Children of the Nile demo
I downloaded a demo of “Children of the Nile” last night, and tried it out during my lunch break today. It looks very promising.
CotN appeared on my radar several months ago in a brief CGW preview, but I didn’t take much notice at the time. Only on visiting the official site did I realize it is meant as a continuation of Impressions Games’ city-builder series: Caesar I-III, Pharaoh, Zeus, and the Cleopatra and Poseidon expansions. This is a good sign; the city builder line includes some of the most underrated computer games on the shelves. The heart of city builders is transportation. Although they provide various economic, political, and military goals to meet, all of them depend on getting goods, especially consumer goods, shipped in bulk to the right places.
At least that’s how it used to be. There are reasons I didn’t make the connection between CotN and the rest of the city-builder series.
CotN makes a radical departure from its forebears by abandoning a “push” delivery system, where suppliers send goods to consumers as they are produced, for a “pull” system, where consumers fetch their own supplies from producers as their stocks dwindle. That’s a huge change for a game that’s all about distribut