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\ Heliopolis
Island-hopping time, as you try to scrape enough limestone together to satisfy a
greedy Pharaoh.
Requirements:
Events:
Hints:
You've got to get started
early here - get a limestone industry up and running as soon as possible to get some
income coming in. Pharaoh will ask for limestone early on too (his requests tend to
be for 26 blocks), and he'll also rather cheekily ask for game meat in year 3. This
one caught me out, as the birds are on the farthest island, along with the reeds, and are
as far away as possible from the island with the kingdom road (I hadn't expanded that
far).
Your personal savings might
well have to be donated to the treasury to keep you out of debt if you are to get
everything sorted out soon enough - the initial grant and rescue loan don't really provide
enough cash. Limestone isn't too lucrative an export on its own, so pottery and
papyrus will probably have to be sold as well. You'll need all the cash you can get
your hands on, as the grave goods you'll have to import are pretty expensive.
Monuments building here
shouldn't provide much of a problem - you can produce all the clay and straw you'll need
to get the small number of bricks you need to build the 3 small mastabas. The only
potential problem is space - most of the islands are very narrow, so you'll need to keep
your housing blocks away from places where you can put the mastabas.
I was there for 276 months,
and needed neither to produce sandstone nor create a military force of any kind.
Here's what Cherub Dragon2
had to say in this
thread:
I
went back to play this after tough military levels at Dunqul and Thinis and found it much
easier. My results, with difficulty set to hard:
Time
169 months
Culture 50
Prosperity 37
Kingdom 100
Funds 2502
Population 5278
Score 3439
I
have posted two .sav files in www.tiac.net/users/bamberg/pharaoh/heliopolis/Heliopolis.zip
. One is from just before the final brick was laid on the third mastaba. The other
(perhaps more useful if you're about to play the level) shows the city after two years
,when the economy is stable even though I forgot to turn on papyrus exports.
To
centralise my commerce, I built two docks near the limestone mines and just built houses
in a disorganised way along the Kingdom road. This let me get pottery, limestone, and
papyrus exports (with imported reeds) going very quickly. Although I later set up a linen
industry ,I had trouble getting the stuff to market.
I
started all three mastabas close to one another on the next island. This caused no
problems. It let me centralise my brick industry, using straw mainly from three grain
farms. The final mastaba was the last requirement I met, but most of the others were met a
year earlier. At hard difficulty there's not quite enough cash to import all the grave
goods quickly.
Everywhere
but by the Kingdom road I squeezed in a nice neat housing block, which evolved as far as
it could without beer. Squeezing in a Temple complex was hard.
I'd
like to hear whether someone can do this level faster by building the three mastabas on
three separate islands, each with its own source of straw, and also whether anyone
successfully built two separate dock areas (when I did that it C3, ships came to the wrong
dock and waited for goods to be toted across the map.)
With
any military activity this scenario would be hard. I trusted the walkthrough and built no
forts.
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