What do you think of Pharaoh?
Pharaoh got a lot better today. It's now two separate games in my library, the original one and the new Dynasty. A ton of new factions and units and gameplay options. The difficulty is such that I may need to break my long-standing tradition of not watching anyone play so that I can learn some tips. I've never watch anyone play before. It might be fun.
We just finished playing and this is the hardest Total War in many years, possibly ever. Two things are causing this: resources are very hard to come by. One unit may cost 550 food a turn, and a settlement might produce about 200. Basically, you have to scrap for food. Win battles, barter with other factions, etc. I'm currently losing 1700 food per turn, but have 16000 food. I've never produced enough food, but I'm doing okay with it.
The second thing that makes it hard are the garrisons. Troy had some great late game garrisons, but these are tough in the early game. If the enemy has a small army in the settlement plus the garrison, you are pretty much guaranteed to have to manually fight the battle, at least at this stage in the game when I can't afford units.
It's all a struggle. I'm losing 155 bronze per turn and have 490 in stock. I spent six turns attacking and retreating against a settlement because my nice 20 stack army couldn't defeat the garrison and a 6 unit army. I was basically just preventing them from creating more units until I could go further and further into debt and get a 2nd army there. When I got there, I still had to fight the battle because auto-resolve said I was going to have a "close defeat". The battle was horrendous, but I won by routing their general and ganging up on stray enemy units. Got enough of them routing at the same time to send the whole army running. Honestly, I thought I was going to lose the right up until the moment I won. For one thing, I had units hidden in the forest I was going to use for flanking, and they sent 4 units of chariots right at them. I was very relieved when that battle was over.
At one point, Guido commented that the game was impossible, and when we quit for the day, he asked if we could start over from scratch tomorrow. Guido isn't a bad player at all, either. Things were finally looking up for me, but I'll take what I learned today and do things better tomorrow (hopefully). The kicker is we were only playing on Normal, figuring correctly that we'd need to learn the game.
By the way, there are a decent amount of bugs. We had several desyncs that were always followed by crashes to the desktop, and there are some very basic QoL features missing from the game. I have one settlement where I can't destroy a building, etc. Also, when playing co-op, you cannot give the other player units to play during battles. Your partner's options are to either play as the enemy or just watch (or alt-tab to something more interesting). Despite the problems, I'm very excited about all this.
Oh, I'm glad you can still play the original Pharaoh, as well.
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