Caesar IV hands-on impressions

We came, we saw, we conquered.

BY TAL BLEVINS If you're into city-building and management sims, you're certainly familiar with the venerable Caesar series. Although it's been almost a decade since we saw the last entry into the Caesar ancestry, Titled Mill Entertainment (comprised of many team members formerly at Impressions who brought us the previous Caesar games) is hard at work putting the finishing touches on Caesar IV. We recently had a chance to take an updated look at the game, which should be out within the next couple of months.

The mission we played took place in the small city of Syracusae in southern Sicily. While each city you'll play usually has five major goals of various levels to fulfill -- culture, security, prosperity, favor, and population -- our main task was to gather and create resources such as timber, olive oil, wool and pottery, and create a bustling economy for the glory of Rome.



Starting out building our city, it was important to balance form and function with good planning to insure that the population was happy enough to work efficiently. Although they're essential for survival, nobody wants to live next to a stinky pig farm -- they'd rather live near a plaza, bath house, or coliseum. We found it helpful to build our city in sections and provide plenty of gardens, statues, and trees to gain a maximum bonus for beautification. It's also important to make sure people had easy access to public services, and to place warehouses between the markets and resources gathering areas to make sure all the resources were going to good use and not being wasted. Of course, it was all for moot as a major earthquake knocked out Syracusae in the end. I should have had more engineers on hand to make sure the buildings were strong enough to survive such a disaster. You'll also have to contend with other disasters such as fires and sandstorms throughout the life of your city, so keeping plenty of civil workers on hand comes in mighty handy in Caesar IV.

As far as the general population goes, there are three basic class levels: the plebes, the equites, and the patricians. The plebes, or the lower class, are the grunt workers of the game, and they are the ones who provide the manpower to harvest and transport resources. The equites, or the middle class, provide basic services such as education and entertainment to the citizenry. The patricians are the upper class in society, and do little more than sit on their big Roman asses, snag the best seats at the coliseum, and spend all day in the bath house. However, you want to keep this class the happiest because the patricians provide most of the revenue for your bustling city through taxation.

Just because you're born into one class doesn't mean you can't ascend to the next. Each division requires a different resource to rise. If you provide the right resource, your population will evolve during the game, with their buildings changing visually to reflect their new class. The plebes need advancement from well water to fountain water, while the equites require luxury goods, religion, education, and entertainment to evolve to patricians. Of course, you'll need representatives from each class to create an efficient, well-run city.



There is also another class of citizens: the military. Military units must be trained at a barracks, and provide defense to the city at the cost of some of your dinari. For those of you who want to wage war, there is a more robust RTS system this time around where you can take direct control of the troops and add a little strategy to the game. While it's not as detailed as something like Rome: Total War, it is more interesting than just watching your troops fight and not having any direct control over the outcome.

Of course, no game based around the Roman Empire would be complete without a few gods from the vast pantheon thrown into the mix. You can build smaller shrines or larger temples to the gods in the game -- including Mars, Bacchus, Mercury, and Jupiter -- and have up to two chief gods (determined by how many and where you build your points of worship to them) in each town which will bestow special effects on your city if you worship them to the fullest. For example, Mars will increase cohort confidence and Mercury will allow all of your citizens to move faster making for more proficient production time. Every two months there is also a small chance for a benevolence bonus that will give your city a major benefit, such as Jupiter clearing all of the criminals from your town. While you can only have two chief deities in each city, you must show at least some love to big daddy Jupiter or he'll occasionally rain down lightning bolts to smite your buildings.



One of the things we were most impressed with during our playtest was the interface. City-building games are known for their high learning curve, and while there will be a tutorial included with the game, the interface does a beautiful job of arming you with most of the info that you'll need to play Caesar IV. Not only are the icons plentiful and logical, but there are also roll-over pop-ups on all of the buttons that will inform you of exactly what each does should you ever forget. In addition to the illuminating interface, you also have a gang of essential advisors to help you make decisions on various sectors such as labor, finance, health, and religion, and they will give you plenty of feedback to tell you what you need for your city.

While the basics of the city-building and management model haven't changed much in Caesar IV, what is fresh are the all-new graphics, and Caesar IV looks pretty nice for a city-management game. Tilted Mill has upgraded to a fully 3D engine since the last release in 1998, and has also included shader effects, HDR lighting, and specular mapping. While the game was still a bit choppy at this point when there when the city grew big and there were lots of people moving around, we were playing unfinished, unoptimized code, so we have hopes that the slowdown will be solved before launch.

The Caesar series has always been a favorite with the PC editors at IGN, and Caesar IV is looking to expand on the already solid design. If you don't know much about the history of the series and you'd like a little background, you owe it to yourself to check out our entire coverage on Caesar IV, as well as our previous coverage on Caesar III way back in the late '90s. Luckily, the long wait for a sequel is close to an end, as Caesar IV should be out at the end of September.