www.gamesover.com Caesar III: FAQ/SWAT/Walkthrough - Pre-Release Version ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author: Adar (adar@flashmail.com) Last Update: - Last Revision: 10 April 1999 Last Change: 23 April 1999 Version: 0.00.048 ============================================================================== All rights reserved by Adar (adar@flashmail.com) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents (TOC) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please note: This table of contents is a summary of the main paragraph titles and subtitles. Some information on the respective chapter is given here, but detailed information can only be derived from the actual part of text. One idea of quickly finding your way there (as the text is quite long all by itself) is cutting or copying the title of the chapter you want to read into your clipboard (system) buffer and then pasting it into your "search text" dialogue (with edlin for instance use F3 and then CTRL-V then ENTER). This will bring you to the referenced chapter. - changed parts are marked with [C] - added parts are marked with [A] - removed parts will be mentioned with [R] and the name of the removed chapter for a few versions As long as there are no changes, additions or removals no symbols will be attached to the title of the chapter. Symbols generally appear in column number 1 (e.g. see the next line) [A] The General Law of Gravity where "[" (without double quotations) would be your left text windows border ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I. Introduction a. Preliminary Informative text on the copyright and other legal information concerning the release, availability and liabilities of the text, reader, writer and other people connected to it. b. Structure of the text The implemented structure is meant to provide navigatorial help to the reader. This chapter explains the various visual helps used. c. Version Information The version information goes back to the format x.yy.zzz which is the primary version information. Some people, like webmasters will probably need to review this version information chapter from time to time. d. About the game 1. What type of game is Caesar III? 2. A bit of the history of Caesar (the person) Since the game bases on Roman history I am inserting history information from time to time. If you need more information you can always contact me or have a look at the more than generous text of the online help. 3. A bit on the history of Caesar (the game) Caesar - the game - has a long history. It started out way back when the Commodore 64 ruled the Earth.. 4. Installation Although there are real good help supports online and available straight through the Internet I have provided some common troubleshooting aside from information on the files the game installs. 5. Setting up the preferences a. Outside This means, you can alter configuration files (.cfg and so on) to for instance adjust sound volume. Also, this is connected with part IV (SWATs - secret weapons and tactics). Altering the files may infringe copyright, so be sure to review your local law and/or the copyright information of the game. b. Inside There are some menu entries you can always alter when in-game. The speed setting for instance comes especially handy from time to time. Also the map bookmarking is a very nice function to have at hand when two to four armies attack simulatenously. II. General Game Play 1. Types of game play There are two types of gameplay, career mode, which puts you into contigous wave of assignments and the individual (single) game play. 2. A note on online help and historical references 3. Exempli Gratia a. Main Menu b. Career Mode - Walkthrough More than just an example I am providing a complete walkthrough with a ton of hints and tips on how to solve various problems common to some assignments' tasks. Assignment 01 (Training) This is the first assignment of career mode and it puts you into a tiny area where you have to examine the various functions of the game. Assignment 02 (Training) Almost the same as assignment 01 this area again features training only. There are - however - a lot more functions activated by now and this may seem quite overwhelming at first. Choice assignments are what defines the bigger part of the game. You may choose between warfare and buildup levels. BuildUp means you have build your city and do not need to worry about war or building military forces too much whereas Warfare levels usually make you end up with six forts (a full legion that is) and your city surrounded with heavily guarded walls. These are usually the more difficult missions. Assignment 03 (Choice) - BuildUp Level Assignment 03 (Choice) - Warfare Level Assignment 04 (Choice) - BuildUp Level Assignment 04 (Choice) - Warfare Level Assignment 05 (Choice) - BuildUp Level Assignment 05 (Choice) - Warfare Level Assignment 06 III. Frequently Asked Questions Basically this is what I projected when I started writing this file. This may also be the main sense for what GameFAQs (my initial inspiration) stands for. Now FAQ files sometimes - and with GameFAQs this happens around all the times - do not answer questions in the sense of writing down questions and then the answers, but answers are found by reading the walkthroughs. Both of these possibilities are included in this file, and section III. Frequently Asked Questions offers a collection of questions asked and answered. IV. Game concepts This chapter probably includes the most comprehensive information on the game itself. Since every project has to have a concept behind its working, this game has a concept if not to say concepts, too. Of course these cannot be revealed in their entirety by just one person, so this includes work of many other people. Sometimes developers release game concept information, but this is not only seldom but also most of the times costly - you may not publish your information. In addition to the bare concepts I included descriptions and detailed information on the building types and so on. Since this game was constructed from historical data, I have also assembled (true) historical information about the game's components (for instance: walls, trade..). V. Secret Weapons and Tactics SWATs are so called cheats built into the game - e.g. the Alt-V cheat. Aside of this, there are things you can do when utilizing disk editors. Good things usually are hidden well, sometimes they are "legally" available, others again may be hidden well (for instance the cheats hidden in the IMUSE.EXE with Dark Forces by LucasArts). These cheats will be found by some people and usually spread via NewsGroups and reach publishing on the Web and in files like this one. VI. Appendices Appendix A - Legality Statement The "all rights reserved" section - this is important, although not taken care of by all too many people. Appendix B - About FAQs/... What is a FAQ? Where do I get FAQs from? Appendix C - Official Distributors Who are the distributors? Where do I get updated versions? Appendix D - Rumors Rumors on the game, basically only the weirdest or the proven ones will reach this section. Appendix E - Credits Credit to whom credit is due. There have not been huge piles of people supporting the upcoming of this file, but a lot of people contributed in one or another way, aside from not knowing some people where just an inspiration. I would like to use the few more bytes here and thank them - you know who you are. Appendix F - Upcoming implementations What's going to happen to this file? New ideas.. Appendix G - Resources Where I get my information from - only partly, of course. Appendix H - Mailing List Updates on the mailing list, information on the service, how to subscribe, how to unsubscribe. Appendix I - Discussion List Why, when, where - hell, this is NOT in existence right now. See there. Appendix J - Revision History Revisions made are usually complex journeys through the mysteries of grammar, alphabet, hyphenation and thesauric battles - these are the outcomes. Appendix K - Game Alterations & News Updates, News mainly from www.caesar3.com Appendix L - Manual Errata Of course there had to be errors in the manual, who lives without 'em? Appendix M - Frequently Asked Questions WITHOUT answers Interesting questions seeking their answer in this file, please help out, you'll be well awarded! Appendix N - Known Bugs and Errors See Appendix L. Appendix O - Searching for Caesar III topics on the interNet Private searching hints. Appendix P - Fun Facts To say it in one nice person's style: "Jovial Quotes". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I. Introduction a. Preliminary The text contained herein has been written, designed and formatted, checked and revised, changed, saved and published out of free will. No money has been received for the work put towards its creation up to its present state. Because of this I hereby notify everyone, that this file and its contents in their complete form shall not be bound to any royalty or "distribution fee" which may arise to be earned by distributing this file. Distribute it out of free will, but do not take money for it. More information on distribution of this file may be obtained from appendix A (legality statement). This file contains information on a game named "Caesar III" (name without double quotation marks). This game has been designed to work on a PC, that is, a personal computer. General information on what a PC is cannot be given during this file, but your local PC vendor may help. Alternatively you can contact the author of this file for more detailed information. To understand what is contained within this file you will need basics in computer using, e.g. how to start a file, how to launch Windows Explorer, what is MBytes, MHz etc. If you are not familiar with the basics of computer using and applying Windows commands your PC vendor may help. Alternatively you may contact the author of this file for assistance. If you have not read a file like this one i.e. a FAQ, a SWATs collection or a Walkthrough-file before, please read appendix B (about FAQs, SWATs, ...). b. Structure of the text I have tried to implement a logical structure with indents, sections and paragraphs each supporting the other one. It may however prove, that some people will find it hard to read this text. Because of this, I have provided a little information on how I planned the structuring of the text. A thing you may notice very fast: it is plainly written in ASCII characters. This ensures many people will be able to read it without many difficulties. Aside from this the text has not been formatted with tabulator spaces, which may vary from editor to editor in length and behavior. Also, the document was written in non-block mode. This offers advantages as follows: - the file can easily be read using any text editor able to interprete ASCII characters - the file can be published on the World Wide Web easily, since no special formatting is needed -> How to publish this file on the World Wide Web - obtain written permission from the author of this file by writing to adar@flashmail.com - enter your favorite HTML editor, alternatively use the Windows Notepad - copy the complete file to the text file and put it between 
 and
