Caesar IV Review

Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Lend me your crippled index fingers for yet another strategy click-fest. The Caesar series is back with a vengeance in its fourth bite at the city-building apple. While the development company responsible for the series has now changed in the six years since the last instalment, many of the original developers from the previous games have moved to Caesar IV's Tilted Mill. In the meantime they have been keeping themselves busy with similar titles such as Children of the Nile. The hallmarks of their work are dotted all over Caesar IV, from the unique citizens that roam the city, to an interface that doesn't compromise on depth for a second while remaining surprisingly simple.

The basic format of the game is the same for all of the cities you will build. Your first responsibility as Governor of a new Roman settlement is coaxing some Plebeians, the working-class, to move into the shanty towns you have so kindly built for them. Set them to work tilling the fields and manning the factories, possibly providing a market or Odeon here and there to keep the general circles of society happy. Unfortunately this leads me to my first criticism of the game, which is that the controls for placing a building or laying some roads can be a little irritating at times. The functions are a little less intuitive than they could have been, making more complicated tasks (such as building aqueduct systems) a bit tedious at times.

Once you have secured your working populace, you must then attract the classier elements of society to your agricultural hub with promises of wine, theatre and pottery. The Equites are the middle-class who will involve themselves in service jobs around your city, while the Patricians are the upper-class who seem content to just mooch around hedonistically. They are also the class that you are most interested in bringing to your city, as they are the only citizens who will pay taxes to fund your ambitions.

The patricians are incredibly difficult to please. Good ways of doing this include aesthetic improvements to the surroundings such as a few plazas here and there, some shrubs and trees to decorate the place and maybe even a statue or two. However, other more critical changes to your city must be achieved first and these reveal the unique depths of Caesar IV. For example, the patricians must have a supply of cleaner water than the other elements of society. To do this you don't simply build a large reservoir which magically provides water for a certain region of the city (as is often the case in lesser titles). Instead, complexities have to be overcome such as building a system of aqueducts to disperse the water and providing pumping houses at the source.

This sort of eye for detail is present throughout the game in a number of ways. Each individual citizen has a unique life to lead and you can follow them from their homes to the grain fields, and then on to the market with their crops. While this has been one of the main selling points of Tilted Mill's recent titles such as Children of the Nile, this sort of gameplay has been done in city building classics as far back as the original Tropico. That said, the link between this and the wider trade and economy of your city have never been as clear and exhilarating as in Caesar IV. Raising armies will also play a part in the game, although you shouldn't expect this feature to bring any RTS elements into the game. Building city walls and forming cohorts serves mainly to increase your security rating and protect the city from rampaging barbarians.

While you're busy attempting to get to grips with all of this, powers from upon high in Rome will occasionally order you to supply the empire with certain goods. Demands of 30 grain and 50 clothing can be irritating when you're desperately trying to build a temple that will shield your populace from the wrath of Jupiter, but ignore them at your peril. If you fail to supply the goods that Caesar demands then you will be harshly punished, promptly bringing your town planning days to an end.

There are a number of modes that can be played, and the main types are the 'Republic' and 'Empire' games. In these modes you start off by building a city in a corner of the empire with certain targets that must be met for that city. For example, if your settlement is in the north then you may well have to protect your citizens from barbarous hordes by achieving a given security rating. Other targets include providing a specific amount of prosperity, or reaching a set population. In any case, once these goals are met you will be assigned to another settlement with different targets. The aim is to keep succeeding in each city until you have reached the top and become anointed as Caesar, ruler of the Roman Republic. Whether this is a good representation of the corrupt Roman Empire that we know and love is another question, but it's a passable reward system nonetheless.

In addition to the Republic and Empire modes are a wide range of scenarios. Each scenario revolves around one city with a specific back-story, set of goals and location in the Roman Empire. This illustrates another fine point to Caesar IV, which is that the different geographical regions require varying approaches to city building. The arid southern regions will require differing levels of maintenance to your buildings than the lush northern territories. This is due to the climate and weather that each region tends towards, which are accurately depicted on the whole. Thunder storms will be more prevalent in certain areas and they will also cause fires, although you will be told by your advisors that this is the gods smiting you - stupid superstitious Romans!

In the old days the Caesar series was obviously the stand-out Roman city builder of its time, but now a young pretender has risen to the challenge. CivCity: Rome has had some mixed receptions but it has also managed to make a name for itself within what has become a fairly marginalised gaming genre. While much of CivCity: Rome's attractions centre around gimmicks, such as the ability to see through the walls of buildings so that you can spy on the populace, Caesar IV focuses on creating an exceptionally detailed city builder. For this reason, Caesar IV stands in good stead to regain its title. It may not break any ground in originality stakes or provide stunning visuals, but it does revive the original facets of a classic genre for today's gamers.