Caesar IV

Even as a big fan of the Caesar/city-building series, I was surprised to see Caesar IV show up in the best of the year thread.

I haven’t finished the campaign, but I spent a good bit of time with it, and ultimately the game just doesn’t grab me like others in the series did.

Pros:

  • You can build beautiful cities and post nice screenshots.
  • The cities feel more real and less cartoony, which may or may not be a pro.
  • Having to play the scenario a time or two to understand what requests you are going to be hit with and prepare for them. Okay, for some reason this worked for me.
  • Being able to close up factories without having to destroy them…so you can turn them “on” and “off” as needed.

Cons:

  • Rather dark look to everything.
  • Almost none of the humor of the previous games.
  • The attempt at quasi-realistic scale means you can barely see the people.
  • All the people you do see are cart carriers and traders…none of the girls skipping to school or the lion tamer whipping a lion through the streets or any of that. Those images are probably my warmest of Caesar III.
  • The houses have fewer states, so it’s harder to see how things are going just by looking.
  • Feels more like a spreadsheet, less like a living land. In previous games, I would have to tweak things constantly due to trading partners closing shop or earthquakes or whatever. In this game, at least as far as I got, once I reach a money-making equilibrium I can just sit back and accumulate without having to change anything.

So I’m curious: What leads some to put this on their personal best of the year list?

I’m coming at C4 as a sequel to Children of the Nile, not Caesar III. From that perspective I see improvements in graphics, advisor feedback, and managing resources my reasons to call it the best city-builder available today.

Personally I never got into Caesar III but played Pharoah, Zeus, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, Tropico, Tropico2 and CoTN. For me moving away from the walker mechanic and having citizens actully go get the services and goods they need is the best things to happen to the genre. Tropico was the beginning of the end of the walkers. CoTN was an interesting attempt to simulate an entire city but went too far for a lot of city-builder fans. C4 takes the best parts of CoTN and evolves on the games from the past instead of starting over.

I had a demo of this once, and I loved it. However, whenever I could’ve bought it, something else grabbed my attention first, or my computer wasn’t good enough to handle it.

Should I get it now that I’ve got a moderately okay computer? Or should I still pass on the earlier and newer versions?

For me moving away from the walker mechanic and having citizens actully go get the services and goods they need is the best things to happen to the genre.

I understand this, but I go back and forth on it. The mechanic of having to get someone to pass by a particular structure was certainly annoying…but I love seeing lots of diverse people walking around. Also, I find the purely grid-based influence of a building to increase the spreadsheet-nature of the game.

However, if I were to design such a game, even if I went with the grid approach for influence, I’d still have interesting people walking around and not just cart-pushers.

Should I get it now that I’ve got a moderately okay computer?

Personally, I’d recommend getting one of the earlier ones if you haven’t been introduced to the genre…Caesar III or Zeus, of the ones I’ve played. If you do get Caesar IV, make sure to turn off several of the graphics features, such as the day/night cycle. Turning off a couple of the effects took the game from dog slow to fine performance for me.

Tangentially, there are several older city-builders on my shelf that I haven’t gotten to yet…which should I get around to?

  • Pharoah
  • Emperor
  • Tropico (tried it but bailed quickly)

Also intending to get Children of the Nile at some point…

IMO, Emperor was the peak of the Impressions series, though Pharaoh certainly isn’t bad either. I wasn’t real impressed with Tropico personally.

I agree that C4 didn’t quite have the magic I wanted. Once I finally “grokked” Children of the Nile (which took me like 4 serious attempts) I liked it better but C4 is more approachable. Of the Rome-Citybuilder wars of the summer, CivCity Rome was my clear favorite, though I have a hard time defending it’s many, many flaws. Something about that Firefly magic just shone through a little bit for me…

I never got into the Impresssions games but loved loved loved Tropico. The Impressions games always seemed to move too fast and have counterintuitive things like the walker’s pathing algorithms (intersections are bad) and were full of disasters. Tropico meanwhile is a nice laid-back city builder with great atmosphere and it’s fun to just watch your people go about their lives.

This is highly dependent on your video card, I think, and other settings. But there are also seasonal weather effects that can make the city dark at times. My CGM review has a screenshot of my city on fire at night. Looks great.

I always forget prefects.

Almost none of the humor of the previous games.

There wasn’t a lot of humor in the other Caesar games, and the goofy British accents drive me nuts. The Greek city builders were a little funnier, but we’re talking about marginal amounts of chuckles in any case.

The attempt at quasi-realistic scale means you can barely see the people.

