General Questions

Is there a demo of the game available?

Yes, you can download it from here

What does the demo include?

It has the 6 Xia tutorial missions plus the first 3 missions of the Shang Dynasty. It also includes a multiplayer mission though this can only be played on a LAN set up.

What is the difference between the difficulty levels?

Difficulty levels affect start up money, cost of buildings, wages paid, number of workers available, fire/damage/health/crime risks, how other cities in the Empire interact with you, strength of both friendly and enemy troops.

Can I rotate the map?

Yes, the second from the left icon at the bottom right of the screen that looks like a compass is used to rotate the map.

Can I rotate buildings?

Only some buildings can be rotated by using the “r” key. The buildings that can be rotated include the Palace and Administrative City, forts, statues and non square monuments.

What does the “Part of the city is isolated from the main road to China” message mean?

You get this message if you build housing in an area which immigrants can’t reach. The most common cause is because it is across water from the entry point and there is no bridge or ferry. It can also occur if you completely surround housing with other buildings and/or water, rocks etc or if you build on a raised area that does not have ramp access.

If you build non housing buildings in similar situations you will not get the message but the buildings will never get workers.

Note that the message has nothing to do with the actual road that is often on the map when you start except that this road usually marks the entry point. You can delete part or all of this road if it doesn’t fit in with your city plans with no ill effects.

Are there any updates to Emperor available?

Yes there is an update, the 1.0.1 patch. If you have the 1.0.0 version you should download the patch from here and install it. You can check which version you have from in the game by looking in Help then About, or by right clicking on the Emperor.exe file then selecting Properties then Version. Details of what the patch fixes and the new features it introduces can be found here

I find the intro movie annoying, can I turn it off?

Yes, you can. Browse to the folder where you installed Emperor, open the file “Emperor.ini”. The very last line in that file is “PlayIntroMovie=yes”, change that into “PlayIntroMovie=no” and you won’t see the movie again when you start the game.

What does “random seed” mean in Open Play?

Quote from one of the developers:

A “seed” is a set of data used to set the initial values used by a random number generator. In Open Play, you can type in anything you like as the “seed”. The character string you typed is then treated as binary data and if, you change the string each time, each time you will get a different set of initial game data (i.e. the city map, other cities in the empire, commodities available will all be reset). If you keep the string (and all the other Open Play settings) the same, you will get the same initial setup.

However, the actual string of characters typed in is not associated with the actual results in game terms at all. So when you type “rice”, that is just a series of numeric values used to set the random number generator … it has nothing to do with that crop appearing in the game.

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