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excellent deal... historical city building...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

"Caesar III" is a best-selling, top-rated historical city building game that established the genre seven years ago. It lets you run a city in ancient Rome. It was so popular that "Zeus"/"Poseidon" for cities in ancient Greece and "Pharaoh"/"Cleopatra" for cities in ancient Egypt soon followed.

This collection is an excellent deal to get the three Caesar III, Zeus, Pharaoh games and the two Poseidon, Cleopatra expansions. Each culture has a different theme treatment for landscapes, buildings, characters, goods, interactions with other cities etc.

Game play ranges from easy to difficult depending on what scenarios and difficulty levels you choose to play. Game help is available in the player menus. Even better help is available free from online fan sites offering strategy guides, walkthroughs, and faqs.

If you like these games, check out also the modern game treatment ("Sims2"-like zooming 3D landscapes and characters) now available for ancient Egypt in "Children of the Nile" (reviewed separately) and ancient Rome in "Caesar IV" (due Fall 2006).

Great games - must have

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

You'll get to play five games in beautifully detailed graphics and animation; it's challenging and very addictive. Expect to spend lots of hours on the computer against your will.
My favorite is Caesar; I often end up playing it till the wee hours of the nite.
Check the Sierra site for patches.

game man 212

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: August 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

first, this is the first review i have ever wrote.next, This game is great and i have only got the trial versions! i'm going to get it soon. last, I think it's a exelent choice for any gamer!!!

Hundreds of hours of gaming enjoyment

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 21 / 22
Date: May 05, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The City Building Series starts, oddly, with Caesar 3. Caesar and Caesar 2 are sufficiently different that knowing how to play either of those games will not give you a clue as to how to play Caesar 3, Pharaoh, Zeus, or Emperor. The same holds true in reverse.

The best way to view these games, IMHO, is this:

Caesar 3 is the progenitor of the City Building Series proper. It featured the introduction of basic concepts such as labor walkers, warehouses, foreign trade, sea trade, and so on.

Notably, when compared to the rest of the series, it lacked roadblocks. Given that roadblocks were put in the subsequent games due primarily to fan demand, their absence in C3 is easily understood and forgiven (particularly since you can, with only a minor amount of effort, make city gates confer the exact same benefit to your city as roadblocks provide to the other games). And since it's still possible to build functioning housing blocks without either gates or roadblocks, the lack of them isn't a problem, and is more of a challenge to your designing skills.

Pharoah and Cleopatra took the basic C3 engine and added a vatload of complexity. It was still the same basic engine, but with many more features: Monument construction, seasonal farming, industries requiring more than one type of raw material, and riverborne combat with boats, to name just a few. The numbers were also adjusted to make the game more challenging than C3: each level of housing holds less people than housing of comparable level in C3. Thus, keeping your industries filled with employees became much more of a challenge.

Pharaoh (and Cleopatra) is considered by many die-hard fans of the entire series to be the most challenging of the 4 games.

With Zeus, the game engine was given a major revamp. Gone were the labor walkers, who needed to pass by occupied housing in order to acquire employees for a given industry. Instead, any industry on the map would find employees as long as it was connected via road to any occupied housing.

Also gone were the forts. If your city was invaded, your citizens poured out of their houses to defend the town from invasion -- with a concommitant effect on your industry. (When all your employees are out fighting the bad guys, there aren't many left to make olive oil.)

Elite housing was made in a new way. In C3 and Pharaoh, if you wanted elite, high-tax housing, you had to grow it from small tents and shacks. In Zeus, you were given elite housing plots, which you could simply plop down anywhere you wanted (assuming they would fit, and you could support them, and the desirability of the area was sufficient).

Zeus also introduced the episodic format of the series (something that I, personally, consider a bit of a step backwards). Instead of starting at the dawn of time and going through the game city by city until the final mission, you are given a series of episodes. Each episode may have you developing multiple cities, and returning to one or more of them at various points of the game. You might start off building Athens for a few missions, then switch to building a colony city (which will provide goods to Athens when you're done), and then switch back to Athens (which will be exactly as you left it).

There were many other adjustments made to the basic City Building game engine that made it almost (but not quite) a new game. However, you could still see the skeleton of the C3 game engine underneath the hood.

The Manuals are on the CDs

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: February 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

They finally got it right with Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. But, these games, the precursors, are still great fun if you're into city building. They just require a bit more micromanagement. This facet annoys me a little, but I'm so drawn to the Egyptian and Greek and Roman themes that I keep going back and trying to overlook that.

Unlike erroneous reports previous, this collection DOES include manuals in PDF format on the CDs. In fact, once you install the games, there are shortcuts installed in your start menu to take you right to the manuals. No software company is stupid enough to rerelease a game, even a budget title, without some sort of manual.

So, do not fear! All the instructions are here. Set yourself up for a long night of city building!

Best strategic games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: September 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Hi guys, I found these games really really good. They keep you busy. Need to think and plan in every aspect of the game. It eats away all your leasure time. Good for mental exercise !

The best collection ever!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: August 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is a must have for anyone who ever wanted to run their own country! I found it to be easy to play, fun and historically accurate. Overall, it is a great collection for a great price.

Worth the price even if you don't play everything

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: June 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

A friend and I are both playing the games in this collection right now. She prefers the Egyptian themed games, Pharoah and Cleopatra, but I like the Greek games, Zeus and Poseidon, much better than the earlier installments. Our differing opinions show how other potential buyers might find some of the games in this set more entertaining than others, but with five games for twenty dollars, you are bound to get your money's worth out of the package even if you only like one game/expansion set.

I have played a lot of sims, especially "quiet" games that don't focus on combat (Zoo Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, etc.), and I have to say that I find the Zeus/Poseidon games especially engaging. The agricultural and mercantile elements of city building are fascinating! I find that the AI in the Greek games is much improved over the earlier games, particularly in the way that building safety and maintenance are handled. In Egypt the buildings are much more fire-prone!

One minor quibble about Poseidon is that it lacks map variety, since most of the games are set in Atlantis. That round map with the water channels is very difficult to build on! I don't mind the challenge, but greater variety in the open-ended campaigns would be nice.

Overall, this is a lovely set and is well worth the price. If you like sims and city building games, this is a great buy. I particularly recommend it for women gamers like myself, who enjoy non-violent PC games.

Age Of Mythology

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 7
Date: June 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I think it doesn't have anough campaings.But the game is still good.

This Package Was Great!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I love this package of games. If you like civilization you'll l love this game. It has most of the same features but with a more user friendly interface that makes it easy to figure out what to do, so you're not spending so much time trying to figure out how to play and more time accually playing. I found it to be quite addicting and I would loose track of time while playing these games.

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