Empire Architect

This game is fine. Not great, not terrible, just fine. There's a couple of reasons why I'm ruling it as not recommended, though. First of all, it's clearly not finished. There's grammar errors everywhere, the build menu is a bit buggy (you can enter another context menu while still in the building interface, but closing either closes both), there's some keybind conflicts (Right-click, for example, is both movement and exiting a context, so if you try to pan while building you stop building), et cetera, et cetera. The fact that the update history runs pretty well until it hard stops in September 2018 isn't promising, though it's not super unprecedented for a surprise update after lots of time away (See Victoria 2, Reus, et al). The second reason I'm not recommending the game is that it often feels like you need to wrangle information out of the game, if the game is even willing to give you information at all. Things like "How much food do my people need?" or "How long does it take for my workshop to finish a cycle?" or "How far does my market reach?" are questions that are either unanswerable or so unnecessarily obfuscated that it's difficult to figure out how to optimally build a city. Maybe that's not super important to everybody, but it's the kind of thing that really annoys me.

TL;DR: It's a fine game that will serve you well if you need a Ceasar/Pharaoh style citybuilder and have already finished/beaten those, but if you haven't, I'd probably rate those 2 and probably also Anno as better than this.

Complete waste of money. Still unfinished. For example, in the custom game, you can choose the number of AI, and it has a box to select the AI's nation with "Rome" preselected, and when you click this box, there are no other nations to select. The same thing with "Team." All AI will be on team 1 whether you like it or not, and you don't have a team.

It's far from finished, and shouldn't be for sale.

What is Empire Architect?
Empire Architect is a city building game set in the Roman Empire.
In the rest of the review, I will attempt to not go into comparisons with other games, but in advance it should be stated that this game is very similar to Caesar III, but it has quite a different scope.
What is it like?
Empire Architect offers two ways to play, either a campaign with maps with predefined goals or a sandbox game on a random map.
Whichever way you choose, you are trusted with building settlements in the Roman Empire. You do this by building houses for your people, providing them with entertainment, health and religion and making goods.
Goods are needed on one hand for keeping your citizens happy (the better their home, the more goods they require) on the other for trading - the latter will be the town's main source of income. There are several different types of goods like pottery, furniture or clothes. Each product requires some raw material and at least one step of processing (e.g. pottery from clay), but there are some that require two steps in two separate buildings to process (e.g. furniture is made in a furniture factory from lumber, which, in turn, is made at a lumber mill from wood, gathered at a lumber yard). This means the player needs to set up an infrastructure for making enough materials to make enough finished goods for the populace and trade (and, in the case of certain resources, for building buildings).
While goods are nice, the true soul of a city is its people, and this is where Empire Architect differs most from its inspiration. Instead of building cities of tens of thousands of nameless people, you build towns of a couple hundred, maybe a thousand inhabitants, but each of them are named and have their own routines. This means that each of them has a schedule of going to work, going home to rest and going to the market to pick up food and goods. Each citizen also has their own happiness level as well, made up of their satisfaction with their dwelling, their choice of food, choice of goods and access to water, religion, entertainment and health services and the desirability of their surroundings.
Citizens can also be educated in schools so that they can fulfill jobs that require an educated employee.
In an interesting minor twist of the usual formula, buildings have more than one type of employee, e.g. production buildings have workers that actually make the product and a cart pusher who is responsible for delivering their product to a storage building and, unless the building makes some raw material itself, getting raw materials for the production. While it doesn't make much difference gameplay-wise (aside from being able to set different salaries for the different roles), it is a nice touch.
Speaking of buildings, another interesting difference (and one with slightly more impact) from standard city builders is that building don't just appear by themselves, they need to be built by builders, sent out from architect's offices. The bigger the building, the longer it takes to build, and when the player builds many buildings at once (e.g. a new housing block or a new production centre), if there are not enough builders, it will be quite some time before everything is finished.
Helping the player in running the city is a host of informative reports and graphs, accessible from one central menu.
There is a military aspect in the game as well, but like in most games of this kind it is perfunctory at best, with legionnaires and bowmen available for training and a "click somewhere and hope your guys will prevail" style of combat, so it's obvious this part of the game was not where the developer's focus was.
There is no multiplayer, but on custom games, the player can choose to have one or more AI rivals on the same map.

