Caesar III

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Review: Caesar III

Three years have passed between the releases of Caesar II (which I once described as SimCity Goes to Ancient Rome) and Caesar III. Was the delay due to generating many new maps, or adding fresh army units? Was it a matter of balancing new building types, or improving the graphics? Were new city-designing equations being evolved? To all of this the answer is yes. Judging by the results, Caesar III represents more than simply an incremental product evolution. It's a whole new empire. Clearly, this Rome couldn't be built in a day.

The most obvious changes in the game are visual. Caesar II required you to fight wars and construct roads on a province map, while creating your city on a local one. The duality is gone from Caesar III. A single map now encompasses your demesne, the uninhabited wilds, and unaffiliated tribal villages. Combat occurs in realtime at your urban doorstep, with specific attackers possessing individual objectives. In times of famine, they'll loot your granaries; if they seek money, they'll invade your Senate.

Expect a lot more buildings, and therefore a lot more activities, in Caesar III. You'll construct oracles, barber shops, palaces, and two types of land bridges. (The more expensive variety permits ships to pass underneath.) You'll also be able to supplement your people's diets and city income with profits from the fishing trade, creating boatyards, wharves, and dock areas. New entertainment venues include actor colonies, chariot schools, gladiator schools, and lion houses. As buildings wear down due to erosion, neglect, fire or revolt, you'll have engineering posts for on-the-spot repairs.

Excavate beneath the surface of Caesar III, and the differences with earlier releases are more marked. Consider labor allocation. Formerly you added houses to your city, lowered taxes, and wham! -instant population, available for any purpose. But in Caesar III, a variety of reasons will bring people to your metropolis, or drive them away. You'll need housing placed in proximity to specific businesses, too.

Temples in Caesar III are no longer generic houses of worship. Instead, you'll erect individual temples dedicated respectively to Venus, Cerus, Mars, Neptune and Mercury. Please a god and it may bless you-Ceres filling you granaries with free food, for instance. Slight a god in favor of others, and watch out. Working the diplomatic relationships with supernatural beings becomes a strategic game subset within the main game, and one that you'll need to redress with the changing circumstances of each new scenario.

Caesar III does a good job of maintaining interest across the nine scenarios that comprise a campaign. (Each time you achieve win conditions in a scenario, Caesar gives you the choice of two new locations, one in a warlike province, or one that requires extensive trade balancing skills. Of course, you can avoid the campaign altogether, and play a freeform game on one of the twelve pregenerated maps.) In one scenario, you could find that all food must be imported; in another, the chances of fire are greatly increased by a desert locale. The game forces you to rethink the building process as you move from city site to site, just as a modern city planner or ancient tyrant might.

As you can tell from this review, I haven't come to bury Caesar III, but to praise it. This realtime strategy game was worth the three-year wait. Truly, the Roman Empire risen again this fall.-- Barry Brenesal / GamePro