The warning messages can get more than a little annoying at times, especially those that tell you about the Inundation. And especially in missions without farms.
The Political Overseer has a knack for telling you you have enough goods to fulfill a request just after the deadline passes.
Trying to get a specific blessing from a god is often this. Want Ra to increase your export prices or the amounts of goods traded? Nope, have some more Kingdom rating instead.
Some gods' blessings can be downright unwanted. For example, one of Ptah's blessings multiply an item type until they completely fill the Storage Yard. Good when the item is exactly what you wanted, but more often than not, it is the one you've already have in abundance, and you will have to demolish the Storage Yard (doubly so when it's a Storage Yard for distribution for the residents instead of storage).
Awesome Art: While the remake has graphics and UI that are just off, the intro is a truly gorgeous animation.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The remake now allows bazaar buyers to pick up locally-produced and imported foods from storage yards, meaning there's no need to build granaries (which take up more space, are more expensive and need more workers).
Hippos and Crocodiles. Hyenas tends to be more like Goddamn Bats instead. The game advises you to send your armies to deal with them. The easier way —the expensive way— is to build a wall encircling their spawn points, or have Towers to snipe them if they get too close.
Chariot units, when you don't have access to it yourself. Also, the Carthaginians from Caesar.
Difficulty Spike: The campaign becomes Nintendo Hard with Dunqul Oasis at the end of the Old Kingdom, which is followed by the Middle Kingdom with a hard mission (Waset) or a very hard one (Thinis).
Disappointing Last Level: The missions in the Cleopatra expansion are simply less interesting than the main game ones. Also, the maps aren't very intricately designed, breaking immersion. Made even worse in the remake where the removal of the timing mechanic means that you can simply fill enough slums to reach the required population and win without even witnessing the battle that you were there to fight.
Even Better Sequel: Usually considered a finer evolution of Caesar III thanks to the addition of unique features like monuments and the flooding seasonal mechanics, several improvements such as roadblocks, and a superior, well-documented historical flavor that goes beyond a generic "period dressing" connecting garden-variety missions of its predecessor. For Pharaoh, ChrisBeatricedid his research and the storyline for instance follows the exploits of the dynasties historically, up to a point, while Caesar's gameplay features an Empire and an unnamed Emperor centuries before the end of the Republic.
Fridge Horror: One has to wonder what becomes of the children named after you when your rating falls and it becomes used as a child-scaring term.
Contrary to what the game tells you, your mansion doesn't need road access to receive a salary. Placing it one space away from roads allows it to avoid fire and collapse, while being impregnable to thieves.
Once your economy is up and running, the mansion accumulates money that can be returned to the city coffers in an emergency or used to boost your kingdom rating (read: bribe your way into Pharaoh's good graces).
Work camps are the best possible way to deal with high unemployment: they soak up twenty workers for only four spaces, and are cheap to boot, so can easily be razed to free up workers.
Building Shrines is a good way to keep the gods appeased. They only take up one space each and only need to be within two spaces of a road, so they're easily placed to fill space in blocks, and they raise desirability more than gardens and small statues to boot. Once you reach a critical mass of shrines-to-population ratio, the gods will be perpetually happy and shower you with blessings endlessly.
From the Cleopatra expansion, Pyramid Speedup. With the option on, there's a 50-50 chance that a god's blessing will advance the construction of certain monuments. The description says it only works in the early stages of construction, which translates to 70% completion. That means that for pyramids it's possible to build one without quarrying or importing a single stone block. The blessing also works on all eligible monuments at once and the cutoff completion is based on the first monument you place.
In the remake, the ability to switch to a global worker pool rather than the recruiter system is a godsend. No more waiting for workers to get to an industrial area, no more putting down more roadblocks than there are buildings to make sure the recruiter actually goes past the housing, no more making sure said industrial area also contains police stations, doctors, tax offices, etc. (and consequently, no more industrial hellholes that keep spawning criminals and plague walkers like clockwork...).
Construction workers sometimes Walk on Water to get to their destination.
Trade caravans will sometimes put items you didn't ask for in the yards. In this case, getting free stuff is definitely Blessed with Suck- more often than not, it's something you can't sell (such as construction stone) or that you have no use for because you weren't supposed to have access to it (such as barley) and thus can't turn into finished goods (no breweries). Thankfully the remake adds an ability to get rid of unwanted goods.
The remake had one at launch where building multiple resource-using buildings without enough of the resource causes the storage yard to duplicate the resource for all those buildings (such as, say, 2000 scribal schools sharing 300 papyrus.
Hilarious in Hindsight: If you place a monuments but don't create any builder's guilds, one of the Monument Overseer's messages is demanding to know who will build the monument, asking if you expect the gods to do it. The Cleopatra expansion adds a Pyramid Speedup option, which does have the gods take over construction work instead of granting one of their normal blessings.
Narm: In the remake, the combat screen has two armies starting in a corner and meeting each other in the center of the screen, but sometimes they just keep walking without clashing, overlapping each other for a while until they disappear in their opposite corners, unintentionally resembling a silly / humorous monty pythonesque sketch.