tags; this lets the HTML compiler of your browser display preformatted text. Note: Unauthorized published copies are infringing the copyright. Please read appendix A (legality statement) on this subject. As you may have noticed the structuring basically is subdivided in I. 1. a. and - listings. I.1.a. listings are very logical by themselves, but differing between a. and - listings may be very important in some sections. "a." listings refer to a important sequence of things, which should be carried out using the alphabet; starting with point a. run through the statements until you reach the last one. "-" listings refer to a listing without significant importance of sequence. Similarily a. b. c. listings should be read in the sequence as they are written. c. Version information I am using a special type of version information. "Last Update" Updates refer to major updates after a long period of feedback, or complete revisions with a lot of new information added. "Last Revision" Revisions are when I re-read the whole text, correct spelling, grammar and other lingual mistakes and then rewrite parts or the whole text to a better style, layout and contents. It is very important that feedback arrives numerously, by the way. "Last Change" Defers that you actually are looking at a changed version. This may be a simple correction, addition or deletion or whatever simple change you may imagine. Of course there may be other bigger changes like new chapters, but then again a change means editing the file in any way. Also there is special type of information contained in the actual version numbering: x.yy.zzz whereas x denotes the first number, yy the second number and zzz the third number each having as many digits as letters in x, yy and zzz respectively. x denotes the releases which do not happen many times. yy denotes updates so far and zzz the days working on current release. As far as releases are concerned, they are published scarcely. Usually I will release pre-releases or updates. Pre-releases are versions of the document, that although incomplete, yield important information already. Even though, the document is not completed to state where it could be called a unity of questions and answers i.e. pre-releases often include many more questions than answers. d. About the game 1. What type of game is Caesar III? At its core it's an action simulation. It simulates a career of a Roman citizen that takes up the so called "cursum honorum" which is the "curse of honors". Romans had to undergo several types of offices before they were admitted to governing and legislative offices. For example they were tax collectors, police staff and and other members of public service required for a town or civilization in general to work. More about the history of Caesar later on. This cursus honorum has already brought you to a point where you govern a city. If you know Sim City, Caesar III will be very familiar. But! There are big differences, still! You will have to construct a city out of nothing. There is a lot of woods, water and perhaps a street through the lands. But that's it. You will have to cultivate land to feed your people by building farms. Further on you will need to construct workshops to equip your armies and fight intruders. There's a whole lot of life in ancient Rome, and your city is a thrilling pool of activity. A lot to attend and a big amount of details you may overlook, but this file should put you on the right way to it. Basically after building up your basic city, still every single building added may cause little catastrophes. It is not easy being one of the mighty ones, but it's great fun watching for people unfold, develop, grow and finally having a metropolis making Rome itself turn pale. 2. A bit of the history of Caesar (the person) About 2000 years ago the Roman Empire had its biggest spreading in history. Also, about 2000 years ago, emperors ruled it. As we all know from history Rome first was ruled by kings, then, after Caesar claimed dictatorship emperorship was introduced (after Caesar's death - should you never have seen any Asterix movies or read comics - they stabbed him to death). Emperorship under Octavian who was also called Augustus (the month August is named after this emperor, the first in Rome's history namely) was something completely new to the Romans. Now when Caesar claimed dictatorship after he had a quite interesting and adventorous career, actually marching straight through Gaule, that is the ancient France, and bringing it under the flag of the Roman Empire (which was some type of spear with banners and stuff around it, with the letters S.P.Q.R. (senatus populusque Romanus) - "belongs to the Roman senate and people") he invaded Britain and "convinced" Britains to be part of the Roman Empire from then on. It was also him who added a lot of culture to Rome's outlook. "panem et circenses" may be familiar to some of you, which means bread and games - and that's exactly what he did: he spent money to bring food to the (starving) people to get their favor and then he entertained them with games full of blood and brutality. Actually you may have heard of the Coloseum in Rome, a small picture of it is also shown during the game at the map of the Empire where ancient Rome would be. This theatre, which consisted of a doubled ancient Greek theatre (half circles usually) featured a lot of other games aside of plays but also covered some blood thirsty gladiator battles (the fighting gladiators greeted Caesar with "ave Caesar, morituri te salutant" which is "greetings, those who are going to die salute you"). They had also quite funny games. For instance they let people dressed up in feathers run and jump from the highest precipice to honor the gods. And then again there were also games for Artemis, the goddess of hunting: A wood was constructed in the middle of the Coloseum. Into this wood small animals were brought. Quite actually all spectators were then admissed to search and hunt for the small animals. Entertainment was big fun in those times. 3. A bit on the history of Caesar (the game) Caesar, in the original way was designed to work on the PC. There were and are several similar programs around. The oldest predecessor I still remember was Centurio on the C64. The three games of Caesar each offer similar game play. Even though one immediately sees the huge amounts of changes applied to all three games, the changes from Caesar II to III were not that great than they were from the original Caesar to Caesar II. Yet, and that may be the most fascinating thing, Caesar III offers even more details than Caesar II which already incorporates a lot of what is known about the antique Roman civilization. Caesar III in it's general has far more advanced graphics, nice tunes and new sounds, of course also old elements but a much richer game engine, that features a lot more details than the other versions. Basically, if you do not have any of the three games I would recommend Caesar III, because it incorporates the best of all games and adds some new things, too. If you already have Caesar or Caesar II you should consider trying whether you are still fascinated by similar game play, but yet still the game Caesar III itself has already a place among those nice games arrayed on the heaven of game stars. 4. Installation Although explained with a lot of details, the installation of Caesar III may yield some problems. However I will not repeat endless "how to clean up Windows 95" articles here, instead, please contact me, if you need assistance on installing the game. If you are planning on doing so, please include at least a Microsoft System Information file, which contains all data available about your computer. -> How to extract information using Microsoft System Information - open the Windows Explorer * select Start in the left bottom corner, * select Run from the opened window, * type "explorer.exe" (without double quotes) into the blank field * press [ENTER] - go to \PROGRAM FILES\COMMON FILES\MICROSOFT SHARED\MSINFO on your primary bootdrive * select "PROGRAM FILES" (without double quotes) from any window by either clicking one time or double-clicking * select "COMMON FILES" (without double quotes) from any window by either clicking one time or double-clicking * select "MICROSOFT SHARED" (without double quotes) from any window by either clicking one time or double-clicking * select "MSINFO" (without double quotes) from any window by either clicking one time or double-clicking - run the program Microsoft System Information by selecting MSINFO.EXE from any window and pressing [ENTER] (there are other ways to start a program, but since Windows 98 lets you customize whether you use double-clicking or single clicking to open a program, I will stick to selecting and pressing [ENTER]) - select "FILE" from the menu bar on the top of the program's window by clicking on it or pressing [ALT]+F - select "SAVE" from the file menu that you have just opened - enter a path and filename for the file The file should be around 500 KBytes in size, which makes it easy to be sent via E-Mail. Should you fail in creating or sending the file, please contact me at adar@flashmail.com and I will try to assist you. 5. Setting up the preferences Some things like performance or sound volume should be adjusted before you start playing. If you have a problem like the game running very slowly, read these paragraphs. Also the following paragraphs will net you with a bunch of information you will need to set up the game for a better performance. a. Outside Before actually running the game itself, please make sure you have a look at the following file (i.e. open it with Notepad or similar). README.TXT This file contains extremely useful information considering you are not completely familiar with the instruction manual. So called 'readme' files are usually addenda to manual errata, that is, they contain information or corrections on mistakes that have been placed into the printed manual. Sometimes readme.txt files also contain information which could not be added to the help files, because different people worked on that file. There are some additional manual errata in this file, please read appendix L (manual errata) on this subject. A lot of what is stated in the README.TXT paragraph is very important and should be known by all players. Generally reading the following paragraph will render you with a thorough basis of nice tips and "what-do-I-do-now" information. It should be located in the directory whereto you installed Caesar III. I will list the most important things here, so you will not have to switch files a lot. Also I will include some hints and information from myself. As for originality as stated in the FAQ to FAQ writing (at http://www.gamefaqs.com) the following information of the following paragraphs is mainly taken from the README.TXT of Caesar III. Generally I have however corrected some mistakes that were stated and added new information. I have placed only the most important information and what conclusions may arise from reading it here. 1. Minimum requirements for playing are.. - 100% IBM compatible PC - 90 MHz processor - Quad-Speed (4x) CD-ROM drive (600 KBytes/sec transfer rate) - 16 MBytes RAM - Video Card capable of 16 Bit graphics at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels - Hard Drive space of at least 150 MBytes - Hard Drive space of at least 100 MBytes for Virtual Memory - Windows 95/98 installed If you need more detailed information on what technical terms like 'virtual memory' are, please look them up in your Windows Help. Recommended components for playing are.. - 133 MHz processor - 32 MBytes RAM - Full Installation Include with these the components from above. Of course having a 450 MHz Pentium II with 512 MBytes of RAM will work - even better, that is. 2. The following information may be useful if you have problems inside the game. You will have to come back outside (i.e. quit) to apply any of these hints. If you get a warning about low memory or "low virtual memory" please consult your Windows Help on how to increase virtual memory. Be sure that it is set to at least 100 MBytes AND that your harddrive also yields 100 MBytes of free space. If you have extremely slow game play, try increasing virtual memory and defragmenting your harddrive. Also, if you seem to have problems with your mouse, try installing new drivers from your mouse hardware vendor. Many of these offer them for free download from their homepage e.g. http://www.logitech.com for Logitech mice. Note: Even new computers may be shipped with outdated drivers. Some TSRs (programs located in the system tray, usually left of your system clock at the right corner of the Windows Desktop featured as little icons, smaller than the others on the Desktop) e.g. screen savers as well as compression programs e.g. Stacker, DriveSpace or crash protection programs e.g. Norton CrashGuard may interfere with the game. Unload these programs and try again. Do so by pressing [CTRL], [ALT], [DEL]. A window will popup. Select an application, hit [ENTER] and another window will pop up. Click "End Task" (or press [ENTER]) to unload the previously highlighted application. Trying to unload everything except "Systray", "Explorer" and "Caesar III" may crash your computer, since there are a lot of programs that are needed for some computers to function correctly e.g. when playing on a diskless workstation. Occasionally you may refresh your monitor by pressing [ALT], TAB to switch between your Desktop and Caesar III. 3. Now, if you have not yet read the manual, do so. A lot of information that follows now refers to things stated in the manual and you will not be able to follow if you do not know some basics of the game. Some things here are well in-game situations, but they are good to be known or heard of before you start a game, so you don't come back here frustrated because something does not work how you expect it to do. - there is not a context help to any single element in the game featured with a context help button - SPACEBAR does not pause time, the P button does (look up appendix D (rumors) for more information!) - use SPACEBAR to toggle between normal view and overlay view or overlay view and another overlay view - hotkeys are as follows P .. pause game [ .. reduce game speed ] .. increase game speed cursor keys .. scrol main map SPACEBAR .. view main map while in overlay view SPACEBAR .. return last overlay while in normal view L .. cycle through legions F .. fire overlay W .. water overlay D .. damage overlay C .. crime overlay T .. problems overlay advisors 1 .. labor 2 .. legion 3 .. emperor 4 .. ratings 5 .. trade 6 .. population 7 .. health 8 .. education 9 .. entertainment 0 .. religion = .. finance - .. chief hitting a key twice takes you back to normal view - you can set bookmarks to certain map locations using [CTRL], F1 for position #1 through to [CTRL], F4 for position #4; recall these bookmarks using F1 through to F4 - enter window screen mode (background = Desktop) using F6 - you may change the currect resolution using.. F7 .. 