Children of the Nile is the more modern version of the old citybuilders like Pharaoh And Zeus, allowing you to build a city in ancient Egypt. Some of the more modern things are, aside from the obvious graphics being different, that you no longer need to worry about intersections sending your supply and maintenance people entirely the wrong direction. You can now actually focus on building a city, rather than having to puzzle out the most efficient way to place buildings without them collapsing, catching fire, and starving because the food vendor doesn't show up there.

Citizens in your city are in a class society. From top to bottom, they are the pharaoh. That is you, and your family. You have a palace, and your family goes out to collect any sort of material, be it luxury goods or a humble pot to store things in. You are the state. All food belonging to the city also belongs to you, but you will always have a nice supply of food stored away in your palace. Pharaoh gets first pick, and a percentage of all food farmed in taxes.
Just below you are the nobles, who live in large houses and get their income from the farmers under them, and in order to support a large farming population, you will need nobles to guide them.
Under the nobles are the educated elite. Priests, scribes, overseers, and commanders of the military. They have similar demands as nobles in terms of luxuries, but they are paid by the government for their services. Only the sons of nobles and luxury shopkeepers qualify for education. These are the doctors, the administration, and the tax collectors. Because nobles will try to dodge paying taxes, a scribe can catalogue how many fields have been sown so that you know exactly how much belongs to Pharaoh.

Under them still, the middle class. Entertainers and shopkeepers. These earn their bread through their services and the goods they sell. Simple, but neccesary for society to function.
Below them, the peasantry. Farmers and servants. The farmers work the land and earn enough food to last until next harvest in doing so, and the servants do the shopping for nobles and collect resources for luxury shopkeepers - So they don't have to mingle with the common folk.
Separate from them all are government workers. They fit somewhere between the middle class and peasantry, and are paid generously by Pharaoh's bread. They are the brickmakers, the construction workers for bigger buildings(Small buildings like a servant's shack are made by the servants themselves), and anything else government wants from a papyrus maker up to the military.

If at any time your system fails and the people are without food, they will leave their jobs to scavenge for it. Dates, pomegranades, fish and so on are plentiful, so you need not fear you'll ruin your city and have a ghost town.

The game starts slow every map, as you have 10 bricks(Enough for one baker, brickmakers huts don't need bricks), and only one educated person in your city at the start. So you will want to build a school and several brickmakers more to ensure you can keep growing. Before you know it, you've spend several hours building. There is no immigration either, from what I can find. You start the map with 200-300 citizens living in huts, scavenging off the land. After that, children will be your main population growth. This becomes an issue when you want a big military, as military men don't get married - They live in their barracks-tent with two other men.

Some things that are bad, there are a lot of shrines out there that will take a bit to figure out which goes where and which are popular - If you even have room for them. Sometimes your citizens or a merchant may get stuck on a corner, and sometimes you may find your labourers can't figure out which limestone block they want to pull, and manage to fail to move any of them.

In the end, it's still a pretty and somewhat relaxing game where you can spend hours getting your city just right, and then decide to change it up again because you have a new idea. Cosmetic things like gardens, plazas and trees are free to place too, so you can make it look good without having to worry about your workers spending ages watering the plants and not farming.

Worth grabbing it if you like citybuilding, it's good at what it does

An excellent city builder set in the times of ancient egypt. Meet the many needs of your citizens and build massive monuments with the labor camps you construct to show Egypt how prestigious of a leader you are.

This is a pretty fun game once you figure out the mechanics. Not quite like its predecessors Caesar/Pharaoh/Zeus/Emperor.

Pros: 3D world which can allow for panoramic views, more interaction with the surrounding world, more focus on city building and managing rather than satisfying objectives quickly, resolution to challenges in the city are discovered by you rather than told how to fix those problems from advisors (for those who like something more engaging), all missions are treated nearly like a sandbox. Pretty much, you can build 100 pyramids if the map can hold it.

Cons: Sometimes the game can crash unexpectedly, not many missions in general campaign, not much historical/mythological context is given with missions as in the predecessors (found them to be enlightening and neat).

this is a challenging but very good builder.

instead of building your badass Pyramid,
Your slaves instead revolt in front of your badass Palace.
And the Po Po won't kill them.

Worst Soviet Egypt ever.

10/10

I have never played a city builder that was just so indepth and this unique. Get it.

An amazing game built for city creators like myself

An absolute gem. I pride myself in digging up golden PC titles that receive little fanfare, and this game is surely one of those. As an ancient Egyptian simulation, this game is a unique city-simulation concept with excellent execution and historical accuracy. The mechanics are distinct, with the three "Seasons" revolving entirely upon the flooding of the Nile. The only currency is the only one that truly mattered in the ancient world; food.

