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Rome. The very name conjures images of grandeur and might, the dominator of the world, the conqueror of vast armies, and truly one of the world's greatest empires. Now, fortunately (and
finally), the greatness of Rome has been reflected in a truly impressive game. Rome, if historians are to be believed, was unique in its era; and while Caesar III probably doesn't stand
alone among strat titles, it surely is one of the best, cleanest, and most fun computer games to come down the pipe in recent years.
Caesar III is a game of city construction and defense in ancient
Rome. SimCity fans (and fans of Caesars I and II) will no doubt be familiar with the basic concepts of designating land for housing, various economic and social functions, and military
defense. As you might expect, your city will also depend on an effective transportation grid (more on that later) and a working economic base of taxes and trade with the rest of the empire.
Rome Zones
Cities in Caesar III revolve around the concept of neighborhoods. In each neighborhood, you must allocate space for the area's primary function (for instance, housing) as
well as various related buildings. For the most part, the game makes the process of building a working industrial area quite straightforward, and most gamers will have little trouble
arranging the flow of raw materials, storage space, workshops, and the like.
Residential areas, on the other hand, require considerably more planning. All Roman homes must have access to roads
and water, and all but the most simple homes must also have access to food. A fully functioning city will require large neighborhoods of high-value, high-density housing, which will,
in turn, require health care (baths, doctors, barbers), commercial goods (furniture, oil, pottery), a variety of foods, places of religious worship (a number of different types of
temples dedicated to various gods), entertainment (including venues and performers), policing, tax collection, and education (schools, libraries, and academies).
Of course since land is usually at a premium, good planning is a must. Each building you construct sends out a related worker - for instance, markets send out food vendors - who services a
limited "route." If you structure your residential neighborhood in such a way that your medical clinics are located too far away from the housing, your physicians will be unable to reach the
people, and you'll end up with a health crisis on your hands. When planning, integration and overlap are two concepts that aspiring emperors will want to get familiar with.
Imperial Edicts
The city building core of this game is nice and well executed. What elevates Caesar III to greatness, however, is the campaign structure within which players operate. (You can
build cities just for the sake of building, but I can't see why you'd bother.)
The campaign takes the form of a series of assignments, each
with specific objectives set out by Rome. At each step in the campaign, you're given the choice between a dangerous city site and an economically challenging one. Even if you
repeatedly select the same scenario type, your path through the campaign will present you with an impressive variety of situations and planning challenges.
This overlay of plot and game direction lends, in my opinion, a much needed storyline to the august series of "building" games that comprise Caesar III's lineage. Instead of building
city after city along the same lines, you must tailor your efforts to the requirements of the scenario. Caesar III will require different goals from you in terms of how your city looks, while
the local situation will present obstacles to be overcome and, if Rome's enemies are around, throw some nasty curve balls at you. (Those Carthaginian elephant troops can be a real
problem, if your walls aren't thick enough.) At each new level the designers also throw in some twists (natives, wolf packs, increased dependence on trade) that go a long way toward keeping the game fresh.
On the whole, Caesar III is a magnificent accomplishment. It comes with a thorough manual, a good tutorial, and useful online help functions. The game ran smoothly on my Pentium
166, even when the large cities created a fairly complicated graphical screen. It never crashed once, which for any program running on Windows 95 pretty much amounts to voodoo as much as solid programming.
Non-Roamin' Citizens
I do have a few minor quibbles, however. For instance, if your warehouses fill up (as mine frequently did), delivery crews will
stack up along the road leading to the warehouse itself, blocking the path of any incoming trade caravans. Since most trade-centered warehouses operate on a "fill up, then sell out"
basis, this can be a problem - particularly if you're trying to micromanage trade in a big city and want to tee up certain goods at certain warehouses.
Another problem is that the contours of terrain often leave fatally weak flaws in your defensive walls (see "Fighting in Ancient Rome" sidebar), which the computer is only too willing
to exploit. I'd have thought that a wall that runs directly into a rock face would be stronger, not weaker. Yet I found myself in several scenarios tailoring my defensive design to counter
attacks that repeatedly ran along "seams" in my city walls. Moreover, in some scenarios the terrain will force you to expand your city close to the edge of the map. This becomes a
problem if invaders appear virtually in the middle of your city because you will have to build somewhat strange defensive fortifications to accommodate the attack.
In some later scenarios in which you're given higher objective levels, the game can drag somewhat as you wait for your peace and prosperity levels to rise. Gamers sometimes have
to sit and wait while their fully functioning city generates the long-standing security and positive balance sheet they need to achieve a high score.
There are also a few design decisions that I'd like to mention. Overall, the "paths" method of attributing influence to a particular building is a neat idea that works well in gameplay. It
does, however, encourage some rather strange transportation grid-building tactics. Consider the following: A maintenance worker (prefect or engineer) will leave his workplace and walk
in a random direction. At each intersection he'll randomly pick a direction to turn and keep moving outward until he hits the edge of his walking range, then he'll walk back. Generally
speaking, this means that four-way intersections should be avoided at all costs. And if you really want to control where your service people go, you'll primarily want to build dead-end
streets that feed into residential neighborhoods. Whatever you do, don't build a complete grid because an optimally efficient transportation network will give your workers simply too many
choices and will force you to build many more service buildings than is strictly necessary to manage your neighborhood.
Ultimately, these objections are quite minor and don't detract
from the fun or addictiveness of gameplay. Caesar III has that elusive, difficult-to-define quality of "excellent gameplay" that can really only be quantified in terms of the number of hours it
shaves off of your sleep patterns. By that measure, as well as most others, Caesar III is a certified winner. By Tim Carter Posted 01/01/99
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