640 by 480 pixels F8 .. 800 by 600 pixels F9 .. 1024 by 768 pixels 4. The README.TXT features some hints and tips for those who actually read it. These are very useful for all who like to be on the safe side in the beginning. However, if you keep to reading this file, you may not need the README.TXT, since I incorporated some ideas, enhanced them and eliminated some mistakes in the README.TXT. FILES IN THE INSTALLATION DIRECTORY There are always some files that are human readable, or pleasantly to the point where you still can manage to edit something. *.SAV You will not have any of those directly after the installation, since these are the savegames the game creates. As you may know the filenames DOS 6.x uses are made of filename.ext; 8 characters, a point and 3 characters. This has been changed a lot with Windows 9x, as there the limit of 8 characters before the first point (more or less) has been set to 200+ characters. Basically you may use up to 255 chracters of whatever kind except \ / : * ? " < > | Now as you name your save game during game play (via the file menu - save game) you will enter a name around 10 - 20 characters usually. This name will be exported to the installation directory (i.e. to the directory you installed the game to) and there the extension ".SAV" will be added. These files are the savegame files and may be deleted freely - since you can save as often as you have free hard drive space, you may easily get a harddrive full of savegames (I did so with Dune 2 some years ago). Then you would have to delete some. Another little hint on this: Try to use senseful filenames/save- game names since when deleting you may have a hard time guessing at what savegame were those you wanted to keep and those that existed practically just to be deleted. Bad naming would be.. "BEAT EM.SAV" "HAHA.SAV" "ENDED WAR.SAV" "GOOD GRAIN.SAV" Good naming instead could be.. "LEVEL 1 - Beginning.SAV" "LEVEL 1 - Temporary Save.SAV" "LEVEL 2 - Beginning.SAV" Basically creating save games at the beginning of an assignment does not have much sense, since you may easily restart an assignment by selecting "replay map" from within the file menu. I am using a combined naming of "assignment nr." and what type of save it is. I like to keep a savefile for the beginning and ending of each assignment so that I am able to show people how to do something or make screenshots. CAESAR3.INI One very obvious line: CDDrive= ( means any letter or something else) Now changing this can assist you with game play, if it's very slow, try copying the CD to your harddisk and playing it from there. Use CDDrive=. in order for the game to recognize your harddisk as CDDrive (and thus being able to run the whole game from there - which is much faster). SIERRA.INF Some information placed by Sierra. There are some things which you may change. You can also add your own bookmarks here, which may be shown somewhere. Also your basic configuration is stored here aside with product code and version and some information which demos the game will show to you. This is interesting, since you may actually skip the demos if you just blank the lines after the equation marks. Unless you like them or have enough time to lose, do this - speeds up loading the game. C3_MODEL.TXT This file contains information on every structure and the taxes in connection with them. There is some information in that file on model data (that is the data contained therein). Basically this a trial-and-error thing. The values of what a structures costs etc. are balanced out, so game play is good. If you change this, you may have a nice cheat, like paying only little for a palace or something. This is however not recommended. Slight adjustments are okay, but do not exaggerate it. Unless you are very familiar with the game, do not change this. It offers a lot of possibilities though. Also see the SWATs section for more details on this file. STATUS.TXT Created as a log file for loading the game parts. Whenever you start the game, it logs what happens during loading the game's parts. If you have any errors at hand, have a look at what could not be loaded or was not enabled, is not sufficient (like memory) or could not be found. Except for the README.TXT and the STATUS.TXT it is a bad idea to delete any of the files contained in the Caesar III directory. Technically you may delete any TXT and MAP files for the game to work. But pre-designed maps probably needed by the game may fail to load if you do so. This could be needed for small laptop harddisks. Usually you do not get more than you lose by deleting every single file you do not need. You may also delete the SMK files (video files) and various WAV files (audio files). Handle with care - the game may crash or not even start doing so. Again technically you can reduce the amount of space needed, but this reduces the actual game to its engine functions. Same thing if you remove the beautiful red metal outlets, the wooden inlays and stuff like that from a Ferrari and go driving around with the engine in front of you. It's possible but it's not a nice feeling with all the wind coming at you at 100 mph. And then, a car door adds a lot of comfort, doesn't it? Installation Hints - I have received some questions on "ISSET_SE general protection faults". This basically happens during installation, when the setup procedure starts up and cannot allocate enough memory. Also faulty memory chips may be the cause. Be sure to thoroughly test your system before contacting me. b. Inside Quite exactly, editing any preferences inside is very easy because there are not many that refer to the games actual outlook. First of all, you have to start a game and on the main screen to actually get to editing any preferences (also have a look at the chapter later on, where we will talk about how to start a new game). On the main screen there will be a menu on the top where there is something called "options" - a dropdown menu item listing where you can select Display, Sound and Speed Settings. DISPLAY SETTINGS This lets you adjust how you actually get to look at your city. Resolution and windowed mode may be changed. These are the same things you can do with the F6 through F9 keys. SOUND SETTINGS These are very obvious. You can adjust the volume and whether sounds are played at all. Generally the basic settings (everything ON) is okay. You will have some performance gain by turning of music and sound effects. SPEED SETTINGS Now this is an interesting menuitem, because you may adjust game speed, which may help you if things are overwhelmingly fast - and that 450 MHz Pentium II running at your service may overdo it :). Scroll Speed - this lets you adjust the speed of how fast the main window will scroll around the city map Aside from these settings you may change the Warnings and the Mouse Help. Both are changed via the Help dropdown menu. Warnings - if ON shows warning e.g. nearby enemies etc. Mouse Help - if ON will show tool tip like windows if you place the mouse cursor over any topic a help item is assigned to if SOME will show only most important mouse context help This is pretty much you can do concerning preferences that have an effect on how the game works. II. General Game Play 1. Types of game play Caesar III has been designed to allow different types of playing. There are generally two modi which you may choose from. I will give an overview of both first and then go into detailed information. Career Play - This type of game puts you in the position of a Roman citizen which has to first eloborately prove her or his management skills by building two cities to a preset amount of wheat stored, population etc. may go choosing what types of city she or he governs. Basically you are given the military style career and the governing, managing type of career. A balance between both is also possible. Individual Play - This type of game allows the player to play single games with the goal Sim City may set. Expand your city and keep it alive against all the bad things that may occur. With Caesar III these things are differently from invading spaceships. But there are wild storms angered gods may conjure to wreck your nice city. Individual play more or less offers freedom of action since there are no real goals to achieve. For now we will concentrate on career play, since this is the story mode. You may also look at it from the view of a campaign, since in this mode you have many connected levels or cities to build up. 2. A note on online help and historical references There are a lot of mistakes one can make when starting a new game, that is, many things, you do not even know about in the beginning. The online help of Caesar has some very important strategies embedded into it. Even if you are going to try and play on your own, you should read this paragraph. For one, there are no spoilers because everything is available from the beginning on, and two, these are not talked about anywhere else, because I would have to rewrite them. I will try to explain it as neatly as possible, but some things may be hard to understand. I urge you to reread them since some strategies, although hard to overlook are extremely efficient. Some strategies are taken directly from the online help, because sometimes this help is quite confusing. For instance clicking context help on caravans shows help on workers. Now that was not quite exactly what you wanted, right? So help is not that useful. I have scanned through almost all screens and tried to unwind the complexity - I believe there is another manual typed into the online help. A lot of things could be noted here, but quite a bunch already is printed into the instruction manual you got when you bought the game. Still there are some glitches, ideas and hideaways you may simply overlook, because they do not seem important or because you are not yet familiar with games like Caesar. First of all, the cursus honorum discussed earlier is a bit enhanced from what usually is known to be a cursus honorum. There are far more different states on this, and you may actually have more job types than described in mythology and history encyclopediae. Now this is perfectly okay for a game like Caesar. Note that Caesar in that context also offers some glitches from history, that is, as far as it concerns the game, there are sometimes additional buttons leading to genuine historical information. In case you miss some, you can always come back to them, because if once a building has been discovered whenever you click at it, you review the historical information on it. This may be something of interest to you. 3. Exempli Gratia This section will deal with a complete game in the career mode. This means, it will take you from the actual starting of the game to the end scene. During this section there will be big amount of knowledge you can apply later on when you are playing independently. This basically will be something like a walkthrough. In career mode you have two maps of training before you finally are able to choose what maps or types of job you are going to do during the game. Since career mode also is some type of history mode (compare to campaigns, only that there is only one) I will describe every map, its difficulties and strategies to get over the problems arising. Let's get down to it. After starting the game the various opening video sequences appear. You may click the left mouse button to skip them, but do not overdo it - clicking too fast may cause the PC to crash with some machine configurations. Not even Sierra is completely sure what types these machines may be, but they experienced problems. a. Main Menu The main menu features a nice title screen "Caesar III" and four menu options. Start a new career - Clicking this enters career mode with a new career, that is a new game. Load existing career - This will allow resuming earlier careers by loading a saved game. Save games are snapshots of your current position, rank, time etc. so you may continue playing at the same position etc. after you have turned of the computer because you needed a break after many hours of continous play. City Construction Kit - The third option invokes the second game mode, which is individual playing. Here you may design your own city, just as if you were playing career mode, except you are not made Clerk, Engineer or other rank after you have completed a city. Basically this differs from career mode because you cannot have any story in the backgrond. Put simply this is designing a city to play with. HINT: If you would like to play the career mode maps in individual playing mode, which normally is not possible, save any career map you are currently in and load them when in individual playing mode. Quit - The most obvious function. Quits the game. HINT: Pressing ESCAPE will allow you to exit the game almost that quickly you sometimes miss out saving, because the game does not explicitly asks for it. Great if you want to play when your boss/parents/.. are coming around to watch you work on the PC and you have to get out quickly leaving no evidence back. Save often, if you are doing so...! b. Career Mode - Walkthrough After starting career mode, you are presented with a briefing on your first assignment. Assignment 01 - Training (Citizen) ------------------------ Objectives: population of 150 citizens Chronicles: no events Basically this is an extremely easy assignment, however still there are some vaults that you may readily jump into and wonder where all the money, citizens and fame have gone within four minutes (it's a pity I did not film my first try on the game - without reading the manual I just started clicking around - bing - that was it ... 4 minutes 3 seconds of playing) What we are going to do now, is have a little relaxation, because knowing The Settlers I, II or III will render you with some experience of what will be going to happen very soon. 150 citizens may sound really little if you compare it with Sim City where a 5 billion (or so) citizens is maximum. Now, 150 actual means 150. So if you have 150 citizen you can go, press P for game pausing and then scroll around counting them. Here it would be a bit difficult, because once you reach your goal you will be awarded a new rank and that's it for this city - on to new waters. But not so fast. We have just read the first few lines of the briefing and that is not quite enough for a new rank yet. If you look carefully at what is provided during the briefing, you may well understand a lot of the game's inner workings. As mentioned beforehand practically the whole manual has been embedded into the game, and part of it will be shown almost every briefing. During this briefing they teach you how to reach your objectives, namely building a path and placing housing. First things first I read in a FAQ some days ago. And that's what's happening shortly. Clicking the little arrow in the window on the bottom right corner will lead you to a little loading and finally your main view expanding over your monitor. This seems to be your home for the next hour, because an hour around you may spend before advancing. Depending on what you would like to do - gain experience, try various things - or just roam about get some people chained to your city and move on, this assign- ment takes from 10 minutes to 60 minutes. Keep in mind that a well built city also is quite rewarding, and during career mode the more money you have the better gifts you can give to Caesar, the better you will be in his favor. This reminds me of a little erroneous information during the game. You start out in around 400 BC, which is definitely not the living time of Caius (yes, it's a C, not a G, that's Latin, folks) Iulius (I instead of J) Caesar, who actually lived from 100 BC to 44 BC (when he was murdered). Being Caesar's friend is already rewarding a lot if you need assistance or run out of money: Caesar may justly give you 5000 more denars if you need them. (Denars are the currency unit used, aside of the more widely known sesterce, the denar was the larger unit, compare: dollar - cent and denar - sesterce). There is no significant difference in naming this currency unit denar or denarius, the plural being denars or denarii. One it the English derivation from the latter Latin expression denarius. So, you have arrived at the main view of your map. Quite actually I have tried this various times and found out some things.. - the first map does not change contrary to some rumors on the InterNet - the trees and rivers are always situated at the same positions, relating to north-south coordinates - the size of the map is not the full size available in later games - you face unemployment very fast, since there will be a lot of citizens and you will not have enough need of structures, since you will have constructed the needed structures very fast, because you only have a few structures to build in the beginning Actually these things are very general but apply well to the first assignment. If by now you start experience performance problems, please read the related paragraphs again, because later in the game the screen gets so crowded with animated little people that performance will drop to a frame each second. The first thing you may try to do whenever you enter a level may be looking for a suitable site for your first residential area (of course saving beforehand may be a nice idea as well). This may well be somewhere where you have as many resources close by as possible. For this city, and only for this city by now, look for a place, where there is some water, a river for example, and big patches of land without rocks. It does not matter whether there are many trees, since most of the time land will be covered with trees which makes it almost impossible to be member of Greenpeace of ancient Rome. Now that you have found an appropriate spot, you start building and note that, heck, citizens seem to move in from one side only! - Now that can be remedied. I recommend you have another look at the map. There is a red signpost at one side and a blue one on another one. The red one directs people into your territory, and the blue one away from your territory. This means, that most of the time, you will start building from the red signpost, because citizens will then come in from the fastest. Note: Do this only, if enough resources are close by, or resources are not available at all at that stage, or - alternatively to the latter two, if resources are not important. And that's what's happening during the first assignment. Resources are much less important than they get very soon during the next assignments. But for now, you may simply eradicate ("detach") some trees from their former woods by clicking the shovel icon on the right icon bar and then marking a 3d-window shape with clicking the left mouse button and dragging the window around. You will notice the ground shape is changing slightly indicating you are changing the window borders. Inside the border usually everything will be destroyed. Now again, don't exaggerate in the beginning. You do not have a huge money bag at your disposal and tax income with a 100 citizens is not overwhelmingly good - perhaps just enough to pay your income (which we'll discuss a little later). Be careful with this option, because you can lay waste to a full grown city within a second and leave a thousand people stranded. Build a three by three tile square without a housing in the middle - a method taken from Sim City. Now click onto the icon with the 3d-street picture. If you cannot find it - it's hard to identify - click on the icon to the right of the shovel. Create a patch of roads around your 3x3 tile. Using the shovel you can correct any misplaced tiles, but beware, everything costs money and again: you do not have endless money bags in your treasury. A more in-depth description of what you have to do: After you have eradicated some space above and below the initial street, start building out some housing (select the house icon and place each housing tile simply by clicking the left mouse button. Remember that you can also click and hold this button and then build a row or rectangle at once. The cost for these types of building actions always are shown at one corner of the window you are creating. With buildings in general it will be much easier distinguishing the window borders from the background, because half visible shadows of the buildings to be build will be shown. In case of housing however just a signpost will be displayed - something like "for rent" or "for sale"-signs. :) These first housing patches may well disappear if you are not fast enough drawing streets around, so be fast, or alternatively do not put too many down at once. Be sure streets are adjacent to the housing patches! A 3x3 tile should last quite some time, but, left alone from the main street, that is, not adjacent to the main street - which is a normal road all by itself - will disappear far more likely right a second before you click on it than a 3x3 tile adjacent at one side to the main street running straight across and cornering to the left (north). OKay, so your first 3x3 tile is set up, you came up with streets. Now go for some wells. Later on we will use another "standard" design for housing, but for this level 3x3 tiles are more than enough. On the free tile in the center place a well. Placing a well is almost as easy as any other building action: Click on the double wave symbol in the lower right corner of the screen. Select 'well' and then click at the center of the 3x3 tile. A well will be built. To have a look at the water distribution system, press W. This will activate the water overlay, which lets you examine the sewer and water distribution pipes, if such exist, and in case of a well as this one, lets you see what area can be covered with water to last the demand. Now that the well seems to hydrate the surrounding area quite well, begin building some more 3x3 tiles. For your first projects try building one or two more 3x3 tiles. Do not build more than that, or you may run out of funds quite soon. Do not forget the wells at their centers. Citizens should begin moving in quickly and within half an hour your city should already have a fifty to hundred citizens. Now your city features some unusual behavior: fires will break out, because Romans tend to burn every building you do not explicitly watch out for. -) For this reason let's built a prefecture, a site where a "soldier"-like person stays and moves out to watch for crime and fire - should a fire start, you can watch him carry two heavy buckets of water. Right click on him whilst he's carrying them, and he'll simply tell you, he's busy! ;-) Now, hurry with that prefecture, because if you do not, fire will spread around the city and all housing be destroyed. The leftover rubble is NOT able to hold housing, so you have to eradicate that using the shovel icon mode and then rebuilt housing. It makes sense to have enough or more than enough prefecture offices around and spread around the city all the time: first, because fire can lay waste to a city almost as fast as can do the shovel. And second, because sometimes citizens come marching into your city seeking a housing position. And with twenty to fifty new houses filled within a few seconds you may get problems supplying them all. So new housing should always have water (which the little fellows from the prefecture will need to fetch!) and a prefecture nearby. You can watch how much buildings are likely to catch fire by pressing the F key, which activates the fire overlay. The higher the column the worse the situation. Do not get it higher than three units and everything's fine. Higher is very dangerous. And highest means fire-water-burn to your city. But that's not all of the trouble. If you did everything correctly and keep waiting suddenly your buildings will start collapsing. Fun, isn't it? Okay, another obstacle fortuna has placed on our way to glorious city building. You will have to erect engineers' outposts. Those are not needed to be put that frequently because buildings catch fire more likely than they will collaps. If you press D you may examine the damage overlay showing you structural damage within your city. Again: keep it to a maximum of three unit columns. More may be the Big One to your city. You'll find the engineer's post in the construction submenu, that's where the hammer is displayed on a rectangular area right next to the sword where you found the prefecture. A note on desirability: maybe you have found out you may examine a single building by right clicking it. Generally examining something is possible with right mouse clicks. Another click will deactivate the information popup window. Now a buiiding next to a prefecture has the likelihood of not developing very well. Try to move the prefecture some tiles away (mind the fire overlay!). Security should be your topmost goal. Next comes housing, then food, water.. etc. Note: Chain structures such as aqueducts do not affect desirability. Okay. Your city should be flourishing now. Since there are no enemies that early in the game all you have to do is provide shelter and water. Note: Your prefecture-soldier does not necessarily need road access to your well. He still will get buckets from the wells if they are placed within the insula - in case you wondered. Next thing you will have to do is build a senate. These huge buildings.. - increase desirability - manage to get taxes (beforehand you did not receive any) - show you ratings faster than the rating advisor - can only be built once in an assignment, that is, there may be only one You may be noticing changes in the street graphics: this is a sign for development. Because of the nice senate you just built streets are getting enhanced. This shows you are building a nice community. Usually it takes around a year to accomodate 150 people, although if you are fast and do not look at your city looking perfectly nice, you can do it within three months' time as well as in twelve. Next will be the temples. But beforehand you should have a look at whether you have enough workers. Whenever the message "not enough workers" appears, build more housing, and if needed provide more food (we'll get to that later on). If you have not had any messages (and you have turned Warnings ON) go ahead and build each god a small temple. One after another, waiting whether there will be a message, which may happen if there is not enough housing in your city to accomodate all those workers. Build a temple of Ceres (you may access them via the flash symbol in the array of icons to the right of the screen), Neptune, Mars, Mercury and Venus (all of the gods). Whereever you build them keep following in mind: - build a temple for every 750 people you have - build them spread so each house has access to a temple - temples raise desirability of their neighborhoods - always have the same number of temples for all the gods (i.e. 4 of all gods; 4 for Ceres, 4 for Venus,..) otherwise you will displease them and a wrathful god is a pain in the neck - it can wreck your city within a year. During or shortly after you have built the temples you will reach around 140-150 people which ends your assignment. There is a way evading this and building more temples and fill the screen: simply only build one 3x3 tile or, alternatively even less. Now this should only be done if you are completely sure you have saved beforehand, because if you do so, you may actually fail the assignment. Another thing possible is the following: Since you may play on this map later on in the City Construction Mode (which is the single map game, similar to melee game in Command & Conquer) you may as well stay in this level and make a full grown city out of it. The only problem is, after some time it will be very hard getting a lot of houses, a lot of money etc. with just 140-145 people. As soon as one house evolves, it can hold more people and if people immigrate to your city in that moment the assignment is over (though successfully finished). If you have done well, let's face the next assignment. Assignment 02 - Training (Clerk - Brundisium) ------------------------ Objectives: population of 650 citizens Chronicles: no events This assignment is already a bit more difficult. A little side note: First of all you start out on a completely different map. With this assignment you may already experience size problems. My city soon expanded over the half of the map. But don't worry, the single levels are not that hard and once you have tried this level you may retry it as many times as you want simply by selecting Replay Map in the File menu of the game. This makes exploring and trying out very easy. You could for example try different trade routes, undergo experiments as to write "I Love You" with garden patches (which impresses girlfriends; or boyfriends, to the girl players out there) or make a Smiley out of it. But let's start right into it. If you have read the online help carefully one thing they tell you (as well as I am telling you from time to time above and below this very line) is to look very hard where to place your first residential district. Now this is very important. You may as well have a little pause and scroll around the map for a few mintues looking at what will be built where. Naturally farms and all food industry will have to be built on farmland. And this is something which will happen quite a few times during this level: Something which you never have heard about just coming in without warning. During this and the next assignment (level, mission, heck!) you will face the situation as follows: You have nearly all types of buildings at your commands. This makes it hard to decide what to build with absolutely no experience how many farms are needed for say a large city of 2000 people. But all you need is written here - let's get back to farmland. Farmland is basically what is displayed with yellow dotted areas (which may be wheat). These yellow dotted areas are also shown on the minimap in the upper right corner. So go to one of these patched areas and have a look, whether there is some water nearby. If so, you've found your place. As stated earlier, always have raw materials, farmland and water close by. Since raw materials (clay in this case) are always near water, or stone (with marble) all you need is some farmland, a river or pond and some small pebbles around (well, a mountain to be exact). Found your place? Okay! Now best would be if you started out in the Southern West corner by eradicating around a big area. Desirability increases as you clear the surrounding of trees. There, to the North build a reservoir to have water access, but mind that it should be far away from the rest of the to-be residential area. A short way to the north (that is to the upper side of the screen area) there is a flat (i.e. not zig-zag running part of coastline); try building it there. After you have established your first housing areas start out building prefectures and engineers' post. You should have at least two for every twenty buildings you build and at least two of each should be on every screen you look at; if the city inside this screen fills out the whole main view, that is. Finally you should remember that you must build a senate in order to receive any income from taxes. For the moment this is more an object of prestige rather than a real source of venues. Build it though. Another thing very important in this scenario is to open up a trade route as soon as possible. You can do so by making up with around 3 clay pits and another two or three potteries (found under the hammer icon on the right portion of the screen; click on workshops then on pottery). Don't place either of them near any housing facilities or you will suffer in deevolution of these very housings. If you are set having enough employment around 300 people in your city and a well working industry over all, you may have forgotten something: Our chain was security, water, food. And we still lack food. If your people have not complained as of yet, now is the latest time to actually build farming. Do so in the Southern regions. Next to the farms build a granary and near to your housing, but on the opposite side of the roads, build markets. Two for each 9x9 tile cluster (approximately). After building all the basic structures (including temples), do not forget you will need water for each housing building. If you have a lot of money try opening up any trade routes that may be possible. Note on trade routes: These, if established will bring caravanes of traders or trading ships to your city which will naturally bring much more income than before. You will have to pay a little money initially but after you actually have started a trade route, and be it the least effective selling only wheat you may gain a lot of money from it; I usually have all possible trade routes open and my cash income seldomly falls below 10000 denars. If so I usually just wait and sit without expanding for a minute; which usually renders you with exports of marble to the extent of 10000 denars. Opening trade routes is basically very simple; all you have to do is opening the trade advisor which is located on the button to the left of the small map on the right icon section of the screen; alternatively you may press 5 which will also bring you there directly. Another possibility would be to go there via the menu bar (advisors). As you reach the trade advisor you will face a ton of options you may select from. Be aware that every little thing you change here ultimately also effects on the wellbeing of your city. For example clicking on wheat brings up a window which allows you to start stockpiling wheat. If you start stockpiling wheat now, in that early of the game your people will soon starve. But later on Caesar may request wheat from you and stockpiling is the most effective way of getting enough wheat for the request to be dispatched as soon as possible (and since requests are bound to a time countdown of 24 months or less you maybe want to hurry - the faster the better the favor score you earn - it seems). Clicking on any product you may trade with does not have any sense right now; first click on "Goto Empire" at the (not very) far bottom of the screen. This will bring up another window which shows a map of the Roman Empire, its borders and other cities around. Their flags are color-coded: - red cities are Roman cities willing to trade with you - a big golden flag indicates your city - cyan flagged cities indicate Roman cities not willing to trade with you - dark yellow flagged cities indicate distant cities of foreign population Try to specialize in commodities (i.e. products made in the workshops out of the stuff you produce in the raw materials outlets). For now make up one type of commodity which is not immediately needed by your people e.g. clay. Be sure you can trade this item with any city (clicking on the various cities reports to you what they will buy (buys) or sell (sells) in advance to opening a trade route of specific type). Exit the advisor now. After you have built some clay pits and have your workshops start producing pottery, open the trade route by clicking on the city you want to open a trade route with (of course on the Roman Empire map). By clicking on the city there will shown an additional button on the bottom of the map where you may click (it is labelled "xxxx denarii to open trade route"). Click on it and you will be offered the possibility to visit your trade advisor. Do so. With the trade advisor click on the goods you want to trade. After another window has appeared click on "not trading" which will change to "trade over .. units". Enter 0 units for the beginning. If you are trading pottery this is okay. It's meaning is as follows: .. units will be stockpiled. If you have stockpiled above a certain amount you enter here, the overflo0w will be exported. The stockpiled amount will be traded within the city so long you do not enter stockpiling on the button at the bottom of this window. After you have finished click the little arrow on the bottom right corner of this screen. Resume with your city planning then. You will have 8000 denari at your disposal, which should be plenty to build and rebuild your city quite a few times. The more money you save, the better you will be able to face any crisis that may occur. If you are not able to hold your money bag filling above 2000 denari, immediately start a trade route. Focus on this. Of course basic supplies like water and food, security and engineering must be provided first. If you have too many employees, build temples. Aside from the blessing you may receive this takes away a few employees. If you have too little employees, take away extra buildings. If you cannot afford anything else you will have to eradicate some housing space in order to make the surplus of employees go away (only if your problem is unemployment or lack of food; if you have too many jobs, and enough food respectively, build some housing and immigrants will overrun the place!). OKay, I hope you are doing well that far. If this was quite complicated, don't worry. This assignment was quite overwhelming for myself in the first as well, since you have so many new things to think of. You may get a feeling over time for how to face a crisis and soon some things like placing housing at a nice pattern (I privately like 5 housing tiles in one row, in the middle of another row right behind them I put a fountain, the rest is filled with gardens; I usually use empty spots which are left due to landscape types with barbers, doctors, prefectures and engineering posts namely). Now that you already have a nice city going, you may as well try out one of these hints. Maybe something is going wrong and you would like some help.. - from time to time activate D(amage) overlay and scan through your whole city whether there is need for more engineer's posts - sometimes the engineers also do not go where you want them to go (I had a nice farmland area some way from my senate - which is usually my centre of town - and the engineer I placed near the farms actually did not give a penny for the farms and wandered around the senate having a good time; perhaps this is connected with desirability because my farms usually do not have a higher desirability than the area surrounding my senate) - do the same with your prefectures in F(ire) overlay - if a fire occurs immediately take out (!) any adjacent buildings with 2x2 tiles or less, you can easily afford rebuilding them, but usually you cannot afford them having put fire to their adjacent buildings and so on until you got something like another burning Rome - which you clearly will never be able to afford - if a building collapses remove the rubble immediately as it causes negative desirability - usually people get thrown out of their homes even though you did not do anything: this is a cause of lack of housing; build more residential areas - buildings always need specific things to evolve, right click them and have a look what's needed - build that and more people will be able to live in that newly evolved grand insulae (which is even nice to look at - and if you care to have a few in a row it already looks a bit like a city of ancient times!) - always have water, even most primitive sources like wells are needed to get bigger tents from normal tents - only place wells though if you have no chance of putting up a reservoir nearby - initially you do not earn a lot from your taxes and you should have set it to something around 1%, later if there are enough people to get a 1000 denari from 4% to 6% make it 7% increasing by 1% every year from the 1% you had to the 7% you want These should be quite a bunch of things to watch for yet. Although there are many many more details like with driving a car it happens that you get much more accustomed to it than you may believe. It will run through your fingers and mind almost automatically. Whenever you have spare time, try searching for problems. Either there is one or one is developing - seems to be part of the game concept... :) To quote E. Murphy: "If you have tried to mount two things a third one, unexpected will go lose and crash" - and many similar ones. Assignment 03 - Choice ---------------------- Times get interesting from now on. The first two assignments were for training only. But now we will concentrate on real- life matters. You are given to choose between a more peaceful city named Capua and a slightly dangerous city called Tarentum. We will try both. First let's face Capua, which seems the easier one. Choice #1 (Capua) Engineer - salary of DN 5/month Objectives: population of 2500 citizens prosperity rating of 10 favor rating of 60 culture rating of 35 peace rating of 20 Chronicles: Initial money DN 8000 Highest Housing Level Grand Villa Trading (all selling and buying is on a per year basis) Syracusae (sea route) sells 15 meat sells 15 marble buys 15 olives buys 25 oil buys 15 furniture Tarentum (land route) sells 15 furniture sells 15 wine buys 25 pottery Jan 350 BC The level begins Requests Jul 348 BC 10 oil Apr 345 BC 15 oil Things may prove a bit more difficult than ever before. You have a full disposal of buildings to build and you have 8000 denars to waste. But beware! Don't hesitate but don't overdo it either! This assignment has some tricky spots. As always try to locate a nice spot for the beginning of your settling. Ideally this should be somewhere on the street and to the south where there is farmland. Build your first reservoir to the river north and put up some housing just south in order for some fountains to work with. After this initial residential placements, build up a senate somewhere near to the left on the main street. You should have enough employees to start building temples. Do so. Then build housing around the senate which increases their desirability (and thus evolving them to a better level). Place gardens near housing, at curves and crossings place plazas. Do not overput plazas as these represent special places. A special place will become boring if there are only special places on the world. Next start building farms right on the edge of the map near the main street as far away from the farmland as possible. Build 4 farms for wheat. A granary just next by and one or two markets around your housing. Of course you need to connect everything using some streets! If you are not able to support your farms with water from a fountain or well, do not worry. Initially they do not necessarily need water supply, but do not forget them after some time has passed. If you would like to add the water supply immediately, be sure you still have a bit of money left - you will need a few denars left after you have finished with the following sect ion. First, clear any remaining woodland or grassland in the vincinity of the lake with the island in it. Next, build a reservoir as close as possible to your farms, but beware, do not build them on the rare, valuable farmland. Keeping all these things in mind finally place your cursor and erect it. Place your first fountain as far north (towards the main road) as possible. This will make future expansion in this region easy: Since you are supplying an area beyond the needed already you are possibly filling the gap of pipelines in the subterranean level with fountains which actually supply a much bigger amount of area than the wells will do. Besides: fountains cause bigger desirability, too; this will be visible, when you notice the fountains develop. Sometimes they'll be rectangular, but usually they get nicer all the time. This generally is an indicator for the cleanliness and desirability this fountain spreads. Although you could have done so earlier, now may be the right time starting up your advisors. And this will be something we will be going to discuss a bit more in-depth here. Take a look at the 'Advisors'-menu on the menu toolbar on top of the screen. Left-Click there and select 'labor advisor'. This will bring up a completely different screen. The game will be paused for the time you spend with your advisor, so take a good, extensive look at what is presented to you. Basically the labor advisor allows to change the priority at which the people will be working at specific jobs. E.g. we've got entertainment, religion and education. Now if you place priority 1 on entertainment, 2 on religion and 3 on education, people will primarily work on enter- tainment, and respectively on the other two. This of course only applies if you are low on workers. If the game starts telling you that you are in need of more workers, you may actually change the priority, so that the most needed jobs are getting done. Otherwise people themselves choose what they want to be ("I want to be a lion tamer" :). Best however would be if you set the priorities before you are facing a crisis. Most of the time a crisis arises because you do not have set these settings and people start having (say) a job as teacher and you lack in prefectury workers who keep your houses from burning down (which will assuredly happen if you do not have enough people assigned to prefectures). Now what would be the best priority setting, you may ask. Even though this depends on what level you are in among how you designed your city - you should try to balance everything out: the number of unemployed/employed workforce is always shown in the labor advisor; as long as you have got unemployment, try building some things which render some jobs, preferably something that increases desirability or welfare (e.g. trade goods like clay pits); as soon as you got exactly the needed workforce start building housing; alternatively, if there is already a forty people moving into your city (from some far away edge to your city) you may as well get more jobs built. I usually keep my priorities set around to this. Note that this is generic and should be changed if something else is more important. Priority 1 ... Prefectures (otherwise buildings will burn down, crime produces bad habited rioters who are quicker with fire than normal citizens) 2 ... Water Services (without the simplest form of water supplement not even tents will develop) 3 ... Food Production (food, jobs and water are essential to immigration) 4 ... Engineering (buildings will crash; not as soon as with lack of prefectures they would catch fire, but they will, if you do not have an engineer close-by) 5 ... Industry and Commerice (quite important, since without workers or merchants even markets will not supply food) 6 ... Health and Education (important to immigration, since the better the people are talking about you and your renownedness, and the big life-span you've got in that nice city of your's, the more like to come - also some high class citizens need it badly; aside from that, education always is good, isn't it?) 7 ... Governance and Religion (governance means tax income, which is not very important if you have a good trade route array, but religion can be dangerous - even so gods are not angered as fast as are citizens without water and shelter) 8 ... Entertainment (important to high class citizens, among immigration) 9 ... Military (should be changed to higher setting in more hostile areas; see specific assignments) All set? OKay. There's plenty more you will have to do: - prepare to set out doctor's huts (under the cross symbol) around your housing - make up some hospitals (about half or less than doctor's huts) - build a school, library and academy somewhere nearby housing - build an actor colony near to any housing and one or two theaters (NOT amphitheaters) spread around your housing - best would be farthest from the colony, since the actors will tell all houses they pass about