Alex: No, absolutely not. It’s a pop-up window – your priests will provide you with the necessary information. They’re usually pretty accurate – it’s pretty rare to get misleading information, and it’s a great help when planning your city to know what kind of a harvest you’ll probably be getting. If it’s a good one, then go ahead and expand. On the other hand, if it’s a bad one, then those expansion plans will have to be put on the back burner for a while.

ARR: How do people get across?

Alex: There are no bridges across the Nile - the crossings are made using ferries. The cool thing about ferries is that, whereas bridges in C3 had to be positioned exactly across the water, and it could be tough to line it up exactly where you wanted it on both sides. With ferries you have a little more flexibility as to where you put them on either side of the water. They can’t go up and down the Nile too far, but the crossing doesn’t have to be dead straight. It’s definitely a lot better that way. You also have to be careful that 1 side of the ferry breaks down. If that happens, the ferry becomes useless, but you may not necessarily notice.

ARR: Say a ferry did stop working, would all settlement on the island it was serving suddenly disappear because its link to the road to Rome (or its Egyptian equivalent) had been cut?

Alex: Your buildings will start to devolve but the way we’ve worked devolution in Pharaoh is that it’s not quite as sudden as it was in C3. If a house loses a resource it needs to maintain its current level, then the inhabitants will complain for a while before the house devolves. It’s not as sudden as it was in C3. That’s one of the beauties about making a game based on an existing engine – you don’t have to start from scratch, but instead you can evolve the engine based on comments you’ve received about it.