In Caesar III, your "blocks" were organized by how far the laborers walked. For example, the houses a Bath Worker walked by determined which houses had access to a bath. If the worker took a left at a fork, all the houses to the left would have access to the bath, but none of the houses to the right would have a bath.
This led to the strategy of minimizing forks and maximizing the worker loops to create "blocks", where workers reliably provided needed services (marketplace for food/pottery, furniture. Bath houses. Doctors. Prefects/police+firefighter units, religious services, entertainment, etc. etc.0.
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Pharaoh / Cleopatra, the next game in this series, made this more explicit. With "roadblocks", any worker who "determines services" would make a U-turn upon touching a blocker. This allows you to explicitly make blocks (by preventing workers from taking the wrong fork in a road).
So I guess what I'm saying is... the "height" of the gameplay was found in Pharaoh / Cleopatra, rather than Caesar III. Impressions Games did a great job with Caesar III, but those last few additions in Pharaoh / Cleopatra really makes the designing of blocks / housing areas much easier and more consistent.
> While Julius does not implement any gameplay changes, a fork of Julius named Augustus is implementing many long-wanted gameplay changes, such as roadblocks.
Ah, that's somewhat exciting. At least another open source project is backporting the roadblock to Caesar III's engine. Which of course breaks compatibility... but it'd be a better game IMO.
In my recollection, roadblocks didn't really fix the walker issues.
I've had countless occasions where a walker would suddenly stop servicing a row of houses he or she could previously access just fine without any change to the layout of a "neighbourhood". This seemed to happen because the houses had gotten too big and a resource the walker was distributing to the houses did not last until the last few houses (walkers had limited stores of resources they carried, although this seemed to happen with religious walkers also who as far as I remember didn't have quantifiable stores; might be wrong). At that point the walker would have to go back to fetch more of the resource to service those last few houses. Meanwhile those houses would devolve because they didn't have any more of the resource they needed to keep their current level. Devolving houses would lose one or more levels and shed occupants. Once the walker reached them with the required resource, the houses would evolve again. Then when they ran out of the resource again they 'd also devolve again, in a vicious circle that could drive a player mad. Usually the only solution was to demolish some housing and build a service building in their place. Which messed up everything all over again.
To be fair, I observed this primarily in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (which I played at least as much as Cesar III, but more recently since I found it on GOG a few years ago). I've only played a little bit of Pharaoh and Zeus, but if this kind of problem wasn't fixed in Emperor (which came after Pharaoh) then I'm guessing it affected Pharaoh too.
Interestingly, I observed exactly the same issue in Lethis: Path of Progress, a Cesar III clone I've played. Lethis also has roadblocks, but they don't really help, you gotta be prepared to pull some houses down and build new service buildings.
Well, the key to these games is to "not solve every problem" for the players, but only to "solve the tedious problems" for the players.
You could build very good blocks in Caesar III with consistent services. However, it meant that you couldn't have _ANY_ forks in the road at all, and that all of your blocks would be giant loops. By adding roadblocks (ie: Pharaoh), you can suddenly have as many forks in the road as you like. For different sized blocks. Expanding the kinds of "block designs" that are optimal for the game is probably a good thing. Base CaesarIII is too restrictive IMO.
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"Running out of resources" locally is solved through warehouse management. I'd argue that this is the "fun" part of the game. Each warehouse + marketplace only can serve as many homes / houses as they can reliably pull supplies. For something like pottery, that is:
1. Clay Pits
2. Pottery furnace
3. Warehouse
4. + Additional Warehouses throughout the city for a good distribution network. Possibly augmented with foreign trade / docks.
5. Marketplaces
6. The final delivery to the house.
Yes, the Marketplaces, and even warehouses, have limited "throughput" and can only serve a finite number of houses. After that, you must expand by building "parallel marketplaces". Eventually, you build too many marketplaces and the Warehouse cart-pusher is overloaded with work, so you need additional warehouses to expand that bottleneck. Etc. etc.
IE: This problem is "reserved for the player to solve". The game shouldn't solve it for you, otherwise it wouldn't be a game anymore. Deciding "which bits" of the game to solve vs leave to the player to solve is the fundamental question of game design: what is fun anyway?
In my experience, the biggest source of "random" glitches were the entertainment walkers. Because of a bug, sometimes the dancers would teleport and wonder off outside of the block. Lack of bazaar goods can also be a problem, specially if you have 1x1 houses because those run out of supplies faster than 2x2 houses. For 2x2 houses they need a bazaar visit twice a year, which matches the period in the random walker algorithm. However, for 1x1 houses that might not be enough; I suggest building an extra bazaar to be safe. Religion & water walkers don't spend resources. Education walkers consume papyrus every time they leave their building. If they're out of papyrus they don't go to work.
Yeah, I really wish those games allowed me to simplify "draw" the trajectory of the workers. You'd still be limited by the length they can walk from their origin building but would not get frustrated by worker suddenly choosing another route, breaking all the nice areas you took hours to build.
But they were really great games anyway. Caesar III in particular is the first game I spent many hours on, and hold a special place in my heart.
Augustus has been playable for a long time now. I was playing it months ago when I went back to revisit CIII.
The walker mechanic struck me as a clever solution that really feels like something from a more resource-constrained era of games. With one feature, they managed to solve two problems: “is this service building close enough to this other building when following the road graph” and “guys walking around whom you can click on”.
