It's hard to believe that it's been nearly 10 years since Impressions released Caesar, the first in what would become a long line of well-respected city-building strategy games. Since then, the company's City Building Series has been bolstered by two more Caesar games, a pair of Pharaoh games, and most recently, Zeus and its subsequent expansion pack, Poseidon. But while the evolution of these games has been shaped by a full decade's worth of advances in gameplay innovations and graphics technology, the entire series has been defined, up until now, by two constants: They all take place in the Mediterranean, and they all lack any form of multiplayer support. That's all about to change later this year when Sierra releases the latest entry in the City Building Series, called Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom.

Agriculture is an important part of building a successful empire.

The two most important things that you should know about Emperor is that it takes place in China and that it'll be the first City Building game to have multiplayer support. And there's actually a third thing to take note of: It's not being developed by Impressions at all. Maryland-based BreakAway Games has that particular distinction. If you recall, BreakAway developed Cleopatra, the expansion pack to Impressions' Pharaoh, as well as the excellent add-on to Tropico, Paradise Island. According to Impressions producer Jon Payne (who, surprisingly, has no relation to Max Payne), BreakAway was the obvious choice for Emperor's developer. "We have a great relationship with those guys," says Payne. "We're currently busy working on Lords of the Realm III, so we approached BreakAway with the idea to do this game." The idea to create Emperor was conceived at Impressions in late 2000, shortly after the release of Zeus, and BreakAway began actively coding the game with a full development staff in April 2001. Since then, production on Emperor has been moving along at full steam, but publisher Sierra kept news of the game's development quiet, waiting for the right time to reveal its hand. Well, what better time to unveil a game set in China than on the dawn of Chinese New Year? To commemorate this event, we recently had the opportunity to talk to Payne about Emperor, and even though the game is still almost a year away from completion, we learned some new details about what's clearly shaping up to be yet another promising City Building strategy game.

You'll be able to trade goods by using rivers.

For the most part, Emperor will follow in the footsteps of all of Impressions' previous city-building games in that it'll blend some elements of urban management with a bit of real-time combat--in a package that isn't intimidating to the casual player and yet still compelling to the more serious closet mayor. Your overall goal of successfully building and managing a sprawling urban area remains unchanged from the goals of earlier games. That means you'll be in charge of all aspects of city life, from deciding how much to tax your populace to ensuring a successful crop and even maintaining a sizable military force to repel invasions. Naturally, Emperor will also have the notion of diplomacy. China is a vast country with many towns and regions, so you'll have to contend with your neighbors by participating in diplomatic relations and trade or choose the slightly less pleasant approach of engaging in open hostilities or spying. In fact, there will be several levels of diplomatic relations between your city-state and your neighbors. "The inclusion of emissaries and spies lets us give Emperor a level of diplomatic interaction that we weren't able to achieve in Zeus and Pharaoh," explains Payne. "For instance, if one of your spies is caught operating in a foreign land, and your diplomatic ties with that empire were already bad, then war will break out between you two." However, anyone who's played any of the earlier Impressions games knows that combat is secondary to the other gameplay elements of the series--the combat has always been somewhat an afterthought in the City Building Series. Payne asserts that Impressions and BreakAway are working very hard at making combat easier to control in Emperor. Specifically, the idea of conscription from Zeus is now gone, which means that your citizens won't neglect their daily chores whenever they're called to arms, and the addition of siege engines and other war machines should facilitate invasions. Of course, there will also be the option to let the computer handle combat altogether, and that too is being improved upon.