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.
You'll probably notice a few other people complain about a bug where workers are idle. There are a few work-arounds to this problem (I find that re-launching the game and randomly futzing with the graphics settings helps about half the time) but the fixes are only temporary. This is a huge bummer, as the four hours I had in my first launch of the game were very fun and scratched a very deep city-building itch I've had for a while. If there's ever a patch of this game that permanently fixes the issue, I'll happily revise this review to be five stars.
