Interview with the Tilted Mill boys

Atomic: What was the motivation for creating a new Caesar? Do you think there’s enough interest in the city-building genre to justify a fourth game?

Chris Beatrice: Yes, in fact, it seems that ‘life sim’ games are becoming more and more popular, and the Caesar series has always occupied a unique spot somewhere between those and historical strategy games. The Caesar ‘formula’ has never been matched, though there are a few clones and would-be challengers out there. It’s hard to believe that it’ll have been eight years since the last Caesar game, and from the response we’ve gotten from fans and journalists, I can certainly say there is enough interest out there. The challenge is to bring the Caesar experience to a wider audience, and to do it all in 3D.



As for motivation, well, I guess it was sort of a ‘perfect storm’. More than half of the team members at Tilted Mill are from Impressions, and many played key roles on Pharaoh, Zeus, Caesar III and even Caesar II, so we were always very eager to keep working on the Caesar games. Similarly, Vivendi was keen to continue developing the franchise, and so there you go. Usually, as a developer, you find yourself having to work extraordinarily hard to convince a publisher to consider your game idea, but in this case Vivendi was pretty much committed to taking the series to the next level, and we were really happy to partner with them again.

Atomic: Did you have any specific design goals when creating Caesar IV? Can you give us an example of something you’ve learned from previous games that you’ve been able to apply to Caesar?

Chris Beatrice: Really we needed to accomplish two important things: maintain what it is that makes the Caesar games so special, while at the same time open up that experience to more players. In some ways these are, or could become, contradictory goals. The Caesar games have always delivered a nice mix of in-depth strategy gameplay, with a light, humorous, lively presentation, and ease of use. Caesar is a creative game, not a combat game. These types of combinations are rare in good games, and not always easy to deliver.

In Caesar there are gameplay challenges and pushbacks, but really the reward comes from creativity and building. Most games are one or the other – either strategy games where you don’t care about your ‘units’ or don’t feel you are creating something, or creative playthings with no real strategic challenges, or even a sense of victory.



Caesar is a game where there is a lot going on, and ideally you, the player, should be able to tell exactly what’s happening just by looking at the city, and maybe using some special display modes. These types of games are deceptively difficult to make, and to balance properly. For example, it’s hard to show a ‘narrow slice’ of gameplay – the gameplay doesn’t emerge until almost all systems are working, because Caesar is about creating an organic whole – a living thing – not a three-second adrenaline rush.

So in a nutshell we had to preserve all the basic player activities that characterise the series, even to the point of ensuring that strategies and approaches to city-building that worked in prior Caesar games also work in Caesar IV. It’s no good when a long time fan, an expert Caesar player sits down to play and finds he is no longer a good player, because the designers decided to ‘shake things up a bit.’ However, in order to make these systems more accessible, smoother, and more ‘user friendly,’ they needed to be completely re-invented from the bottom up. For example, there are no ‘access walkers’ in Caesar IV, and rather than a randomly wandering market lady delivering food and goods to houses, homeowners determine what they want, and go and retrieve these things themselves (in fact, all resource transportation works this way).