Post by Keith Heitmann on Jul 30, 2006 21:50:16 GMT -5
There were a lot of posts about bugs in the game and poor graphics so I installed CivCity Rome with a bit of foreboding. However, as it turned out, the game wasn't as troubed as others make it seem.
I have a pretty decend computer system with a 3Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and I run a fairly powerful if not older video card, Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB.
The install went smoothly and the game started up, but it is a bit of a "slow loader". Even on my system it takes nearly 1 minute to load the initial game files and begin running the intro videos.
The I opted not to install Gameshadow, whatever that is. I figure the less on my system I don't know about the better. And if I do find I need it, there is an option on the game start menu that lets me install GameShado later.
The game does require access to the internet and my firewall brought up an alert asking if I wanted to allow it. So be prepared for this if you have a firewall that might need manual configuring.
After browsing the various menus and credits I started changing a few settings in the settings options menus. The game had autoselected HIGH settings for my particular setup, I turned on realtime shadows and changed graphics to HIGHEST.
I began play with the recommended Learning Campaign. The graphics looked clear and sharp, not the pixelated or blocky graphics that others were complaining about. The maps in this campaign are small for the most part and you don't have a tremendous amount of room to build on but you have enough space to complete the missions of the Learning Campaign without too much trouble.
Starting a new city begins with the placement of a new town center. Then one or two industries, and houses for the workers, actually they start out a low grade shacks. Then a well which causes the shacks to upgrade to the next higher level. You need a warehouse to store the products of your industry and a granary to feed your people. Next you need a farm for animals to fill the granary with. You start out with a goat farm. You need butcher shops nearby to slaughter the goats and turn them into meat. The excess meat is sent to the granary while the people with homes come to the butcher shop to pickup supplies.
Next you need a watch tower to protect your citizens from wild animal attacks and a fire tower to spot fires in the area. Brush fires occur in the area near your city and can spread to your farms and other buildings if they get too close. A fire tower sounds the alarm and the men run out with buckets of water to put the fire out.
Soon you have to setup trade and meet requests from Caesar or other cities. At the start you don't have the option of trading with other cities so everything just goes into the warehouse. A small cart comes to the city to pickup the items when you have enough and leaves.
Your houses require more than water and food to evolve to the next level of a small hovel. You need to provide items like olive oil and tunics. So you need to place a olive farm and a flax farm, then place olive press shops and tailor shops to produce those finished items.
Rather than just placing houses, the game provides a means or placing the jobs first, then from the industries menu, you can click on the icon of the workers and the up-arrow icon to place a house for that worker in your city. You want to try to keep these workers close to their jobs. Each house will display a green ghost area showing its effective range. You want all their needs within this green area as much as possible, but you can place somethings outside that area and they will still travel to it to get things like food, clothes, etc.
In the Learning Campaign only three temples are available, Mercury, Diana, and Mithras. Placing these near the housing meets the need for religion of your citizens.
There is no Research requirements in the early Learning Campaign missions, so you don't have to spend money on researching new technologies at first.
Soon you will be in a mission where you must start trade. Trade depots only handle one function, import or export, and only one product which you select from its menu. That trade depot is dedicated to that function and that item until you change it.
In Massilia you will have to build docks and shipyards to start sea trade. Ship building requires lumber so you need wood cutters cutting down nearby trees. In Massilia you need to quarry marble and export it in return for wheat. This wheat which can be sent to a mill to be turned into flour and the flour into bread by a bakery shop, is needed to fill the request from Caesar for wheat to feed his legions. So you need to produce cargo ships quickly to increase the influx of imported wheat to meet the request from Caesar with vary from 40 to 80 units of wheat.
Other items you houses need to evolve are music in a piazza, so you need the piazza and a music school. A Taverna (tavern) is a place for people to relax and drink. Taverna seem to function on their own and don't require any special supplies.
A bath is eventually required to meet some mission goals. People need enough down time from work to go to the baths and must be a large hovle status before they need a bathhouse to evolve.
Once a large hovel is ready to evolve you will see a green up-arrow flashing over it. Click on that building and click on the upgrade icon then find a vacant area to place the new small insulae building. Insulae buildings can be placed over the tops of shops leaving the shops intact on the ground floor. The upgraded large hovel disappears from your city and leaves a blank spot where it once stood for you to build a new structure on of your choice.