their new play on the way from the colony to the amphitheatre - from time to time scan using fire and damage overlays in order to control whether your prefectures and engineer's huts harmonize with your city design - try to concentrate on harmony more than on expansion; this is especially important once your city grows beyond one screen - there's almost always a minor fault you should correct; but beware: don't get distracted! - should you manage to get a layout that is very suitable, please send me a short notice, so I can implement the strategy here - as soon as population exceeds 750 citizens build another small temple for each god - basically each temple can cover 750 citizens at maximum - but try to spread them over the city so each citizen has good access to religious services These are just basic guidelines. You should try to smoothly arrange with these actions: expansion, harmonizing, pleasing the gods and getting money. Oh, yes. Getting money. Wages can be set too in the labor advisor. It's generally a bad idea having lower wages than Rome. If you can afford it, pay 5-10% more than Rome does. Let's get back to the advisors. The legion advisor is not that important for this assignment, but the emperor advisor is. You need 60 favor points and that is quite much if you are low on money. If your private salary savings allow it, buy some expensive (generous should be plenty) gifts. But aside from this, you will have to supply goods some time - and this one's coming up soon. The next advisor may be the most important in some aspects. It basically shows you how much you have advanced towards completing the assignment. Aside from a certain score you have to reach during the assignment you will also receive important hints on what the city is lacking. For example with culture it may be academies which may be attended by young grown ups - Caesar III keeps track on what type of people are in your city, their age, everything. There is even a graph on this with one of the advisors - we'll look on that later, though. If you reach the trade advisor things will start getting interesting. Raising funds never has been easier. Although there are quite a bunch of things to realize if you want a functioning trade route. There may be two different things that may arise out of your current situation: 1. Caesar demands resources from you (e.g. 12 units of oil) 2. you want to open a trade route because you need money If you have not opened up any trade routes start doing so immediately. This is next to required for your survival. Should Caesar require something from you, try to have it within the given period. Hints to achieve this.. - try to increase your workshops' output by getting built warehouses nearby - get more workshops built - with oil have at least 5 workshops if you need 1 oil/month - try to get farms of all types as soon as possible - always produce MUCH more than you eat If you manage to build these things and have still some harmony, you will easily succeed in this scenario. You now get the choice of accepting your promotion or continue building your city for 2 or 5 years. You will not receive any salary, because you are doing this out of free will (no more gifts for Caesar!). Whatever you may choose, after this period you will advance to the next assignemnt (skip the next paragraphs in this case!). Choice #2 (Tarentum) Engineer - salary of DN 5/month Objectives: population of 2500 citizens prosperity rating of 10 favor rating of 60 culture rating of 35 peace rating of 20 Chronicles: Initial Money DN 8000 Highest housing level Medium Insulae Requests 347 BC 10 Vines in 24 Months 345 BC 10 Vines in 24 Months 342 BC 10 Vines in 24 Months Invasions 347 BC 5 Etruscans from NNW 344 BC 9 Etruscans from W 341 BC 13 Etruscans from NNW Loans DN 6000 Price Changes 345 BC furniture (+DN 40) This is a quite tough assignment if you are not very careful with what you are bound to do. First of all: Try to celebrate a few festivals around one every 4-6 months. Dedicate at least half of them to Mars. This will most probably allow so called guardian spirits to destroy any incoming enemies, Since throughout the assignment you will have some enemies closing in, this is a very nice addition to any legion you may build. Generally gods are giving you boosts in a special way if you please them with a lot of temples/festivals... Ceres yields boosted crop growing, Mercury increases payment from oversee trade, Neptune lets them arrive faster, Venus enhances the moods of the people. For more information on mood effecting on the game see game concepts (IV). Now this region is somewhat strange in building, but quite actually I tried Aaron Jensen's strategy here the first time and it worked extremely well. See the SWAT section for more information on how to apply this. The layout is very simple and may be also applied in part as well. This means, you also have an open side of the rectangle in any type - e.g. without a street on one side. You can build gardens etc. inside. Around it build a school, library, actor colony, theatre and more in that direction. Be sure to have your taxes raised to about 7% only after you have reached around 1000 people. With that happening (probably with your second rectangle) you will need to build a forum. This is found in the same menu as you find the senate in. Simply select overlay view and commerce/tax income to see where the least money is received from. Where there is no money got from, build a forum nearby which allows the people being registered. Generally a rate of around 90% registered payers is quite okay - but hey - 10% more brings 10% more in tax income, so why not spend a little more on extra fora (latin word, plural is fora)? I would recommend building the first settlement near the blue flag. Enemies will almost all the time come from the opposite corner which leaves enough time to react to their strength and approach. Walls should be build only if there are excessive enemies or if you do not have a "exalted" with Mars in the religion advisor (which would mean you do not have any guardian spirits at hand). If you want to rely on your own army alone, do sure build some walls and remember all the hints that are found in this text on building a wall (search for wall if you do not remember them all). Right, the city should be flourishing quite well by now. If you have your settlement, build across the country. Be sure to have around 1000 people quite soon. Simultaneously establish all possible trade routes, as you are surely going to need the money: build two iron mines and at least three vine-farms (Caesar will request 15 vines later on) together with 4-5 weapon workshops (exports and army supplies) and around 3-4 wine workshops (people and exports). If you are set with that, we'll face some detailed hints. - build barracks, a fort for legionaries, a military academy adjacent and away from residential districts in that order - have them staffed - do not draw a city wall unless Mars' wrath is on you; most of the times his guardian spirits will kill the enemy (and if his wrath is on you, hold a grand festival to his honor, build him a large or small temple and one or two oracles - balance the overall temples for each god, though - and he'll be settled again) - build auxiliaries only if you are planning to stay in this level after completion (2 or 5 years) - most of the time enemies are not immortal; hit them fast and hard and they are but whincing meat - try to be on the "double": have two or more legionaries at hand for each enemy unit you face so you can easily overthrow them - clicking on the fort will produce a line up with formations: * only send people into war who have positive health and morale (perfect with both is only available with the already build military academy) * have them use the left most of the selectable formations since this is the most efficient one * read the descriptions of the formations and act accodingly - watch your people when fighting, re-arrange their order and formation if needed and retreat if the onslaught is too strong, sometimes enemies wait there for you to return with another (new, refreshed) refreshed army - build more legions or auxiliaries if you need more legionaries - have long range fighters behind short range, because short range fighters can then protect the more effective long range units who are extremely vulnerable to short range attacks Should you win all (total battle count with my games: one) battles, your city may well raise its desirability since you are able to defend from enemies - possibly. I noticed slight changes in crime rates after successful battles. Note: Once the enemy has entered your city, the best is to let him damage something and remove all buildings in a line behind that building, building a wall in the empty trench and then moving on again. With that, the assignment should be done for easily. Assignment 04 - Choice ---------------------- Whatever you chose priorily, you again will have to choose between a hostile area and more or less peaceful region. Basically both can be the same, with the peaceful region being a bit easier to conquer, because you do not need any legions. We will start out with Tarraco in Spain (old name: Hispania) - the peaceful region, but later on I will also talk about the "somewhat" dangerous region Syracusae, the so called wheat store of ancient Rome (because the closer Roman cities were all supplied by grain from this island in the very early times - also, this was the first Roman province). Choice #1 (Tarraco) Architect - salary of DN 8/month Objectives: population of 2500 citizens prosperity rating of 25 favor rating of 70 culture rating of 45 peace rating of 30 Chronicles: Initial money DN 8000 Highest housing level Medium Insulae Trading Capua (sea route) sells 25 timber buys 40 wheat buys 25 fruit Tarentum (sea route) sells 15 furniture buys 25 marble buys 15 pottery Jan 270 BC The level begins Requests Apr 269 BC 10 pottery Sep 267 BC 10 fruit Mar 265 BC 15 pottery May 263 BC 25 fruit Sep 261 BC 15 pottery Mar 259 BC 20 fruit May 257 BC 15 pottery Jun 255 BC 15 fruit Sep 250 BC 15 fruit Sep 245 BC 15 fruit There are no more requests after 245 BC. Price Changes Aug 265 BC Fruit price increased by 20 Dn Jul 262 BC Marble price increased by 20 Dn May 255 BC Furniture price increased by 20 Dn Mar 250 BC Fruit price decreased by 15 Dn There is a strange detail I just noticed with this assignment. If you play the dangerous assignment (Tarentum) as assignment #03, and then choose this one, Caesar (i.e. the assignment briefing) will tell you that you have to get less people into the city now, but strangely this assignment again requires 2500 citizens. So, may this be a bug? Another nice thing you may recognize: Playing this assignment after Tarentum will present the same map as would be presented if you had not chosen Tarentum in the first choice you had to take. We'll have a look at whether there will be earthquakes as well in this region. Yep there are! It may be some time for you to build your city, but the earthquake will assuredly come (Jun 268 BC). It always affects the same area with the same pattern, so building, saving, reloading and doing it better second time would be wise. Quite actually you may still access all of the land if you stick to building bridges there. You should be using the 9x9 road tiles layout and should have some three of them (complete or incomplete is not that important) around. If your money ever drops below 2000 denarii, build a warehouse, if you do not already have one and a dock. Open up a trade route selling marble. This will greatly bring money to your city. If you actually build two docks, you are done with that for the time being. Have at least three marble mines, better four and make them produce as hell goes - all filled up with employees. If you also want your citizens to get marble, or need marble for temples (big temples for instance require marble loads, or loads of marble, if you want to put it like that), you should build another two mines. There is plenty of stone and since you do not need any workshops, build your warehouse nearby. If you can afford it, build more than one warehouse. Always have the granary nearby if not attached because food is rare and the faster the wheat is produced, the faster you will get your people fed and the less will