope mentions that Athena saw her undoing her day's work at night, and seemed to think Penelope hadn't quite understood the concept of weaving. You can hear Penelope corpsing as she says this.
• Game-Breaker: The "Fireballs from Heaven" cheat not only one-shots enemies, monsters and gods, but the real Game-Breaker is that you can reduce rocks to rubble, clearing up land for expansion, and also turn cooled lava into walkable terrain (you can't build anything on it, but at least resource collectors can go through).
• Genius Bonus: One of the Atlantis missions is called "The Greater Mediterranean Co-Prosperity Sphere" in case you didn't get you're playing as the imperialist power.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Deleting a storage or trade building just before it's destroyed by a god or monster and then restoring it will let you keep whatever was in the building, while the invader will then move on to the next target, preventing not only the loss of goods but the hassle of resetting the trade requirements again.
  • Sometimes, a graphics bug occurs where buildings don't display their "working" animations... and also causes attacking gods to remain stuck in the first few sprites of their appearance animation, meaning they can't move, attack or curse your city (on the flipside, this also applies to friendly gods, prevents you from placing buildings on the stuck god's location, and prevents some workers like urchin gatherers from working correctly).
  • When ordering a raid on a city after ordering another, the targeted goods remain in the targeting menu even if the city doesn't produce the good. A successful results in the message that the plunderers' sacks are bulging with the weight of the 1 item they brought back.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Zeus is by far the easiest game in the whole series. Upon premiere, this was treated with contempt and mockery, especially considering Pharaoh's difficulty level.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Trade buildings will try to fill up to maximum capacity of anything you're exporting/importing if not checked (even if the city isn't trading) despite no city ever trading more than half at a time, and if a trade building is destroyed, you need to reset the trade requirements again.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Zeus is considerably easier and way more forgiving than Caesar III and Pharaoh.
  • Buildings are automatically staffed, as there are no labor-seeking walkers anymore.
  • A single building provides maintenance and fire prevention, and fires can be put out before the building is consumed.
  • There is only one single type of food required for requests and fewer types of goods and services required to fully evolve houses, and no complex land fertility system.
  • Taxation can be implemented from the start, as unlike in Pharaoh, the infrastructure to set it up is quite cheap.
  • Wages can quickly lower or raise the labor pool.
  • There is no rating system, no gods to appease by default (the hostile ones can still damage the city)
  • There isn't a painfully slow recruitment system, as the basic housing provides weak but free and numerous soldiers from the start to defend the city, with elite housing providing strong soldiers and cavalry.
  • Invasions are not always inherently deadly, as the enemy can be bribed off or the city can lose/surrender once and become a vassal, even to several cities.
  • Everything is cheaper, and fortifications are no longer prohibitively expensive.
  • In campaign mode, all the treasury is carried over from one mission to the next, which usually translates to only the first episode being a financial challenge.
  • Water is available everywhere. In Caesar you need to transport it with reservoirs and aqueducts, while Pharaoh has a desert setting and water supplies can only be build on grassland.

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