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Varus! Give me back my Legions!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: October 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I just bought the long anticipated Caesar IV from Sierra games. I'm returning it. While Caesar III was a GREAT game, C4 is hands down the worst game I have ever bought. Right from the start the problems began. The auto run function on the 2nd installation disk will not run, and my PC (a state of the art Dell XPS) cannot read the 2nd disk once the first has been ejected. After several force quits and errors, I finally out-smarted the flaw. I used my 2nd CD drive and restarted with both disks inserted. Had I not had a 2nd drive on my PC, I never would have gotten any farther. Once it finally loaded and I began to play, I spotted the first major graphics flaw. When you rotate the perspective to plan or top-down view, all the topography meshwork translates through the scenery skins and you can read the skeletal aspect lines of the geography - very shabby and annoying. As I got further into the game, I quickly realized other shortcomings of the game - for instance the very narrow and confining perspective boundaries. When viewing the outer-most edges of your settlements, you cannot fully rotate the perspective 360 degrees and have to rotate it back and forth. Also, the overall perspective range is very limited - similar to the latest Roller Coaster Tycoon. While you can achieve a plan view, you cannot bring the perspective tight to the ground - in fact, not even close. The playability, features, menus, objectives and other characteristics are virtually unchanged from the last edition (which was released in 1998!) . There have been almost no changes from what I can see, other than some fairly improved and more up-to-date-ish graphics. It's basically a C3 facelift if you ask me - but you can still see the old, grouchy 10 year old game under all the bad, puffy plastic surgery. This game is a total disappointment, especially given Sierra's reputation for pushing the envelope and making high-quality, imaginative, creative and ingenuous games. Don't know what's happening over at Sierra recently, but if this product is any reflection of their latest corporate mission, philosophy or structure, I'd say they're headed in the wrong direction and need to take a second look at what has made them successful in the past; taking a close look at Rome Total War wouldn't hurt either - that was their competition for C4 and they totally struck out. I for one will not be looking to purchase another Sierra game anytime soon. Very shabby and shoddy work. Maybe I accidentally got a copy of the 1st rough draft or something??? The American consumer is not so far gone that we're always going to settle for 2nd rate or "good enough." Once in a while, some of us still expect quality out of a $40 purchase - especially in today's economy.

Controlling Nightmare

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: December 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

the graphics are nice, but the 3-D views are hard to control with the right click panning. i end up just building from the top down view, still with dificulties rotating.

but as mentioned, this game has horrible lag. even with 2GB of RAM and a decent CPU the game is too slow to pick up on second clicks or sliders.

Troublesome

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: November 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Very pretty, if you can keep it working long enough.

Before you spend your money, I suggest you check out the official forums for the game. They're flooded with technical fault reports.

The "fixes" often include suggestions to roll back drivers, turning off graphics features (!), reformatting the PC (!!) etc. I've personally made numerous configuration changes, on a well above spec machine, and the game still crashes at clearly defined points, making the game unplayable.

The game simply does not run on all machines above the required minimum spec.

Not as good as Caesar 3

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: October 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Caesar heritage, as well as the "spinoffs" (Pharoah and Cleopatra) set a high standard for this series of games. Unfortunately, Caesar 4 had a different design team than the previous Caesar games, and as in many (if not most) cases where a new Studio takes over someone else's idea, they just didn't "get it" (the "it" being that indefinable thing that made the previous games so popular). They attempted to make the transition to full 3-D, but as was the case with the Rollercoaster Tycoon franchise, the 3D version just plain stinks. If you're a big fan of Caesar 3, I strongly suggest that you download and play the demo before considering buying this game.

Like many others, I've waited a long time for this next installment in the Caesar series, and can only say that it's a huge disappointment. One of the great features of the earlier games was how housing evolved from mere tents to palaces, and how YOU were involved in that process, by providing specific goods to your city-dwellers. Well, that's been completely removed, and now you simply plop down whatever housing style you want right from the get-go. There's no "improvement" in this game. Rather than founding your city and watching it grow and mature, this is more like "Burpee Garden Designer" or any other similar program, where you simply place objects on the terrain and you have the completed end-product right away.

