Giving Caesar 3 a whirl, amusing n00b mistakes

[The Wall]

Who even owns these IPs today? How come no one wants to use them? I remember back in mid 2000s every year you had at least one game set in Roman period and being city builder. Biggest problems with them were that majority of them were low-mid budget, usually came with bunch of bugs and little to nothing new to offer. There's now gap of like almost a decade since the last big release in this genre, let's call it historical city builders.

I know that company that made Caesar IV started development on Medieval Mayor but thanks to financial hardships that game has been put on ice and so has the company itself.

It's quite a pity no one makes these historical city builders with charm. What I mean by charm is that though serious, they are not super serious, there are all these quirky things about them like funny one liners every citizen says when you click on them which depend on their mood,personality and state of city, interactions between different npcs (like in Caesar III when I found out that invading troops would get eaten by lion tamer's lion who walked down that street when they attacked, I found that quite funny and useful) and so on. It doesn't have to be even in 3D, it can be in some stylised 2D and it would be probably for the better.

The same problem was evident with latest Stronghold Crusader II. Devs put emphasize on big battles, multiplayer and DLCs not getting it that the charm of Stronghold lied in different Lords and their personalities, your peasants and soldiers reacting in all manners of funny and quirky yet believable ways like for example depending on whether you have increased or decreased rations, easily defendable, hard to build and hard to take castles with all manners of defenses on your disposal from traps and boiling oil to different types of towers etc.

TL. DR. - Where my quirky 2D historical city builders in last 10+ years at?!?

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Who even owns these IPs today? How come no one wants to use them? I remember back in mid 2000s every year you had at least one game set in Roman period and being city builder. Biggest problems with them were that majority of them were low-mid budget, usually came with bunch of bugs and little to nothing new to offer. There's now gap of like almost a decade since the last big release in this genre, let's call it historical city builders.

I know that company that made Caesar IV started development on Medieval Mayor but thanks to financial hardships that game has been put on ice and so has the company itself.

It's quite a pity no one makes these historical city builders with charm. What I mean by charm is that though serious, they are not super serious, there are all these quirky things about them like funny one liners every citizen says when you click on them which depend on their mood,personality and state of city, interactions between different npcs (like in Caesar III when I found out that invading troops would get eaten by lion tamer's lion who walked down that street when they attacked, I found that quite funny and useful) and so on. It doesn't have to be even in 3D, it can be in some stylised 2D and it would be probably for the better.

The same problem was evident with latest Stronghold Crusader II. Devs put emphasize on big battles, multiplayer and DLCs not getting it that the charm of Stronghold lied in different Lords and their personalities, your peasants and soldiers reacting in all manners of funny and quirky yet believable ways like for example depending on whether you have increased or decreased rations, easily defendable, hard to build and hard to take castles with all manners of defenses on your disposal from traps and boiling oil to different types of towers etc.

TL. DR. - Where my quirky 2D historical city builders in last 10+ years at?!?

Grand Ages Rome + an expansion

& I think they've done Grand Ages Medieval now as well, though haven't tried that yet.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

If you want stable and boring you can try Zeus. Once you set up everything plus some backup, there's no breaking down anywhere.

After Zeus, Caesar3's charm is in its randomly unstable.

That's certainly a point of view. Me, personally, I find it unplayable watching a Large Insular suddenly collapse into a Small Shack because my stupid bathhouse worker decided to wander about the farmland rather than walk round the buildings she was employed to walk around. You know... "you're fired" kinda employment situation. Shit, I only had 18 buildings with a one continuous road around them and two fucking Bath Houses built on the opposite side of the fucking road to these 18 houses and this still wasn't enough to prevent some houses being missed for huge periods of time. It's a fucking joke. It's not cute, it's not different, it's a fucking joke.

Still, I'm having fun just doing freebuilds working out how to cheese it. That's basically where the fun of this game lays, just working out how spastic it is. It's like doing an autopsy of a train wreck. Fun, if you like that kind of thing.

 

[The Wall]

Grand Ages Rome + an expansion

& I think they've done Grand Ages Medieval now as well, though haven't tried that yet.

Grand Ages Rome was okish but it was released back in 2009 which is like 8 years ago. Quite a drought for a long time on market when it comes to this type of games.

Grand Ages Medieval was lackluster in every regard, to say the least.
At least we still and always will have classics and they're not classics without reason despite some of their flaws...

