Product Details
 | Caesar IV |
| List Price: | $19.99 |
| Price: | $9.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
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Product Description
Take on the role of an aspiring provincial governor within Caesar™ s empire as you build and manage an ancient Roman city and its province. As governor you lay out each city road by road building by building making sure your citizens have all they need to remain healthy happy and safe from barbarian threats. Everyone wants to live a convenient distance to shops and entertainment but nobody wants to live too close to the noisy and dirty stuff! Your goal is to manage this delicate balance and grow your city from a simple village to a cosmopolitan metropolis. Do your job well and you will rise among the political ranks of the empire and become Caesar!With full 3D presentation and all-new realistic citizen behaviors Caesar IV is sure to please fans of the series as well as strategy gamers in general. State of the art city-building gameplay awaits you!Create your empire with 100 unique buildings diagonal roads and a set of decorative items.Prepare for the inevitable problems that plague a city: fires raiders riots plagues food shortages (to name a few).Select any of the more than 75 unique characters in your city they ll tell you what they think!Consult advisors and extensive map overlays for feedback on activities and problems in the city.Open trade with neighboring and distant provinces to acquire exotic materials and to sell excess local goods.Format: WIN Genre: ENTERTAINMENT Rating: RP UPC: 020626725507 Manufacturer No: 72550Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2617 in Video Games
- Brand: Vivendi Universal
- Model: 72550
- Released on: 2006-09-09
- ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
- Platform: Windows XP
- Format: CD-ROM
- Dimensions: .50 pounds
Features
- Create your empire with 100 unique buildings, diagonal roads and a set of decorative items
- Prepare for the inevitable problems that plague a city - fires, raiders, riots, plagues, food shortages & more
- Select any of the more than 75 unique characters in your city -- they'll tell you what they think!
- Consult advisors and extensive map overlays for feedback on activities and problems in the city
- Open trade with neighboring and distant provinces to acquire exotic materials and to sell excess local goods
Customer Reviews
Beautiful game, but you may have to upgrade your machine
For me, there's nothing wrong
with the game; it installed without a problem; the graphics are
glorious and the play is fascinating.
Unfortunately, they did set
the system requirements on the box lower than they should have. You
need a better machine than they say you do to use all the features. I
can get by with a solid playable version by turning off a couple of
things, but the game is really, really good. The last game Tilted Mill
did, 'Children of the Nile,' frankly had too much make-work in it that
did not really apply to the projects you were completing. The game-play
on this one is excellent; it's so excellent, in fact, that I'm seriously
considering buying a bigger and better video card so I can use more of
what's available.
I know that there is a temptation for
manufacturers to put requirements on the box that will sell the maximum
number of games, but I wish they would warn you that these requirements
are not the optimum configuration; it would be even nicer if they would
say what the optimum configuration is, so that there is no possibility
of a nasty surprise.
It is a genuinely good game, though, and a
work of art. If you have bought it and have been unable to play it
properly, I would advise you to hang on to it; in the normal course of
things, it'll probably play perfectly on your next computer, and it'll
be worth the wait.
I really wish this
was worthy of a higher rating!
As I said in my title, I
really wish this game was worthy of a higher rating (I'm giving it 4 for
fun and 3 overall) but because of overall unwieldiness of the controls
I'm sorry that it isn't.
I'd lost track of the City Building
Series since Emperor so was really surprised to find this "treasure" on
the store shelf last fall. Being a lover of the series since Caesar 2 I
had to give it a try.
I totally enjoy that the developers tried
to take it back to the base Caesar 3 game and at the same time try to
make the game more enjoyable and less frustrating. Unfortunately they
didn't succeed in the frustration level in a couple of vital areas.
One
major complaint is how unweildy control of scrolling and rotating the
map is. Rotation can only be accomplished with the right mouse button
and if you're not careful you've gone several 360-degree turns before
you know what's happening.
The other biggy is trying to lay out a
city that's both aesthetically pleasing and functional. I know it can
be accomplished--I've seen plenty of screenshots to prove it.
Unfortunately I don't want to take the time to count out the tiny tiles
for exact road placement (I'm not a bean counter by nature). I want to
get into the nitty-gritty of city building and have everything fit
nicely and work out as I go along.
