Biscuit Reviews Caesar III
When you review games from your past that you played that helped shape how you are as a gamer, it could be hard to set aside the nostalgia goggles. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that returning to the old and the comfortable can be a good thing sometimes.
So for me part of that returning to the old and comfortable is playing a city builder game known as Caesar III from publisher Sierra Entertainment and developer Impression Games’ City Builder Series.
As you can guess from the title you build Roman cities and you have the option to either play the campaign or freely play on a map and just build a city to your heart's content.
If you choose to play the campaign, you are a new Governor assigned to build and establish cities throughout the Roman Empire. During the campaign you’ll have goals that you’ll need to reach such as population count, city prosperity, peace, wealth, culture, and of course, Caesar’s favor.
As you are building cities, you’ll also get tasks from Caesar asking to produce specific items in a specified amount of time and then delivering it to him. You can ignore him but it will reduce your Favor rating. However continuing to ignore Caesar could result in either you being fired. If you go bankrupt, Caesar will bail you out once and if you go bankrupt a second time, he’ll send troops in to destroy your city.
While building and expanding your city not only will you need to hit the rating goals and keep Caesar happy, you also need to keep your citizens happy. This means producing food and being able to distribute that food through markets for your citizens to be able to eat. As your city grows, their needs will as well. These needs range from having more places to work, entertainment, education, having places of worship, and health. There are also multiple ways to find out the needs of your citizens. You can confer with your city advisors or you can talk to citizens directly to see what they think needs to be improved. What the advisors tell you matches up with what your citizens tell you most of the time so it’s more of a matter of preference as to how you go about learning and figuring out what needs to be improved in your Roman city.
However, the city also needs to make money to expand. It’s important to establish trade routes throughout the empire to earn money and also gain some other goods to help with the livelihood of your citizens.
Aside from keeping Caesar and your citizens happy, you’ll also need to be in the good graces of the gods. In Caesar III, you will need to keep five gods content and happy. Ceres, the goddess of agriculture; Mercury, the god of commerce; Neptune, the god of the seas; Mars, the god of war; and Venus, the goddess of love. There are plenty of benefits and penalties that will happen depending on your relationship with the gods.
If you have a good relationship: Ceres will bless your farm fields with a plentiful harvest, Mercury will fill your food storages, Neptune will allow safe passage for ships on sea trading routes, Mars will send spirits to watch over your city to keep enemies away, and Venus will improve your citizens moods.
However, you can also make them angry. Ceres will destroy your crops. Mercury will create hindrances to your land trade routes, Neptune will sink ships on the sea trading routes. Mars will send barbarians to attack your city, and Venus will make your citizens hate you to where they incite riots. If you make all of the gods angry, they’ll send natural disasters such as fires and earthquakes to do damage to your city.
To maintain this relationship you’ll need to build temples and hold festivals in their honor. The more citizens you gain, the more temples you will need to build. However, if you don’t want to worry about the gods at all, you can turn off god effects in the menu.
There’s really not many negatives I can say about this game either. Only real negatives I have for the game is how commanding your troops to fight off invaders isn’t exactly user friendly. There are certain maps where you will have to worry about invaders. To combat these invaders, you’ll need to build city walls and have armies to defend your city. As far as controls for your armies, you can change their formation to account for certain actions. To move your troops, you move their banner to where you want them to go. This can be a bit cumbersome sometimes because if the banner isn’t right next to an invader your troops might not attack unless they are really close to an invader. By really close I mean practically standing next to them, causing you to constantly click the banner and move it as the invaders move and they move extremely fast. It gets more annoying later in the campaign as you start getting assignments that have invaders and the more you advance in assignments, the more frequent invaders come. Failing to properly defend your city will not only cause your citizens to die, but also have Caesar issue a warrant for your arrest.
Another minor complaint is the default difficulty. It doesn’t bother me personally because I played the game for a long time without realizing it but it’s still something to note. The default setting for Caesar III is Hard. Not Normal. Not Easy. You can pick your difficulty beforehand in the setting menu before launching anything, but if you pick up and play right at the start, you’ll be starting on Hard mode. The fact that there’s also no difficulty selector before starting your city is definitely an odd choice. I would say maybe it was just an old design choice, but when many games in 1998 also had difficulty settings that was prompted at the start, isn’t much of an excuse for this one.
Caesar III receives a 4 out of 5.
