ok so the first thing you're going to notice is that I avoid the nice big farmland and go build on the awkward farmland and there's a reason for that…
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the earthquake. the earthquake is going to hit and fracture that section as well as destroy buildings built over there, which yes was a surprise the first time I played as a teenager. But not anymore so we build on the awkward spot first.
Otherwise, this map is relatively straightforward. Once the earthquake is over, then it's just a matter of getting everything up and running for real. I have a bit of trouble with unemployment making everyone unhappy as I waited to get the post-earthquake farms going but it sorts out quickly. And then it’s just...waiting. With Caesar the big time issue is the Peace rating because there’s no way to hurry it.Later, I’ll struggle more with prosperity and culture sometimes but in the on this one it’s just...waiting for the peace.
Sometimes when playing for myself I turn the speed up on some of the 'just waiting' periods but I don't want to do that with streams/these videos. So sometimes there are very chill periods where I'm just waiting for a rating to go up or another goal to be reached. It depends on what you want out of these whether or not that's boring, I think. I want to do very relaxing and possibly boring games actually as a possible sleep/relaxation aid. No idea if I achieve that, haha, but that's the overall vibe I'm going for.
and I try again and....oh...oh the amphitheater of doom....
on twitch for 14 days here if you want to watch about 2 hours of things going ok only to then suddenly...not and have me panic and try to recover...
ok so I set this one up differently trying to cram more housing in the area closer to the main food supply and I tried a sort of box set up? ehhhhh not a huge fan in the end but it did work more or less!
I managed to get close to the target of 5000 people with no food supply issues. I was merely starting to try to get the culture rating to go up when I placed the fatal amphitheater.
the mistake is because when I have played this map before, all my bridges were connected by roads on the different islands, but in this case, the bridge was merely to allow immigration, not walkers. That meant there was no road in front of it to make sure people could come and go if I started trying to build things in front of it. Since I am not used to this, I didn’t check and didn’t realize what had happened until...well...
so if you take out a bridge or block it everything past it is ‘cut off’ and the game depopulates all your houses. Which is a little weird in that in a real situation you’d have more time before everyone died to fix the problem but the game is the game.
and since EVERYTHING was past that point....everyone in my city died! or disappeared if you prefer because that’s more accurate to how the game does it. And then I had to figure out what went wrong, delete the amphitheater, and then wait for everyone to move back in.
I actually tried to revert to an autosave except...Caesar doesn’t have those haha and I never remember to save while streaming which...yeah. Since that failed I had just wait while the population went up only of course the city started collapsing and ugh.
BUT I got almost back up to the point where it all fell apart before the end and may beat the map next time...I hope...ugh ick hate this map.
It’s not actually that hard really, I don’t think, but it’s the one I was stuck on perpetually as a teen so I have baggage.
here I very definitely absolutely totallllly intentionally demonstrate a few pitfalls and consequences in this game...
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so part 1 is basically just me doing a tempting but silly thing: over-planning too early. I’ve played this map enough before that I have an idea where I want my neighborhoods to be and get over ambitious about that from the beginning--as per usual, haha.
This means that parts of my city catch fire because there’s no workers there yet, I don’t have enough food for too long...it’s just not a good idea. One wants to because it’s tidier that way but it’s smarter to do things a bit at a time--the way real cities usually grew up. Rarely is a whole city planned from the start, they usually begin as smaller settlements, even if the beginning is well planned.
anyway, despite how ambitious I am about planning this city, that doesn’t mean I actually have figured out the best way to handle things in Caesar. As a teen I used to do a long row of two deep houses and everything around that, I have changed to a more square approach with two rows of houses and gardens in the middle. This works well for some maps and situations and not for others, haha. Tends to give me more unemployment options than underemployment like back in my high school attempts.
all that said this is a gentle map, lots of farmland and resources and space, no major obstacles...and the thing that drew it out was the peace rating. That will be a theme with this game if I am doing well. That’s essentially just running out the clock because that rating cannot be rushed really. When the hold up is the other requirements that means I’m struggling more, as you will soon see...
after this map we get into the real game so to speak!
The First (of No Doubt Many) Failures hahaha...(but it makes for far more interesting commentary?)
ok so this is a map I got stuck on enough as a teenager that in one of my attempts to play caesar since I did actually ask the internet of today for advice.I never really tried implementing it because I got busy or bored and wandered off but the trick with this map supposedly is essentially to live with the natives. As a teen I tried to stay as far away from them as possible and while I got much closer for this run through, it clearly wasn’t enough.
