Caesar™ IV

I was somewhat suspicious initially, but I think I like Caesar IV better than III. The thing I absolutely hated about Caesar III and its family were the stupid walkers, delivering services along random paths. They condemned you to either build absurd cities with weird paths and no intersections, or to just accept that entire neighbouhoods would periodically fall into poverty as a key walker decided not to deliver some vital service for a few months. Personally, I chose the second option. Anyway, Caesar IV has a much more reasonable system for coverage, which is distance along roads from the relevant building. A few cons. - The interface is not very friendly. - Your advisors fail to give you some crucial pieces of information. - The combat system is horrendous. Consider yourself lucky if you're at all able to get your troops to attack the enemy (ok, not quite, but it's really awful). Luckily this is not a very big part of the game. - Somehow lacks excitement. There are no cool buildings to look up to building, unique challenges to overcome, or special map requirements. You can easily build a Circus and Coliseum on the very first day. Every map ends up being largely the same drill: build your city, develop trade, raise an army, send Caesar the required goods, wait. Just slight variations. Btw, I see some people complain about small map sizes... I had no problem with that. If anything, I regretted only using a small part of the map most of the time.

In Caesar 3, because of the walker system, you cannot make your city the way you want to. You have to build housing blocks and carefully arrange your roads or else your city will crash and burn. This problem is gone in Caesar 4. In Caesar 4, you can build a beautiful city without worrying about your walkers. This means that in some ways, Caesar 4 is a much easier game than Caesar 3. Play Caesar 3 if you want a challenge and like to micro-manage. Play Caesar 4 if you want to build a beautiful, functioning city. Pros: Beautiful graphics, no more random walkers, more resources, no more ghost workers and population aging Cons: Even the largest map feels small, can be laggy if you have a large city, battle mechanics are still difficult to control

This game improves on quite a bit from Caesar III. Gone are the days of service-centered suburbs; instead of employees having to walk to houses, it's now a much simpler service area thing. Housing quality is also simplified and split into three classes, so no more worrying about over-upgrading your homes and losing valuable laborers. The one big drawback is the tiny and invisible plot grid. Whearas in Caesar III most strucures are 1x1, 2x2, or 3x3, IV has few structures smaller than 6x6 and a number at 12x12 and above. Without any sort of visible placement grid, it can be frustrating to try to expand a section at a time only to find yourself a row too tight years down the line. Other than that it does a decent job balancing the building and managing aspects, and doesn't let the military portion get in the way of the rest of the game. A little micromanagement when it comes to resource production but it's much more a blessing than a curse. And as a note, once you get past the tutorial the maps are plenty big enough.

In some ways I like it more than caesar 3 (you don't have to micromanage walkers) but in scale it falls short. Where as in previous caesar games you build sprawling cities in this its just a couple buildings. I've owned this game on other platforms since it came out and beaten twice. My main gripe with it is the maps are indeed cramped and the buildings are huge. Even the bigger maps later in the game just feel like they don't really give you enough space to build a proper roman city, and it in that way it reminds me of a scaled down ANNO, where its more about managing space on a tiny map for a handful of buildings. Not a bad game and worth $10 to people who like city builders but it honestly doesn't have the feel of its predecessors.

Running it on Windows 10. The labor allocation in Caralis started giving me bogus numbers when the pop gets near 1,000, and seems to quit working. Crashed a couple times, but been running it 4-12 hours a day the first week. It's intoxicating enough. To say the least. A very responsive city-builder. Gorgeous map. Ingenious strategies that slowly dawn and develop over multiple attempts-- can I really handle special orders by annually cycling the number of my plebs with common goods? Maybe we'll see by 4 am. Oh yeah, almost forgot: on mine, anyway, the "back" build button doesn't work. It actually charges me the same amount all over again, when I cancel. If a road costs 200 Dn and I cancel it, I'm out 400. Saving while I build as an alternative. Overall, it's extremely immersive, pretty, & fairly well crafted. Very easy to fall into for long periods if you happen to go for that kind of thing.