Pros and cons
++Overall, the game is nice and well designed, the different parts of citizen management, production, etc. fitting well together to make the game entertaining.
++Thanks to the campaign also serving a as a tutorial, the game is quite accessible. Different difficulty levels also mean that the player can choose how forgiving or challenging they want the game to be.
-That said, in some parts, there is a distinct lack of information, for example when the player is struck with a blessing or curse from one of the deities, it doesn't say what actually happened. Also, the tutorial doesn't always explain elements which do come up in the given mission (such as how to fulfill imperial orders).
+For a game where having stellar graphics was obviously not the focus during development, buildings are decorated quite nicely, they show a definite attention to detail.
-However, the graphics might be too minimalist even for some city building fans.
+The music is nice and Roman-like...
-...but gets repetitive fast.
++Having a smaller number of actual individual citizens means the player really feels like they're caring for actual people who depend on them for having a nice place to live.
-On the other hand, since here the player doesn't build cities for many thousands, it doesn't feel like we build an actual city, let alone a metropolis.
++Managing all the production chains and all the requirements of the populace makes a nice kind of challenge.
-Still, I feel like there's a bit of a missed opportunity here; for example, while citizens go to have a rest and buy goods, they don't actually visit entertainment buildings or temples like they do, for example, in the Tropico games.

As much as I love Caesar III; it's a little flawed and dated. So I strike out to find something similiar and find this reasonable little game.
At first I was very impressed, there are some fundemental improvements here over the Impressions city builder games; Citizen Happiness, Stockpiles and unemployment/open housing/open jobs on the hud, overlay of buildings effect range before placement, etc. So far so good. But after a couple of hours the flaws start to show, some features that are present in C3 aren't here; Every construction must be accessed by a single menu and then sub menu, buildings have no animations, it's not very colourful graphical nor has much variety in sound and the combat is clunkier than C3 believe it or not.
Some things have been improved on but some stalwart features just havent been taken on at all. I was very much on the fence but what swung it for me was bugs; houses full of starving people who live directly next to a market in a city with a surplus of food and therefore crushes your citizens happiness?! Ultimate frustration.
It's not awful but it could be better.

I don't write lengthy reviews that are pleasing to the eye like some users, but after a few hours of this game I kept running into sloppy problems that mainly had to do with the interface. No clear guidance on how to make these people happier, spamming buildings around the area that would make no since in a city in any other game... It was just not fun to play. The icing on the cake was when I went to save and the game just crashed all together and I lost my save file.

Classic city builder with an active dev that continues balancing and adding to the game. Quite challenging and satisfying on higher difficulty levels.

I'm not impressed. I'm really not impressed.

This game is essentially a rather sub-par rehash of the old Impressions city builders, and borrows so much from Caesar III that it might as well be the same game. This isn't entirely bad - Caesar 3 was a good game. But there isn't much progress here. Oddly, a lot of the quality-of-life measures that made it into the later Impressions games, such as Zeus and Pharaoh, simply are not here.

If you have fifteen bucks to spend, you're better off buying one of the games mentioned above (Zeus I would particularly recommend) instead of this.

If you like city building strategy games this is a fun one. Currently (June 1st) there is a campaign with 11 levels and a sandbox game with many varieties of choices. But this game is still in development so there are ongoing improvements and additions, not just new buildings and the such, but also new levels to the campaign. It may be possible to get a new campaign if enough people asked for it. There seems to be only one developer but he has been very attentive on the Gameplay Feedback Thread. As far as I can tell he has answered every question and remarked to every suggestion given to him. So the game still being developed is actually a positive because of the developer's attentiveness. Some of my suggestions have been built into the game by the developer, making me, in a minor way, a cocreator! This is fun in itself. One thing I do wish there was more of is achievements. But if enough people asked for them ....

This game fully satisfies those cravings for "I want a game that's like Pharaoh/Cleopatra but NOT Pharaoh/Cleopatra," and is still being regularly updating. Upgradeable buildings, happiness meters, campaign and custom games, this game will feel nostalgic for city-builder veterans. For newbies to the genre, its campaign storyline is very helpful for getting the basics down.

For the price of a movie ticket and popcorn, you'll have hours of fun. I highly recommend this game.

Greet rendition of the classic Ceasar 3, Empire Architect holds true to the general feel of the game while also adding really good content on top of it and making some smaller featuers really hold their own. If you enjoy Ceasar 3 style city builders, you will love Empire Architect.

I would only recommend Empire Architect if you want to tickle that 1999 city-builder nolstagia. If your standards for city-building games have evolved in the last two decades, you should look elsewhere.

- Clunky user interface
- Frustrating combat
- Shallow gameplay

I am really liking this game so far. Very similar to CivCity: Rome. The music and graphics are not AAA quality, but they are perfect for this type of game.

I'd like to see the option to "Continue Playing this City" before ending the senario. It is kind of jarring when you're in the middle of planning out an area, then suddenly get the scenario complete screen.

Great game, plays a lot like Pharaoh & Ceasar 3, had mostly positive experience with it, yet there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be tweaked. Kudos to developer! and keep up the good work

Very fun and promising game. Also dev is great. He answers every question. The game constantly get updates (almost every day). Totally worth to play.

It's not a bad game, I had some fun with it, but it feels really unfinished even for an early access, and I doubt it will get much better. Almost no sounds, poor animations, very generic artistic direction, basic UI, terrible combat system...

Hi, I typically don't bother to write a review but I felt compelled to write one for this game. I have always loved the city building and resource management category and have been waiting for a game like this for a long time. I had really gotten into Banished but felt there was still a small part missing. As much as I liked playing, I really missed having a military component. Even just a minor one, I don't mean Total War military stuff, just something to keep me on my toes. I've searched and searched and never was really able to scratch that itch...until now. Empire Architect is a perfect mix of resource control, city building and a touch of military necessity to make it exactly what I've been looking for!

The campaign mode is really a perfect tutorial to get you to understand the basics and I immediately won my first custom game utilizing what I learned in the campaign mode. Granted, I played on "Easy" to start, but now i feel confident to try the other difficulty levels knowing what I know now.

I know the campaign is short right now but the multiple difficulty levels and the custom game feature have enough options to keep me playing. It does seem very clear that the developer is highly motivated to continue adding and patching which tells me my $12 was well spent. I've certainly spent a lot more on way worse stuff.

In summary, if you like city building, resource management, and having a basic military, then this is the game for you.

Respectfully,
Rob

This is a classic style city-building game (a la the old Sierra city building series, like Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus, Children of the Nile and such). It's close to Caesar III not only in thematics and looks, but also in gameplay. The gameplay also reminds me quite a bit of Grand Ages: Rome (which is, itself, heavily inspired by Caesar).

So far, my only real complaint is that I would love to have more information on the UI, like the ratio at which each building produces each resource and such. Currently it takes a bit of testing to get used to how many of each building you need to supply a production chain, or to keep your population well fed, etc. Kinda like the Tropico series.

Still, certainly enjoying my time with the game so far. The developer seems to be quite active, so I'm looking forward to things improving further.

So at first I gave a negative review, and after talking to the developer I learned why I was having the issues I was. So this game isn't your typical "just build and yolo, it'll work." You have to play around and learn how buildings service areas, and how to efficiently build so that your workers aren't over extending and bottleneckings services. You also need to be aware of what your citizens want, especially when it comes to the level of homes they want.

I'd give this game a 9/10 until I can see a more finish product.

To go over my negative review:

Citizens always starving, but large stocks of food: You need to better place your buildings. If you go to the discussion forum there is a guide on my post "starving" from the developer. This will fix your problem.

People don't move in to level 2 homes: You cannot force them in to level 2 homes, they have to desire it first. This simulates a class structure.

Another one is health services, this is area based, and as long as they have employees, that area will get serviced. The employees require education, so this is a possible bottleneck. Schools aren't bottlenecked by distance, but I reccomend them being closer to your residential area.

Do you miss games like Caesar? Would you like to play a more relaxing RTS? Then this game is for you. Empire Architect is a promising game with a lot of depth, with some features inspired by the grand strategy genre, and an always evolving gameplay, with a lot of updates and bugfixes made by a developer who really cares for his creation and the community.

At the moment there are two modes available: custom game, which is a skirmish mode in heart, with four difficulty levels and procedurally generated maps; and campaign, which already has enough levels to teach you how to play and show you some strategies. Even if the game is not on Early Access anymore, more content is still beign added, so there's more to come.

The gameplay is based on keep your population happy by providing food, education, jobs, entertainment, religion and security, while you try to defeat your opponents with your army. Don’t worry, Empire Architect is a game where your APM (actions per minute) won't matter – you can play in your own time, and the units are independent, which means you don’t need to control them. This allows for a more strategic approach, where what matters are the choices you will make about what to build next based on what your population needs at the moment, what to research, and think about efficient ways to deal with logistics for an optimized city.

It’s worth mentioning that the developer of this game is working hard to create a fun experience and fix occasional bugs, and I’ve seen a lot of bugs fixed on the same day the community reported them. Also, the game is already well optimized, with an almost nonexistent loading screen and no fps drops.

To summarize, Empire Architect is worth playing if you’re a strategy lover and want some new ideas inspired by the relatively recent grand strategy genre. Your input can make a difference about features and mechanics, so if you want to help build the future of the game, join the community and don’t be shy to share some ideas on the forums.

With the caveat that this is an early access game, so bugs will happen and many features are as yet nowhere near as fleshed out as they ultimately shall be, I think this game has a lot of potential. Indeed, even at this early stage, this game has gotten more playtime out of me than have many other similar games, that were 'not' still in development. I have high expectations for the future.

If you are the sort who like to support developers showing promise, and don't mind playing the role of tester, I highly recommend supporting this game.