Caesar 3

One of my all time favorite games. The old style graphics and entertaining sound track create a great sense of immersion. Caesar 3 has a great balance in which building any kind of city is possible but not easy. The only weak point I would point out is the combat system- it is much too fast paced compared to the rest of the gameplay and feels out of place, however it's not enough to bring down the 5 star rating this game deserves.

I've played SimCity [the 2014 release], Anno, Grand Ages, Tropico, Children of the Nile, Dawn of Discovery [Anno 1440], and still find this gem to hold up for it's graphics and standards. It has a nice vibe, and goes into the gameplay very fast.

The game might seem to be a little too hard at first since even relatively stable cities can fall apart in minutes due to the seemingly slightest mistakes. Maybe Caesar3 punishes beginners like me too hard, but once you have figured out the game mechanics the game becomes rather easy. If you don't have the time or the patience to learn how to play this game then you should skip this. If you like challenges and city builder strategy games you should give it a try. (Note that this was my first city builder game so I cannot benchmark it with other city builders.) Also note that in the GOG version I had problems with controllong the audio in-game.

I had this game as a child (and likely still have the CD somewhere too!) and I loved the editor to just mess about in and never really played the campaign. Now I'm playing through the campaign and I love the challenges it brings. People who like old school mechanics will find them here and their charms are here to enjoy for those looking for that particular vein of gameplay! One thing which is really nice is how well it ported to macOS by using Porting Kit, when playing on Windows 10 there were a few minor graphical and sound glitches, nothing that got in the way of gameplay but were just a bit annoying. However on macOS it plays absolutely perfectly, I can only assume the wineskin wrapper automatically fixed the compatibility issues which I never bothered looking to sort on Windows. Overall, it's just great.

Haha, not consistently, but I've played it quite a bit in the late 90s and then again about 6 months ago. I've always played on Hard (only realized that there were other other difficulty modes after winning the game, lol) and could never beat the whole game back as a child. The game is highly demanding, but also very entertaining. You don't have to win (complete every mission) to enjoy it. I finally succeeded after giving it another try as an adult and realized that I am, in fact, smarter now, than when I was 13, haha, which was a pleasant revelation. It wasn't easy, but I did it and derived a huge amount of satisfaction from it. However, you need to be really into city building but also into history and the Roman Empire to fully enjoy this game, at least in my opinion. This game takes many hours to enjoy, the graphics are still fine, I actually prefer these to 3D ones that came a few years later, and made everything look cartoonish. Caesar 3 has a more serious look to it, somehow. I don't agree with some of the reviewers that say that there are issues with warfare and trade - that's just the game being difficult, there are no issues. You really have to plan ahead for any contingency and need to master the combat as well as city building. I've always found military missions to be easier than peaceful missions, because the requirements on prosperity aren't as great. If you're completely new to this game, basically you build a brand new city in every mission, you have to plan it well, build up the infrastructure, provide residential buildings with services, recruit soldiers, train them, trade with other cities and achieve difficult requirements. It's a smart and difficult game. Some people go truly nuts over it, have spreadsheets to reverse engineer every bit of the game for 20+ years now - I think that's going over board. I also think that most people wouldn't enjoy this game today, due to the patience and difficulty that it requires. I will definitely play again.