great game
Unlike most strategy games it is more along the lines of creating a magnificent healthy city and to expand your empire and power, by forming alliance and trade with neighbouring cities.
You start off with a vast open space of land and a whole load of cash, you build a road and create houses, houses will soon be filled and people will automatically arrive once houses have been built, once you have a good population, you build wells to supply the city with water, you build farming houses and mills to grow and store crops, you build markets to disperse the food throughout the city. You build a tax office to collect taxes but first need to produce paper to supply the offices.
It works just like real life, and you could waste hours playing this none stop as it is a never ending game.
The detail, art and environment is truly a site to behold and just shows you the spectacular beauty of a Chinese country side.
Every time you click on a different building for statistics or changes pleasing sounds that are suited to the building would be heard, clicking on a loggers hut would play the sound of sawing and wood being cut, clicking on a market plays the sounds of people giving orders or exchanging money. All of it hits the spot perfectly.
The music plays traditional Chinese instruments and is highly relaxing and catchy.
All other neighbour cities are off map though and can only be interacted through a country map. Say for example, you want to request money or food, you click on the map of China and click on the city you want to make the request from and after a 10 min wait, the message should be delivered.
On the down side the battles on this game are IMMENSELY poor and a huge let down, if being invaded, enemy troops appear on your map and begin attacking anything they see, while in a battle you cannot command troops or interact with them in any way but you can only sit back, watch and hope that your army will win, even that's poor for even if you have a fit and large army, their is a 75% chance they'll become demoralized and flee the fight, and you can't do a thing about it. If on the other hand you want to invade a city, you just assign the troops and send them off only hoping that they will be successful, which most of the time, they aren't.
You can only build 2 forts out of 4 which include cavalry, archers, infantry and catapults
but there is even a limit to the amount that you can build, like 6 Calvary, and 12 archers and that's it.
though battles is it's weak...sorry, AWFUL point, the main aim of the game is basically Sim City similar. Which I think is a good thing...