Ramses (Public Domain)

Longplay Information

Author(s): IronclawIronclaw
System: Amiga 500
Region:
Language:
Subtitle Language:
Additional Info: Public Domain
Publication Date: 28/09/2022
YouTube Release: 31/12/2030
Duration: 10:08:24
File Size: 940.04 MB (962602.73 KB)
Downloads: 105 downloads
File Links:
Archived Submission Thread

Screenshot

Player's Review

This game has always been on my to-do list as I love everything Egypt-related, but never bothered to longplay it as there's no instructions anywhere on how the game works. The game only have a few short clips on YouTube of people not knowing what to do, and as this game came with a German magazine ("Amiga Fun", September 1990), there's no scanned or documented manual for it.

On the disk there's the game and a text file (in German, that I translated to the best of my ability) that is just vague with the "insrtuctions", like (I'm paraphrasing) "click here to get to where you buy/sell ships", "right click on a port to get other type of info", "on the main screen is where you see your ships moving around", "some tips are to always keep 2000-3000 gold available, when selling ships try several times as the prices might change" etc... The only REAL thing I learned from these "instructions" and "tips" was what "The Temple" part was for, as I couldn't figure that out by myself. It's for donating to the gods so shit are less likely to happen on the sea (monsters and pirates attacking etc). Didn't really seem like donating did much difference, especially not the every-now-and-then stupid ship crash that happened so I had to buy a new one.

Pretty much the only thing you do in this game (like 95% of it) is staring at the "main" screen where you see your ships move, as you just send them out again once they return, and you can't be elsewhere if you want the game to progress, as everything is paused if you're not on this screen and have exited all the sub-menus (like, can't even check out stuff in a port where its info is shown in the big black box to the right). So, when the clock on your mouse cursor is not active (or you don't hear the "sea" sound), nothing's happening.

I kept to the small 10k ships only as I didn't feel it was worth buying the more expensive ones. With these 10-cargo-limited ships, I had more control when buying/selling, what I mean by that is like...

* With small ships only I could buy and sell with more precision. So if a place only had like 15 of something I wanted to buy, I sent 2 ships, and to not waste the other 5, as both ships = 20 in cargo space (T), I also checked the place if they had something I could sell to them, and made that 5 if possible. Sometimes I was only after building materials, so if a place only had... for example 8, I sent one ship, and then filled the other 2 with either 2 other materials that were cheap to buy, or stuff I could sell to them.

* Kinda the same as the above example, but also not. I feel it was more often than not that ports didn't have more than maybe 10-20 of stuff I wanted to buy/sell, so would be wasteful sending a bigger ship. And often several ports had like 10 each I wanted to buy/sell, so was better to have this cargo space split amongst different ships so they all could go to a place each. Having a bigger ship would only be ok-ish in late-game I guess, as in the beginning, if you saved all your money to get one big ship, trading would be sooo slow as you could only go back and forth between one port at a time (and pretty much never fill its space). I didn't like the idea of having some small ones and some bigger ones, would just take more work then to keep track of things (so didn't bother naming my ships properly, like what their loading space was, as I knew they all were 10 T).

* When a ship crashes it would be more easily replaced. Maybe the more expensive ones have less chance of crashing, or never crash at all, don't know.

So, basically, here's my short HOW TO PLAY:

1. When you start the game, buy 2 of the cheapest ships (10k each)
2. Buy about 500 acres of corn
3. Set taxes to 20-25% (not really needed as you get very little gold from taxes anyway (IMO), but if at 0% you could need more acres of corn later as the people multiply quicker)
4. Now all you do is buy cheap stuff (always prioritize getting building materials, and never sell it, ofc) and sell for more, and when you have 10k, buy another ship (keep repeating until max ships)
5. Once you have enough materials for the pyramid, like maybe 22k or something like that (didn't check exactly how much was needed per % of completion of the pyramid), and enough money of course (250k-ish), put all workers (or a lot, the more = the faster the materials are used up and the faster the pyramid gets built... I know, kinda obvious)... to work.

I was close to quit many times as it was sooooo boring to do the same thing over and over again for hours, as this game has very little challenge or variety in the stuff you need to do. But I kept going as no longplay had been made of this game, and I didn't worry about there not being an ending, or it being broken because of a bad dump of the game, as I cheated and gave myself loads of gold and materials when trying to figure out how the game worked, before playing for real.