CivCity: Rome Now Available; Innovative City Builder Inspired by Civilization

[Adagio]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Yeah no need to have forums for fleeting games that no one plays anyway. *looks pointedly at RoN forums*

What are you talking about? We had a new post in June this year, it's a very active forum

[DrSpike]

Yes, they are a thoughtful crowd. After giving the post due consideration, the other 2 people that play the game are due to give their response in late September.

[Snotty]

This game seems like a fun little game I wouldnt mind recommending to people who are interested in the history and arent elite gamers.

Ive started playing the campaign on hard mode for a little bit of a challenge, and have got to the 2nd city. The game requires a certain degree of patience on my laptop as it has below minimum spec RAM and graphics card. Im sure it will run smoother on my desktop

I struggled to get my economy to work, until I found my people will remain in my city if i cut their wages but make sure they are well housed.

[MarkG]

yeah the hapiness situation is a little tricky. for example if you go well you will get tons of new people who will want to get a job and since you wont have any jobs they will become unhappy about it, thus reducing you hapiness levels even below zero (usually your happiness is at a balance when your city is not fully developed), so when you hit -30 or -40 people will start leaving the city, solving your problem: no excess people, no unemployment, no unhapinness about it, hapiness rising again

[Blake]

I've played through it on medium and most of hard (only having trouble with final military bugs). I've got some random hints and observation type things, hopefully these aren't too obvious, there seems to be a lot of uh undocumented stuff in CC:Rome and in reviews there's misinformation (saying you can't do something, but you can it's just not obvious).

1) Be a tyrant with the happiness settings at the start give them nearly no pay and/or make them work nearly all day if that suits your purposes. There are easy sources of happy, in the early game full housing is easy to get, so is full rations, later on full pay is very useful and raising civ score "only" requires money (and... space). It's worth noting that you can't really run 100% workday (with 0% playdays) indefinitely - to get a wife from the temple, there needs to be a "playing" man and "working" priest.

2) Forests can be cleared by dropping down lumber camps near the trees, the vagrants run over and chop down a couple of trees... then you delete the camps, the workers and tree trunks vanish along with the camp. Repeat until you run out of trees or vagrants (let the town center restock and clear more trees later). This has the side effect of reducing unemployment (it's not exactly a tasteful method of eliminating the unemployed... but eh, whatever works).

3) Once you get cisterns for water supply, shacks will still often try and insist on mucky well water, don't give in to this nonsense, if you relocate a stubborn shack [I played the entire campaign without noticing the relocate feature ] it will immediately gain piped water access and upgrade to a small hut (probably a bug, but those wells are nasty unsightly things), on some maps you can "cheaply" get the cistern right away and thus need wells only for firewatch (if hard difficulty).

4) Walls and gates are strange.... it seems if you completely wall off a path, any enemies behind it get confused and just run back and forth. It seems gates are always open and enemies just run through them as if there were not in fact big solid wooden gates there. Before walls become available you can drop guard posts or farms or pretty much anything in their path to "divide and conquer" the enemy.

5) Forwarding junk around using the warehouse system can be very useful, granaries not so much so. Basically warehouses hold a lot of stuff and warehouse goods are used slowly - it makes sense to keep switching around the warehouse forwarding to balance goods supply, granary goods are consumed much faster so granaries should stick to forwarding one thing around (I usually distribute meat via the granary system and every other food purely via shops). Where possible distribute goods by warehouse rather than granary (ie you import wheat to a single location - distribute it over your city at the wheat or flour stage, bake the bread for housing on site rather than using granaries).

6) Some goods can be collected directely from the producing building, others need a warehouse intermediary. As a rule stuff that goes into a granary can be collected from the producing building (ie olive press will collect olives from the olive farm), stuff that goes into a warehouse usually needs to be collected from the warehouse (altough some like linen don't). The main ones which need an intermediary are Iron, Timber and Wheat - build the "processing" for these at the warehouse rather than the supply building. Houses can collect fruit directely from fruit farms - no need for fruit stalls (but the stalls will go further to get it). With careful observation you can figure out how most things work (For the most expensive and critical supply line: one iron mine supplies 1 weapon workshop, the workshops need to be really close to the warehouse - if there's no room for everything around the iron deposits, then have the mines warehouse forwarding the iron to a workshops warehouse).

7) Citizens will collect goods from shops or a granary/warehouse, a shop will not distribute goods from a granary/warehouse - so if the goods are already in a warehouse, you simply distribute them with more warehouses and the goods forwarding function (ie you need to import dates: there is no purpose in getting date vendors).

[Proteus_MST]

So what´s the difference to other roman city building games, especially to Caesar I - III?
Especially in terms of gameplay (i.e. what buildings there are and how they interact [compared to Caesar III] and so on)

[Jon Miller]

Caeser 4 is out, so it is in competition with it.

JM

[Proteus_MST]

Oh, good to know.

So is anybody out there who has bought and played both games so to give us a first hand comparison about the differences and similarities between Caesar 4 and CivCity: rome?

[MarkG]

havent looked at caesar 4, probably the main differences are civcity's tech tree and resource-for-house-advancement model


interesting: the caesar iv site notes "100 hours of gameplay" as part of the feature list. i wonder how many hours firaxis should put on the box of civ4...

http://www.caesariv.com/us/overview.html

[Adagio]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
Caeser 4 is out, so it is in competition with it.

I heard the release date was late next month

[Locutus]

Actually, Ceasar IV won't be out until late September.

[Nikolai]

[Blake]

If anyone else is interested in this game, the best forums (ie the ones devs visit) are www.civcityforums.com

No doubt the most useful piece of information is this one:

You can unlock the camera by hitting enter nero enter then pressing shift-C and your camera will be unlocked, press shift-C again to lock it.

Unlocked camera is very nice, especially for screenshots.

[jdchambe]

I was really enjoying this game for a while, but I'm getting to the later maps and am finding that the bugs are starting to over whelm me. :-(

the kinds of bugs a frequently see: place a building that consumes resource of type X and produces resource of type Y (e.g., the mill, which converts grain to flour), and maybe 1 out of every 4 times you build one, the stupid guy who works the mill will just sit there forever and not go pick up any of the grain. When this happens you have to delete the building and rebuild it. It happens mostly with the mill. But it also happens sometimes with trading posts.

But when I got to the map with the iron mines in a place where that cannot be reached except by transport jetty, the workers at the mine are just taking all the iron out of the mine and dropping it into their houses where it vanishes from the game. they used the transport jetty to get to the mine, but they refuse to use it to take the iron back. On a similar note, I built a second mine next to the first one, and the vagrants refuse to come and work it. They don't seem to know that the transport jetty is there. I'm pulling my hair out in frustration.

A similar bug occurred on the previous map. I had a granary overflowing with meat and another granary with no meat. I setup the first granary to redirect it's extra meat to the other granary. What happenned? 5 minutes later both granarys had NO meat in them.

Lots of Crash-to-desktop errors in the latter maps too on my machine. save often!

The other thing that irks me is that the point click interface for the game's UI does not function on any resolution other than 1024x768. The game claims to support other resolutions, but this is a lie. 1024x768 is the only resolution at which the game can reasonably be played. Non-combat missions can clumsily be played at higher resolutions, but combat missions are impossible at higher resolutions because your troops will not move to where you direct them to go, and will instead go somewhere else.

[jdchambe]

whoops. won't let me delete this post. it was in error