Obvious Beta: The remake was released with some unbearable bugs not present in the original and easily spotted by players, such as the flood not drowning the farmers who get caught on the shore (which was fixed a month after released), serious blocking issues with building monuments and false calculations regarding the amount of stored goods - or the fact that housing doesn't require any goods to sustain itself, just the first delivery.
Dunqul Oasis presents small building areas for housing, little trade opportunities (and you can over-commit initially to a closing one of wood), hyenas running rampant across the map and early Bedouine invasions followed by massively strong Kushite ones. In addition, towers cannot be erected to balance that they hugely outmatch your soldiers in one-on-one combat.
The second run of Thinis, which is absolutely nightmarish. The one reliable source of income consists of gold mines placed away from the grass so they'll work at a limited rate due to traveling time to and from the expensive palace. You face near-impossible demands from your Pharaoh, extortion attempts from your rivals, closing trade routes, and constant invasions that can often overlap. Failing to provide adequate military aid to Men-Nefer will permanently close the source of papyrus and make the mission unwinnable. The alternative mission, Waset, is hardly simple, but is a cakewalk in comparison.
Khmun introduces chariots and has an early invasion of the Hyksos that works as a Wake-Up Call Boss that can lead to defeat if you don't properly prepare for it from the start.
In what doubles as Unintentionally Unwinnable, the Hittite chariots at Qadesh are virtually undefeatable in the field on very hard. While it has been done (with an ungodly amount of micromanaging and Save Scumming), the only really viable way of winning requires taking refuge behind the river in a corner of the map in a small settlement and hope they get demoralized and leave in time without completely destroying the rest of the city. Towers can't be erected.
Only the Creator Does It Right: Chris Beatrice and the main team of Impressions Games were not involved in Cleopatra, as they had already started working on Zeus. The expansion was made by Breakaway Games and generally found inferior to the original game.
The way Cleopatra rushes through the history of the New Kingdom results in many historical events being glossed over. Including Amenhotep III and the creation of Luxor, Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten and his religious schism, the Third Intermediate Period as well as the Kushite rule of the 25th dynasty. The entire Assyrian as well as the Persian invasions also only feature a single dedicated mission.
With a campaign dedicated to Rameses II and his exploits, you would think one mission would have you build his famous Colossi at Memphis but nope.
Scrappy Mechanic: The timed missions from Cleopatra where you have to achieve your goals within a certain amount of years are not well-liked among fans. The biblical disasters from the same expansion are also more annoying than anything and just grinds your game to a standstill for as long they last.
Pharaoh is slightly easier than Caesar III thanks to its different water system that allows more flexible housing blocks instead of the fixed blocks (9x9 or 7x7) around a fountain limited by its coverage radius. The vital addition of the roadbloack makes roads and walkers more manageable and several quality of life improvements in storage orders also contributes to a friendlier user experience.
The remake compared to the original:
It lacks a "Very Hard" level, and "Hard" itself is easier than the original setting with the same name, despite having a higher cost multiplier (Compared to "Normal", in "Hard" buildings cost 1.3 times the price in the remake, vs 1.2 in the original)
With an average army, the tougher enemies like the Kushites, Hyksos and Hittites are regularly beaten in the (automatic) stand up battles without losing most of your forces.
The invasions of the Hyksos do not happen in Khmun if you save Rowarty, and you are given a time extension for it if you don't send forces before the start of the battle, time you can use to bulk up your forces for better chances.
The ability to switch to automatically staffed buildings makes the game hugely easier (and faster, since you no longer need to wait for a migrant to go to a distant housing plot). As there's no longer a need to build housing to keep industries staffed, buildings can be packed tighter together, there's no Industrial Ghetto, therefore less crime and no need to have cops and physicians patrolling said ghetto, therefore more workers available to run the city, giving higher Prosperity levels, etc.
A patch increased the population coverage of all cultural service providers in order to reduce the spam of such buildings.
Each caravan and ship can trade 1600 of each good, so you can trade a lot more and faster. In the original the limits are 800 and 1200 per trip.
Clunky and annoying as combat was, many fans preferred it to the remake, which simply shows two Onrushing Armies then tells you the result of the battle (and doesn't tell you which buildings were destroyed if your army lost). The abstracted combat without enemy entry points also removes the gameplay aspect of planning your city accordingly to facilitate its defense. In some missions of the original (notably Thinis, Iken or Khmun) you can even avoid some invassions altogether if you don't build on certain banks of the Nile, which is no longer possible in the remake.
The remake doesn't allow you to rotate the camera. The minimap was not available on release, but it was added in a patch a month later.
There is no scenario editor available for the remake.
The tombs built during "Valley of the Kings" scenarios are not present in the next mission.
The remake removing time limits from levels (both of the Timed Mission and Hold the Line varieties) devoids of purpose or outright derails some missions of Cleopatra.
