Next to this you will then set up some housing space. This process generally begins with the humble road. From here, you must erect the buildings and create the conditions necessary to entice legions of settlers to flock to your new town to live, work and pay you taxes.

A typical mission starts with you the master of nothing more than a plot of unclaimed land. The game spans 3,000 years from around 2000BC to 1000AD in China, tracking its emergence as a powerful empire. Something like a hugely complex, though pacified version of Age Of Empires. You are charged with constructing and running a city, while at the same time conducting diplomacy, trade and espionage with neighbours. PeacenikĪs anyone familiar with said predecessors will tell you, this particular dynasty of townplanning behemoths is at the intricate end of the God game spectrum. And it’s from this humble starting point that you must construct a series of sprawling, thriving conurbations in this, the latest city-building extravaganza from the people who brought us Zeus and Caesar.

In fact, it was precisely this kind of urban entrepreneurship that elevated China, the Middle Kingdom in question, to the position of the pre-eminent power on the Asian continent. The last person to walk into the middle of a field in China, plant a flagpole and declare: 'I will build a great city here,' was probably subjected to eight months of intensive anti-bourgeois conditioning and Maoist revolutionary indoctrination.

Emperor rise of the middle kingdom mods