Yeah, this could be annoying. My wife calls these “ant farm games” and they lose some of that if you can’t see your ants. The graphics load was heavy as it is, so I guess we had to make due with people playing pots and pans in the utensil factory.

All the people you do see are cart carriers and traders…none of the girls skipping to school or the lion tamer whipping a lion through the streets or any of that. Those images are probably my warmest of Caesar III.

No children, and a lot of carts, but there were also patricians going to court, tax collectors running about and, yes, even lions going to the arena. The end of the walker system meant that you had to look for the lions sometimes, but the overlays showed the path clearly. Once again, the scale means that the buildings dominate the landscape, making the citizens nigh on invisible sometimes.

The houses have fewer states, so it’s harder to see how things are going just by looking.

Your best guides in C4 were your warehouses and factories. If they weren’t working, then you could have some problems. It takes a lot for the houses in C4 to degrade in any case, but this avoids the annoying cyclical stuff in Caesar 3, where you would veer between 10% unemployment and “too few workers” because your patrician estates bounced back and forth into and out of the work force.

Feels more like a spreadsheet, less like a living land. In previous games, I would have to tweak things constantly due to trading partners closing shop or earthquakes or whatever. In this game, at least as far as I got, once I reach a money-making equilibrium I can just sit back and accumulate without having to change anything.

Absolutely, and this is one thing I liked about the game. The constant tweaking in the earlier Impressions games was often in the search for the perfect layout. It was a math puzzle organized in the form of walkers. C4 is definitely easier, but I’d much rather get a warning that my city-layout is doomed in the early going (one of the Gallic maps) than when I’ve already spent four hours putting my farms in place.

I really liked C4. The class division made the city look like a city, the interface was much better and the trade system allowed you to take different paths to success.

So I’m curious: What leads some to put this on their personal best of the year list?

Not one of my top 5, and City Life is probably a more interesting city builder at the end of the day. C4 pales beside the brilliance of Children of the Nile (which also looked dark to a lot of people). But it was the best of the year’s Roman games.

Troy

My favorite city builders would be
Tropico 1
Sim City
Pharoah
Zeus
CoTN
in that order. I really didn’t like Caesar 4 that much, the military aspect was pretty awful. Also I didn’t get the same sense that I’m building a functioning city that I got from Cotn.

The military aspect is awful in every city builder that tries to shoehorn it in. It was bad in CotN, bad in Emperor, bad in all the Caesar games. But you can’t have a Roman game without legions, so in they go.

Troy

CoTN in my mind is a hardcore city-builder sim. Every aspect of every household is modeled down to the person level. Labor and materials is required for construction instead of spending X money for an instant building stamp. You couldn’t make everyone happy all the time. That freaked out a lot of people especially those who were looking for Pharoah 2. C4 was a step back to the middle ground between games like Zeus or Pharoah and CoTN. More game, less sim. I think it hits a good balance but there’s going to be people who want another Impressions builder and people who want CoTN in Rome.

I never play city-builders focusing on the military aspect. There’s plenty of RTSs and games like the Total War series for that.

Which version of SimCity pfreak? The original or one of the sequels?

My faves:

Children of the Nile
Tropico 2
Pharaoh
City Life

in that order. My not faves:

Caesar 4

in that order, for all the reasons Deadron states. 'Twas bery boring.

Latest version I played was simcity4 + expansion, but I think my favorite was simcity 2000. I remember back in high school there was some club or science class that we got free copies of it, I can’t remember if I had to return it or I lost it .

One pro I left out for Caesar IV:

  • Ability to rotate camera.

On the question of humor, I’m not just referring to flat-out jokes. The earlier Impressions games had it in the nature of the walker sprites (the fire watcher whose robe was on fire) and their overall more cartoony feel.

I really like the fact that you can make beautiful and realistic-looking cities with Caesar IV, but I miss the more welcome feel of the overall approach to those other games.

That said, it sounds like CoTN is worth checking out even if I tend more to the Impressions direction, just for a chance to see how this genre can be done differently.

But before I get to that, perhaps over the holidays I’ll break out Emporer or Pharaoh and finally try one of them out…

Yeah… I should go find some of the older Sim City’s to satiate my desire for just creating cities.

When I play Stronghold, I just build Castles. I don’t even CARE about military aspects in games such as these. But, if its required, I’ll donate time to it. I just won’t focus entirely on it… and I’ve lost games because of it.

So, in all, what would you suggest for someone with a lower end computer (A free Dell… Trust me, its nothing that kicks ass.) I can run medieval 1 on it, and Empire Earth, the two most ‘taxing’ games I have. I’m sure it could run a little more, but I don’t want to have to shut everything off inside of it to play the game.