Pictured: Mortal enemy of order and happiness. It’s not enough to have the distribution forced through this chokepoint the chokepoint is staffed by badly-coded chuckleheads with the priorities of a drugged squirrel. If you’re thinking that maybe it’s not the most foolproof plan to bottleneck the entire supply line for a large town through Biggus Dickus’ Biggus Deals, you’d be more right than you know, because therein lies the game’s most all-pervasive challenge. From food to furniture, all physical goods are passed out through this one distributor. But access to goods is all lumped in to just one vendor: the markets. I don’t even want to think about the bath house workers.Īccess to services is pretty well delineated - you have access to religion when a priest walks by, access to health care when a doctor walks by, etc.
#Caesar 3 housing blocks upgrade#
Do the actors give command performances at every house? That must get complicated when you upgrade to gladiators and lions. If, however, you’re a snarky bastard like me, it can look like you have an empire of shut-ins supported by the best door-to-door service industry mankind has ever known.
#Caesar 3 housing blocks Patch#
(Each business has a sound clip that adds to the background noise of the city, too, so it’s very cool to hear your town grow from a windswept little patch of nowhere into a bustling center of life.) It’s a tidy, self-explanatory, and very efficient game mechanic to represent how each neighbourhood grows. …obviously, the game can’t render all those citizens walking to schools and bath houses, so “access” works by having an industry rep walk through the town.
All those insulae and I’m barely over 1300 people?! As your population will quickly reach thousands or even tens of thousands… Though not as quickly as you might think. So, you have to provide access to goods and services, with all the buildings pertaining thereto. I cannot believe I found a picture of this.Īt least, I assume that’s what governorship feels like. You have to build businesses just to give people jobs, and as soon as services are open, housing starts to improve – so it expands, so more immigrants come, so you have to build more business, to grow more housing… It creates the very authentic, and surprisingly fun, sensation of standing on a ball while juggling hedgehogs. I can totally run a city on the equivalent of one dollar per person…right? You’re forced to keep up with popular demand, and grin and bear the cost.
Deny your people the newest upgrade, and protests, crime, riots, emigration, and even the anger of the gods will start to tear down what you’ve built. (Yes, you can get up to condo-style living before your people will start asking about chairs.) Hell, for that matter it can be tempting to leave everything in the tent stage and just build 500 tents. It is really tempting to stabilize your city at the “small casa” level and never worry about upgrading to the luxury-level requisites like hippodromes and furniture. The power of Mercury compels you to put a roof over your head, numbskull.Īll these farms and schools and theaters and things cost coin, though, especially once you pass a certain level of housing. I don’t know, maybe the sense of community gives people the willpower to lean a few boards together. From tents, you evolve to “small shack,” which for some reason requires “access to religion” to upgrade. You start with simple tents, which will upgrade once people have food and water. Housing gets bigger and better as access to goods and services improve, which is one of those life lessons for the world at large. Now Hiring: Unskilled Lackeys to Shoulder National Tax Burden Find the farmland, find the river, stick your “Peasants Wanted” signs somewhere in between. So, you need housing, the construction and management of which takes up at least half of gameplay (in the early levels, pretty much all of gameplay). Have fun in the clay pits.Įvery city has a population goal (plus you need warm bodies to accomplish the goals that Caesar sets you, like “make wine” or “fight Goths”). So, let’s take a look at the first major objective in the game: Get People. It’s not just having resources, it’s allocating them all the denarii in the imperium won’t produce pottery if you don’t have a good road from the clay pits to the pottery workshop. Even with “cheat like a motherfucker” mode engaged, most of the game’s core objectives can’t be solved by simply having piles of cash.