Im getting filtered,
>im running out of money
>plebs hates me
>rebels set Senate on fire
>Caesar is displeased cause i didnt provide olives
>i had no workers cause nobody wants to move in
>gods hate me
>city planning was so terrible cant even squeeze basic stuff anymore
What a disaster.
>I though city builders are supposed to be comfy
Nope. That's city sims, a different genre.
interesting, i wasnt aware of that distinction and dismissed all city builders since i tried sim city 4 and that game was so trivial it was borderline map painting. i never bothered with Caesar cause i thought its the same genre.
There are also so called colony builders/sims with a bigger focus on scarce resources and manpower, and isolated hostile environments. At the end of the day these distinctions are kind of fuzzy and prone to misuse and mistagging.
which genre games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Railway Tycoon belong too?
They're simply called tycoon games.
but are the jack off to pretty pictures type of games or demanding city builders
they are business management games. Railway Tycoon is more demanding than rct2 but you can play sandbox and jack off to pictures or actually play the game, the choice is yours
I think of caesar and pharaoh as puzzle games honestly. Every building has to be in the right place or your economy will collapse.
Try Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. Same studio and still kinda hard but the game is much more forgiving.
If youre still looking for a comfy but not trivial citybuilder unlike SC4 try Sim City 3000, any of the Tropico Games or any of the Anno games.
When i was a kid Caesar III's walker->employment system filtered me so hard it was a miracle whenever i was able to get a housing block above small casas
In the campaign you make money by export first, then servicing rich frickers and taxing them, but you should get exports in place first
Requests suck yeah, sucks even worse in Syracuse which is an early mission because dammit you need that oil for export and theres such little farmland to spare
Gods hate you because its unintuitive how many temples you should have for the population you have. A lot of the time you need so many temples that you get pressured into placing duplicates onto your city blocks, but really you can just place them to the side without their priests walking by any houses and it still counts as servicing the total population in your religion advisor tab
City planning being so bad that you can't squeeze more stuff is probably the main driver of my autistic urges in Impressions/Sierra and Anno style games... once i get the fundamentals down i get the urge to start over so i can make a city block in a less-moronic way. Then after that i refine how i make city blocks to make slightly-less-moronic designs. In the end a city almost has to be fricking completely pre-planned before the first immigrant arrives.
Also, look up the Julius and Augustus mods
>its unintuitive how many temples you should have for the population you have
Culture and health is the same way. Having 100% coverage isn't the only criteria, you also just need a certain number of service provider buildings, which isn't clear from the phrasing of the advisors. Annoying and unintuitive indeed.
>In the end a city almost has to be fricking completely pre-planned before the first immigrant arrives
You never have the cash for that in the campaign though. I find it charming getting your initial worker's slum up and running to fulfill demands and export for a profit, before getting the cashflow to start working on the real city.
>>city planning was so terrible cant even squeeze basic stuff anymore
Lategame you just gotta get the gods to magic you up stock.
have you considered a career in rowing instead?
i would rather row your mother instead, if you know what i mean
enough, you will mock Caesar no more!
The only Impressions game builder that's close to being "comfy" is Emperor since there's a global labor pool and as long as you place enough roadblocks everything should be running nicely.
However Feng shui is not a fun mechanic and ancient China is not everyone's cup of tea
>since there's a global labor pool
Every game has a global labor pool. In earlier games you have to build one house nearby in order for buildings to access it though.
>roadblocks
Present from Pharaoh onwards.
>Feng shui is not a fun mechanic
Going for perfect Feng Shui is fun and forces you to actually think about planning your city each time, rather than copy pasting the same housing block you designed in the first mission.
The gatehouses in C3 work just like roadblocks in the other games.
I always found building a ghetto to give workers easier access to jobs a hassle because eventually the shitty tent I built starts generating criminals that loot everything.
But that's more of a skill issue from my part
No, that's Zeus. It's nice, simple, and cartoony. Except for the very last campaign where you play as Greeks against the Atlanteans. That map is hell.
For the life of me I cant beat Syracusaie
Wow, they really nailed the late Roman Republic if what you're saying is true
wow you anons are really making this game sound like total shit. i have memories of fricking around in this game as a kid (even if i didn't know what i was doing) and the graphics have aged like wine so i've been tempted to reinstall it for a long time now, but this thread convinced me not to bother.
what do you mean everything mentioned here is great, game being hard is a plus, theres too many braindead easy strategy on the market nowadays
>what do you mean
i'm talking about things like this
>Gods hate you because its unintuitive how many temples you should have for the population you have. A lot of the time you need so many temples that you get pressured into placing duplicates onto your city blocks but really you can just place them to the side without their priests walking by any houses and it still counts as servicing the total population in your religion advisor tab
>In the end a city almost has to be fricking completely pre-planned before the first immigrant arrives
>Culture and health is the same way. Having 100% coverage isn't the only criteria, you also just need a certain number of service provider buildings, which isn't clear from the phrasing of the advisors. Annoying and unintuitive indeed
>Lategame you just gotta get the gods to magic you up stock
>I think of caesar and pharaoh as puzzle games honestly. Every building has to be in the right place or your economy will collapse
It's the walker sytem that's at fault here, it turned what would've been some nice city builders into tedious puzzle games where doing the right thing feels like you're cheesing the game. It's peak nostalgia for some and the games are pretty, well polished titles, so it has it's fans but besides the graphics, the games have aged pretty badly.
I don't know what the deal was with Caesar 4, never played it, but you could try playing Children of the Nile if you're interested in these game but dislike the aspects you listed, among it's many improvements it removed the old walker system so it plays a lot more like modern city builder. Admittedly, the graphics are a lot less charming than in the earlier 2D games but what can you do.
>Children of the Nile
thanks i played that game as a kid for a short while too. i liked it and i don't remember feeling as lost as i did playing caesar 3, but for some reason i forgot about it until now. i might reinstall it within the next couple of weeks
i honestly prefer that approach over city builders with bloated production chains and resource types to create artificial difficulty
Damn I should have studied architecture instead of memengineering
>Im getting filtered,
Unironically play Zeus. It's a perfect learning experience for Impression games, and then you can branch out to Emperor and Pharaoh
>b-but C3
Is a shit game, and the mods to it (both Julius and Augustus) are poorly masking that
>>im running out of money
skill issue
hates me
get used to it
set Senate on fire
police brutality is the answer
is displeased cause i didnt provide olives
entirely your fault
>>i had no workers cause nobody wants to move in
build ghetos
>>gods hate me
give them your firts son blood
>>city planning was so terrible cant even squeeze basic stuff anymore
old game sadly