Caesar IV Review
In terms of PC gaming, the Caesar series is proving to be as enduring as Rome
itself. Not many game series are good enough to eventually have a “VI” after
their name, but it also means that the latest incarnation of the game has a lot
to live up to. Is it one for the ages or the collapse of an empire?
Before I get into answering that question, I should mention the basics of the
game for those of you new to the Caesar games (and considering how long it’s
been since Caesar III came out, there are probably a lot of you). Caesar IV
casts you in the role of a Roman official placed in charge of building and
growing a new city for the betterment of Rome. The empire is quite demanding
when it comes to taxes, tribute, and manufactured goods, and if your city
doesn’t meet these demands you could quickly find yourself demoted to lion chow.
To build a thriving city you’ll need to balance the needs of your citizens with
those of the empire. You’ll need to create supply and manufacturing chains that
take raw resources, process them, and then turn them into finished goods, but at
the same time you’ll need to provide your people with a comfortable living and
make sure that their needs are met lest they move out of your city.
Caesar IV’s strong point is its economic engine, which is a good thing because a
good economic model is at the heart of a good city simulator. There are numerous
raw materials available and once they are processed you’ll need to manage how
they are used. Do you send the wood to your arms factory to make more weapons or
to the furniture factory to produce goods for you people? And there’s also the
matter of making sure that you can effectively store, move, and sell all the
goods that you are producing. This is the stuff that sim fans live for.
While the economic aspect of the game is implemented well, the military
component is not. Fielding military units requires the same sort of supply line
you need to get your products to market. You need recruitment facilities, mess
halls, and forts in which to quarter your troops. So far so good, but the
process loses its fun when you must actually use your military. The game will
occasionally throw marauding bands of barbarians at your city who will entertain
themselves by killing your citizens and trying to burn things down. To stop them
you must dispatch military squads from your forts and then click on the
barbarians to attack them. Since your military can get a little confused by the
layout of your streets, you’ll generally need to guide them along before you can
give the final attack order. Once the battle is finally joined there is nothing
for you to do but watch as the troops fight and the side with more soldiers
wins. It’s all tedious and unexciting, and the game would have been better off
either totally abstracting the combat or just tossing the military aspect out
all together.
Another aspect of the game that doesn’t really work well is the religious
component. Your citizens will want access to various shrines and temples and
providing them will help your structures to evolve. This is all fine and good
but the problem is that if you don’t have enough shrines you’ll suffer from more
than non-evolving structures and unhappy people. The gods themselves will grow
angry if you don’t have enough religious structures in your city and you may be
on the receiving end of some lightning bolts from the heavens that take out some
of your buildings. This comes off as a silly annoyance in the game. It should
either take the approach that the Roman gods were real and fully integrate
mythology into the game or dispense with the notion entirely and treat religious
structures as the same sort of placebo for the masses as theaters.