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Yes, Grand Ages Rome has its own problems of retardation, most notably both the Theatre and Colosseum being way too large while having ridiculously small circles of coverage (effectively making them redundant for all games that don't specifically ask you to build them) but it benefits from having the RPG aspect to governor progression which genuinely makes you play differently during some parts of the game. What GA:R lacks is the aesthetic beauty of something like Caesar 3. And Caesar 3 does look gorgeous and, if you don't really care too much about beating the game, you can design some pretty nice looking towns and cities - it's just a shame the housing looks so stupid growing and shrinking from tower blocks to tents and back to tower blocks again - on a literally daily basis, which is not at all aesthetically pleasing.

What I did work out in yesterday's experiment was that the market traders won't collect an item from the warehouse if the houses are not big enough yet to require it. So in the first real mission of the game it wants you to trade furniture and olive oil via the docks which, if you grow your houses, is a nightmare because all the market traders just lift all the furniture and olive oil. So the only two ways to solve this is a) spam workshops or b) don't let houses get bigger than Large Casa. And a) doesn't work because you'll never really have enough labour to support all those workshops anyway and because you'll already have gone into bankruptcy, possibly even twice, before you get enough of a surplus to start trading the resource. With b) you spam houses instead but don't let them get past Large Casa size, thereby allowing all of the furniture and Olive Oil be available for sale immediately (excluding Caesar's requests for 10/15 free olive oil of course).

From an aesthetic point of view, the Large Casa is the most attractive building I've seen yet anyway, they look like those nice rustic farmhouses you imagine litter the countryside. Small Casa look ok as well and Large Shacks aren't too bad either.

 

[luj1]

This is also a good page

http://caesar3.heavengames.com/strategy/housing/block11.shtml

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Yes, I can imagine the first instinct would be to field lots of help pages, walkthroughs and youtube videos, and I thank you for caring and providing that info for other lurkers, but when the primary enjoyment you're going to get from a game is experimenting with different designs, looking at spoilers is going to be killing half the game. I'm not one of those people that can play games via walkthroughs and spoilers. I'll look up one small detail if its really bugging me but try my damnest not to peek at anything else while I'm there. If I find myself looking at walkthroughs too much I tend to quit the game (which happens with most Adventure Games I try). I know some people do most of their gaming just following guides, but I can't be one of those people. For me, the journey is more important that the goal

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

As described above, my previous attempt at this design was infuriating because I put the road on either side of the housing, making a fully circular road around the housing, to which the bath house operator only ever walked down the left hand side.

For this experiment I have only one road, right down the middle. Get out'a that game!

Well. It did. This time it's the Entertainment. You'll see I have both a Theatre and an Amphitheatre right there at the end of my road and down a small side street. That entire row of houses were Medium Insulars but in the last 2 seconds 50% of them suddenly regressed into Casas. Why? Apparently they "lack access to Entertainment". Yo-ho-ho, I bet if I had a theatre and a cinema at the very end of my fucking road I would not be moving out due to a lack of access to entertainment venues. But, alas, I have to wait for the Entertainment walker to pass by my houses...

And they quite clearly have been, because that whole row has been Medium Insulars for a very long time now. In this test I'm 100% making sure everyone is walking past my houses before moving onto the next upgrade structure. I've watched those actors go up and down that road again and again.

Then suddenly they choose not to...

Who designed this crap? Who play-tested this crap?

Is it really that difficult to code "Move towards nearest house, then proceed to the next nearest house without backtracking until you run out of movement points"?

Is it really that difficult to code "Using this overlay, please highlight the route you wish this employee to take"?

 

[Jugashvili]

Ditch the intersection with the sidestreets, it's bad design. Look, there's a schoolkid wandering down by your sawmills instead of providing education to your housing, another by the temple and there's a prefect wandering around there for some reason. Just build everything along a line unless you want this to happen.

 

[Ovplain]

Don't think I ever played III, but I LOVED Caesar II!

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Ditch the intersection with the sidestreets, it's bad design. Look, there's a schoolkid wandering down by your sawmills instead of providing education to your housing, another by the temple and there's a prefect wandering around there for some reason. Just build everything along a line unless you want this to happen.

You mean the game can't cope with intersection?

Small intersections?

OMG

How utterly retarded is that?

Who designed this crap? Who play-tested this crap?

Is it really that difficult to code "Move towards nearest house, then proceed to the next nearest house without backtracking until you run out of movement points"?

Is it really that difficult to code "Using this overlay, please highlight the route you wish this employee to take"?

