CivCity: Rome
Description
CivCity: Rome is a city building strategy game by Firefly Studios and Firaxis. In terms of game logic, it includes elements from two well-known game series, i.e., Caesar (primarily) and Civilization, giving players the opportunity to build, run and maintain various cities of the Roman Empire.
Despite the name, CivCity: Rome isn't the next game in the Civilization franchise. So this is more of a traditional historical city builder than a take on cultural victories.
Game Play
The game offers two types of missions: stand alone missions to include free play (or "sandbox") and a campaign based mission. The campaign based mission begins when the player, an engineer, is hired by a local stone works overseer to construct a stone mine colony. The player then gets further opportunities to prove himself, meeting such historic characters as Crassus and Julius Caesar. The player is offered various ranks, progressing through such titles as: Quaestor, Aedile, Censor, Praetor and Consul.
Each campaign mission begins with a patriarch to the player offering the greeting of "Hail!" and then stating the character's title. Midway through the game, the player can choose to embark on military campaigns which involve combat or continue to play peaceful missions which have harder goals but no risk of invasion.
CivCity: Rome grafts a simplified tech tree and a handful of wonders onto a clone of Impressions Games city builders from the late 1990s like Caesar and Pharaoh.
Unlike more traditional large-scale city-building franchises like Sim City, the style in CivCity: Rome is about creating and managing a daisy-chained economy in which raw materials are harvested by citizens from the landscape or by placement of farms, then converted into finished goods. For example wheat, which is grown on a farm, and then taken to a mill and ground into flour for a baker, who then sends the baked bread to a granary where citizens can get it to eat in their homes. Certain finished goods are required for a particular household to evolve. In most cases this upgrade is automatic so long as the house has access to the commodities needed for the evelotion. The higher up the socio-economic ladder the house climbs, the more taxes that house will contribute to the city coffers. This alone provides an easy and simple way to increase your finances.
Playing the game
Playing the learning campaign is strongly advised. The campaign is not a tutorial but a series of linked scenarios that will teach the full range of buildings available in the game and how to use them. By the end of the campaign, you should be an accomplished Roman town governor.
After the campaign, you can choose a scenario from the single mission screen and play the style you enjoy, at a difficulty level you are happy with. Some scenarios have economic goals such as collecting resources, raising a cities Civilization level or building wonders or a certain number or buildings. Some scenarios will have a more military outlook and others no goals at all, which will allow you to build without worry as long as you want.