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Good, but two big problems

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 51 / 65
Date: December 01, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I played this game for a couple of months earlier this year, and enjoyed it very much. It was very exciting when you got to the point where you were generating money, pleasing Caesar, and increasing the population. There are two big problems, though.

The first is that the instruction booklet, which comes with the game, is not complete. In order to get to the nitty gritty, which I insist on knowing in every game, you must buy the companion "strategy" guide. This is bull. For the $ you have to plop down in the first place, you should be able to get complete instructions.

The second problem, and the more serious one, is that the game is almost impossible to win. Now I expect it to be difficult, and I don't mind playing a scenario three or four times before I get it right, but at some point, I would like to be rewarded with a victory.

In Caesar, the goals are usually to reach a certain population level, and to reach a certain rating in four categories: peace, prosperity, culture, and favor. You can see where you are at any given time. So you click on prosperity, and you are at 31, and to reach the goal, you must have 35. You click on it, and it says, for example, to build more theatres. So you do. A year goes buy, or about ten minutes, and the favor improves to 33. Great, you think, I will win next year. But the next year rolls around, and it stays at 33! Why? You click on it again, and it says the favor rating is improving. So you wait another year. Now it goes down! So you click again. Again it says the rating is imrproving. And the following year, it does. But now it's been forty minutes, you've accomplished everything else, and you'd like to go on to the next scenario, especially since you've played this one five times already.

I finally quit in exasperation, and haven't picked it up since. It is unfortunate, because all the other ingredients were there.

very engrossing, even with minor documentation flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: December 10, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The best way to visualize _Caesar III_ is to think of SimCity: the player creates urban environments, then attempts to profitably adjust to the influx of people, random (and not-so-random) events, and Imperial demands. You build and govern a city for awhile as part of a campaign; when you achieve the given objectives, you move up to a more challenging and involved assignment.

It's very attractive visually; the user interface is pretty good; the hotkeys make sense. The only thing that chapped me a little was the documentation: it was classic Sierra documentation, one of those books that looks and feels great until you actually need it to look up information. For example: when setting up trade routes for the first time, I experienced a shipwreck. Ok, very well, I thought, let's figure out what happens now since it seems to be blocking my harbour. I looked in many pertinent sections of the manual; not a word on shipwrecks. I just had to wait and hope it went away after awhile. Even though the manual has an actual index--rare enough with game documentation or strategy guides--it could have been better. Also lacking was an in-book reference for the tutorial; all reference for it is in-game. That's fine except that one reason you have a manual is so you can take it away from your computer and read up.

Very good game. Fine graphics. Ok manual. Superb dollar value--it has dropped in price to the point where you can hardly lose.

Fun, but gets to be repetitive.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: January 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Caesar III has a lot of things going for it, and a lot of frustrating flaws. Your job is to build a city that meets Caesar's demands in culture, prosperity, peace, and population, and to keep the citizens who live there both happy and healthy. At the same time, you must manage your available funds, appease the gods, send goods to Caesar, and fight off invading armies.

The pluses? Don't be intimidated by the thick manual enclosed with the game. It's easy to get started, and the game guides you carefully through your first cities. Advisors are available to help you if your city isn't progressing. The people who populate your city are interesting, and you can click on any of them and they'll tell you how they feel about the city and how you're doing. Completing a city and moving on to the next one is always fun. What will the next landscape be like, and what will you will have to do to win Caesar's favor this time? After you've completed the beginner cities, you're able to make a choice between which of two cities you'd like to try next: either a peaceful settlement or a dangerous one where you'll be fighting off a lot of invaders. You'll probably be a little bit addicted to the game at first. It is fun, and it's hard to resist the "let me just finish one more thing" feeling.

The minuses? The game is rather repetitive. When building your city, everything must be completed in roughly the same order every time. First you build houses and a way to keep them from catching on fire or falling down. Then you provide the citizens with food and clean water, and then with temples, and then with theatres, and then schools, and so on. If you deviate from doing things in the correct order, your housing won't develop, and people won't move into your city. Another problem is that once you place a building, a worker must leave the building and walk by the housing in order for that house to develop. The workers don't always walk where they should. For instance, if an area of housing needs schools, you must wait for a school child to leave the school and walk by a house before that house will develop. So you build a school right across the road from the house. And the child leaves the back of the school and wonders away into your fields, never walking by the house that is right in front of the school. Argh! This is a major frustration. I also found that some of the buildings available were totally unnecessary. Two small temples seemed to work better than one large temple, and took up less room. The Senate is a large building used to collect taxes, but the smaller forums worked just as well and didn't require as many employees.

