Retro Revival, Part #34 - Pharaoh (2012, GOG.COM)
7Buy Pharaoh (+expansion Cleopatra) here;
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/pharaoh_cleopatra/
A conventional city-building game like Sim City is too dry and impersonal for me, but the Caesar trilogy and its successors Pharaoh and Zeus are just my kind of strategy game (...which doesn't mean that I'm actually any *good* at them, mind you). Just like in Settlers, there's something oddly fascinating - though at the same time stressful - about watching your little city grow rapidly and to observe many different kinds of citizens go about their daily business while all being interconnected in a vast urban "scala naturae" which gets progressively more complex with each new block added. Caesar III is the game in the series I've spent the most time with, but I remember getting pretty far into the Pharaoh campaign too (I've barely even touched Zeus, though), and although the pyramids in this game take an inordinate amount of real time to build there's something very satisfying about painstakingly getting all the supply lines up and running in order to finish these gigantic projects. Even though the feedback systems aren't quite as dependable as you'd like them to be, there's real depth in these games and many hours worth of gaming for 10 bucks each.
On a side note, the Swedish releases of Caesar and Pharaoh (not sure about Zeus) were extensively localized with fully translated text descriptions and new voice acting for all the dialogue. Caesar III even had historian and legendary documentary producer/narrator Hans Villius (b. 1923) doing the mission briefings, which is just awesome.