Advice needed reg Caesar IV and CotN:

[frogbeastegg]

Then you should enjoy the full game. The expanded options of the full game really add to the experience; when you have a massive city with several distinct districts set up around different needs the game really shows its worth. I mean proper districts, for example a military district with military housing, military officer housing, military focused temples, a hospital, the correct support industries, and barracks. Very different from the old style of slapping down the functional buildings and then placing a shack or two so they could access the labour pool without needing to put too many houses in the desirability black hole.

I missed the housing evolution at first, but gradually that faded until it became a niggle. A few levels of evolution per housing type would have been nice; I like the separate categories of housing.

The military side of the game as abstracted. In terms of what you build to support and create your army, it is far more detailed. There is a special housing type for soldiers, and you need to place some elite housing designated for officers. Because soldiers don't work the fields they are reliant on other sources for their food (and thus currency); you pay them with the food which you take as tax from the fields. So if you want a big army you have to create many farms and farming families, and then fill their needs so they don't get upset ... it's a tricky balance at times, and very satisfying when you get it right. Then there's the predictable weapons making industries, reliant on raw materials created by other industries.

You can send your soldiers off to fight on the world map; you don't control those battles. I think you could fight on your city map, but it was very rare in my games. There are some military heavy user created maps if you like that sort of thing.

World map interaction is closer to Zeus or Emperor:RotMK, if you played them, because of the ability to go and attack distant sites.

[Kekvit Irae]

In my personal opinion, I did not like Children of the Nile one bit. It bogged me down with too many things that took too long to grow effenciently. Granted, I'm addicted to Pharaoh/Cleopatra, but the micromanagement of CotN did not appeal to me one bit. Maybe I'll go back one day and figure out what I'm doing wrong, because it seems like there's always a lack of bread, pottery, or whatever. It's pretty embaressing when you struggle to figure out what you are doing on the first level.