Revisiting Caesar III (almost) three decades later

I often joke that Caesar III is what inspired eleven year-old me to enrol at a gymnasium, a type of preparatory school in the Netherlands (and much of Europe) that teaches classical languages alongside regular subjects such as humanities, economics, and sciences. The highlight of that gymnasium education was a study trip to Rome, during which I finally got to see all the monuments, ruins, and churches (side note: I had enrolled at a catholic gymnasium, partially because eleven year-old me mistakenly believed that Christians only existed on TV.) I had been learning about.

Given all that’s happening in and around Rome right now, I decided to take a trip down memory lane by spinning up Caesar III again this weekend.

Reviewed version	Windows
Release date	30 September 1998
Developer	Impressions Games
Publisher	Sierra Studios

For those who don’t remember or were born after the ’90s, Caesar III was part of Sierra’s City Building series of historical city-building games that ran from 1992 until 2008. As its name already suggests, Caesar III puts you into the sandals of a Roman governor who’s tasked with turning barren provinces into thriving cities across the empire. As governor, your goal is to make sure that your citizens’ needs are met (housing, food, jobs, amenities) and production pipelines are smooth, while at the same time protecting your city from natural disasters, hostile enemies, and angry gods.

In essence, it plays like an early, stripped-down version of Cities: Skylines or Factorio, but set in the Roman era.

I bought a copy of Caesar III via GOG, and to my surprise it still works surprisingly well on modern Windows systems without any tweaks. However, it being an almost 30-year-old game means that the experience will be far from ideal. This is why you should probably play via Augustus instead.

Augustus is a fork of Julius, a popular open-source re-implementation of Caesar III, that introduces some much-needed quality-of-life (QoL) improvements and some less-needed gameplay changes. It uses the original Caesar III assets, so you’ll still need to fork over a little bit of money for a legitimate copy.

The most obvious QoL improvement is support for higher resolutions. You’ll now be able to see a much larger portion of the map at once compared to the original game. The main menu also makes better use of the available screen estate by showing your city’s key performance indicators instead of a useless decorative graphic. There’s also a new zoom functionality, which can be useful if you want to admire your entire city from afar.

Julius and Augustus both improve the gameplay in various ways, the most notable of which is the introduction of roadblocks that make it much easier to manage foot traffic. Similar features from newer City Building entries such as Zeus: Master of Olympus and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom have also made their way into Augustus, like more fine-grained control over markets, granaries, and warehouses, monuments (side note: Grand temples, lighthouses, city mints, things like that. The quality of the artwork is quite impressive!), and residential walls.

There are also some changes that I am less happy about. For instance, citizens are much more likely to riot if you don’t meet their needs, and housing blocks may be susceptible to the plague unless you lay out your city such that contact with the outside world is minimised. Some of the new monuments require materials that are unavailable on your map but nonetheless still show up in the building menu, meaning you only find out halfway through construction when it’s already too late. Such changes make the game harder for no good reason, especially as most are documented badly (or even not at all) within the game.

Finally, there are a few things that I wish the developers had addressed. Markets still suck at distributing goods, causing housing to devolve constantly due to lack of goods even when warehouses are overflowing. Gods remain petty as ever, wreaking havoc if you fail to pay constant attention to their moods. And it’s still incredibly obvious that “random” events in scenarios aren’t actually random, as they conveniently stop happening after a certain point.