Rome if You Want To. Again

Maybe Rome is the Eternal City because we’ve been building it forever. Not only does Caesar IV come in the wake of two similar games (CivCity Rome and Glory of the Roman Empire), it follows two decidedly mediocre ones. But, just as Octavian’s rise to the purple was preceded by the squawking of lesser men, so there is hope that Tilted Mill’s city builder can awe and astound. After all, the Caesar series stands astride the genre like a Colossus. Why shouldn’t it crush all those that oppose it? If any franchise can get it right, this is the one.
Caesar IV is still a Hollywood Rome, with none of the slavery, political backstabbing, or civil wars of the real thing. You still have a budget, a map, and goals to meet before you can move on to the next map with new goals. Trade, taxation, and a light military game are the keys to your success. The near-complete elimination of the hated “walker” mechanic (buildings could only be serviced if a citizen happened to walk past them) means that your inner Romulus can focus on the big picture.
The scenarios encourage you to think broadly right from the start. No city will be self-sufficient, so the first thing you have to do is get the lay of the land and decide which trade route is the highest priority. If you can import food, precious cropland can be devoted to the raw materials for wine or clothing. Markets will be your primary tax base for a while, so keeping them stocked with goods is an early priority.
Caesar IV has done away with the anachronistic upwardly mobile model of housing. Your low-class insulae will never evolve into palaces. Instead, Tilted Mill has divided Roman society into three classes and taken the usual historical liberties. At the bottom, the plebs do all the hard work—farming, crafting, and warehousing. In the middle, the equites take care of the water supply, the temples, and the entertainment. At the top, the patricians do nothing except sit in their porticos and pay property taxes. Each class will improve its houses, adding more citizens, so long as its needs are met, but there is no need to put odeums in the slum area.
Thanks to class-specific needs and the elimination of walkers, for the first time in a Caesar game, the city actually looks as if there are rich and poor parts of town. You are encouraged to plan where the patricians will be and how to get them the piped water they demand. Similarly, industrial and residential districts are easily marked in advance. The planning is so natural that you never feel that you are being pushed toward a perfect city model. Even the smallest maps are big enough to allow for considerable variation in meeting the goals.
A bad start still demands a lot of do-overs, and it is sometimes difficult to know exactly where you went wrong. When the emperor demands 50 weapons, while you are trying to outfit a legion because the Gauls are on the way, it’s completely understandable if you flee to exile. You can keep the boss man happy or you can save your people, but you can’t do both. And failing at either one can cost you your job. Fortunately, there is always the choice to try another city, but there’s no guarantee that Sardinia will be easier on the mind.
Provided you have the horsepower, Caesar IV may be the prettiest city builder ever made. The shadows and weather can wreak havoc on even high-end machines when the cities reach a certain size. There are noticeable slowdowns, and building placement can become a real chore. If you avoid the higher-quality graphics, things run better and you lose little of the grandeur. The art design of the buildings in the game is phenomenal. The citizens don’t come off so well, and they are sometimes so hard to pick out that you can’t figure out whether there is a problem. Ironically, the poorly drawn city dwellers prove to be more pointless as eye candy than the tiny animations in the factories: At least the guy beating out a sword isn’t pretending to tell you anything more than that he has iron.
As military minded as the Romans were, the city defense game could look silly in the wrong context. The battles are scrappy little affairs, and city walls are more useful for pacifying your own citizens than for keeping out Carthage. But your legions are as much an economic game element as a military one. You need them to keep the riff-raff out, but mostly they consume iron, wool, and food that you could use for a more profitable purpose. Balancing your safety and your pocketbook is the real game here.
You may still have a nagging sense that this has all been done before, if not so well. Caesar IV has none of the alien beauty of Tilted Mill’s last game, Children of the Nile. The latter’s leisurely pace and novel economic model were made possible by the decision to set the game in an underexploited and truly foreign land. After three great Impressions Rome games and two average ones this year, city sim fans already know what a coliseum does and that fountains are better than wells. For veterans of these games, there is no real exploration to be done, since the landscape has been trodden so many times before. It’s a little like going to a historic landmark and seeing that it is exactly the way it was presented on TV.
Newcomers, however, are in for a treat. Caesar IV deserves an ovation, if not a triumphal procession, for merely reminding people what a good historical city sim looks like. Historical inaccuracies and goofy British accents notwithstanding, Caesar IV feels right. There is never any guessing about what needs to be done, only some careful thought about how best to do it. If you aren’t all Romed out, this is the game for you.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #193