Touch the Future Now at Staples
The second new campaign in Cleopatra deals with the arrival of new enemies, while the third deals with the reign of Ramses II, and the fourth with that of Cleopatra herself. The first campaign basically acts as a primer to the new elements, while the others require that you use everything at your disposal to stop the near-constant invasion of enemies. The military element of Cleopatra is tougher than in the original, and you'll even have to complete some missions that simply require you to survive an onslaught for a given time.
Most of the new challenges in Cleopatra are welcome and serve not only to extend the game, but also to enhance it. Among these challenges are the plagues - problems of epic proportions - that occur when the gods are displeased with you. Rivers of blood, swarms of locusts and frogs, and hailstorms all add to your need to keep any and all of your patron deities as pleased as possible at all times.
Cleopatra does include a few unwelcome additions, like creatures that will attack your populace. The scorpions in the first two missions will undoubtedly make you frustrated as they wander your streets and kill your people. You can theoretically take them out with military personnel, as you are advised to do in the game's help file, which would be fine if you could actually recruit military personnel in these missions. Also, there is a strange bug that occurs when building tombs - if you dispatch any of the luxury goods to the tomb before it's completed, all production on the tomb will stop. However, not only will this affect your current game, it will also affect any saved games you have in that mission, requiring you to start over completely.
What's more problematic is the fact that one of Pharaoh's more frustrating elements has still not been addressed. Quite simply, your workers are still as dumb as dirt, and they wander the streets as if they were windup toys bouncing around your city. You'll have food and water distributors wandering completely unpopulated areas, while residents are moving out because they're starving and thirsty. You can help reduce this problem through strategic placement of markets and the use of roadblocks, but it would have been nice if these key elements had some sort of artificial intelligence that would have sent them where they were needed, within a limited range.
But this problem is endemic to Pharaoh (and the Caesar games before it), and Cleopatra can't be entirely faulted for not addressing it, especially when the additions in this expansion are so numerous and so much fun. Cleopatra is both more difficult and more complex than Pharaoh, but it also makes the game seem new and fresh. And you can't ask much more than that from an expansion pack.
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