Cleopatra
Version 2.0.0.0
Readme File
June 29, 2000
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About This Document:
Thank you for purchasing Cleopatra.
This document contains last-minute information about Cleopatra and other information about the program not found in the Help Files. This README file includes information that pertains to general problems and questions you may have concerning the game or your computer. Should you experience any problems with Cleopatra, please refer to this file for additional help on answering questions about the game and solving technical difficulties.
Please visit our website at http://cleopatra.impressionsgames.com/ for additional information about Cleopatra.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
II. GENERAL TECHNICAL ISSUES
III. GENERAL GAME ISSUES
IV. MISSION EDITOR
V. UPDATES TO THE GAME MANUAL
VI. CONTACTING SIERRA
I. MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
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Pentium 133 Mhz
32 Mb RAM
Windows 95/98
DirectX 6.1 or higher
-The installer will install DirectX 7.0a if necessary. To reinstall, run DIRECTXDxsetup.exe from the Cleopatra CD.
360 Mb Minimum Install size
100 Mb Swap file on your Windows drive.
4X CD-ROM
Video card with at least 1Mb of Memory capable of 640x480 resolution at 16 bit (High color) color depth
II. GENERAL TECHNICAL ISSUES
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For better game performance, we highly recommend exiting all non-essential background programs before running Cleopatra. Cleopatra will also run better if your system has current hardware drivers and a recently defragmented hard drive.
Using animated mouse cursors can create cursor anomalies in Cleopatra. If you encounter problems, restore your Windows mouse cursor to its default settings.
To play Cleopatra in Windowed mode, your desktop resolution must be set higher than Cleopatra's game resolution, and your desktop color depth must be set to 16 bit (high color).
III. GENERAL GAME ISSUES
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There is a lot of feedback and advice available in Pharaoh/Cleopatra, if you are having problems, consult your Overseers and right click on problematic buildings, people, or other items.
The very easy difficulty level is a "Sandbox" mode. Some features of the game are disabled or greatly reduced when playing in this mode.
Some missions require you to build multiple monuments. We recommend building one at a time, since the construction foremen of the monuments can be quite competitive, and may issue conflicting orders to your workers. You don't want to see stonemasons working on one monument while stone is being delivered to another.
Soldiers must be able to get to their Forts. Be sure to have a walkable path for the soldiers from the city's Recruiter to the Academy and to the city's Forts.
Many Egyptian cities trade quite a lot of goods. Sometimes the cities are willing to trade a greater total volume of goods than their trade ships and caravans can handle. If you have a particular good from a particular city that you want to buy or sell, then you may need to limit the traders from that city to trading only that good or only a few goods. This will ensure that you are selling valuable beer instead of less valuable barley, or that you are importing the granite needed for the construction of Obelisks, instead of importing less needed luxury goods.
Storage Yard delivery men will attempt to deliver the goods in their Storage Yards to buildings that are in need of those goods. If they take the goods to a building that upon their arrival no longer has room for them, the deliverymen will wait with their full cart until that or another building has sufficient room to accept the carts' contents. If you see a lot of deliverymen standing around doing nothing, try to provide a place for them to take their goods, because they won't do anything else until they can drop off their loads.
Deliverymen can briefly appear and disappear in front of their home buildings if they are trying to "Get" a good from somewhere else and cannot "Get" the good for some reason. When deliverymen are trying to "Get" food from a Granary, a road connection to the Granary is needed. Lastly, buildings will not "Get" from other buildings that are also "Getting" the same good.
Roads must touch the middle two tiles of a Granary's edge for the Granary to have road access.
On rare occasions, Granaries and Storage Yards can get their special orders settings linked to other Granaries or Storage Yards special orders settings. If this occurs, saving and reloading will fix the problem.
Try to keep Storage Yards close to docks. If there is too much of a delay between the time it takes to unload a boat and deliver those goods to a Storage Yard you might wind up with more goods than you requested. When goods are being transported they are not counted as being stored so traders might sells you more goods while the original batch is being transported.
To avoid memory conflicts, refrain from switching to an older family during a game. When a player switches from a family with a small amount of save games in its folder to a family with significantly more save games stored within its folder, memory conflicts can occur. It is recommended that you restart the game with your newly selected larger family rather than switching to it from within the game. Also, deleting any unused save games from a family's folder and reducing its size, will also help any memory conflicts that might occur.
On rare occasions, deliveries of certain goods to a monument can become stalled. If this occurs, saving and reloading will fix the problem.
CLEOPATRA SPECIFIC ISSUES
Upon installing Cleopatra, you will immediately be able to play any mission or campaign found in Pharaoh or Cleopatra. If you are new to Pharaoh or Cleopatra, it is recommended that you play the first campaign either by selecting the "Begin Family History" button (for a newly created family) or by selecting the Predynastic Period campaign. This campaign is designed to gradually introduce you to the basics of playing Pharaoh and Cleopatra.
Cleopatra contains certain monuments that must be constructed upon rock or cliff. When placing Abu Simbel (Colossi of Ramses II), the Lighthouse, or a tomb, make sure to place the monument entirely within the rock/cliff with its entrance just outside of it, jutting out onto clear land.