 

[Jugashvili]

Yeah, it can't deal with them, the walkers (most of them, at least) move randomly. Rivers of digital ink were poured speculating on the mysterious question of Caesar III walker behavior back in the day. If you want a similar game which requires less meta to get the walkers what you want them to do you could try Pharaoh (which has roadblocks to prevent them from going in unwanted directions) or Emperor (which has selective residential gates that allow some walkers to go through and restricts others).

 

[torpid]

Ditch the intersection with the sidestreets, it's bad design. Look, there's a schoolkid wandering down by your sawmills instead of providing education to your housing, another by the temple and there's a prefect wandering around there for some reason. Just build everything along a line unless you want this to happen.

You mean the game can't cope with intersection?

Small intersections?

OMG

How utterly retarded is that?

Who designed this crap? Who play-tested this crap?

Is it really that difficult to code "Move towards nearest house, then proceed to the next nearest house without backtracking until you run out of movement points"?

Is it really that difficult to code "Using this overlay, please highlight the route you wish this employee to take"?

"Hi guys, Incendiary Device here. Playing Caesar, wondering about a lot of things"
"First things first, avoid intersections"
"No intersections"
"Crossroads are bad"
"Do NOT build intersections!"
"No intersections"
"Intersection delenda est"
"Hi guys, just built an intersection, WHY NO WORKY?"

Don't try to build a plausible-looking city; that's not what the game is about. All you're looking to do is to funnel the walkers into going where you want them to go.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Ditch the intersection with the sidestreets, it's bad design. Look, there's a schoolkid wandering down by your sawmills instead of providing education to your housing, another by the temple and there's a prefect wandering around there for some reason. Just build everything along a line unless you want this to happen.

You mean the game can't cope with intersection?

Small intersections?

OMG

How utterly retarded is that?

Who designed this crap? Who play-tested this crap?

Is it really that difficult to code "Move towards nearest house, then proceed to the next nearest house without backtracking until you run out of movement points"?

Is it really that difficult to code "Using this overlay, please highlight the route you wish this employee to take"?

"Hi guys, Incendiary Device here. Playing Caesar, wondering about a lot of things"
"First things first, avoid intersections"
"No intersections"
"Crossroads are bad"
"Do NOT build intersections!"
"No intersections"
"Intersection delenda est"
"Hi guys, just build an intersection, WHY NO WORKY?"

Don't try to build a plausible-looking city; that's not what the game is about. All you're looking to do is to funnel the walkers into going where you want them to go.

Yes dear, I'm aware, however, to get the buildings to get big you have to build loads of buildings and if you just put them all on one long straight road then you'll still have the walkers choosing to walk the wrong way down the long straight road, duh. And once your road is too long, the walker won't have the legs to make it all the way down you're high street either, duh.

All buildings need roads, you need to build a lot of buildings to get your building to get posh. A LOT of buildings.

----------------------------------------------------/--------------------------------/-----------------------------------------------------------

Will cause you the same problems as the walker might still choose to walk:

----------------<------------<----------------<-/--------------------------------/-------------------------------------------------------------
---------------->------------>---------------->-/--------------------------------/-------------------------------------------------------------

In that the problem is not intersections, the problem is the random.

 

[Jugashvili]

Yes dear, I'm aware, however, to get the buildings to get big you have to build loads of buildings and if you just put them all on one long straight road then you'll still have the walkers choosing to walk the wrong way down the long straight road, duh. And once your road is too long, the walker won't have the legs to make it all the way down you're high street either, duh.

With housing on both sides there is no wrong way, that's the beauty of it. Whereas with your crossroads your walker only had a 25% chance of going towards the houses (he could go away from the crossroads, towards the crossroads and straight ahead, towards the crossroads and take a right or towards the crossroads and take a left) so at the end of the day they spend more time faffing around in dead ends than doing anything useful.

Now in what concerns walking distances here's some age-old autism that may prove helpful: http://caesar3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/caeforumscgi/display.cgi?action=ct&f=2,3458,,all

Basically, try not to place your services more than 26 tiles away from whatever you want them to reach.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

With housing on both sides there is no wrong way, that's the beauty of it.

If you build certain buildings near houses, as in, in amongst the houses, then the building is limited in growth. Of course if you build houses to the south as well as the north then the walker is bound to hit one of them. None of that stops the walkers from being random.

