IGN Caesar IV reviewTweetNews ID: 342 Date: 2006-10-17 Source: http://www.ign.com/articles/2006/10/17/caesar-iv-review Not the emperor of city building simulations but still a mostly competent governor. BY DAN ADAMS We're big fans of Impressions' old city building classics like the Caesar series so hearing that some of the old Impressions guys at Tilted Mill were taking another shot at that venerable series got us pretty excited. After seeing initial screens and then builds of the game we were even happier since the game looked to be moving along swimmingly. Now that we have the final, we're less happy than we were, but not cursing at the gods either. Caesar IV is definitely good in some respects but has just missed some important aspects of user interface design and hasn't exactly mastered the technical aspect of engine design. Even with the problems, it was nice to get back into Rome for a bit of city building. City building can be a very rewarding genre. It's really something else to take an empty spot of land and build something glorious from the ground up. As houses rise and cart-pushers, citizens, and workers begin going about their business a small city becomes a large one and suddenly it's a lively bustling well-oiled ancient metropolis. My version of an ancient Roman society may be a bit more ordered and grid-like than their own, but I love it just the same.  Tilted Mill has done a wonderful job making the visuals lovely as well. Buildings are colorful and factories are lively with animations when active and idle. Plenty of effects like bloom make the world pop in 3D like these games used to when they were sprite based. Unfortunately, that pretty pop comes with a hefty price. It seems like a 3GHz processor 2GB of RAM and a GeForce 7800 (not the best computer, but not a chump either) would be enough to run the game at a decent framerate with settings on high and 1280x960 resolution. It's not. The framerate is awful. The slowdown can cause enough delay that the game won't recognize mouse clicks either. It can take three or four clicks on a building option to get the game to recognize the selection. When the heavy rain effects come pouring down on the city it's frustrating as hell to play the game at all. Thankfully the effects and options can be turned down for a much better, but not perfect, framerate and the game will still look decent. Check out the comparison pictures below for a better idea of what the game will look like after the options are turned down. The issue is more that those players without great computers are going to be in for some framerate issues. It's not like the game is unplayable with a bad framerate - it is just a city builder afterall - but it's not always fun.  It's really too bad because the game is a pleasure to look at when everything is turned up. There's even a feature that hides the ridiculously large interface from view to get a better look at the city. Unfortunately there aren't any shortcuts to place structures with the interface hidden. There have been plenty of changes to the series in this latest. One of the first noticeable ones is the change to different housing for different classes. Instead of any housing raising up to a new level of wealth and prosperity, the city housing is divided by class for plebs (lower class), equites (middle class), and patricians (upper class). This makes a lot more sense than the previous way of doing things since plebs didn't exactly have much hope of raising in the ranks without some very special circumstances. This way, it's stuck, allows you to target the correct number of workers for the different industries correctly, and provide the right number of goods for each of your populations. It also depicts Roman life a bit more realistically than previous titles.  The other really important changes are in the range of your citizens and the way walkers work in general. Now, as long as you have the right number of the right class in your city, all of the jobs will be filled, regardless of how close they are to any sort of housing as long as a building has a road next to it. This means you can set up a little marble mining operation dedicated to trade off the beaten path. You don't even have to connect the road back to the city. While it's good that the range of your citizens is much larger, it also seems like there should be limits. In Tilted Mill's previous title Children of the Nile, citizens actually had to travel to work so it was a good idea to place homes next to work areas. Workers simply appear at the correct buildings in Caesar IV and are industrious automatically. Buildings will always function properly as long as they have the maximum number of workers. As long as you have basic markets, water, heath, and religion next to your workers they'll be happy. The plebs that do your most important manual labor are incredibly easy to keep happy and bunch together in such close proximity that it's very easy to create a little community with all their needs. Providing for the middle and upper class can be a bit trickier thanks to needs that require bigger buildings, but most of the buildings have enough of an active radius that with simple planning it's easy to push your town into happiness and riches. The bigger trick is simply knowing what that radius is when placing a building. Unfortunately, the only way to tell is to actually place the building, check the overlays to see how much area the building covered, then hit the undo button (if it's still available, sometimes it simply doesn't work) and try it again until you get it right. There really should have been a dynamic radius showing the areas each building will effect when deciding on the placement. Coming by the money to handle all of these improvements is the challenge. Every new worker hired to tend the fields, harvest sand, make clothes, perform plays, maintain the buildings, and so on require pay. It can add up to a hefty sum. Thankfully the tax collector will put a charge on the sale of goods and collect property taxes from the patricians, which can amount to a pretty large sum of money if there's enough of them and enough has been provided for them to upgrade their homes to large estates.  The big money comes in from trader. While large sums need to be handed out for the exotic goods that are never available to harvest, most scenarios provide plenty of trade opportunities to make some cash by providing goods to other cities. The problem is, it's always unclear exactly what kind of money will be coming in beforehand. We couldn't find any info regarding how much any goods will sell for or can be purchased for. It would be very helpful to know how much items are worth comparatively. Each trade depot should have a ratio of cost to earnings associated with the goods. It also can be pretty tricky balancing how many goods to hold in trade centers and supply depots. There's no way to tell a certain supply depot to simply destroy goods to make more room (though mothballing a depot and creating another is a solution) or actively seek out goods and then stockpile them without letting merchants or traders take them away. These little details that are missing can eventually make the game either confusing or frustrating. For instance, why are my citizens running around on fire from time to time? There aren't any fires in the city. Also, why is it when the religion interface says Jupiter has no problem with how much he's being worshipped at shrines and temples, he suddenly decides to set fire to some of my buildings with a lightning strike without any warning so that if he is actually angry, something can be done about it without having to check the advisor screen every two minutes. Other mistakes such as the imperial advisor telling you that Rome considers you a mediocre governor when the text on screen says that Rome considers you efficient is confusing at best. Which is it? Why is it that there are eight patrician medium estates (getting pretty rich) and the ratings say my city isn't very prosperous, especially when there's 9,000 Denari (Roman currency) in the bank and tons of beautification and culture everywhere?  Most frustrating of all is probably the lack of anything new when it comes to the actual scenarios. What's there definitely provides some good fun, but these are the same challenges that have been thrown our way for years. It's all about getting certain ratings with nothing more creative than that. No scenarios for governors to come in and fix up a dilapidated city or compete directly with another city for trade dominance or even construct any wonders this time around. It's back to the basics, which can be fun, but basically comes down to map design to make things interesting. Caesar IV has some good maps that create some pretty interesting challenges for laying out a successful city, especially with some of the large footprints of bigger buildings and restrictions on where walls can be built. For instance, walls and aqueducts can't intersect, which is incredibly frustrating and has to be seriously planned around. Lastly, there's no sandbox mode here, but there are scenarios that challenge players to build up a city of 1,000,000 people. There will still be the demands pouring in from Rome and outside influences, but 1,000,000 people is a really big city on a really big map. It also probably possible to create a true sandbox using the game's tools, but they're so convoluted that it's not something easily attempted. The Verdict Caesar IV is a good fun game from Tilted Mill. It does a good job providing the economic and production chains that are expected from a city builder like this. The developers also did the right thing when they split housing and jobs among the three different classes. Some eye-pleasing visuals also help create some lovely cities. At the same time some interface drawbacks, high tech requirements, and lack of creativity in scenario design keeps Caesar IV from becoming the big sequel that we were really hoping for. It's still enjoyable, but hopefully Tilted Mill can really come through with their next title and create some innovative scenarios and challenges that players haven't experienced for the last decade. If you're looking for a good city building economic simulation, Caesar IV has a lot to like.
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