Builders of Greece

by Aethyna Mar 9, 2024 | 1 Votes | 98 Played | 0 Reviews

7 rate

Genres:

Simulation

Graphics:

Labels:

City Building , Building , Management

Platforms:

Publishers:

CreativeForge Games Builders of Greece is an in-depth and strategic city-builder that’s set in ancient Greece. Here, you’ll need to manage your budding polis, develop it, and even protect it from invaders, be it pirates or a jealous neighboring nation. Advance through the technology tree and discover new knowledge to further enrich your people. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Builders of Greece is an in-depth and strategic city-builder that’s set in ancient Greece. Here, you’ll need to manage your budding polis, develop it, and even protect it from invaders, be it pirates or a jealous neighboring nation. Advance through the technology tree and discover new knowledge to further enrich your people. Will your city thrive, or will it fall into ruins? Find out in Builders of Greece!

Gameplay

Builders of Greece comes with two game modes – Scenarios and Sandbox. If you’re looking for the tutorial, you’ll want to head into the Scenarios first. Here, you’ll get to choose between a more simplified version or a comprehensive one. Do note that the tutorial only serve as a guide in this game. If you choose not to follow it halfway through the tutorial, you can easily do so without having subsequent advancement be blocked.

Now, if you’re familiar with city builders in general, the game should be easy enough to figure out. You’ll first build your Agora, which serves as your polis’ center, and from there, you’ll start placing other buildings like housing for your people and vital production buildings to start the production of food and various building materials. Your people have needs, and as long as their needs are being met, their happiness level should remain high.

There are also various ways to bolster your people’s happiness, such as building entertainment and cultural buildings, like the Lesche or the Odeon, and ensuring that the houses are under their respective areas of influence. A high happiness level often means a higher influx of people looking to make your city their home. There are no children in this game, and I don’t think your people are designed to reproduce here, so the only way to get more people is by immigration.

There are three tiers of people in this game as well. You have the laborers, the Thetas, who make up the bulk of your workforce, toiling away at farms, mines, fishing wharves, and lumber camps; and you have the Zeugitais who are able to take on jobs that require a higher level of fine craftsmanship, like the brewery, the bread bakery, and the bronze smelter. The last tier consists of the Geomori, people who have a taste for the finer things in life and pay a whole lot more in taxes than the other groups.

And yes, in this game, you can adjust the tax rates for each tier of citizens to maintain the delicate balance between happiness and getting more taxes to fill the city’s coffers for further development.

As with most city builders, it’s all about managing your resources (including your “human resource” -the people) as you’re growing your Greek city. There are plenty of resources you’ll need to keep an eye on, ranging from various food sources like meat and fish to crucial building materials like wood and stone to even herbs to ensure your people have access to medicine. Eventually, your civilization will advance and start to require more advanced items like bronze and other cultural and luxury goods.

Once you have your Sophist’s House built, you’ll then have access to the game’s technology tree. Here, you can spend resources to unlock new production lines, such as the one for lamps and tunics, so you can fulfill the needs of your new class of people, the Zeugitais. However, I should point out that if you’re like me and decided to skip the tutorial midway through, you may be confused as to how to unlock the second tier of technology. Well, aside from needing your Agora upgraded, you’ll apparently also need to build a new structure, the Library. Only then, will you be able to recruit better troops, and unlock the production lines for luxury goods, which your Geomoris will need.

This is similar - well, in some way - to unlocking new goods to trade at your trade harbor. You’ll need to first research the corresponding tech before the new list of resources will appear in the trade interface. Trading is also fairly automated here – you can simply set how much to sell or buy and at what threshold and just leave it there.

As an avid fan of city builders, Builders of Greece can sometimes feel like it’s in easy mode. For instance, you seem to get 100% resource and money refunds whenever you destroy a building. This is super helpful, especially in the early game, where resources can be a bit tight. I also like that you can’t really cheese the game, at least in the way that I did – I wasn’t able to just destroy buildings that are infected with a disease to prevent the disease from spreading to neighboring houses.

Buildings are even instantaneously built (and destroyed) here, which is an interesting design choice since it does take a whole lot of waiting out of the equation. That said, I still find myself speeding through time just to wait for my cash to accumulate enough so I can purchase a new research or build a new building.

Builders of Greece features some combat as well that plays out like a fairly rudimentary RTS. In this game, you can build barracks, and eventually, an archery range and even stables, to recruit soldiers to defend your polis from invaders, be they pirates or a jealous rival nation. However, oddly enough, this aspect of the game seems to vanish after that little bit during the tutorial, and I have not encountered any invading forces since. As a side note as well, housing a huge army costs a lot of upkeep, so it’s probably a good idea to only recruit troops when you see an invading force sailing towards your island.

Builders of Greece is unmistakably fun, but the game does have plenty of room to improve further. For starters, the game seems rather stingy with its stats, providing no charts or numbers for players to track the production vs consumption (upkeep-wise) of resources, or notifications regarding research completion or resource depletion. There are also no numbers indicating how many goods are produced per minute or what the maximum storage available is, if there’s one. Due to this, I often find myself overproducing stuff, just to avoid the headache of suddenly discovering some resources have been completely depleted.

This brings me to my other point – storage space! The game has a painfully limited storage space that you can’t expand by building more warehouses. You can only upgrade your storage space by upgrading your Agora. However, on the upside, the warehouses all share the same storage, so you could have a clay pit producing clay on one end of the island and have the ceramics workshop producing pots on the other, with minimal logistical delays, as long as they are both placed within close proximity of a warehouse.

As an early access title, the game also has the occasional glitches. At one point, my Lesche stopped working because, apparently, the runner who was supposed to supply the place with wine got stuck or something. With no way to unstuck the poor guy, I had to destroy and rebuild my Lesche – thank goodness for 100% resource refunds!

Graphics/ Sound

The quality of graphics here is simply superb. Every building is so well-designed, with an incredible attention to detail. I often find myself zoomed in really close to the streets and just checking out my buildings and the people while waiting for my city’s coffers to fill up or for new people to move into my city. Though, it’s odd that the people all walk the streets like a line of marching ants. In terms of sound, Builders of Greece features a selection of relaxing background tunes that fit well with the game’s Ancient Greek theme and atmosphere.

Conclusion

All in all, Builders of Greece is a promising city builder that has a fun Ancient Greek theme. However, the game is painfully early access, with several critical issues regarding its design and gameplay, along with some glitches, that I think many players would love to see some improvements to. If you enjoy playing city builders, maybe you might want to keep this in view for now and follow the development of the game.