 When, where and why
On Friday September 3rd 1999, Alex Rodberg, Brand Manager of Impressions, was in London spreading the word
about Pharaoh. Angel Reckless Rodent caught up with him and did a 45 minute
interview:
ARR:
The preview of Pharaoh over at GameSpot mentioned that there would by 9 types of monument,
excluding small, medium and large. However, only 7 of these types were mentioned. Can you
say what all 9 are?
Alex: Hmm…I think
there might have been some kind of a misunderstanding. There are 19 monuments that you can
build in total, including small, medium and large. However, there are currently only 7
types of monuments. Some of these types, the Sun Temple for example, only come in 1 size,
as does the Sphinx. By the way, keep an eye out for workers falling off the head of the
Sphinx while it is under construction. Other monuments have 3 different sizes, except the
pyramids, which have 4 – small, medium, large and Great (like Khufu’s).
ARR: How about the Valley
of the Kings – can you build your own tomb there?
Alex: No, there are
currently no plans to incorporate the Valley of the Kings into the game. However, there
are small burial chambers beneath the pyramids which the workers hollow out when you place
the structure.
ARR: And can these burial
chambers be customised?
Alex: No.
ARR: How are monuments
incorporated into the scenarios – are they reflected in the ratings system or
something like that?
Alex: The monuments are
often the end result – they’re the goal of the mission so that, while
occasionally you do have to achieve ratings, the monument often serves as a visual
indicator of how far along you are. Quite often, being able to build the monument almost
assures you that you’ve fulfilled the ratings, because you need to have a city
that’s thriving, that’s happy, and able to produce both enough food and enough
people to work on the monument, so you have to have a population that’s relatively
happy with you to get to that point.
ARR: Who
actually builds the monuments – is it normal people, or are there special workers?
Alex: The labour for farms and monuments
comes from work camps, so neither farms nor monuments spawn walkers. The work camps gauge
how many people are required to work on the farms and supply them as best they can. If you
have any left over, then they go to work on the monuments.
ARR: So the work on the monuments will be
linked to the Nile flooding?
Alex: It depends on the size of your
population – if you don’t have enough people to farm all of the farms that
you’ve laid out along the floodplain or irrigation ditches (the water lifts), then
the work on the monuments will cease and every available worker will head to the farms to
create food, because that’s your number 1 priority. On the other hand, if you’ve
got a surplus of people, the you can do both things simultaneously. The works camps will
automatically send workers to both the monument and the farms, providing it has enough
workers to perform the tasks.
ARR: And the work camps get labourers in
the normal way – send out walkers looking for housing nearby?
Alex: Yes.
ARR: Just keeping with the pyramid theme
for the moment, can we configure our own methods of building a pyramid, or is that fixed?
Alex: There are 3 major theories about how
the pyramids were built that we looked at. One was the long ramp – very impractical
for large pyramids, and definitely not practical in the game. The wooden ramps that circle
was definitely the one that worked our for us, both in terms of gameplay and in terms of
being able to implement it.
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