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Game that keeps me busy!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Well this is the second time that I've purchased Caesar 3. I actually got it when it was first available and just recently thought about it and went online to find it again. I like to play the freeform mode or "City Construction Kit" I find that building a city and keeping all of the areas happy really challenging. The other great thing is that you can alter the difficulty and even turn the effects of the Gods off... you can also choose between really hard assignments and more trivial ones.

The career mode of the game is more challenging. You have to send gifts to Rome, defend your city from invaders, make enough $ to sustain your city, and keep your people happy. I honestly sit and play this game while watching Tv... The manual is a good tool to keep everything organized...

Just go slow with your building and watch for running out of money. The best way that I have found to keep this from happening is to build forums and keep the tax collectors working. There are very few cheat codes out there for this game....so it's not one you can just fudge your way through. One of the main complaints that I have is that it's really hard to get your housing to evolve past a certain level. It's more frustrating to me that just about anything else. I prefer the freeform mode of the game as opposed to the career mode but that's mainly because I just like to play!

Happy gaming!

good product for learning a little about Rome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 04, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this product for my daughter, age 12. Her school used it as part of a intro to languages program. She loves it!

Still a great game...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: October 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Out of nostalgia, I decided to play Caesar 3 again. It's been 5 or 6 years. The Caesar series is the only city building sim game that I've played so I can't give a comparison to the SimCity games. Anyway, for a game that was released back in 1998, I think it still holds up pretty well today. Graphics is sub-par compared to the games today, but Caesar 3's strength is the challenging gameplay.

There are two mode of gameplay; I'll call them city sandbox and campaign. In the city sandbox mode (I don't play this mode) you select a province you want to play so that you can build a city from scratch. There may or may not be any barbarians you would need deal with depending on which you province you choose. Campaign mode is my preference. You start your career as a clerk and you are given very low expectations by Caesar's proconsul since it is your first city. However, as you advance in your career the proconsul expectations will increase. If I remember correctly the first two cities in campaign mode are pretty much tutorials where you will be given tips on how to improve your city.

I believe after the first two cities you will be given the choice of which province you want pursue. If you are the non-violent type, then you can select the peaceful province which is easier since you won't need to build forts with trained soldiers to repel barbarian attacks. If you want a bit of a challenge then choose the harder province where you will need to deal with barbarian and sometime rebellious natives. Because the you will have less headaches in peaceful provinces, the expectations are generally higher than in the harder provinces since there will not be any barbarians to deal with. That's not to say it will be a walk through the park though.

Your goals are broken down into 5 categories: Population, Culture, Prosperity, Peace, and Favor. Population is easy to understand, simply attract as many people to live in your city. But that's easier said than done. Culture refers to a combination of temples that you build to the gods, education infrastructure for your citizens and theatrical entertainment. Prosperity basically is a measure of how well your city is doing (are you spending more than you are collecting?) and how wealthy your citizens are. The wealth or prosperity of your city his depicted by the type of building they live in; from tents through large palaces. Peace is simply, do not let your people riot. Make sure they are employed and fed. Mars (the god of war) may cause some of your citizens to rise up against you if you do not pay homage to him by build temples dedicated to him. Lastly, defeat the barbarian hordes. Favor is basically how much Caesar likes you. From time to time the proconsul will request "goods" from you that must be delivered to Rome. Send the goods on time and your favor goes up. Send the goods late then... Well at least you can say, "Better late than never." But if you fail to provide the goods at all, then your favor will plummet. You can also send gifts from your personal savings, but once you start giving gifts then they will no longer be gifts in the future. They will become requirements.

Now that the introduction has been completed, it's time to start building. This is where the fun begins. Most of the time you will start in an empty province and you will need to build housing and jobs to attract people to your fledgling city. You don't build villas or palaces from the start. Instead you build tents. As people move in, the tents will evolve to shacks, hovels, small villas... well you get the point. But you have to build up the desirability of the neighborhood for house to develop. Water is one of the primary necessities. While a well will provide water, it is much too primitive for most people and housing will not evolve beyond the basic hovel. People want clean water from nearby fountains. They want jobs! Employment means money. Money means they can eat and buy things. They want a marketplace nearby to go shopping, but don't build it too close `cause marketplaces are noisy and will have a negative affect on the overall local desire level. Build temples, people love going to a nearby temple to prey to their gods. They want a nearby bathhouse `cause who wants to walk around smelling like "old cheese"? Hey, all work and no play means one hell of a boring city, so build theatres, amphitheatres, and a coliseum or two.

Anywaste, you get the point; people want to be happy. All you have to figure out is how to do so and where to place the various types of buildings. Anything that is noisy or dirty will have a negative effect on the local neighborhood and prevent housing to evolve beyond a certain point. For example, farms are generally dirty places so any housing built right next to it will probably have a hard time evolving into a large villa. Workshops for building goods is also noisy as are granaries and warehouses. Building plazas, gardens, temples, theatres, and other structures as well can offset negative effects. The manual's pretty good and it should be referred to from time to time.

