^^^ "soon". looks sweet, but most vaporware does.

first time I thought "wow 3d" was with alone in the dark.

Need to figure out how to get my stupid wheat farmers to deliver their darn wheat!

Make sure your store houses (not storage yards, the place where you store food) have adequate labor. You could temporarily adjust the priority for food storage and distribution, but make sure that doesn't completely mothball your husbandry/food production. My advice is to set them both to "High" until you can get your food in order and houses to evolve.

How can I add more labor? The wheat would go to the Granary, right? I'm starting to wonder about this game, though. It says the people want to eat carrots and onions, but I can't make any carrot or onion farms! I also can't collect urchins. I'm so frustrated I could cry.

Yeah, wheat will go to the granary. Houses only need a food type...so it doesn't really matter what food they get, so long as they are getting enough food. (Once the food is delivered to the agora, it becomes a generic 'food' symbol. The different types are just used for the production)

Ok, so, here you go, I've flow-charted it.

Common housing > labor force

wheat farm > granary > common agora > food vendor > agora pushcart (walker spawned by agora) > common house

Wheat is under Husbandry in the Labor label and Granary/agora are under Food Storage/Distribution label (Click the Amphora on the toolbar and then click the magnifying glass in the bottom right hand corner of the window where info/stats are displayed)

You build a more common housing to add more population unless you're in debt. If you're in debt, I suggest restarting.

lol alright I'm going to try restarting. Maybe things will be better this time. Ever the optimist :)

Yeah. Get your food network functioning first, then add water, then add safety (architect dudes that make sure buildings don't fall in/catch fire), then start with everything else.

Yeah it seems to be going much better now. I didn't start off building as many plots for housing, and things seem to be functioning better. I'm still short of labor, but there's always more people coming.

Minor labor shortages are par for the course. The only way you can stop that is once you've built the city up having a small number of unemployed citizens. That takes practice and time, though. I've also always found it easier to have fewer houses, but have them as advanced as possible (if not Townhouse, a level or two below) instead of having more mid/low level houses.

Elite housing is the real challenge especially if you want cavalry soldiers. The real issue there being having horse ranches close enough to the grand agora horse vendor to operate but far enough away from houses as to not have an impact on desirability.

My labor shortages were eased when a couple buildings fell down lol. Immigrants keep coming but I haven't had to build new houses yet. How soon should I be thinking about armies and that? Do they function like other jobs, in other words, am I going to be short of labor if I build more army-related stuff?

Check your world map to see who your enemies are and if they're currently hostile or not, that should give you an idea about armies. If you're thinking about raising one, you'll need to make sure you can produce or import enough food, olive oil, fleece, wine, armor (and horses, if you want cavalry) to support your army. To raise an army, you have to build elite houses. To build an elite house, you need spare food, oil, and fleece (not sure about food, but you'll need at least 1 spare oil and fleece) AND to build the home in a high appeal area. Elite citizens don't count in the work force, so they won't deplete your labor. The only thing that is basically a labor drain is the trireme wharf. A fully battle ready wharf takes 100 people, but directing them to stand down allows those 100 to find other jobs.

Also, by default, when you build a palace, you'll start getting Rabble armies (denoted by a hand with a stone flag in the courtyard). These are made of normal citizens and are best used a auxiliary troops in support of hoplites/cavalry. They are effectively useless against foreign invaders.

ALSO! (sorry), the temples of Ares and Artemis will give you 2 companies of super soldiers (Spartans or Amazons, respectively) and the temple of Hephaestus will give you the ability to summon Talos to defend the city. Divine creatures (Talos, Cerberus, Ares' dragon, etc) are good for taking on invading armies, but are poor at battling invading monsters/gods/heroes.

Neat! Thanks mucho for the help SY37 :D I'll need to spread some more rep around before I can rep you.

Any time! Zeus is one of my favorite games ever and I've encountered just about everything that it and the expansion could throw at me.

Also, if I might recommend a game...if you like Greek myth thing, Titan Quest and the expansion for it. It's a really beautiful game and you get to hack/slash your way through mythological creatures.

Yes! I just got Zeus on a lark. I'll keep my eyes peeled for Titan Quest :)

It and the expansion are around 2 years old, so you should be able to get them on the cheap. I think you were talking about WoW earlier? I suppose it's kind of like that with the character building/class/dual class system. Way too in depth for me to go into right now.

Sounds very interesting! It's pretty cool that although some of these games are pretty old they still have good entertainment value.

Honestly, I reinstall Pharoah/Zeus about twice a year. I'll long to play them and I'll start back, but then everything kind of falls by the wayside and I'll uninstall them to reclaim my free time.

I might have to get that after I'm done with dawn of war (I've finally made it to normal).

For the unaware:

Zeus:


Pharaoh: