I can only hope for more CivCities named after other magnificent cultures in the future.
CivCity Rome is a city building game inspired by Sid Meier's Civilization world. Instead of building a huge empire and take over the entire world, here you concentrate on developing your cities and making your citizens happy.
When you begin playing your first mission, the tutorial becomes very effective and helpful. But it only goes so far, and after reaching a few goals, I found myself a little lost in all the statistics and management menus. At some point, I kept getting negative Empire Points for each missed delivery because I couldn't figure out how to send goods to the city requesting them. It's more complicated than it seems. I had to build wood camps, gather wood, build a boat yard to use the wood to make ships, build trade docks to be able to use ships, and gather the resources that Rome was requesting. Then go into the trade menu and manually send the goods if I had the right amount. Ok, maybe I should have read the manual some more, but I'd rather learn while I play. It's a lot more fun, and then the second time around you ace the mission like an expert!
Aside from needing a more in-depth tutorial, it's fairly easy to get into the mechanics of the game, trial-and-error included.
It all begins with a certain amount of money, since every building and road costs money. They're placed instantly once you click the land. The first thing you need to place is your Town Center, which is where immigrants will arrive. Anyone looking for a job begins here. The Town Center can't be moved either, so you have to pick a spot you will be happy with later on.
Your citizens will then need houses to live in and places to work in, so place the basics first: a cluster of houses with a well nearby, and then spread the farms and stores around them so everyone has access to the goods they need. Once they have the basic needs, your people will begin demanding other services, such as access to religion, education, entertainment, health care and other services and structures.
You will also need warehouses and granaries to store your food and other goods. You can transfer items between warehouses and you can manually change settings on each warehouse to accept only a certain type of goods or you can lock things in so no one can take any of a certain type of item. For example, if you let your carpenters use all the wood, you won't have any for building boats, so you have to plan ahead and put some aside for later, especially if you don't have any trade routes available. As you can guess, having the houses in range of everything is crucial and it's not that easy, especially when the landscape interferes with rivers, ocean and hills. Many goals require you to have a certain number of houses reach a certain size. To achieve this, concentrate on creating a specific carefully planned area with a few houses in reach of everything. Once the houses are ready to evolve into insulas (you will see a green arrow above them) you can place them above stores, freeing up space for more houses in that same spot. Wash, rinse, repeat, and you will have a bunch of insulas above you stores soon. The more prestigious the house is, the more taxes the citizens will pay. Taxes and trade routes will be your source of income, so keeping people happy really is a priority: you want them to stay in the city and pay their taxes after all!
Most of the city-building missions will require you to reach a certain number of a specific house size or gain a set number of Empire Points. But the world isn't a peaceful place, and there are wars going on in the Roman Empire, so if you want some military strategy you can accept one of these challenges (they show as red markers on the world map).
As this is based in Sid Meier's Civilization, there is also a reasearch panel. Researching costs money, but it's a very easy process and you can "chain research" from one end of a category tree to another. Researching will allow you to improve roads, make your ships faster, increase farm production, increase stores production, discover services that add to city happiness (i.e. more efficient doctors and allowing marriage), obtain more tax revenue and even build wonders.
It's interesting to see how citizens go about their lives. If you zoom in as close as possible, you can peek inside their houses and work places. You can click on them and hear all sorts of comments (some are actually pretty funny: "Pizza? Now there's an idea that will never work."), so you can tell if they're pleased with your governor ways. It's funny to speed up time and watch everyone run around transporting things from warehouses to stores or their homes, so you will see someone carrying a bed on their backs into their house, a donkey hauling a cart full of fruit, quarry workers filling up carts with marbles. There are many little things worth looking at, the game shines in these little details. Lions will come to attack your villagers if you don't have watchtowers, and you will see the guards swirling rocks on their slings and throwing them at the beasts. As someone works at a water well, you will see little ceramic vases line up near it. Trained musicians will come to play at your piazzas and gladiators will fight in the amphitheatre while the crowds applaud. This virtual Roman Empire is really full of life.
Paying attention to the little things is also how you eventually spot certain bugs. For example, I had a small fishing boat get stuck in the water. The poor villager, try as he might, kept rowing and rowing but going nowhere. At some point, he was just stuck through the little canoe-like structure, doing nothing. The boat yard wouldn't send out any other boats, and the fishermen never received their little boats to go fishing, so that was one city affected by a major shortage of meat because of a small bug.
You'll also start noticing that your villagers aren't too bright. As I've said before, houses need goods and facilities in range so they can evolve. The problem is that sometimes you have a carpenter's workshop right in front of a house and the people will still be in need of a bed. Or maybe they're right next to a temple/doctor's office/bath and complaining about no access to that particular sevice.
Aside from those two downfalls, CivCity Rome is a pleasant experience. It looks good, it sounds great and it has replay value since you can create your own maps and make your own campaigns.
Rome can technically be built in a day of solid gameplay, but chances are it will be a skimpy-looking Rome. If you really want to get this Empire going, you will do well immersing yourself in the urban planning bliss, trade route setting delight and military conquering euphoria that is CivCity Rome. I can only hope for more CivCities named after other magnificent cultures in the future.
Review text part of Grrlgamer.com. Full review and screens at:
http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=civcityrome