Gameplay When the thoughts of a game about Ancient Egypt started to form, it's not immediately that we knew it will be just a single game or a series. We had a lot of ideas, but when we started to work on Predynastic Egypt, it became more and more clear we will not be able to realize all of our plans in just one game. That's how we knew it will be a series of games, each game about its own historical period. The idea was not just to make another historical strategy, but to make the player feel the reality of that time, let him experience first-hand how did this ancient civilization work. Predynastic Egypt was the first step on the way to fulfilling this idea, and the "Egypt: Old Kingdom" will continue to develop this idea, being the result of two years long work on this series. Today we're presenting to your judgment Egypt: Old Kingdom's gameplay. The idea of workers cards received a good feedback from Predynastic Egypt Players, so we decided to keep it this way and enhance the system. As before, the player will be interacting with the map via workers cards, by placing it to any selected area. If the selected area is still uncovered, a worker will become a scout and will begin exploration of this area. It may last from 1 turn to 40-60 turns near the end of the game!

As soon as the area is uncovered, scout goes back to the worker cards deck. The player can return him back again as a worker when the knowledge of the new area becomes available after exploration. Every new area has its own features. Depending on what was found in the area, the player can give worker different tasks. For example, in case if papyrus was found, the worker can be appointed to pick up the papyrus gradually, receiving a stable growth of the resource, or he can be appointed to exterminate all of the papyrus at once. In this case, the player will at once get some bigger amount of this resource. gif (temporarily unavailable) Another example: the map can reveal several kinds of animals, let's take antelope for our example. When antelope is revealed, it might be friendly or unfriendly toward people, and depending on this player will have to decide the method of interaction with them and give a certain task: tame them, pray to them or exterminate them. Extermination will give the player one-time increase of food (in case of antelopes), praying to animals will help to improve the relationships with them, which eventually will allow the player to tame them. Tamed animals can earn resources to the player, as usual, but they also will give some culture bonus, same as from praying to gods. gif (temporarily unavailable) The same way the player will discover about 20 more different effects, which should make map revealing much more interesting. In the city, there will be other functions available. By placing the worker card in the city region, the player will be able to know more about this region - what kind of buildings are there, how much resources it consumes and provides, etc. Besides, depending on what kind of technologies were researched at the moment, a worker can be assigned a task to build several types of buildings. On a side note, it's interesting to know that one worker card represents about 250 people - not only workers but also their families, elderly people, and children. Besides described above effects, there are occasional tasks, such as plagues, fires, great personalities. They also have different ways of handling.
All of the cards are animated. We adopted skeletal animation. It made movements smoother, and characters on the cards are now more diverse, with different hairstyles and clothes. Almost every character has a background which explains his/her appearance. Here is a comparison of our old animation from the Predynastic Egypt and the new one from the Old Kingdom game.

Altogether new features made every turn last longer. In the Predynastic Egypt the player made 2-3, max 4 actions per turn, but in the Egypt: Old Kingdom it's possible to make up to 10-12 actions per turn.