People bought and paid for (or pirated or whatthefuckever) a city building game. The only advice people have for the game is "don't try to build a city, try to build a highway", so it fails at the most fundamental level at being a city builder game. It shouldn't be sold as a city builder and, to be honest, you have to ask if it should even be sold at all, the game is, basically, broken at the core. I'd say it's verging on the criminal, either by negligence or incompetence.

Rated 4.6/5 on gog.com
Rated 9/10 on steam
Rated 4/5 on Holyfile.com

It beggars belief. With customers this gullible and retarded, who the fuck needs decent games?

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The fanboys of this particular game (it's quite nice looking, I admit) will be glad to know that this will be my last post kicking the shit out of it as I have uninstalled it. While there's a certain pleasure to be gained from staring at a train wreck, at some point even that loses its value and it becomes evident that one would just like to get on with playing a half-decent game again.

I finished off my test as far as I could be bothered and, my god, practically every moment of the game provides screenshots of misery and mayhem, I didn't even catch'em all and will have to simply describe some of the hilarity without pictures. But first things first, on with that row of houses:

From the screenshot in the previous post, all I did was swap the Warehouse with the Amphitheatre and everything was back to 'normal':

I then swapped the Theatre with the pottery and moved up to the next level of housing. A really butt-ugly level of housing. The Large Insular expands into the garden behind the house, so each building now occupies 2 squares. However, the art for the game makes it appear as if the houses are three deep and conjoined with their neighbour. You also now have to re-add the gardens at the back to replace those that have been covered and now the well is blocking some houses from growing:

Now getting somewhere at least I press on to the next upgrade, the Small Villa. "Hooray!" I think... until I look at the housing in detail and discover that upgrading from a Large Insular to a Small Villa actually halves the population of the household, a whopping drop from 84 citizens to just 40. I now have chronic worker shortages, by quite an order of magnitude. Now that's what I call an upgrade... Oh well, at least the design of the Small Villa actually represents the squares it's sitting in and appears to be one complete building. You'll notice I now have 2 marketplaces (for future reference):

But alas, something has gone terribly wrong on the right hand side of the street while at the same time the the left hand side of the street has promoted to Large Villa. Large Villa is as far as you're allowed to go at Engineer level, so I now consider my test to see how to grow a building complete, my objective now is to see how to stabilise it and get the whole row stabilised. I look in the details screen of the houses that are regressing and it appears they are lacking one of the items that's sitting right there in my Warehouse. The warehouse that is literally next door to the TWO markets. The markets that don't know how to prioritise what to collect nor what route they take and you, as a player, are not allowed to micromanage:

Let's whirl the camera around and see just how ugly this brief interlude of devastation actually is. OMG! it keeps the design of the large building on the back row but lowers the front row down to its bare minimum, the smaller buildings now having the knock-on effect of "lowering the desirability of the neighbourhood", like dominoes dropping after someone sneezed. You can actually use the spade button to remove the tents if they're on the back row and it negates the effect without knocking down the house, but you can't do it to the front row because the front row is the actual property. Just how retarded is this picture:

And then guess what happens... Everything is back to be being fine and dandy and then, after 5 years of gaming time, that's 60 game months and God knows how many 'turns', the Bath House lady has suddenly decided to miss the main street for however long it is she needs to do that before anyone notices. Oh, how I laughed. And laughed. It was such a pleasurable experience watching the street turn into a modern art installation:

As if by magic, things get somewhat back to normal quite quickly and I decide that just getting one property up to Large Villa size is the best I'm gonna get. However, my eye has now been diverted to a new crushing problem with the game's micro-management issues, but more of that later:

While I've been dedicating so much time to this side of town, the other side of town, which had been stable at Large Casa size for the duration of the entire game, some 15 years, has suddenly decided to screw me over. For some inexplicable reason not one of the three market traders has collected either food nor pottery for so long that they have zero supplies in storage. This is... impossible... The granary is full to capacity and there are 10 units of pottery in the warehouse, both of which the traders have visited with dedicated regularity for 15 years:

The entire left side of town is now, obviously, collapsing. So I watch it for a minute to see what's going on. And what do I see? I see a market trader go to the warehouse to buy pottery! WTF? Did it notice me not looking at that side of town for too long and decide I needed to be punished for it? And it was at this point I uninstalled. There's either something incredibly fishy going on here or the game is, quite literally, broken (not the best screenshot, but you can just make out the trader's boy behind the schoolboy at the crossroads) (also, for people tempted to say "crossroads" there is a market trader at the end of each road, they have to walk down the road to get to anywhere else, the crossroads are NOT the issue, market traders are target-led and will always aim for the granary or warehouse):

So, yeah, uninstalled without hesitation.