This would be a bit more usable if it were in a sortable table and/or had more filters. The badges look is cute, but less useful for quickly skimming. As a casual "hey I want to play an opensource game" reader, I think it would be beneficial if the landing page focused only on those that were Playable. A long list of Unplayable games with Halted development degrades the quality of the resource.
I am haunted by the of things that caught fire and as a 8-9 year old I didn’t understand why. I don’t think I generally made it far enough that the plebs were in need because the whole city had burned.
Yeah 10 yr old me burnt a dozen or so cities before deciding the point of the game is humiliating me by burning my granaries/gymnasiums etc and moved on to Czar and ultimately Age of Empires 2.
I really liked Caesar III but I never seemed to be able to get service reach a reasonable amount of real-estate, presumably due to the left turn mentioned in another branch. So I ended up plopping way more temples and engineers/prefects than strictly required.
Readit News
This led to the strategy of minimizing forks and maximizing the worker loops to create "blocks", where workers reliably provided needed services (marketplace for food/pottery, furniture. Bath houses. Doctors. Prefects/police+firefighter units, religious services, entertainment, etc. etc.0.
-------
Pharaoh / Cleopatra, the next game in this series, made this more explicit. With "roadblocks", any worker who "determines services" would make a U-turn upon touching a blocker. This allows you to explicitly make blocks (by preventing workers from taking the wrong fork in a road).
So I guess what I'm saying is... the "height" of the gameplay was found in Pharaoh / Cleopatra, rather than Caesar III. Impressions Games did a great job with Caesar III, but those last few additions in Pharaoh / Cleopatra really makes the designing of blocks / housing areas much easier and more consistent.
> While Julius does not implement any gameplay changes, a fork of Julius named Augustus is implementing many long-wanted gameplay changes, such as roadblocks.
Ah, that's somewhat exciting. At least another open source project is backporting the roadblock to Caesar III's engine. Which of course breaks compatibility... but it'd be a better game IMO.
I've had countless occasions where a walker would suddenly stop servicing a row of houses he or she could previously access just fine without any change to the layout of a "neighbourhood". This seemed to happen because the houses had gotten too big and a resource the walker was distributing to the houses did not last until the last few houses (walkers had limited stores of resources they carried, although this seemed to happen with religious walkers also who as far as I remember didn't have quantifiable stores; might be wrong). At that point the walker would have to go back to fetch more of the resource to service those last few houses. Meanwhile those houses would devolve because they didn't have any more of the resource they needed to keep their current level. Devolving houses would lose one or more levels and shed occupants. Once the walker reached them with the required resource, the houses would evolve again. Then when they ran out of the resource again they 'd also devolve again, in a vicious circle that could drive a player mad. Usually the only solution was to demolish some housing and build a service building in their place. Which messed up everything all over again.
To be fair, I observed this primarily in Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (which I played at least as much as Cesar III, but more recently since I found it on GOG a few years ago). I've only played a little bit of Pharaoh and Zeus, but if this kind of problem wasn't fixed in Emperor (which came after Pharaoh) then I'm guessing it affected Pharaoh too.
Interestingly, I observed exactly the same issue in Lethis: Path of Progress, a Cesar III clone I've played. Lethis also has roadblocks, but they don't really help, you gotta be prepared to pull some houses down and build new service buildings.
You could build very good blocks in Caesar III with consistent services. However, it meant that you couldn't have _ANY_ forks in the road at all, and that all of your blocks would be giant loops. By adding roadblocks (ie: Pharaoh), you can suddenly have as many forks in the road as you like. For different sized blocks. Expanding the kinds of "block designs" that are optimal for the game is probably a good thing. Base CaesarIII is too restrictive IMO.
--------
"Running out of resources" locally is solved through warehouse management. I'd argue that this is the "fun" part of the game. Each warehouse + marketplace only can serve as many homes / houses as they can reliably pull supplies. For something like pottery, that is:
1. Clay Pits
2. Pottery furnace
3. Warehouse
4. + Additional Warehouses throughout the city for a good distribution network. Possibly augmented with foreign trade / docks.
5. Marketplaces
6. The final delivery to the house.
Yes, the Marketplaces, and even warehouses, have limited "throughput" and can only serve a finite number of houses. After that, you must expand by building "parallel marketplaces". Eventually, you build too many marketplaces and the Warehouse cart-pusher is overloaded with work, so you need additional warehouses to expand that bottleneck. Etc. etc.
IE: This problem is "reserved for the player to solve". The game shouldn't solve it for you, otherwise it wouldn't be a game anymore. Deciding "which bits" of the game to solve vs leave to the player to solve is the fundamental question of game design: what is fun anyway?
But they were really great games anyway. Caesar III in particular is the first game I spent many hours on, and hold a special place in my heart.
The walker mechanic struck me as a clever solution that really feels like something from a more resource-constrained era of games. With one feature, they managed to solve two problems: “is this service building close enough to this other building when following the road graph” and “guys walking around whom you can click on”.
It's got some great new features, like having some control and visibility over where and how far the workers go.
The amount of detail and information thrown into the game and the manual.
I really liked Caesar III but I never seemed to be able to get service reach a reasonable amount of real-estate, presumably due to the left turn mentioned in another branch. So I ended up plopping way more temples and engineers/prefects than strictly required.
That would drive me nuts. Plebs is not a plural noun.
I would love love love to see a source code remake of Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
VCMI looks like it's at parity with the original game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4WWRrh-KIc
Spiritual successor is probably Anno 1800, for anyone who wants to try a modern take on this.