Caesar 3 - PC

Amazon.com Players of Caesar 3 are immersed in a city set in the age of the ancient Roman Empire. Players place buildings on previously empty terrain and construct a city. These buildings come to life, and the city begins to evolve. As the city grows, it encounters various problems that must be overcome. Players have specific objectives to achieve, although many players will choose not to use these and will be content to design their idea of the perfect city. The game is structured as a career, beginning with a training mission, then progresses through a series of ever-tougher real assignments. Each mission/assignment consists of a province and set objectives. Achieving these objectives will result in promotion and an offer of a tougher assignment, which can be turned down if the player is having too much fun to accept at that time. The career progression introduces elements of the game step by step, thereby teaching players how to play without forcing them to play through a tutorial. There is also an option where players ignore the career progression and simply play the full game with no promotion involved. Review The company line on Caesar III is that it's SimCity set in the Roman Empire. That's only partially true. You do run a city (or, rather, a series of cities) in a fashion somewhat like the classic urban management game, but the game mechanics of Caesar III are more akin to Blue Byte's Settlers II. Unlike in SimCity, you do not simply zone your territory and sit back while your city prospers or fails. Instead, you are commissioned to perform a much wider array of tasks, ranging from setting up efficient production lines to maintaining a military force. Caesar III is a much better game than Settlers II, and combines some of the best elements of both that game and SimCity. But it manages to suffer from Settler II's most glaring shortcoming: the combat system. What's worse, it finds a shortcoming of its own with some problems that make efficient management often more difficult than it should be. And both of these serve to slightly hamper what is otherwise a very enjoyable game. Caesar III is mission-based. In each progressive mission, you are assigned certain goals, usually a target population and target scores in the various categories in which your performance is rated, including the prosperity and culture level of your people and your favor with the emperor. To its credit, Caesar III gives you two territories to choose from at each subsequent level. In most cases, the difference between these two areas is how much hostility you will face, allowing those who want to concentrate on development to stick to the peaceful provinces, and those who want to battle it out with the game's combat to venture into the war-torn areas. In the peaceful territories, you'll find that the game's many strengths are emphasized. You must zone for housing, find a source of food (either through farming, trading, or fishing or a combination thereof), and proceed to set up profitable trade industries, please your populace, and satisfy the demands of the gods. Planning the city is the best part of Caesar III, and watching your people and your industry thrive is a very satisfying experience. For trade, there are numerous items to make, such as weapons, wine, furniture, oil, and pottery. Each of these items has a prerequisite ingredient (which can also be traded, but for less money), such as iron, grapes, timber, olives, and clay. These ingredients can often be harvested from the land, but often you'll need to trade for the items you need in order to make the items you want to trade. Only certain items are in demand in every region, so you'll have to plan the quantity of production accordingly (although most trade items are also needed for domestic use). Caesar III makes the most of its artificial constraints in order to make each subsequent level a bit more complex, but it's a fun system. Pleasing your populace requires schools, theaters, libraries, bathhouses, and the like. Many of these complexes can't be built too near housing or the neighborhood won't reach the most desirable class levels. Of course, pleasing the populace also requires food, and lots of it. This is the area in which Caesar III is both the most demanding and, sometimes, the most confounding. Food is stored in granaries. Market collectors go to these granaries and then distribute the food to the people. Unfortunately, collectors often don't go to the closest granaries. On many occasions, market traders will pass through granaries stocked with a variety of food, only to go take food from another granary located far away. All the while, the people are starving. Neighborhood market workers also have the unpleasant habit of wandering off into areas where food is not needed (or, worse, where no one lives), and all the while your people go hungry. It's frustrating, especially when you're trying to reach a particular prosperity level, your granaries are brimming,
ASIN: B000031KJX
VSKU: DBV.B000031KJX.G
Condition: Good
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