None of the missions seem to be very hard, most being completed in 30 mins or less. I'm about 6-7 missions into the learning campaign and have hit a snag. My workers seemed to have stopped working. I wanted fishing boats but my wood cutters just sit in their businesses idle. My tailors don't seem to produce enough tunics and my food shortages are growing. I've started making some changes to my city and things seem to be getting a little bit better but there are still food shortages and a lack of new tunics. I'm working on it.
The game has no save game overwrite warning. If you select a save game name from the list when making a new save it will just overwrite that file with asking for confirmation, so becareful.
There is no undo function in the game. If you make a mistake you have to remove it. The removal tool doesn't work well with mouse strokes from side to side. I found it best to rotate the map so that I can use a slow vertical stroke to remove the item I want. The mouse offset problem people have is there but it is not as bad I though. You just have to move the removal tool icon around the desired item you want to delete until it shows a red ghost, then click and drag to remove it.
There is a camera angle unlock cheat as indicated in a earlier post I put ont he board. Enter, type Nero, Enter, and press Shift+C to unlock the camera. It's doesn't work that smoothly, I got it working in some missions and not in others. You have to reactivate it in each mission, it doesn't stay active like the cheats in other citybuilder games from Impressions. The free camera makes getting a view of the city layout much easier. Why this was not the default setting for the camera I'll never know.
Placing a aqueduct requires fresh water from lake or river. At the inward land end of the aqueduct you can place a cistern. This covers nearly the whole map with piped water. However, as noted in the README notes for the game shack do not get access to running water, so they need a well nearby anyway. Once they evolve to small hovel they get running water from a cistern.
The music is pleasant and doesn't get old too fast. In fact while listening to the music I noticed two interesting homage references to one of the music tracks from Caesar III and to one of the music tracks from the movie Gladiator, "The Road to Ahkabar", in the scene where Maximus was being taken to North Africa via caravan.
For the curious without the game I made up a set of screenshots from the game showing the some of the menues, civlopedia and some shots of the city I was building in the Learning Campaign in the Capena mission.
I have a pretty decend computer system with a 3Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and I run a fairly powerful if not older video card, Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB.
The install went smoothly and the game started up, but it is a bit of a "slow loader". Even on my system it takes nearly 1 minute to load the initial game files and begin running the intro videos.
The I opted not to install Gameshadow, whatever that is. I figure the less on my system I don't know about the better. And if I do find I need it, there is an option on the game start menu that lets me install GameShado later.
The game does require access to the internet and my firewall brought up an alert asking if I wanted to allow it. So be prepared for this if you have a firewall that might need manual configuring.
After browsing the various menus and credits I started changing a few settings in the settings options menus. The game had autoselected HIGH settings for my particular setup, I turned on realtime shadows and changed graphics to HIGHEST.
I began play with the recommended Learning Campaign. The graphics looked clear and sharp, not the pixelated or blocky graphics that others were complaining about. The maps in this campaign are small for the most part and you don't have a tremendous amount of room to build on but you have enough space to complete the missions of the Learning Campaign without too much trouble.
Starting a new city begins with the placement of a new town center. Then one or two industries, and houses for the workers, actually they start out a low grade shacks. Then a well which causes the shacks to upgrade to the next higher level. You need a warehouse to store the products of your industry and a granary to feed your people. Next you need a farm for animals to fill the granary with. You start out with a goat farm. You need butcher shops nearby to slaughter the goats and turn them into meat. The excess meat is sent to the granary while the people with homes come to the butcher shop to pickup supplies.
Next you need a watch tower to protect your citizens from wild animal attacks and a fire tower to spot fires in the area. Brush fires occur in the area near your city and can spread to your farms and other buildings if they get too close. A fire tower sounds the alarm and the men run out with buckets of water to put the fire out.
Soon you have to setup trade and meet requests from Caesar or other cities. At the start you don't have the option of trading with other cities so everything just goes into the warehouse. A small cart comes to the city to pickup the items when you have enough and leaves.
Your houses require more than water and food to evolve to the next level of a small hovel. You need to provide items like olive oil and tunics. So you need to place a olive farm and a flax farm, then place olive press shops and tailor shops to produce those finished items.
