Zeus:Master of Olympus Has Entered the Golden Age!
...which is just a fancy way of saying that Zeus has gone gold! Which is a fancy way of saying that Zeus is officially complete and will be appearing on store shelves in North America in a few weeks (the rest of the world will have to wait just a little longer)! So, dust off your city-building skills and prepare to cross paths with gods, monsters and heroes!

Zeus: Master of Olympus should be out in the later part of October, so if you are a fan of city-building games and want something new, Zeus should deliver plenty of the old stuff and a lot of the new.

I'll leave comments about the previewer's building style to someone else

While we do appreciate the support of our fans, we don't discourage skepticism or criticism. All voices are welcome here as long as the viewpoints are presented calmly and politely, as in this post.

I think we've adequately addressed this over the months in our posts and interviews. A short answer: We've removed the need for tedious micromanagement -- without taking away the ability to micromanage, if you're an efficiency freak -- and we've added a lot of higher-level strategic challenges.

Zeus is also less repetitious than its predecessors -- you don't have to start a new city from scratch in every single mission.

Maybe best of all, Zeus has a lighthearted approach, compared to the solemn Caesar and Pharaoh games. You can tell that we had some fun making it, and that's going to come across as a more fun game.

At its heart, Zeus is a strategic city-building game more than worthy of its antecedents. You won't be disappointed, especially if you have a sense of humor.

Soon, now, you'll see for yourself.

We've done the realism/serious history approach, and this time around we wanted a different take. I, for one, have spent the past 3 years of my life making city builders, and couldn't face making the same game over and over again.

The fun that we had making Zeus shows in the game. Early returns, from people who've played our Beta and beyond, say that this is the most fun city builder yet.

I'll be interested to know if your opinion changes after you've spent some time in the Greece of Zeus.

If the game seems to bring the bar down a bit for less experienced gamers, that shouldn't necessarily imply that the challenge level has been reduced. Zeus still has the frustratingly difficult qualities that made Caesar and Pharaoh both hits. Now it's just a little easier to cruise around the interface and a lot easier to stage a comeback after you're run your city into the ground. Having been a fan of the previous games, I'm curious to see how the final version plays. I'm even more curious to see where the series goes now that the trilogy has been completed.

Gamers familiar with Caesar III and Pharaoh will have no trouble jumping right into Zeus and I expect this third installment to be the best of the three. For the first time it appears that Impressions Games has made a real effort at making the game fun rather than detailed. The unique storyline and setting goes a long ways towards piquing the interest of gamers that already own Caesar III and Pharaoh. Pray the game arrives with Mercury's speed. (It's expected to release in US on Oct 16.)

"Green fire" denotes plague. Here, we fondly call it "stench."

Every detail of Zeus has been designed to allow even the most caustic sim-phobe to get a good city-state up and running. One of the nightmares in SimCity was attempting to create a good road system, water system, and electricity grid. Zeus is thankfully much more simplistic, eliminating much of the headache in creating a well-built metropolis.

The game is fully implemented -- we just reached that milestone last night. Our remaining time is mainly for playbalancing and polish. We received a ton of valuable feedback from the Beta testers, but that phase is almost over. Zeus is right on schedule and looking good.