starve and/or leave your city because of malnutrition. If your city is close to harmony start importing timber to let your large casas advance to insulae. You cannot get anything better than medium insulae here, because you cannot get oil. But with medium insulae, three 9x9 tiles should be enough to reach the population goal. The peace rating will come with time - since there are no prolonged intruders you may as well sit there and wait for it to raise. But beware of rioters! Those decrease the peace score. For the favor score, you should buy gifts periodically and deliver whatever Caesar wants as fast as possible. Waiting a year for around 15 units of fruit IS annoying! Culture should be no problem; since 750 people need one small temple of each god or vice versa - each god needs a temple for each units of 750 people you got - you will have quite a few temples around which will nicely raise your culture score. Not so with the prosperity rating. This may be a bit difficult and hints on that may be found in-game as well as here. One would be to have all trades routes set up, imports set to nil, 2-4% unemployment, medium taxes (4-9%) and a working industry which will supply a 10000 denarii a year. If you are doing well, your score will raise, if you lose money, your score will drop. Losing means, overall. That is, you use 10000 denarii on building and get an income of say 20000 denarii still means you got 10000 denarii with no money lost but prosperity increasing because of the positive overall money. Remember: High taxes only are useful if,.. - they do not exceed 10% (riots will happen otherwise) - fora and a senate collect them (as soon as the registered tax payer rate drops below 90% you need more fora!) - the tax collectors are working (i.e. you have enough employees for the senate etc.) - you have a 1000+ citizens. Otherwise drop them to 1-6% (increases immigration by a lot!) After managing this assignment another choice assignment lies ahead, and the following ones appear to be even tougher. But let's face it: you can do it! You came that far! Venebas, videbas, vicebas! Choice #2 (Syracusae) Architect - salary of DN 8/month Objectives: population of 4000 citizens prosperity rating of 20 favor rating of 20 culture rating of 45 peace rating of 25 Chronicles: Requests 267 BC 5 Oil in 24 Months 264 BC 5 Oil in 24 Months 261 BC 10 Oil in 24 Months Invasions 267 BC 9 Greeks from SSW 264 BC 16 Greeks from SE 261 BC 16 Greeks from SW 258 BC 16 Greeks from SE Initial Money: DN 8000 Loan: DN 6000 Price Changes: 267 BC; oil (+ DN 40) You start out with the goal to provide a new settlement, once more. However, earlier governors had problems establishing and permanent city of any size in this area, and so, Caesar's premium governor, you, obviously, is sent to deal the matter. Basically the main problem will be feeding 4000 people with just a few patches of farmland. And this is it: You have too little farmland than to be able to feed them. You will have to generate food by importing them. Additionally to this you will have to waste precious farmland using olive farms for oil Caesar is going to request. However - the favor score only needs to be 20 points, which is extremely low compared to the 70 you had set as goal earlier in the game. Now this could mean you may ignore some (or all) of his requests, because a score of 20 is achievable also with gifts alone. However, we will try to achieve the best out of the situation. Note: It is not recommended ignoring Caesar's requests completely, since favor will drop to 1 (he wants you into arrest) - and the only way to raise it from there is getting the exports done he wants and other things amongst some gifts as well. This is, if you are not close from winning the ratings assignment dangerous and laid waste to a complete city of mine! This assignment is among the hardest you may have seen by now. Usually the threat from invasors is nothing compared with the real low amount of food you are able to produce. First of all, really do think about how and where you are going to build up your housing. It is highly recommended that you use the 9x9 tile technique described in the SWATs section. With this technique, build one residential rectangle, and another, directly adjacent. The second one contains of the following buildings: a senate, one or two temples, a prefecture, an engineer's post, a doctor and a barber. Additionally add anything you like to this. Next, on the farthest side of the second rectangle make up a fort of legionaries and one of mounted auxiliaries. To the other side of the road, that is the one facing the long side of the forts, build one barracks unit and a military academy. Encircle everything with roads and gardens, placing fountains (with reservoirs) into the middle of the rectangles with the reservoirs being on one of the empty sides of the rectangle with the senate. Now start out building more prefectures and engineer's posts as needed. Then, build another rectangle of just roads next to the forts one. You should have a "line" of rectangles by now. Into the fourth rectangle build a unit of each educational facility and the rest of the temples. If there is still space, fill it with one barber shop, one doctor, a hospital and an lion house. If have this one, make up another rectangle, this time again a residential one. Into the next, sixth rectangle, build entertainment facilities, i.e. amphitheatres, a gladiator school (which should be on the opposite side of the side facing the residential area of the fifth rectangle) and finally a coloseum. If you have done so far, watch your city unfold and take your time. You should still have some money left. Start building out farms, but be sure to use up as little space as possible, errecting the maximum number of farms. Have wheat farms only and errect no more than four in the beginning. Cover them with roads and prefectures, engineer's posts and some housing, which you will have to destroy in a few months. If crime is getting high here, simply destroy the housing and do not rebuild it. Crime will vanish but not the laborers from the farms. If you are doing well so far, do not forget the granary and markets to your people. Also, start iron mines and workshops for weapons (3 and 5). If your legions are maxed out we will go on. Beware of storms, as well. Sometimes a message with a content in the vincinity of "what storms!" will appear - this will render sea-borne travel and trade (and such is the only one you have right now) impossible for some months. So be sure to have full ability to trade with the maximum capacity a trade ship can carry once it arrives. The next one may be long from arriving. As far as I found out, this is not connected with Neptune's mood in any way. It seems to be a nature cause, just like the earthquakes. After building military structures (at least two, one legionaries and one mounted auxiliaries are recommended) have all trade routes maxed out and continue building residential districts. You should have a three rectangles and then start optimizing their evolution by importing furniture for instance. Always try to supply what is needed at the moment. You will need five or more rectangles in the end to reach 4000 citizens. I just found out enemies seem to be able to kill sheep, so if you count yourself among the lucky, they perhaps will make steaks out the sheep so they can't trouble you no more. Assignment 05 - Choice ---------------------- Whatever you chose priorily, you again will have to choose between a hostile area and more or less peaceful region. Basically both can be the same, with the peaceful region being a bit easier to conquer, because you do not need any legions. This time however you will have to choose between a largely (sometimes not so) peaceful area called Miletus (some may know the name Thales of Milet, who find for example the mathematical theorem that each triangle with two corners on a half circle diameter and the third on the half circle is a 90 degree triangle) and a very dangerous region called Mediolanum. Place your choice, we'll have 'em both. Choice #1 (Miletus) Objectives: population of 5000 citizens prosperity rating of 35 favor rating of 40 culture rating of 60 peace rating of 40 Chronicles: Initial Money DN 7000 Highest housing level Grand Villa Trading Corinthus (sea route) sells 15 clay sells 15 pottery buys 15 weapons buys 25 fruit Athaenae (sea route) sells 25 wheat sells 15 wine sells 15 marble buys 15 fish buys 15 oil Jan 220 BC The level begins Requests Oct 217 BC 10 weapons Mar 215 BC 10 furniture Jul 213 BC 10 weapons Jul 207 BC 10 weapons Oct 204 BC 15 furniture Jun 200 BC 10 weapons Oct 195 BC 10 weapons Oct 190 BC 15 furniture Jul 210 BC 15 furniture Invasions Oct 217 BC Greek invasion from the southwest Sep 214 BC Greek invasion from the northwest May 211 BC Greek invasion from the southwest Jun 208 BC Greek invasion from the northwest Aug 203 BC Greek invasion from the southwest Aug 198 BC Greek invasion from the northwest Apr 193 BC Greek invasion from the northwest Oct 188 BC Greek invasion from the southwest Price Changes May 215 BC Oil price increased by 20 Dn Jul 210 BC Weapons price increased by 10 Dn May 200 BC Wine price increased by 35 Dn Jul 200 BC Marble price increased by 40 Dn Other events Sep 210 BC Corinthus now buys 25 weapons per year Jul 205 BC Corinthus now sells 25 clay per year Sep 204 BC Corinthus now buys 27 weapons per year This assignment will net you with a lot of experiences in the neighborhood of frustration and depression, if you do not care a lot for prefectures. Since this is a desert scenario, buildings have an increased rate of being a victim to self-ignition. For this reason, using the 9x9 tiles technique you should stick to at least 2 prefectures for each 9x9 tiles area. Also, it is very hard to decide where to start. For instance you may try on the coast line, but fish will get "rare", that is - you cannot build enough wharves to feed all people. Using the farmland yields a lot more food. I feed 600 people with one fruit farm. I recommend starting with your first residential area setting foot on the second road tile away from the red flag. This way, you get the settlers settling soon and moreover you can apply a little trick: you can actually catch the zebras and put them in a nice cage. When they run in the stone cornered zone to the north, build a wall to make it a non passable area - voil , so much for the wild animals of this assignment (they ARE quite a pest in this scenario, and given the fact there may be people who cannot as of yet kill wild animals, this may be very helpful). After building up your basic settlement, start building forts of legionaries (one or two) and at least one or two mounted auxiliaries. Sometimes your city gets big and out of hand. You simply cannot build a pile of forts around your city, city walls would soon have to be eradicated again because of your city expanding and thus troops will have to get from your military district to the enemies probably on the other side of the map in no time. The fastest troops in this game are the mounted auxiliaries, so have them for a fast strike array - they will hold the enemy from charging against your unprotected city (time to have them lay down a 1500 people city: 11,5 seconds). Meanwhile your academy trained legionaries can mop them up. Since mounted auxiliaries regrow much faster than others and in advance do not need weapons to be trained, you may as well start building mounted auxiliaries in masses. But remember, you still need workers, food and - of course the forts have a huge detrimental-effect radius, which means you cannot build housing with a high desirability within say half or three quarters of a 800x600 screen (around 10 tiles). This means, plan your military district well. Best would be building the city around it. But since you cannot start out with building a fort, and then housing around it (desirability y'know?), you will have to stick to the strategy described above. Most important is to have Mars on your side. Try to have him constantly exalted using festivals, temples (large temples preferably, but importing marble may be a bit costly) - so if you have twice the amount of temples you you would need for the amount of citizens you have should also do the trick nicely. Strange enough a once set guardian spiri