Caesar IV is due out in September/October this year; it is the fourth instalment of a city building series from Tilted Mill. In it’s predecessor age it was only shadowed by Sim City albeit the two are distinct games they still fall in the city building genre. In Caesar III merchants and curriers were essential in delivering goods to your city population and other businesses. It seems that this concept of walkers delivering the goods to households has been altered so that the actual home dwellers are the ones seeking goods from the shops, something like the system in 1503AD: The New World. This living population seems to have multiple needs based on the level of the household, similar to the one found in The Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile, the spin off of Pharaoh, which was one of the sister games of Caesar III, only it was set in Egypt.
The new generation of city building family of games seems to be reaching a peak after a long absence of such titles. Tycoon City: New York is looking at the city as a business opportunity, it’s predecessor being Monopoly Tycoon, a cut throat market simulator disguised as a interactive monopoly game. City Life is focusing on the cultural, social and economical, but unfortunately not ethnic divisions in a city and how to build a city in which these social classes can coexist and remain happy. And CivCity: Rome looks like an original duplicate copy of Caesar IV.
It seems that we’ll be able to place roads and buildings at any angle desired, something like Immortal Cities, but it doesn’t look like they will be as curved as the ones in Black and White. Graphics look clean and detailed with HDR lighting, specula maps and reflections, they are promising over a hundred buildings, 25 goods and 75 unique characters with names like Pilysis Anthagoris. Black and white got criticised for making us start over from scratch every time we finished the level, this is the same in Caesar IV, and there is a technology tree, which I suppose will also start from the beginning with each mission. How can this be prevented I don’t know, I think that the designers purposely made each mission in the campaign start on unique terrain and different available resources. However once you get the perfect formula, how many times can you essentially build the same city without being bored or without feeling loss once you have to start over? CivCity could have capitalised on this and guided us trough history, building cities throughout the timeline, but they are not.
Caesar III was wonderful in the sense that it did not force combat upon you, the option was there however and to recruit legions or cavalry a whole interdependent economical and cultural structure needed to be sustained as only the elite of the city were wealthy enough to acquire the weapons and horses needed to join the army. There is also a more strategic side of the game; a map of the area affording trade and alliances between cities, hopefully this will be a little more detailed.
Caesar IV should be an excellent game, if it were only to bring Caesar III up to date with current technology standards and offer the same game play in terms of economical and cultural systems it’s predecessor excelled at.
