Caesar IV

Caesar IV is quite the resource hog, despite what you’d expect to be a game with simple system demands. The biggest frame rate killers are shadows, the day/night cycle and water reflection/animation. If you find your PC is screaming sweet, sweet mercy, try turning off shadows and if that’s not enough, water effects and then the day/night cycle.

If you find fires breaking out across your city and your system slows to a crawl, the best thing to do – paradoxically – is not to reduce particle effects, but antialiasing.

If you can’t live without shadows, you can edit the NewConstants.txt file in the Data directory of the Caesar game folder to improve shadow performance, at the expense of edge complexity. Scroll down the file until you find:

Shadow/MapSize/X;int;2048
Shadow/MapSize/Y;int;2048

Replace both ‘2048’ values with ‘1024’ for a high end system, or ‘512’ for a low end system. You should see a noticeable boost in performance when shadows are on (they’ll still kill your system when things get busy though).

Finally, the trade route bug: On some systems and certain scenarios, opening the Empire map and opening a trade route will crash your system.

A workaround is available and involves opening the NewConstants.txt file and changing the ‘1’ in the following line to a ‘0’:

EmpireLevel/TradeRoutePolys;bool;1

Note that making changes to the NewConstants.txt file will label you a ‘cheater’ on the winning screens and prevent you from playing online.