This map has a lot of farm land but it’s inconveniently on a higher elevation and the natives live near the only access. Building mission posts can pacify the natives, but only as long as the Roman emissary walker continues to pass buy their houses. This makes it challenging to make the most of the farm land because you can’t build the bulk of your city near the farm land but not on it. The farms need access to labor (houses), but houses need goods and services that take up more space. Additionally, with nearly on the farmland in a place with only one way yo access it, getting the food to the people gets challenging as each farm only has one delivery person. This limits the productivity of any give farm if the delivery person takes too long to go and come from the farm and granary--even if one ignores the threat of the natives. The natives will destroy any buildings built on their land if they aren’t regularly visited by the missionary.
The way I have set things up in this stream, the natives are not a problem. But building essentially in among their houses could be because if the missionary wanders around on the roads I build for my people, he might neglect to go by the native houses enough and they might start doing fun things like destroying aqueducts which has a tendency to b pretty dire. Any loss of water access devolves housing fast and leads to a massive population decrease which means there’s not enough labor to run anything. It can sometimes be recovered from, but it can also be fatal.
I tried to build on either side of them, but the way I did this didn’t work if indeed it can at all. I never could get the farming turn around time low enough to support a population that could achieve the map goals (mostly culture though prosperity and population too).
I figured it out pretty early on in this stream actually but you can see my attempts to fix the problem since no one likes failure especially not with an audience, however small and silent mine currently is.
I tried putting more housing wherever I could to get the population up, as well as upgrading my housing though I do know from experience that trying to upgrade your housing to get enough labor for anything is a fools errand: better housing means more people but they’re needed to maintain the better housing. In this case you can see me struggle to keep everyone in pottery and then furniture.
The food was still at the root of that problem because you can see repeatedly like in the picture above that my markets just don’t have enough food to keep all my little neighborhoods fully evolved all the time.
Though having little neighborhoods is an issue too because that’s more service workers per smaller population cluster so you are investing more labor in smaller numbers of fancy houses.
When I do this map again next week I will try to address these problems.
The sad thing is that I did about as well as I used to do as a teen overall, if somewhat faster, despite not building my city on the land further from the food. One reason for that is that while that is further way, the larger city you can build on the sort of ‘main area’ means you don’t run into the same issues quite as fast. Though you absolutely do run into them....
oh these two maps. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I beat Lugdunum as a teenager more than like...once hahaha.
finishing off Miletus was mostly just a matter of stockpiling enough pottery to give upgraded housing a serious chance of getting the population up. I mostly had a good set up, especially for defense. So it was just a waiting game on population mostly though I did make sure not to bother trying until I had the peace rating because I wasn’t sure I could sustain it...
to get the population I had to expand on to the islands which was interesting because I didn’t think it would work but it did!
oh Lugdunum.
The problem I always had on this map before was largely that I was too afraid to build near the natives even once I had set up the mission posts and this used to build very cool cities on the “mainland”. These I could never supply properly, especially with food. The problem I am having now is labor. Not enough workers...but I don’t want to spread out any farther as it’s hard to keep the food flowing even just like this.
I am probably still too afraid to build near the natives...
the wolves also haven’t condensed. Like the zebra in Miletus, the wolves are a hazard and so I have them contained. But usually, like the zebra, they clump up in a small area usually so you can have a very small walled off area. It’s not an issue really but it’s a bit weird in terms of alllll the times I have played this map haha.
will I be able to actually win next time? will it take hours yet?
This is a tutorial map, though not the first. The first is very quick and too basic to bother recording or talking about in terms of gameplay. So I’m starting here and as it’s a tutorial, I will be writing a lot about what’s going on in the game and features of how Caesar III works so if you’re familiar with it you can probably skip this and in any case not all posts will be this focused on game functions.
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since this is a tutorial map it functions a wee bit differently than future maps and these starting objectives are not the full map objectives. But I do start out by building a small settlement and working on getting food in a granary.
You’ll notice I sometimes turn the game speed down when I build, this is because sometimes it matters if you take too long getting new things up and running. You can’t build on pause in Ceasar, so I turn the speed down to sort of slow time.
I am still working out how I want to handle building cities in Caesar, the way I did it as a teen never worked all that well, haha.
Anyway I start out by building some roads and houses. One aspect of Caesar III is that each occupational building--anything that takes workers--will send out a guy to walk around and if he walks past houses before he gets to his maximum steps from his employment building then that building will be functional. This means that where you place things and how you draw your roads have to accommodate this and is why I have the roads in what may seem weird patterns.
Additionally, putting houses right next to say a farm or many other buildings causes problems with desirability which is a metric the game uses to decide if people, especially higher class people, want to live in a house. Since you often have ratings requirements that need fancier and fancier houses, it’s best not to build houses too close to industrial or agricultural buildings--but they have to be close enough that they get employment.
So that’s what’s going on with how I’m laying out this little city and why it doesn’t have say a grid layout or whatever.
For the beginning of this map, the only option I have for water access is wells. This won’t last long in this map and I’ll probably never use wells again after this map because they simply don’t work well as they are icky (undesirable).
The first level of housing is ‘small tent’ as pictured above. Small tents lack access to any water, or have water but the area is too icky and they refuse to evolve into large tents until you pretty things up for them. Every plot designated for housing starts as a small tent when the first person moves in. Once they get water (and things are nice enough) they evolve into large tents.
one of the first things you’ll see me build on any map along with houses are Prefectures (has a lil red flag) and Engineering Posts (has a lil blue flag). Prefects are combination firemen and policeman so you need them immediately to keep things from catching fire. Engineers keep things from collapsing. The buildings send out walkers to patrol the area.
those flames are what happen if you don’t build Prefectures fast enough or place them so they don’t get everywhere....
Once there’s people, prefects, engineers, farms, and granaries you need markets. Markets will distribute food and ultimately other goods.They send out market women to both go get goods from granaries and warehouses, as well as to walk the area around the market distributing wares.
Once the people have food, housing evolves again. And that’s kind of the name of the game for housing--the more access they have to goods and services, the fancier they get. In general, the fancier they get the more people they hold, at least to a point.The more people your housing holds, the more you can expand goods and services.
Rome means iconic aqueducts!
this is the water overlay. There’s various overlays available that I’ll use occasionally to check things. In the video this makes a bit more sense hopefully as I hover over what the different things up there mean, but this shows me where on the map has access to pipes from reservoirs and where has access to water from fountains.Fountains need to be built on a square with pipe access and each fountain serves a number of squares with clean water.
I have to note that while I don’t fault the game for using the iconic arches for aqueducts, that most aqueducts were underground and the arches were only used when they had to be as it’s not very easy or efficient to build giant stone arches to pipe allllllll your water.
other overlays will show other things such as fire risk, access to entertainment, or other useful information.
I am currently playing with god effects off as that’s easier and I’m starting on the easiest of easy but one of the first services Roman citizens want once they have food and water is access to temples. The game has five available gods, Ceres, Neptune, Mercury, Mars, and Venus. With god effects on, if you don’t appease the gods they may punish you, and if you please them they may reward you but balancing them takes practice. I generally play as though they’re on in terms of keeping the number of temples even (nothing pisses off a god so much as if you have more temples to another god!). You also can hold festivals to the gods which please them as well as your people.
The senate building is a quick way to check your unemployment and ratings, as well as opening up the possibility of taxation.
This map does have the possibility of trade, though on this play through I win before I actually get into that, but trade and taxes are key to balancing your fiances. I often probably start taxing later than I should but I try to stay on top of trade. In Caesar, you are given a starting budget and if you use it up “Caesar” will grant you a second budget but after that he gets mad and you go into debt. You have a debt limit and if you stay in debt too long you lose...
Managing employment is as tricky as managing finances, you need enough workers to keep expanding what you’re doing but Romans get pretty upset if they have high unemployment and it leads to crime and potentially riots. For this map one of the weird issues that happens since it’s a tutorial is that it halts immigration in between goals so in this video I get hung up for a bit on the pottery goal because I wanted to make a larger pottery industry than I had workers for. Usually this problem wouldn’t happen quite like this because I had housing space for more people and on subsequent maps that means they’ll keep coming. Here though, I needed to get pottery in a warehouse before it would let more people arrive. This can sometimes become a glitch on this map actually but in this case I just had to downsize my ambitions and wait a little.
In addition to religious access, there’s ultimately entertainment, education, and health. Each of those services as multiple types and the more the city grows and the further allow in the game the more of them will be needed. I have actor colonies and theaters on this map but eventually there will be coliseums and hippodromes...
Caesar III is from 1998, there were previous Caesar games, thus the III, but this is the first one I played. Possibly in 1998 though definitely by 2000. It’s also my first Impressions City Builder. I was a young teenager then and would get stuck on the beginning maps forevvvverrrrr.
As you might expect, Caesar III is an Ancient Roman game. In it you get promoted to different areas in the expanding Roman Empire (*) and have to balance increasingly complex requirements for each city. Everything is based on Roman history, tweaked for the game of course, but featuring real cities and real events. From what I can tell it was decently researched at the time actually, though should not be taken as a historical resource :-P
This is also the hardest of the three I will be playing for me because of a few features of gameplay like less warehouse control and other organizational issues that aren’t present in later games.
I start on the easiest setting for all three city builders but anticipate this one being the worst for me to try to keep playing through on harder levels....
Anyway, this is peak nostalgia though because it was the first and it is still really fun and interesting to play.