Rather than just placing houses, the game provides a means or placing the jobs first, then from the industries menu, you can click on the icon of the workers and the up-arrow icon to place a house for that worker in your city. You want to try to keep these workers close to their jobs. Each house will display a green ghost area showing its effective range. You want all their needs within this green area as much as possible, but you can place somethings outside that area and they will still travel to it to get things like food, clothes, etc.
In the Learning Campaign only three temples are available, Mercury, Diana, and Mithras. Placing these near the housing meets the need for religion of your citizens.
There is no Research requirements in the early Learning Campaign missions, so you don't have to spend money on researching new technologies at first.
Soon you will be in a mission where you must start trade. Trade depots only handle one function, import or export, and only one product which you select from its menu. That trade depot is dedicated to that function and that item until you change it.
In Massilia you will have to build docks and shipyards to start sea trade. Ship building requires lumber so you need wood cutters cutting down nearby trees. In Massilia you need to quarry marble and export it in return for wheat. This wheat which can be sent to a mill to be turned into flour and the flour into bread by a bakery shop, is needed to fill the request from Caesar for wheat to feed his legions. So you need to produce cargo ships quickly to increase the influx of imported wheat to meet the request from Caesar with vary from 40 to 80 units of wheat.
Other items you houses need to evolve are music in a piazza, so you need the piazza and a music school. A Taverna (tavern) is a place for people to relax and drink. Taverna seem to function on their own and don't require any special supplies.
A bath is eventually required to meet some mission goals. People need enough down time from work to go to the baths and must be a large hovle status before they need a bathhouse to evolve.
Once a large hovel is ready to evolve you will see a green up-arrow flashing over it. Click on that building and click on the upgrade icon then find a vacant area to place the new small insulae building. Insulae buildings can be placed over the tops of shops leaving the shops intact on the ground floor. The upgraded large hovel disappears from your city and leaves a blank spot where it once stood for you to build a new structure on of your choice.
None of the missions seem to be very hard, most being completed in 30 mins or less. I'm about 6-7 missions into the learning campaign and have hit a snag. My workers seemed to have stopped working. I wanted fishing boats but my wood cutters just sit in their businesses idle. My tailors don't seem to produce enough tunics and my food shortages are growing. I've started making some changes to my city and things seem to be getting a little bit better but there are still food shortages and a lack of new tunics. I'm working on it.
The game has no save game overwrite warning. If you select a save game name from the list when making a new save it will just overwrite that file with asking for confirmation, so becareful.
There is no undo function in the game. If you make a mistake you have to remove it. The removal tool doesn't work well with mouse strokes from side to side. I found it best to rotate the map so that I can use a slow vertical stroke to remove the item I want. The mouse offset problem people have is there but it is not as bad I though. You just have to move the removal tool icon around the desired item you want to delete until it shows a red ghost, then click and drag to remove it.
There is a camera angle unlock cheat as indicated in a earlier post I put ont he board. Enter, type Nero, Enter, and press Shift+C to unlock the camera. It's doesn't work that smoothly, I got it working in some missions and not in others. You have to reactivate it in each mission, it doesn't stay active like the cheats in other citybuilder games from Impressions. The free camera makes getting a view of the city layout much easier. Why this was not the default setting for the camera I'll never know.
Placing a aqueduct requires fresh water from lake or river. At the inward land end of the aqueduct you can place a cistern. This covers nearly the whole map with piped water. However, as noted in the README notes for the game shack do not get access to running water, so they need a well nearby anyway. Once they evolve to small hovel they get running water from a cistern.
The music is pleasant and doesn't get old too fast. In fact while listening to the music I noticed two interesting homage references to one of the music tracks from Caesar III and to one of the music tracks from the movie Gladiator, "The Road to Ahkabar", in the scene where Maximus was being taken to North Africa via caravan.
For the curious without the game I made up a set of screenshots from the game showing the some of the menues, civlopedia and some shots of the city I was building in the Learning Campaign in the Capena mission.
However, were you not clear, or did I miss it?! Have you started playing the actual game (as you are now comparing C3 cities), or are you still in the tutorials?! It sounds like you're actually playing it now, so just a matter of curiosity. In any case, how about some real comparisons now to the prior CBs for one who has only played them and CotN. What do you really like and dislike in this one compared to the others? That will be more of an indicator to me.
!!! As you know, I detest those and if it's a required scenario, thanks but no thanks. None the less, you know my criticisms, but might give others something to think about anyway.