I second the pulling-back question, being able to zoom out big time would be cool. For those with older cards, ive found that disabling the shadows makes a stonking mondo difference to the frame rate, more than I’d have expected.
My only gripe is the ‘advisors screen’. This takes a long time to laod, which means flipping back and forth between city view and advisors view is tedious. Im pretty certain that this is because the screen ahs ‘3D’ animated people.
Why?
I’d be just as happy with a single gorgeous bitmap, the 3Dness here adds nothing that I can see, other than a big delay.
Other than that, this is looking damn good, pity I’m knee deep in Oblivion still.
The only issue I really ran into (Besides teh aforementioned sheep farm one) is water. I’d put fountains and wells next to houses and it would still say they lacked water even after waiting a very long time.
You have enough equites to cover the employment needs? I had big problems with fountains (never wells…) until I realized that resevoirs feeding them were a middle class domus job, not for the plebs in insulae.
Troy
Yea, that wasn’t the issue. And given that we’re talking wells too. Sometimes they worked, other time sthey didn’t. And it was things like the house next door would have water and the one on the other side of it would not.
Another question:
How do you make land “desirable”? It seems like my entire map is completely covered in red at this point. I tried throwing wells and decorations in a certain area, and it still stays red.
I spam the road in front with plazas and throw in a garden or two. It doesn’t make it great digs, but nice enough for people to move it.
Troy
I built about 5 wells about 3 to 4 little squares with road access around an insula. Still no water. This is buggy unless there’s something about well placement we’re not being told.
I thought I had an issue with water, but as it turned out, it was not really a water problem. The game UI gave me the wrong reason a house could not be occupied.
I had needed more equities so I plopped down a bunch of houses and none of them would get occupied. Clicking on the house, it said something to the effect of “This home will not be occupied unless it has access to water.”
So I started putting down wells and I still got that message.
I noticed there were no well workers and went to the labor panel. All water required equities to operate. So how then did the plebes get water when there were no equities?
I realized that plebes got water from wells by going there, so a new house must always start off needing water unless under the influence of a fountain.
My equities housing must have some other reason no one was going there, and the message about water was wrong. I decided that desirability must be the cause, so I put in a plaza, and placed some nice statues around, and within a minute people came and moved in. They then went to the well and got water, and that was the end of that problem.
I thought only plebes get well water and you needed pump houses, aqueducts, and resevoirs to get water to equites?
If that were true then you could never get equites.
Pumps require equites to run, and if equites required pumped water, then you can see the paradox here.
Click and drag while placing and the ‘r’ key like has been said. As for which side needs to face a road, it works no matter which way you point it, it’s an aesthetic choice. The direction you drag the mouse in with the click and drag method is the front.
I’ll have a look at the camera stuff. I think there’s an issue with the camera focus point getting offset in certain conditions. It can also be a little wonky around the map edge.
The sheep farming and well water things I don’t know what’s up with that. I’ve seen a number of reports on it though. Workarounds seem to be rebuilding the sheep farms, but rotate them different. Wells don’t need labor, so all you should need is a well connected to an occupied home by road. The plebs and equites will then go get the water.
That’s weird, there’s supposed to be a delay in there before the camera rotates, you have to click and hold for a moment before the rotation kicks in.
Istari6 and cliffski - did you go to ‘Free Camera’ on the Interface settings? You can see a heck of a lot that way. I’ve always been satisfied with it. You can see more than any of our past games anyway.
Cliffski - Advisor screen delay is gone already. One of our programmers had a ‘why the hell is it doing THAT’ moment, and got rid of the delay
For totally unoccupied homes it should be saying “Vacant Desirability too low” right at the top of the info area for the home. It sounds like you had some equites in the home and it was telling you about the evolution requirement. I just looked at it, and the ‘won’t get new residents due to desirability’ feedback wasn’t showing up in that case. Oops.
Plebs and Equites need well or fountain water to be happy. Fountain water is healthier and is desired by equites before they’ll improve (evolve) their homes so the homes will hold more people.
I could recommend some pretty decent funds, those real estate trusts are terrible.
So…totally wish the demo had a save option, so I could have gotten to bed at a decent hour. :)
C4, as addictive as the predecessors. Yay!
Things I don’t care for, but are probably too late to fix before the game ships:
Camera. It’s more of a pain that I would have imagined, possibly because it seems counterintuitive because it’s opposite from Civ’s camera. (I think Civ…some game I’ve played a lot and have “muscle memory” from playing.) Also, it’s pretty easy to get it in a wonky setting and have to reset it. On the plus side, resetting is easy. Still, I’d like to see more camera options.
Demo “tutorial”, is not so much a tutorial as it is a groovy sandbox. Great for those of us with Caesar experience, tres baffling to those who have not played the legacy. On another forum there were a couple dozen comments in a thread and the majority of comments would distill down to: “What the heck am I supposed to be doing?”. Hopefully in the release game, the tutorial will actually be a step through on how to set things up. Again, experienced players won’t need it, but without it, a lot of newer players are likely to be pretty frustrated. Previous Caesars had great tutorials, I hope to see the same with C4.
Farms: Cosmetically problematic. Here’s how it’s working, and I think it’s throwing people. I’ll use cattle as an example. You create your pastures and your ranch. Ranchers lead cows to the fields, and the text on the ranch says “Working”. However, cows (and sheep) have to grow before they can be harvested. While the animals are growing, the text on the ranch says “No Fields”, rather than “working” or “in progress”, or “growing fat and happy” or whatever. Leading people to destroy their pastures, because they think it’s not working.
Easy fix: Change the text on the ranches to read “In progress”…or some derivative thereof, rather than having a red error message that says “No fields”.
Building placement: Does it matter which side faces the street? If it doesn’t, everything is all good in the universe. If it matters, then the side that needs to face the street should be easier to discern.
Despite some quibbles, and possibly the ranch thing, I haven’t found any problems that I would consider “game breaking”. It looks fabulous. Even on my 4 year old Alienware, it still ran. (Ok, I had to turn graphics down a bit…) But, it still ran. I didn’t notice any massive performance hit when switching between map, advisers and empire, although there was always a small lag when switching to advisers.
I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on completed code. Yes, yes I am. Rome will be mine. Mine, I tell you! Mwhahahahahahahaha! Ahem, sorry…megalomania ran away with me again…
The default setting the camera is on is cooky.
We’ve got a learning campaign that serves as a tutorial. I think it’s turned out well.
Yep, that’s what I had done.
Nope, doesn’t matter.
I’m happy to see that it’s keeping you up late, and that you’re getting into the Roman Governor mindset already.
FWIW, the game just went gold today.