Caesar IV (PC, 2006)

I bought this game because I bought and loved Caesar I, II and III. I've spent countless hours playing Caesar III. I'm now about five or six hours (six scenarios) into Caesar IV and, while I'm not horribly dissapointed, I'm not thrilled either. Most of the work seemed to go into a new "3-D" camera that allows you to zoom around and view things from different angles and/or view the inner workings of buildings. This is pretty but leads to a very "twitchy" interface in which it can be very difficult to select the a specific building or area. It frequently can take two or three tries to put plazas on a road and one must be extremely careful not to delete the wrong building. (Thank god for the "undo" button.) It is now nearly impossible to select a walking person unless you use an extreme zoom or pause the game. It's also nearly impossible to build an aqueduct without wasting money on unneeded portions or constantly "undoing" areas.

This seems to be a game of complexity for complexity's sake. They've made things more difficult to do without really giving much payoff. Most tasks have been changed by adding more buildings to perform the same task. A farm, which used to be a single building now takes two, a military fort which used to take two buildings (a fort and a recruitment station) now takes both of those PLUS a "mess hall" (Wouldn't that be part of the fort?) This just feels like more buildings for the sake of building and really adds little. Compounding this is the fact that the maps feel smaller than in earlier games so you frequently find yourself out of room to put in all the extra required buildings. It IS nice that you can now build fields without having to take up fertile lands with roads (but, with the twitchy interface, it's still a challenge to arrange the fields so that you get maximum use of your arable land). I also like the addition of new "classes" that require different food, goods and entertainment. That seems a nice and realistic change.

What I was really hoping for from this game would be for the developers to realize that, after three tries, they have the building portion of this game down well and concentrate on some of the other features. The combat portion of this game is stll more of a distraction than a challenge. From my limited play it still seems that the only thing needed for any victory is MORE. Train three or four groups and you can easily defeat anything sent at you. I'd also like to see more flexibility in the trading component. It would be nice to negotiate with or even threaten trading partners for different terms.

Finally, I'm grateful that I waited until I bought a screaming-fast game machine before trying to play this game. Despite the "Quad-Core" processor and top of the line video card I've installed the game occasionally lags. That's a sign of sloppy programming.

Despite all of my complaints, I'll probably finish Caesar IV but if I want a "Caesar fix" in the future I'll probably pop in Caesar III. This game is pretty and has incredible potential but they need to spend less time worrying about how it looks and more time thinking about how it PLAYS.

This game's graphics are UNBELEIVABLE and the gameplay is similar to Sierra's previous city building games.

THERE ARE PROBLEMS THOUGH!!!

First, you need to have an Nvidia video card that supports DirectX 9. I had to purchase an AGP 7600 GS ($150 on Newegg.com) and it works fine, but with my prevous video card the game wouldn't work. If you are not willing to pay the $150 to upgrade your computer, and download the latest drivers than don't buy the game.

Second, the game has some serious glitches. There was a patch released before the game even hit the shelves for online play. I strongly suggest going to the Tilted Mill Forum to find the solutions for any glitches you might be having. Odds are that there are other people who have experienced the same thing (I found the answers to my problems there).

Once all the glitches are taken care of and you have a computer capable of running the game correctly you find that the effort was well worth it. The games graphics still amaze me. Things like the motion of the water, the suns reflection off of the waves and the movement of shadows and weather make this game wonderful to the eye. It is easily one of the best city building games I've played and getting the bugs fixed was well worth it to me. Will it be worth it to you?

When I first played this game, I was disappointed. Being a fan of Caesar 3, I had become accustomed to the layout and look of the game. With C4, everything seems massive, and it is! You can get just about any view within the game, place buildings at 45 degree angles, etc. One thing I noticed is that this game is a resource hog, so if you have an older system, you might be annoyed. In my case, my desktop was a bit older and I wasn't too thrilled with the game, with my new laptop (running at twice the speed of the now defunct desktop PC) the game runs pretty fast (I've got 2 GB RAM), thought it can get bogged down in big cities. Overall an ambitious project by Sierra & Tilted Mills - best to have an equally ambitious computer to run it on!!

I became deeply addicted to the Caesar concept with C-III, and C-IV did not disappoint in any way - my first words on starting the game were "wow." - and that was just the intro screen before the game even started. However, there are things to be aware of - you have to have a good graphics card - strike that, not good, great cutting edge, just came out in the last year graphics card - and a CPU with the speed to match. This game is so processor intensive you can pretty much count on listening to your case fans running on high the whole time you play. Finally, it is wise to just download the patches available before you even try to play the game - nothing like spending a few hours building a city that you lose to a crash!

Issues solved, hardware capable - it plays great and I'll be spending many, many hours playing it.

Pros: Great graphics, interesting scenarios, well structured trading system.
Cons: Hardware intense application, battle controls are awkward, some scenarios require a second try to even survive Rome's outrageous demands (Caesar got a lot greedier since C-III).

Final piece of advice? When the legions of Rome show up, you're done. There's no beating them.

Great advancements from Caesar III, and graphically amazing. But it is a major memory hog. I had to install more memory and a better graphics card just to get the game to load. Worth it though, I love the ability to rotate the playing screen, and the zoom feature is awesome! Plus the graphics are more advanced than any other game I have seen - tons of detail and very visually pleasing. Took a little time to get used to the rotate/zoom features, and the new layout compared with C III, but not too long. That's all from me - time to play another round!