All in all, Caesar III is well worth the cost, but don't expect it to keep you entertained for months.

Learn how the Empire was run

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 19 / 22
Date: June 16, 2000
Author: Amazon User

As an expert on ancient Rome, I was anxious to pick up the newest version of Caesar (Caesar III) and having done so, I wasn't disappointed. This game should appeal to a wide range of people: students of history, fans of the Sim games, Age of Empires, Pharoh and civilization, anyone who enjoys a strategy building game and powerhungry company execs (or wannabes) who love control (it'll want to make you skip that boring sales meeting). One of the few entertaining games that I believe is educational as well: learn about money management, resource management and a bit of History. And for something under $20, its a steal. Buy it for the price, play it for the fun!

Caesar 3 - A Remarkable Game!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: November 14, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Emperor Caesar has allotted you the task of building a city and managing its affairs in a certain region of the Roman Empire as your 1st assignment. You are asked to meet certain victory conditions such as food storage targets, a desired population, a certain amount of Imperial Favor, rise in Cultural Rating and so on. If you are able to attain these goals the Emperor promotes you to a higher rank of nobility and yet another challenging task to perform. If not you are fired and that is the end of your newfound career as a clerk.
Believe me, this is a superb city building game wherein you start your career as a clerk, completing the various assignments allotted to you and finally get to be Caesar himself. You have to build cities that are prosperous and well defended from unwanted invaders.
I played the demo; it was so appealing that I had to try out the full game. Playing the game was such a wonderful experience. I enjoyed every second of it. City building was a whole lot of fun especially when you can learn the opinions of citizens walking up and down the streets of your city. This kind of interaction helps a lot since you get to know what kind of changes need to be made in the infrastructure of the city to create more peaceful neighborhoods, which are the foundations of a healthy and crimeless city.
To make your city prosperous first of all you have to see to it that the basic needs of the locals are well taken care off - like providing easy food accessibility by placing a market in every neighborhood. Placement of fountains is equally important for fresh water supply. Their medicinal, educational, religious needs should also be considered important. Another thing you find the citizens complaining about is limited entertainment; so keep that in mind too.
The graphics are simply neat. Certain buildings especially the gardens and fountains serve the double purpose of adding beauty to the environment and providing relief to the citizens. This helps to attract people to your city, which means more citizens. More citizens mean more jobs and more jobs mean more buildings to be built to erase unemployment. So far so good! But doesn't all this sound like spending a whole lot of money. Help!!! The city vaults are running out of money. This is where trade and industry come to your rescue. Open a trade route with a friendly city and with careful management your city vaults will have enough so as not to keep you worried.
Another thing, which might keep you worried, is defense against foreign invasions. Setting up a military will help you against enemy attacks.
The game also allows a certain amount of interplay with the Gods who prove to be a major influence on the people and thus threaten to affect the prosperity of the city. Planning and dedicating festivals to the Gods seems fruitful and loads of fun. Make them angry and get ready to suffer their wrath. This often leads to shortage of food or unwelcome problems in trade routes, which ultimately affects the citizens. It makes them either unhappy or rebels. The first lot usually leaves the city and the latter causes crime.
Another interesting factor is that you can set a salary for yourself and you can use the money you've saved to send the emperor gifts in an attempt to increase your favor rating. Not only this, you can also set the tax percentage according to your own will, set a salary for the employed lot according to your wishes etc. But at the same time keep in mind that too high a tax rate and too low a salary are going to affect the growing population of the city. Attention given to such minute details of city management is what holds the interest of the player and makes the game play loads of fun.
Some people find this game hard to play. True, city planning and managing its affairs is pretty difficult especially when you have to please the people, please the gods, defend the city and to top it all send the emperor gifts and meet with his over taxing demands which seem totally unfair especially at times when you find your city vaults do not hold enough to meet those needs. But hey! Are these not the very same factors that challenge your abilities as a good administrator and thus keep you interested all through the game and make it unique?
The game challenges your capabilities as a good builder and administrator. You have to supervise the affairs of the city and its citizens. You have full freedom to make decisions on the local, financial and military issues of the city to make it a prosperous one, but at your own risk coz if you fail to do so you are apt to suffer the Emperor's wrath.
Playing this game was a rich experience to me. I found myself in a totally different world, a different era. You get to learn so much about the History of Ancient Rome.
This is my first game by Sierra and I am totally addicted to it. I still have to try out the others. All in all it's a great game. Nothing less can be said about it.