The roads themselves take four
tiles, with most buildings taking nine or more tiles (with the
exception of the few smaller buildings). Since the roads are multi-tiled
and it's difficult to count the small tiles it's extremely hard to
place things in any type of sensible layout.
Another thing that
bugs me is that way too much of the city information is only available
through the advisors (Zeus and Emperor both spoiled me with info
available with one mouse click). As mentioned previously, very little
info on trade is accessible through the trading stations. Unless I
missed it somewhere if you want to know how much of a good has been
shipped so far in the current year, that info can only be accessed
through the Kingdom Map. I find myself spending about half my play time
clicking through the Advisor menus for information. I don't mind
micro-managing but this goes beyond that.
Another major sore
point with me is the lack of messages when you're stockpiling goods to
fulfill a request. Unless your memory is keen those requests could go
unfilfilled without even realizing it. There should have been another
message once you've reached quote for sending shipment.
I have to
say the graphics in the game are quite striking. It's awesome to pull
out from the city and look into the distance and see a somewhat faded
view to give a more realistic look of perspective. Thankfully, though,
the day and night feature is optional. I found it very annoying and
distracting to have my city once a year go so dark I could barely see
what I was trying to do.
A note to the person having problem with
Prosperity rating: Prosperity isn't just how much money your city
earns--your citizens have to reach a certain level of prosperity in
order to reach those points. In other words, their housing has to evolve
to a certain level to meet the win conditions. The actual numbers are a
bit too complicated to go into here.
Overall I'm not sorry I
bought the game, but I am sorry I paid full price for it instead of
waiting a few months until the price came down because I don't feel it
was worth it.
Initial fun at returning
to Caesar gameplay disappears quickly
I was very excited when I
heard that Caesar 4 was in development. When I heard that it was
realeased, I immediately picked myself up a copy. After playing for a
week or so, the game is already uninstalled. I got to the third empire
mission, and couldn't make myself play any more. The reason is that the
initial "fun factor" wore off, and I began to find the game tediously
boring.
Many of the flaws of the game have been discussed
already. Yes, it is true that the interface is cumbersome and that
enabling shadows in the graphics options will likely bring your system
to its knees. The thing that killed the game for me was the lack of
variety in the missions. After you've played about 4 missions, you've
seen everything the game has to offer. The only difference in missions
is the geography, Caesar's requests, and the necessary ratings to win.
I've played all of the city builders.....Caesar 3, Pharoah, Cleopatra,
Zeus, Poseidon, Emperor, Children of the Nile, and now Caesar 4. There
is practically nothing new in Caesar 4, and it omits many things that
made the previous games addictive. Sure the game is in 3D and people get
what they need rather than have it delivered, but that's about it.
There are no cool monuments to build (why couldn't the Coliseum be a
construction project?), so every mission ends up feeling the
same......look at the world map to see what you can export, set up some
houses, their infrastructure, shrines, and industry for export goods,
and you're off. The rest of the mission is spent tweaking the city to
get the ratings needed to win the mission.
The supply "pull"
system sounds good since citizens don't have to wait for goods to be
delivered. They go and get what they need. However, this system has a
tendency to be a pain in the neck when it comes to supply houses,
granaries, and markets. Instead of crops being delivered to a granary,
the cart pusher at the granary goes and collects crops from all of the
fields. Warehouse and market workers do this also. What ends up
happening is that granaries and markets are usually low on food because
their cart pushers are running all over the place obtaining goods.
I
have already mentioned the thing that really kills this game for me,
namely the lack of wonders/monuments. In my opinion, that is what really
made the previous city builders fun...building pyramids, the Great Wall
of China, temples to Zeus, etc. After getting to do those things in the
previous games, it feels like a big part of the fun is missing in
Caesar 4. The game suffers for it in my opinion and rapidly becomes
tedious.
If you have all of the previous city builders, give this
one a shot. If you don't, pick up one of the previous games. They are
almost all funner than this one in my opinion. I think that Zeus and
Children of the Nile are the best of the series. If I listed the games
in order of enjoyment I had out of them, it would be Zeus-Poseidon,
Children of the Nile, Pharoah-Cleopatra, Emperor, Caesar 4, Caesar 3.
(The lack of roadblocks in Caesar 3 puts it at the end of my list.)
That's not exactly a stunning endorsement of Caesar 4.
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