Caesar IV

'I don't care; feed them to the lions until one of them tells me who scratched my throne!'

Caesar IV continues with the Roman-based theme established by its predecessors. The goal, contrary to most games, is not to destroy, shoot or pillage anything but to simply construct a functioning city with industry and agriculture, and infrastructure including law, hygiene, education and entertainment.

Except it’s not so simple, and only with hard practice and good planning skills will a city develop from basic subsistence into a sprawling metropolis. City builders traditionally feature an isometric view in-game, with an interface providing access to building options as well as extended support in the form of city reports and advisors, tax, trade and labour controls. Veterans will be both happy and sad to learn that Tilted Mill has neither improved nor ruined this in C4.

Based on Empire Earth’s Titan game engine from now-defunct Stainless Steel Studios, C4 is completely 3D and allows zooming, camera rotation and – new to the series – building rotation. Support for Shader Model 2.0 is also present, finally providing your golden plazas with shiny bloom and specular lighting and normal mapping for brick and marble. A lack of engine optimisation however penalises all but the godliest of systems from running with all effects enabled, and even on the reviewer’s Athlon 64 X2, 2GB RAM and GeForce 7950GX2 equipped PC, frame rates were dire with shadows on. The model complexity on citizens is also extremely basic, but considering the heavy gameplay focus (and the fact you’ll spend most of the game zoomed as far out as possible), it’s hardly noteworthy.

What is noteworthy is the replacement of the ‘push’ economy model with a ‘pull’ system – a first for the series. Introduced in Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile (also developed by Tilted Mill/Impressions), markets will no longer send out sellers to distribute goods. Instead, citizens will leave their homes to buy what they need, which makes more sense than the old model. The benefit is that city building is more organic and the old trick of building long roads with minimal corners to prevent sellers from ‘wandering’ is no longer mandatory.

Caesar IV also now provides players with the ability to place pleb, equite and patrician housing, so they no longer have to live in fear of their workforce disappearing overnight as housing evolves. Plebs will always be plebs, providing the backbone of your labour, while equites handle the educated duties of teaching, medicine and acting. Patricians do nothing, except pay extravagant taxes, and in most of the game’s scenarios (either in one of the three singleplayer campaigns, or online) all your building is focused around supplying – eventually – a flourishing city for your mansion-dwelling population. When fully evolved, taxes from patricians will easily outstrip other sources of income.

The game is not entirely without its violent elements. C4 supports a very basic military aspect, even more elementary than previous games. While you can’t attack other cities, you can build cohorts to defend your own and send legions off to fight for the Empire. Most of the campaigns allow you to choose between economic or military scenarios as you progress, but thanks to the absurd unit controls, military missions are more frustrating than anything.

One final gripe is with building itself. For a game with such a heavy focus on perfectionism, the lack of a layout grid or other way to align buildings before you place them is close to debilitating until you learn to ‘guess’ with your eye. In this age of gaming, the lack of such a basic feature seems ridiculous, especially with the 3D perspective making placement all the trickier. Thankfully this is offset by the inclusion of an undo button that – most of the time – will back track your last change.

Caesar IV is easily the pinnacle of the city building genre, with a rich blend of all the features we’ve come to expect from a game of its pedigree. But the absence of some polish and the lack of a few features keep the game from total brilliance.