I'm probably going to give Caesar 2 a whirl instead, from what I can gather people are saying this random walker problem started with part 3 and part 2 is a completely different game all-round. And, yes, I really am that desperate for a Roman city builder. Dunno why, just what I fancy ATM. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[torpid]

This is going to end well

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

This is going to end well

So you're saying Caesar 2 has the same problems?

 

[The Wall]

Has anyone here played Caesar II before and how would you compare Caesar II vs Caesar III in terms of mechanics, city building and graphics?

I heared it has much better and more involved military aspect and more politics on city, province and Republic/Empire level. Don't know about city building and whether walkers function the same way they do in Caesar III...

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I just bought it, so I'll let you know tomorrow'ish.

From the get-go though one review on gog states that buildings don't all need roads, so that's a plus right there.

 

[Leechmonger]

I've played Zeus, Pharaoh, and Emperor and enjoyed them all. Caesar, on the other hand, does not hold up well.

 

[The Wall]

I've played Zeus, Pharaoh, and Emperor and enjoyed them all. Caesar, on the other hand, does not hold up well.

I've heared by some friends who have basically played all of these games that Emperor has perhaps the best bits of all previous games and almost none of the flaws (at least major ones which were unique to some and standard to all).

How much is that true in your opinion? I like the setting of Far East, in other words China, so that's a plus to me.

 

[Leechmonger]

I've heared by some friends who have basically played all of these games that Emperor has perhaps the best bits of all previous games and almost none of the flaws (at least major ones which were unique to some and standard to all).

How much is that true in your opinion? I like the setting of Far East, in other words China, so that's a plus to me.

It's hard for me to say, as I got fairly burned out on them by the time I got to Emperor, even spacing them out by years. My favorite is Zeus, but that's probably because it's the first one I played so the core gameplay was novel to me (and I love its setting and aesthetics). Emperor comes in second: I like the increased complexity but it has some needlessly annoying religion and diplomacy micromanagement, I didn't like the feng shui mechanic, and the "story" and narrator were boring compared to Zeus. Planning cities in Emperor was mostly very satisfying though, especially the farms. Pharaoh is the worst one of the three for me.

Also Emperor has a multiplayer mode, if that matters to you. I've never tried it.

 

[catfood]

Has anyone here played Caesar II before and how would you compare Caesar II vs Caesar III in terms of mechanics, city building and graphics?

Caesar 2 has completely popamole city building mechanics compared to the third one. IncendiaryDevice might actually be able to play it. Basically every building has an influence radius, so you don't have to worry too much about city layout. Just make sure your building influences as many houses as possible. There are a couple of buildings that spawn walkers such as the prefectures I think, but I don't know if the walkers do anything or are just there to look pretty. It does have a nice province development screen where you develop your industries, trade with other cities, build forts and attack barbarian settlements, but it isn't too complicated. There is also a separate combat screen but don't expect too many wonders here. The battles are only slightly more involved than the latter games.

Spoiler

The campaign is non-linear so you can spread your empire in any direction you want, but each map plays the exact same way as the previous one, except for having higher and higher scores to beat and tougher enemies. The maps don't come with their unique challenges due to their terrain, resource availability or geographic location like in later Impressions titles.

Caesar 2 is a nice game. I guess you could call it "more than the sum of its parts". The following games will tighten the scope and offer a much more focused experience as a whole.

I've played all of them between C2 and Zeus and if I would rank them it would be like this:

1) Pharaoh - pinnacle of the series. It is streamlined in all the right ways possible, i.e. it gives you more control of your city. For instance you can set how much type of one resource a warehouse, granary or market will store. You also get to build pyramids and other monuments!

2) Caesar 3 and Zeus tied - The mechanics of C3 are more aged and the game can be a tough nut to crack since you have less control over your city. On the other hand Zeus streamlined the game even further than Pharaoh, but in a bad way this time. For example buildings no loner need worker access which completely popamolifies the game in my opinion. Honestly if it wasn't for the humor and the whole mythological aspect (you get to summon heroes, gods and fight monsters) the game wouldn't have much to offer.

3) Caesar 2, like I said, is a nice game. I think it's worth at least a playthrough, but don't expect anything grand.

I mean to play Emperor too one day, but Bobby is hell bent on keeping it expensive on GOG.