I came, I saw, I wasted way too much time trying to get all the insulas and villas to evolve to their third level.
Eh... it gets old too quickly... and it's a bit on the annoying side.
The whole idea is you're suppose to balance your city as you start from basic structures on up. That's a bit more tricky when you're looking to anticipate the space needed for new structures... how much food and basic goods you have to support the city's growth, and some spacing junk so you know the coverage of certain buildings.
The biggest thing that bugs us, beside how certain maps are all twisted so you build diagonally even if you flip the camera, is that one still doesn't quite know what the hell is going on. The homes are helpful in that they say what they need...
Example: So yeah, your insula needs basic goods to grow to the next level... it's right next to the basic good market... you are building basic goods... the insula across town and the insula behind it both have triple figure basic goods... they're all bright green with happiness... but for some reason this insula's just not growing. What the hell?
Your resource adviser will show you what you got, what you're stockpiling, all that jazz... but nobody can explain the deal with that. Eh.
They give you a little radius indicator for water and prettiness, but nothing else for anything else. You're suppose to guess if your building engineer is close enough to prevent your junk from collapsing. Little things like that are really annoying.
There's an overall clunkiness with some of the building process. Tilting things, not lining things up well, and what not. Graphics are decent... just that it all gets pretty old after staring at it for a while. It's sort of like the Sims, once you make a house and lay it out and see all the furniture and character interactions you've had enough.
Know this game has a whole bunch of features that try to increase it's fun factor longevity. There's some create your own map stuff... switching up the scenarios... eh. Frankly there isn't much more than can be gotten out of it. This game isn't detailed or open ended enough to compete with a sim city... it's a good city builder game that gets a tip of the hat for the roman motif.
We have an above average rig and this game tends to lag from time to time... hate having to wait around for the game to either resume or crash.
Still like the game and all... probably... won't... be... playing it again, but still, it was ok while it lasted. Just sort of wish that for a game called Caesar IV you'd get to play as Caesar... eh.