With games such as Company of Heroes showing us how detailed 3D buildings and people can be, this game's graphics appear more like something you would have expected to see 10 or 15 years ago. The people are almost stick-figures, and the scale of the buildings is about 40-50% too large for this type of game. I'm extremely disappointed in the end result, and urge Vivendi and Sierra to look for a different design studio if they plan on keeping this series alive. It's quite possible that the poor sales of Caesar 4 will spell the end of the Caesar series.

Don't buy this!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: November 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have had this game for just 2 days. After finally getting it loaded it is SO slow I just don't have the patience. It crashed a number of times and the graphics are really awful as well. I have spent many hours playing other games (Emperor, Ceasar I and II, Pharoah and Cleopatra, Zeus, etc.) and loved them. I am really disappointed but I am giving up on Ceasar IV.

It's okay, I guess

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: October 15, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am a real fan of Caesar III. It's a game that I've played literally for years. So when I saw Caesar IV, I grabbed it off the rack. When I played the game, my impressions were mixed.

During installation I had a bit of trouble convincing my computer that I had removed disc 1 and replaced it with disc 2. I had to go through My Computer before I could finish installation.

The interface menu is really clunky. The menus and submenus seem to take up half the map. Having to click again on the icon to get rid of the menu is annoying.

I can't seem to be able to rotate the map. There's nothing that I could find in the manual about changing the point of view and that's something that's really needed. You need to be able to see the other side of buildings but there isn't any way to do that that's readily apparent.

Road placement is really finicky and putting a plaza on top of a road is even worse. Almost everything has to be adjacent to a road but it's often hard to get the road to go where you want it to go.

I won't even try to describe the military aspect of the game. It's horrible. Take my advice and stick to the purely city-building scenarios.

However, there are many good points to the game. The advisors are really helpful. The tutorial is well thought-out and even fun. Note: You must play all scenarios in the tutorial to open up most of the other scenarios. The game is demanding but not impossibly difficult.

I'll play Caesar IV every so often, but I haven't deleted Caesar III from my hard drive.

Disappointed this time

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I loved Sierra's city building games, and was delighted when the ex-Sierra developers started Tilted Mill to continue the tradition. Their first release, Children of the Nile, was excellent -- smooth to play, lovely to look at, lots of fun. I pre-ordered Caesar IV and was really looking forward to it. But something went wrong on this one, and I'm sad and disappointed.

For the most part, I haven't encountered the pure technical problems that some of the other reviewers have (I'm playing on a reasonably high end Alienware laptop that's a bit more than a year old). The game installed smoothly and has never crashed. The only graphics bug I've run into is an occasional screen flash or strobe when the mouse pointer is near the bottom of the screen.

The gameplay improvements that were introduced in Children of the Nile are also solid in Caesar IV: mostly that your citizens are smarter, and there is no longer any need for roadblocks and explicit walker path planning. So that's one irritation removed.

The worst problem with Caesar IV is definitely the interface. As other reviewers have mentioned, the camera view is odd, and moving the view around is constrained in awkward ways, so that you can't always simply move left or right on the grid. The UI is clunky and intrusive, and getting submenus to go away after you are done with them can be an infuriating struggle. Advisor information is crucial, but takes too much effort to get to. Building placement is twitchy and hard to get right (aquaducts are especially maddening).

The second worst problem with Caesar IV is that, compared to Children of the Nile, it is just boring to look at. The architectural style is basically the pink cube. Housing starts out as small pink cubes and evolves into larger, slightly more decorated pink cubes. Temples to different gods look basic and interchangeable (at least the small ones do, I haven't built a big one yet). Fields and goods aren't as pretty or interesting looking as they were in Children of the Nile -- there's really just no eye candy to go along with the strategy in Caesar IV.

I played through the first 3-4 levels and then lost interest and put it down. I'm sure I'll pick it up again eventually, but it definitely feels like a step backward from Children of the Nile, and really not as fun as Zeus or Poseidon either.

