In Celestial Empire, the fate of a providence long forgotten is in your hands. Manage your city properly, and you’ll succeed. Fail, and may the gods have mercy on you.
They say that the less power a man has, the more he likes to use it. A wise adage indeed, and one given to you at the start of Celestial Empire, developed and published by President Studio. Celestial Empire is a city-building strategy game set in ancient China, with a beautiful aesthetic to match. As we move into this glimpse at the Celestial Empire, it is important to note that the game is currently being developed, and the product played was an early playtest version without some features finalized or implemented.
To begin with, in the Celestial Empire, you take control of a governor, newly appointed to a province left neglected for far too long. On the flip side of the adage mentioned above, a man with quite a bit of power has called upon your services, requesting your help to restore this poor, forgotten providence to a state of prosperity and beauty. You will need to put your skills to work to the best of your ability, as the Emperor (yes, that Emperor) has entrusted this task to you personally.
So, how do you go about doing that, exactly? To begin with, your main form of interacting with your growing city is to build buildings. You start with your Governor’s House, your base of operations, and can plop it down anywhere you want on the map. While the Governor’s House doesn’t necessarily do anything on its own, all buildings must be connected to it via road for them to function properly. You need to have a proper connection to your growing city, after all.
From there, you receive a variety of buildings to construct, each with its role in your growing city. Early on, you will see a lot of the basics: houses, rice farms, and woodcutters. Houses hold people (obviously), and these people pay taxes, which act as your revenue. The more people you have, the more taxes, thus the more money you get. Simple.
However, as this is a management game, you need to successfully manage the needs of your people. They need food to eat and wood to burn for heat, primarily. As such, you will have to connect houses to farms and woodcutters to properly provide for your citizens. A housing unit with good morale means more people who want to stay there, which again means more money for you to play with. It is the typical balancing act of management games, with an interesting early game flavor that I appreciated.
There is also a development (tech) tree and a religion system in place as well. My feelings on these two aspects of the game are a bit mixed.
In terms of the Celestial Empire’s development tree, it’s fairly straightforward. The tree begins at the Governor’s House and moves rightwards in the menu, with more advanced buildings being unlocked the further right into the tree you go. This is all fine and well, and I have no issues with it. However, the main thing I found a problem with is the fact that certain techs are locked behind population count, such as the duck farm, which acts as a luxury good for the most part.
Now, this is not a bad restriction, and in a game like Celestial Empire, I can say that I think it fits, thematically. However, from what I could tell, there’s no actual way to see specifically how many citizens you have in total. The closest is a ‘Workforce Supply’ counter at the top of the screen, which shows how many free workers you have concerning the jobs (like farming and woodcutting) that need doing. However, this terminology isn’t the same, and it certainly confused me for a bit when I started out.
The only other way I found to check population was to click on a house and manually see how much population out of 10 it has filled. This leads to a pretty heavy logistical problem later on, when you have far more houses, it’s not feasible to go around clicking on each house and tallying things up that way. At least, not if you want to get anything done.
As for the Celestial Empire’s religious system, I felt like this was a little less cut and dry than the development tree was. In the couple of short play-throughs I did, I was never exactly sure when or why the gods started getting annoyed at me, though I suspect my forgetfulness when it came to building shrines probably played a decently sized role. However, could the gods blame me? Shrines are pretty expensive, at a whopping 75 gold upkeep cost!
Speaking of upkeep, that was another thing I found a bit confusing about the resources, specifically wood and rice. At the top of the screen, there’s a bar that lists out your main resources. At the start of the game, those will be the following: gold, wood, rice, wood planks, craftsmen/tools, and available workers.
The confusing part to me was that all of these are very important pieces of information to be managing, with two numbers indicating how many you have on hand and what your income/deficit is. However, only gold and available workers have details when you mouse over them on why those numbers are the way they are. I found myself especially annoyed with not being able to know the specifics of my wood income/deficit, considering that it is both a vital resource for building (being used both raw and as processed wood planks) as well as a necessary resource for citizen happiness.
However, a newsletter on Celestial Empire’s main menu in the demo let me know that they are, as of this preview being written, working on their UI, so hopefully, this issue can be attended to! And with all of that being said, the Celestial Empire is far from a terrible state. Aside from the mentioned hiccups, my playthroughs went rather smoothly, and I oftentimes found myself just sitting there panning around the environment in between building buildings and checking on my resources. It was very easy to just… sit there and be immersed in everything that the game had to offer.
All of the art in the Celestial Empire is drop-dead gorgeous. Everything from the building models to the environment to even the loading screen was all put together so neatly with a fitting and lovely sense of style. This was complemented by the music, which to me felt rather soothing, and made the game feel soothing to work with (despite my worries over my quickly decreasing budget).
And that’s going to be the end of our preview for the Celestial Empire. If you liked what you saw here, make sure to check out the game on Steam and wishlist it to show some support for the devs!
For more gaming-related news, make sure to check out other articles here on GamesCreed! A good place to start would be checking out our preview for The Wandering Village, or check out some of our game reviews.
