Caesar III is an intriguing medium between simulating every citizen (like Tropico) vs large scale statistics (Like SimCity).
It does mean that Caesar is very sharp. A slight imperfection inf your design will cause the market-lady to be slightly off timing, leading to cascading failures as houses at the end of her run runs out of furniture or the 2nd food source of something
Or a a priest takes a wrong turn and collapses the entire economy of a neighborhood.
Cleopatra (the sequel of Caesar III) added roadblocks to make this more consistent. But the overall sharpness is there and part of the gameplay.
It's not a bad thing for sharp situations to occur in games btw. It does add to the stress of management, but you need some stress to make a management game.
"Sharpness" is the quality where I think a lot of designers who intend to make strategy games actually wind up making complex puzzle games. It's something you also frequently see in Japanese tactics games like Valkyria Chronicles, where there's basically one valid solution for the harder scenarios.
As you say, not necessarily a bad thing, but it's where I personally lose interest.
I remember reading strategy guides back in the day that said to make your city one long serpentine road so you didn't have to deal with the random turn mechanic at intersections. I never played that way though and it was still a lot of fun.
If anyone wishes to see some high level Caesar III play on Julius (notably not Augustus) I can recommend watching DDRJake, he plays custom maps that are still being made to this day!
I find it incredible how he's able to take some incredibly difficult maps and beat them without any prior knowledge; the skill in planning a city before planting even the first building takes an imagination far beyond mine, and adapting live to sieges and other dangers is even more impressive.
This game was one of my favorites! I recently moved to a Debian / GeForce / Intel setup and could not be happier with how Steam proton has been working out of the box. I’ve been able to run the windows version of Caesar III with proton enabled flawlessly. The distributed version has some really awful default graphics, so I ran the c3respatcher [1] in wine which also worked flawlessly. Linux gaming has come a long way.
i'm glad people remember the impressions games city builders, even to this day they're still totally unbeaten imo. especially zeus (because it's the one i spent most time playing as a kid, of course)
The amount of mystery and curiosity that this game and others like inspired in me as a kid was immense. It’s great nostalgia and honestly still motivates me.
As an adult, I’ve enjoyed leisurely reading through this code to help unravel how it works.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadBut of course
It does mean that Caesar is very sharp. A slight imperfection inf your design will cause the market-lady to be slightly off timing, leading to cascading failures as houses at the end of her run runs out of furniture or the 2nd food source of something
Or a a priest takes a wrong turn and collapses the entire economy of a neighborhood.
Cleopatra (the sequel of Caesar III) added roadblocks to make this more consistent. But the overall sharpness is there and part of the gameplay.
It's not a bad thing for sharp situations to occur in games btw. It does add to the stress of management, but you need some stress to make a management game.
As you say, not necessarily a bad thing, but it's where I personally lose interest.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm0MDLKuRDrlbT3Boixpg...
I find it incredible how he's able to take some incredibly difficult maps and beat them without any prior knowledge; the skill in planning a city before planting even the first building takes an imagination far beyond mine, and adapting live to sieges and other dangers is even more impressive.
[1] https://gitlab.com/Afdch/c3respatcher
> Support for widescreen resolutions
> Windowed mode support for 32-bit desktops
> A lot of small in-game quality of life improvements
> Support for the high-quality MP3 files once provided on the Sierra website
Also: “a fork of Julius named Augustus is implementing many long-wanted gameplay changes, such as roadblocks.”
[1] https://github.com/bvschaik/julius/pull/110
"our stinging bitesssss are our gifts to you!"
As an adult, I’ve enjoyed leisurely reading through this code to help unravel how it works.