This is a good one

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: September 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

The highest praise I can give a video game: I don't want to do anything else. I have many important things I need to be doing, but ever since I discovered Caesar 3 I've been finding ways of avoiding them so I can continue to build and fight and govern my way through this very entertaining strategy game. This, I think, is the true measeure of any game in the genre.

Caesar 3 offers you the chance to develop a Roman city from scratch, paying attention to every minor detail from trade to housing to where your public baths should go. The game has a very user-friendly interface, plenty of easy to navigate overlays, and superb graphics. Also, it leads you step-by-step through the fundamentals of city building with a tutorial-like early game assignment mode -- very helpful. Lots of intriguing trade options, logical reactions for each of your governing choices, and 'catchy' game play additions (you can click on each of your citizens and get a quick update on your population's state of mind, for example) make the game fun, and the game includes a fairly rich history of various elements of the Roman Empire. It reminds me, actually, of 'Roller Coaster Tycoon,' with its point and click building and background sounds. Easy to use, not easy to master.

Simply put: this is a fun and challenging game, certainly worth the price they're charging.

Best building game since Civ II!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: January 11, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is an excellent game for gamers who want to build cities; the game is complex enough to challenge you, yet the "advisors" are there to prevent the complexity from becoming frustrating. You can get many hours of pleasure for your dollars.

Very few games I know of have such a user-friendly and frustration-free system. One reviewer lamented the lack of difficulty settings, but a simple free patch at the Sierra site provides five difficulty levels and some other good tweaks. One of the interesting aspects of this game is how you get to know the character of certain neighborhoods. While the early building is great fun, even better perhaps is the urban renewal by which you fix some of the chaos that naturally occurs in cities (cyber and real). There is no random map generator, but you can play eight different games (four with and four without military actions) *or* choose the career path. Sierra has another free download which lets you create maps and scenarios (I haven't tried it). This is a major advance over Caesar II.

One of The Best Strategy Games Ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: August 22, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I love this game! I've spent countless hours building my very own Roman Empire and downloading other people's empires from fan sites. The graphics are great and you can learn a lot about the Roman Empire from playing this game. The best part is you *really* get involved in your city, you control everything, unlike Sim City. That's why I think Caesar III is much better than Sim City.

You can start a career and work your way up to the title of Caesar or you play a scenario and not have to worry about being promoted. In your career, you have two choices each time you get promoted (after the training levels). You can take a dangerous province which has many invasions and battles. Or you can choose the peaceful province which either has none or a very small amount of invasions. Both are balanced out in difficulty, so the dangerous province is not necessarily the hardest province. The peaceful usually has more obstacles and higher standings that need to be achieved in Rome in order for you to be promoted.

A great game! This game is such a bargain at it's extremely low price!

So you want to run a Roman city...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: May 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

For those of you looking for a great, realistic and HARD game here it is. You are selected by Rome to run a series of cities, each one with problems and needs different than the last. You will have to develop farms, dig clay pits, fill warehouses, design road systems, supply people with food and goods, build houses, set up markets, workhouses and make sure everybody has clean water. THAN you also have to deal with trade, enemy armies, the Gods and Caesar's own demands for supplies and legions! People will want doctors on call, schools for their kids and theaters for their free time. Businesses will need labor living near them, easy to access docks, roads, warehouses and don't forget lots of enginers to keep things in repair!
Oh, and don't forget the walls, towers and gatehouses!
And lots of roads, gardens, roads, plazas and more roads.

Don't worry, there is a easy setting. And you can turn off the Gods too. Try to take it slow and easy.

Another brilliant strategy game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: December 29, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Caesar 3 is unstoppable! You can play it a million times and each game will be different. The cities in the game can be huge, one of my cities covered the whole map.
The game is very easy to play, you have to build a Roman empire, and take care of it's residents. You have to build loads of things, like schools, libraries, theatres, markets, farms etc.
A cool effect of the game is that every person says something when you right click on them. I had fun just by doing that in a city. Sometimes in the game, Caesar sends you requests and if you don't fulfill them, he gets angry and chucks you out the city, taking away your place of mayor.
You only get 500 in money (i can't remember the name for money in the game) and if you use it too quickly Caesar gets angry.
There's loads of disasters in the game - like fires, building collapses, riots and disease.
Overall, a jam packed game that you will not get bored of. Play and become Caesar!

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