What happened to beloved Rome? It feels like you've been sacked...

User Rating: 4.2 | Caesar IV PC
By commanderkai | Review Date:
On the outside, face value. It's not too bad beauty wise. The colors were nice and it matched well with the feeling. The buildings were nicely designed and better yet you got full 360 rotation. It also had a diverse grouping of goods like glass, clothing, olive oil, and pottery being options for basic goods (however only three were allowed on a specific map at any one time) and same goes with luxury goods and exotic goods. I also enjoyed the fact that you can ban plebs (aka the poor) from buying from some shops you want to designate just for rich. These little details were beautiful and helped make it unique, but it lost its uniqueness from the older games.

Minor Complaints:

You can't tax the lower and middle class. WHY? Sure there are sales taxes...which barely make you anything since you only get maybe...6% of the worth of the good you just sold, which is about maybe 2-3 denarii for pottery. That isn't a lot. The lower and middle classes are money that is being lost considering they are the ones which advance so quickly

Lack of food choices. In Pharaoh and Emperor, there were numerous food types available that represented what they ate in their culture. In this game, there are three. Wheat, Vegetables and Meat. I even remember Caesar III having at least 5 food types (Wheat, Fruits, Vegetables, Hogs, Fish) Sure wheat is important, but I mean, give us history. Let us grow...lemons or some other citrus fruit that the Romans enjoyed, or catch fish, or grow a variety of vegetables and fruits which were common to their diets. The excessive demands. Okay I get that you need to fulfill these, but they can get excessive. "WE WANT 100 WHEAT! WE WANT SOMETHING YOU'RE NOT MAKING SINCE WE NEVER TOLD YOU TO MAKE THIS BECAUSE WE TOLD YOU TO DO EVERYTHING" Yada yada yada. I stopped caring. I had the army called in too. It doesn't matter. If I'm trying to provide for 12 different industries, give me a break not providing for clothing since you planned worse than me.

Lack of housing, insulae (Roman apartments) are way too small while things like tent cities or slums you were used to seeing in almost every city sim doesn't exist anymore since there are only three different building types. Villas, Dumas (I think, basically middle class homes) and insulae. Didn't feel as Roman since small towns had tenements. Major Complaints against Caesar IV:

There is no room. At all. On smaller maps you're squishing everything together because the maps are so poorly designed. And one little rock that you cannot remove will block you from building something important. Usually in the older city builders that meant that you just ignore it since there was plenty of room to do whatever you like. On here that means you might need to build a warehouse next to housing (not a good idea).

Going along with no room, is that the buildings are massive sometimes. For the lack of room given, some buildings, like Entertainment buildings are oversized. I understand that these buildings were huge in real life, HOWEVER this isn't real life, I don't got the vast plains of Southern Gaul, or the hilly grasslands of Italia, or the deserts of Africa to build on, I got a small piece of land that you force me to limit myself to. The grid that they used made it impossible to quickly build a city and made it a task and chore to place a home or a well. This is due to that a small nudge of the mouse will not put you next to the road, and the accuracy demanded of you is frustrating and bothersome after 10 minutes. Well...all I can think of for now. Just avoid it people

Other Helpful Reviews for Caesar IV

Load Comments (0)