Once a tomb has been completed, the original cliff surface will be replaced, concealing the tomb. Tombs thus concealed can be seen by using the Hide Cliffs overlay (the "Hide Cliffs" hotkey is the "H" key). Tombs are always visible in the overview map.
The Hide Cliffs overlay can affect the way certain highlights look (the red deletion indicator shown when deleting buildings or the 'footprints' seen when laying down houses, for example). Since this overlay allows you to see all buildings it is easy not to notice if you still have it on. If you experience an odd looking highlight make sure to turn off the Hide Cliffs overlay.
The gods will aid in the building of pyramids by blessing your workers. This will greatly reduce the time and effort that it takes to construct these massive monuments. This feature can be toggled on and off via the Pyramid Speedup option in the Options menu. The default setting is "off".
You have the option of having your Political Overseer automatically dispatch any goods that are being requested by other cities. This has no effect in the case of extortion - your Political Overseer will not dispatch goods under these conditions. You may dispatch them manually if you desire.
As you progress along the Alexandria campaign, you will come to a point where you will be able to build the Lighthouse on Pharos Island. In order to allow you to get goods onto the island, a long strip of land is placed on the map. This will cut off part of the sea. Do not attempt to build any docks or wharves within that enclosed space. Docks and wharves need a direct connection to the main sea trading routes in order to function properly. It is also recommended that you be mindful of building things other than the Lighthouse on Pharos Island. Space is at a premium there and it is possible to block your construction workers' progress.
Some missions in Cleopatra require you to complete your tasks within a certain amount of time. Adjusting the difficulty level from Normal to an easier level will give you some more time. Playing on the Easy level will add 2 years to your time limit. Playing on the Very Easy level will add 7 years. Increasing the difficulty from Normal to Hard or Very Hard will not decrease the required time. Conversely, decreasing the difficulty from Very Hard to Hard or Normal will not give you any additional time. If you fail to complete your tasks within the required time you will be given a choice of continuing the mission at a lower difficulty, giving you a few more years. If you wish to increase the difficulty level of a timed mission, we recommend that you do so before beginning it as you cannot shorten the length of a mission once you have started it.
IV. MISSION EDITOR
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You can access Pharaoh's powerful mission editor through the main game menu. Please refer to the mission editor manual (Mission Editor Guide.txt or Mission Editor Guide.pdf) for instructions. You can view the Mission Editor Guide by selecting Help: Mission Editor Guide from the Mission Editor menu bar. To view .pdf files, download the Adobe Acrobat reader from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
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V. UPDATES TO THE GAME MANUAL
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The following items were changed after the game manual went to press. We encourage you to use Pharaoh's extensive in-game Help system, which was continually expanded and updated after the manual was complete.
CONTROL PANEL
In some missions, particularly the early ones, new structures are introduced as the mission unfolds. When something new is available, the Control Panel button that accesses it will flash on and off.
"DATA LIMIT REACHED"
There are limits in Pharaoh as to how many buildings, walkers and point-to-point walker routes can be handled. These limits are quite high, and you should never encounter them in the missions included with the game. Some of Pharaoh's "Custom Missions," though, let you build much larger cities, and you might reach one of these memory limits if you build a city of 35,000 or more people. If you do see this message, your only recourse is to resculpt your city for greater efficiency. Populations in excess of 50,000 are possible if you build very efficiently.
FLOOD PLAIN EMBANKMENT
The boundary between the flood plain and dry land is steep, slippery and treacherous. No one can move to or from the flood plain unless at least a small stretch of road spans this embankment. You're most likely to notice this if troops disembark onto a flood plain, or if you notice hunters and gatherers skirting the boundary.
MESSAGES
The Help item on the game's menu bar lets you turn "Popup Messages" OFF. This means that all game messages go directly to your Message box, except for a few that require you to make an immediate choice (like whether or not to accept a gift). While turning off the popups does almost entirely eliminate interruptions in your game, it also puts you at considerable risk of missing important notices. Use this option with extreme caution!
The Message button on the Control Panel blinks when a new, unread message arrives. It stops flashing when you click on the Message button.
We added a button to the bottom of the Message box that deletes all opened messages, except those tutorial messages that are marked with a blue scroll. You can delete unopened or blue-scroll messages by right-clicking on them.
MONUMENTS
Monuments have a "staging area", normally represented by some wooden planks on one side of the monument. Some monuments do not employ such staging. In these cases the entranceway to the monument should be obviously identifiable from the nature of the monument's architecture. Don't block access to the entryway to a monument while construction is underway! Work will stop if workers can't reach the entranceway. If you don't see progress being made, right-click on the monument to find out why. If the construction foreman reports that access is blocked, he's referring to this entranceway.
Masons and bricklayers work in pairs on pyramids and mastabas. One sledge load of stone or bricks occupies two stonemasons or bricklayers, and fills in two sections of the pyramid or mastaba.
The "Trader's Guide to Pharaoh's Egypt" shows that plain stone, limestone and bricks are needed for the brick core pyramid. Plain stone is NOT required for this pyramid; only limestone and bricks are needed.
TRANSPORT SHIPS
When a transport ship is selected, pressing the "K" key orders troops to embark or disembark.