CEASAR IV IS OUT!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I never played Ceasar III so I dont have anything to compare this game to except all the reviews I've read. Not sure why no one has rated it yet since I just got a copy at my local Babbage's. So, this is what I think so far. It's GREAT! Although my computer is just barely above the minimum requirements of a Pentium 4 1.6 Ghz computer with 500mb Ram recommended, the game still plays pretty good although I can't turn on all the stuff or it goes to slow - duh. Otherwise, it's like Simcity 4 and Stronghold and the graphics are excellent including the water reflections. I've just started to get the hang of building my city and there's A LOT to pay attention to. Basically to start off you put down your plebs houses and a well and then some farms and then it goes really fast and all this stuff starts happening and you have to add equites houses and gardens and a fire station and an engineers guild. You can zoom in really close although using the right mouse button makes me sort of dizzy because it spins really fast at times. Then there are day and night sequences and then it rains too. I must admit I was ReALLY excited when my first Pleb house evolved into a medium sized house. Very neat to see all the while paying attention to your approval rating by making sure everyone has food, water and then the luxuries which you have to build sheep farms, grape farms, olive oil farms and other industries to create these and then the game gets really challenging.

Overall, it's much more involved than Simcity4 and more exciting to watch develop. It was awesome getting the message "Plebs are flocking to your city!" and it is just as neat watching the little plebs build furniture and make pottery and then all the supplies build up in the warehouse. When you build a bathhouse you can see the little people floating in the water. However there is one man with white balls that come out of his mouth and I'm not sure what that is - lol.

The only time my computer messed up was when it started raining and I'm not sure why that is. The game also installs Microsoft Net Framework 2.0 and some other new stuff to make it run.

I think this game will really take off and I haven't even gotten to the point of building armys or fortifications or any of the arenas and things. Also it was really neat to build aqueducts and watch the water flow through the pipes. I hope this review helps everyone.

Let down of the millenium!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing the incarnations of Caesar (II, III) since I was 13 years old - I am now 23. After almost a decade of no new Caesars and after really enjoying both earlier games, how exciting a Caesar IV was!

What a let down when I finally played it!! CAESAR IV falls victim to the same disease that brought down SIM CITY 4 - that of emphasizing vulgar showiness and graphics over basic gameplay fun. It really doesn't matter if the characters have unique faces, or can see their reflections in rivers, or if grass is blowing in the breeze. How is any of this relevant to gameplay? I am using a new computer and the game CHUGS like a train going up a mountain.

Futhermore gameplay itself is stupid - for starters the interface is a disaster. When you click on an icon in the taskbar, a sub-menu pops up with choices - click the "scythe" icon in the taskbar and you get a sub menu of grain farms, fields, etc. Click the laurel wreath, get an sub menu of civic buildings, and so forth. But after you click the choice in the menu, the menu stays up and you have to RE-CLICK the icon to make it go away! Having to do this OVER AND OVER is a huge annoyance. And placing an object is an equal annoyance - you can't just click ONCE and be done with it - you must click at least two or three times for a building to appear. What's the deal???

Further down the cobblestone road of frustration, features such as "night/day cycle" is a real hazard as the cycle is quite slow and chuggy, not smooth as it was in a game such as "Glory of the Roman Empire". Also the scrolling/angle change feature is lame as well, it's very hard to try to change the angle of the game view. I'd rather stick with 3 frozen levels of altitude than this.

All in all, this is a product and a game to AVOID unless you own a computer given to you by NASA or are financially equipped to splash out on very high-end memory/graphic cards. Don't buy this very disappointing product!

Epic disapointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 18
Date: February 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I preordered this game based upon my experience with Caesar III. Big Mistake.
1. The game will only funcion properly if your PC is exactly the configuration that the designers used. I am using a 2.33GH Laptop with an NVIDIA 7600 series video card. I am serving Iraq and live with my laptop. This game will not function properly on LAPTOP computers.
2. I searched the forums extensivly looking for fixes to the various performace problems: system crashing, artifacts, vectoring, slow operation. Some of the forums attempted to help me. Overall the suggestions boiled down to this. Update drives or adjust game setting to minimum graphics setting. These did not work.
3. Vivendi, Sierra, and Tilted Mill provided no support for this product.
4. This game was hyped as have fantastic graphics. It may, but they add nothing to game play. It is really cool to zoom in on a building and see little folks doing things. Once you have seen it you don't need to see it again. In order to effectively manage the city you have to be zoomed out to the point that you can't see that level of detail. It's a lot of computer power consumed with no value added to gameplay.
Poor design with terrible exicution would be my analysis of this product. Great marketing, there is a sucker born everyday and today it was me.

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