If you feel like building a city for no particular reason, or you don’t want to play a campaign just that specific moment, the Open Play option allows you to just build a city to your liking, with options to set various game settings like disaster frequency, the density of cities in the empire, their starting attitude towards you, the time period you are going to play in and of course the difficulty level. Also the folded card that comes along in the box could be very useful especially if you are new into this style of strategy games.
The manual is very well organized and very detailed, so after playing the tutorials of the first campaign you should check on it to improve your skills. The first campaign, that of the Xia dynasty is in form of a tutorial so you can basically start playing the game as soon as you install it on your hard drive, thus you don’t need to read the manual that comes with the game right at first. It comes with seven campaigns that will be your means into this journey in time. Breakaway has managed to keep things according to the true historical facts as much as possible and that is one of the many strong points of the game. Emperor is set in ancient China, starting from the very first dynasty and ending just about the time the Mongols were about to invade the land, spanning 7 dynasties (each making up one campaign with several missions), which will serve as your means of traveling through time.
