For anyone who’s played Zeus, Pharaoh, or other city-building simulations from Impressions and Sierra, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom will feel as comfortable as a new pair of shoes. Well-traveled veterans of the genre can delve immediately into yet another ancient culture, with only an occasional need to glance at the manual; the downside of this familiarity is that several questionable aspects of the series’ general design remain problems.

There’s no denying that ROTMK is ambitious in scope. The seven campaigns — each correlating to a dynasty — span over 3,000 years (from 2100 BCE to the invasion of Genghis Khan’s hordes in the early 13th century), and consist of over 40 missions. If you include different farms and crop types, there are nearly 80 structures to be erected, covering every function from entertainment and religion to commercial and military uses.

For newcomers, this depth means a learning curve as steep as a very steep hill. And it doesn’t help that both the manual and the online tutorials are overly wordy.

Though ROTMK is stuffed with more crops and goods than earlier city-builders and features feng shui tactics — buildings must be placed harmoniously, for example — it works in essentially the same fashion as its forebears: throw up some houses and watch the unwashed masses arrive and wait for you to guide them.

Then again, perhaps “guide” isn’t the right word, because these citizens of ancient China — apparently just like those in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome — won’t stir out of their houses even if they’re starving or dying of thirst. Heck, they won’t even walk to an ancestral shrine (required to improve housing) that’s within a stone’s throw of their hut!

The problem can be traced to the distribution system used in all of Impressions’ city-building games. Instead of people going to a market to buy food or hoofing it to a well to draw drinking water, they sit in their houses and wait for everything to be brought to them. I guess it’s a Domino Theory of food distribution — or, to be more precise, Domino’s, except these delivery people never get to a house in 30 minutes. We can only be thankful that the citizens at least handle their bathroom duties themselves.

And that points us to what’s most troubling about all these city-building games: instead of AI, you get an automated spreadsheet. The scripted-in-stone scenarios are one tip-off; another is the out-and-out silly “roadblock” system you must employ to guide water-bearers, city inspectors, and others so they don’t wander all over a huge city as they make their rounds. How hard would it be to have a peddler, inspector, or water-bearer have responsibility over a fixed number of tiles around him and visit only that area?

To its credit, the multiplayer mode has both co-op and competitive gameplay, and lets you save games and return to them later. That last feature is pretty much a necessity, because even a “quick” game of ROTMK can last an hour or more. Another nice inclusion is a Campaign Creator for those who rip through the dozens (or even hundreds) of hours provided by the original missions.

Rise of the Middle Kingdom will probably be another moneymaker for Sierra, and more power to ’em. But I think it might be time to move the series to a new level of design instead of just a different period in history.

— Stephen Poole