One of best features of the game is that you can right click on your own citizens and they will tell what's on their mind. They are not shy about it. This will help you improve your city. Right clicking on a build, like a house will tell you why it has devolved or what is preventing it from evolving. A place of business like farms or docks may tell you there is no one living nearby, thus no employees. A bit of micromanagement and organizational skills are necessary to build a successful city. But I think it adds to the fun `cause you directly affect how well the city performing.

Caesar 3 is unlike most games because very little violence is actually involved. Yes, there are the barbarian hordes, but the violence is very minimal. Violence can be totally avoided by simply choosing the peaceful career path. All-in-all Caesar 3 is still a great game to play because of the underlying complexities of how citizens react layout of the city. There is no one strategy to winning the game.

At this time Caesar 4 is currently on sale, but it has some mixed reviews. One complaint is that the game is less complex than Caesar 3 so some people don't find it as challenging as it's predecessor. It's more pretty (better graphics), but has less substance.

I love it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I keep coming back to this game. I love the challenge of building the city, and the battles aren't bad now I've figured out the strategy involved. ;)
More city building games... please, make more!!

Caeser's Legon

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: November 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I think Caeser 3 is a great strategy game that is fun and challenging. I'd have to say that Caeser 3 is a great war game if you chose to play on a not so peacful province. But even with a peacful province you can still have fun by trying to get a lot of people and other things. I like personally building up your city until the whole map is full then I build another city. Like I said before this is also a great war game, you can have up to 96 soldiers in your army. You can have 6 forts 16 men in a fort, but not only that you can have different soldiers such as Mounted on horses, Javilen with javilen, and Legonaries with sords and shields. If you train your army then you will domenate the battle fields. You can fight Caeser's army made up of blue Legonaries, also a lot more that you can check out. But my personal favorite are the barrbarions that come on some missions.
But the jobs and things you can put on your made are incredible there must be over 200. I would really recemend this game and I gave it 5 stars for it's great game play and enjoyment, check it out.

great game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: October 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I still go back to this game and play it every once in a while. it is one of the best games I ever played. I wish they would re-make it with modern graphics.
I am surprised people having so many difficulties at getting through levels. advice: be very smart about strategy. develop this city altogether. you can't concentrate on one aspect of life at a time, fix it up and turn to other aspects. this is not how this game works.

to "Classified": to solve fire problem, control your roads. don't twist them too much. this will help minimize number of services per capita as well. for defense don't build only legionaries, use velites as well. ratio 1+1 works very well. just keep velites out of melee. towers with ballista on top are very good addition as well.
try building "blocks" at a time: rectangle shape road wide enough to put 2x2 houses on the inside and still have at least 2 spaces for gardens. give the "block" own prefect, temple, market... do houses 2x2, works by far the best. leave spaces for entertainment, education, which you will build later. one road to farms, one road to docks... prefect and engineers at each end. storages along this road. not too close to settlement. when need more workers. do second "block". build first troops early enough. no need to do more than one from the beginning. invasions start small...
try playing again. it is a real pleasure, not "nerve shattering". just need to do it right.

p.s. funny: after saying it, decided to check and turns out they are making Caesar 4! coming fall 2006. looking forward to it.

IMPOSSIBLE!!!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 18
Date: September 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I loathe this game. Sure, it's fun when you beat a level but it takes me roughly 20 tries per level. It's nerve shattering in it's randomness and worse off half the city burns and has to be replaced each level. Fair? No, in fact I want to find the programmer and strangle him for making such an idiotic imbalance to luck and skill. You think you're doing fine after you recovered from plague, whoops, here comes an invading army. If you fended off the army, Caesar gets displeased and dispatches a legion to wipe you out. If you manage to beat Caesar's first legion, he sends more doubling in size every time. That's not to consider the fact that your people are starving, the gods are angry and your city is on fire again and the plague is sweeping your houses again since the doctors were killed by Caesar's legions and you're in debt 5000 Dn to the emperor. Ridiculous. Most units are worthless too, the prefects only put out fires and I've never seen one actually fight a legionaire and not die. I've seen 8 prefects on 1 last surviving legionaire and he kills them all and ransacks my whole city!!! ONE FREAKING GUY RANSACKS AN ENTIRE CITY!!! You'd think he'd at least suffer exhaustion or something but nope!

All in all I need to find a vomitarium. Ugh.

Nice Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 24
Date: September 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It is a nice game, but not too goo for Americans (too much thinking involved):)) and a lot of common sence

Caesar 3

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: September 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I don't know how much fun the game is or how I would rate it simply because the CD does NOT work. Even though I tried several times the game will not load to my computer. I am very dissapointed.

Still a great game after all these years

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It may not have the graphics of a Half-Life 2, but where this one wins is in its addictive gameplay. As you're building your city, you'll build different buildings to feed, house and entertain them. The interactions of the properties of the buildings along with the desires of your citizens creates a complex system that you'll need to tweak and balance in order to prosper. This complexity is part of what makes the game great--each building is affected by its neighbors, and you won't want to quit playing until you get the right balance of doctors, markets, and theaters in each of your neighborhoods. It isn't easy, especially as you get to the higher levels, but the combination of challenge and addictive play keeps me coming back.

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