Like Ancient Egypt, religion plays a key role in the game, with a rich and diverse pantheon of true-to-life Egyptian Gods and Goddesses to be honoured by Temples and Shrines. Every person in your settlement is represented in the game and has unique needs, most notably religious needs. Soldiers, shop-keepers, peasants and elites all demand an opportunity to pray to the Gods and Goddesses which best represent their needs, while everyone will want to worship Amun, Osiris and Hathor; the Universal deities whose festivals were paramount to most Egyptian cultures.

Of course, you will be building an awful lot of pyramids, obelisks and steles to immortalize yourself, mighty Pharaoh, and cement the legacy of your lineage. Throw in a flavourful soundtrack and a diverse array of scenarios and missions and you have the best $2 I have ever spent on steam. I must buy for any city-building lover, Egyptophile or classic game collector.

CotN is a beautiful city-building game with a slight twist -- instead of "walkers" who go out and follow roads around town to distrubute their wares, most of your people take time out to run to the market when they need things (you can follow the individuals out, going through their day, and it's kind of entertaining in itself). The game itself is pretty laid back and peaceful feeling, and the music is quite nice, too. My one complaint would be that sometimes, when you select a person roaming around town, they say something utterly anachronistic and stupid, and I find that detracts from the overall mood of the game. Turn that off, and you're golden.

Sadly this is the last great city builder, as far as I know.
And not great just as a great city but also a great game!

Runs well on Windows 7.

This is an old game and I played it when it first came out. You play in ancient Egypt as a Pharaoh leading his/her people to economic and military supremacy. If you can keep your people well feed, healthy and happy you will be successful. There are some glitches in the game I have had a few problems but nothing serious just annoying. There have been a couple of additions such as the brickyard which are helpful and some new decorations since I first played it.

If you enjoy city building you might want to try this one. You can also do some retexturing of buildings, plazas, costumes. I enjoy doing that and perking up the city a little bit. The game can be played at various speeds to suit your preferences.

A nice relaxed RTS but with the added incentive of needing to build tombs before each ruler dies.

Really like this game. The graphics are great and it's very easy to understand and work. It's a very one of a kind sort of game where money isn't the currency. Only thing that bothered me was that the game lags really bad when autosaving and sometimes crashes.

Awesome to see this classic city builder return to PC! While not a perfect game, I always loved its choice of ancient Egypt as a backdrop as well as the mix of city building and strategy combat to defend what you have built.

I give it 4 out of 5 Anks :)

Love this game, just wish they went a little further with it.

A good game. Everytime I play games from this series,I learn something.

So it crashes at regular intervals. It lags occasionally when a city gets really big, aside from lagging at every autosave. The AI can be infuriating at times: If you like micromanaging, be prepared to sit back and pull your hair at your laborers who will go across the Nile and over 2 mountains to haul limestone, while an overseer stands by himself overseeing no one in a site right next to their houses. Transporting heavy loads, like statues and obelisks across the Nile is also a well known problem, annoyingly time consuming at best, unsolvable at worse (unless you're willing to delve into the editor). It shows its age in a lot of ways, the graphics included, though they still hold their own fine enough.

And now that you have all that information, just look at the time I've sunk in this game. It's just a great city builder. Flawed but great. The setting is interesting, the concepts are the same old, yet refreshingly different. It doesn't have an insane depth of strategy (it may even feel a bit simplified compared to other similar games), yet it feels satisfying. Most of the strategy involved is focused in where you build and what you prioritize, which needs to ignore and which to focus on, so really, when to build what where. There is enough you need to balance for it to stay challenging, between food cultivating, prestige maintaining, religious needs and building pyramids. There's also some nice extra bits of historical info hidden away in the interface if you want to learn something new.

The game is easy enough to pick up if you play the tutorials, which are ok: basically playable, hand-holding, mini versions of the game - I felt I was playing, not reading a tutorial. Even so, looking up some of the details on how the AI works will help you understand the mechanics better. There are huge forums with tons of info, player maps and walkthroughs available online which can help with that. Also worthy of mention, I found the interface easy to use and perfectly adequate, which I think is very very important in a city builder.

Should you buy? Yes. Provided you understand that this is a game released in 2008 that has its share of small annoyances, if you like leisurely paced city builders this is still a solid game that hits many marks.

For a more relaxing take on the city-builder genre, Children of the Nile does pretty damn well. Just be aware that the game can sometimes be prone to crashes, safe often, and you'll probably have a good time.

This game is ridiculously fun, BUT I've hit a glitch in the first scenario that halts progress immediately forever. My laborers get stuck trying to haul granite, so I can't build anything that needs to be quarried. According to google, plenty of people have had this problem, but no one's mentioned a fix. Since the game is 10 years old, I don't have much hope for a patch. This makes me so sad because I really like it otherwise.

Still recommend it, becuase not everone has this problem.

Very fun city builder set in ancient egypt. Made in the 90's but still holds it's charm today.