Strategy Guide for

There are no perfect cities. Just check out the discussions on the website and you will see how many people have put forth "perfect" designs. The game is much too dynamic to make a perfect city. There are more than thirty cities in the game, and each has its unique problems and situations. Still, there are certain basic truths. The first one is that people must eat. The second is that people like to eat often, and the third is that they like to eat well. In this game if there is no food, there is no city.

Some of the scenarios give you ample farm land to plant. Wheat is the best and most basic crop. There are two wheat harvests a year (all other farms harvest only once a year) and everybody needs and likes wheat. If you have a lot of wheat in your granaries, people will be drawn to your city. Even more important, you will be spared the annoying screen warning that "your people are eating more than they produce." While it is not as bad as the "plebs are needed" in Caesar II, this gets my vote for the worst and most annoying thing in the game. Of course, it has its purpose. As my Latin teacher Brother Terrence used to say, "dictum sapienti sat est" (a word to the wise is sufficient – Plautus).

Offering people food is not enough to keep them coming to your city. They need jobs. This is where the game really requires your concentration. Farms needs farmers. They need granaries to store their produce. There have to be markets for people to buy the produce so they may eat. The roads have to link these sites, and there must be people to work in them or the food never makes its way around the city.

This little dynamic is multiplied for every industry you build. Plant olive groves and you will need to build olive presses and warehouses to make and store the olive oil. Dig for clay and you need workshops to make pottery and warehouses to store it. The warehouses have to be accessible to the markets so that people can buy pottery in the markets and thus improve their standard of living. This makes for bigger, better and happier neighborhoods, which of course will require even more "luxuries" like furniture (which requires timber, logging camps, furniture workshops, more warehouse space etc.), more types of food (like, fish, which means building shipyards and wharves and sending men to sea) and even wine (from vineyards).

There are many other types of industries that are wanted and needed by the city. These range from iron mines and weapons shops to make armor for legions, to quarries to get marble for palaces, statues and grand villas. Some of these things are available locally, if you have the right natural resources, while others have to be acquired by establishing trade routes with other Roman cities. Trade routes cost money and require their own infrastructure (like docks and even more warehouses).

Finding workers for all of these jobs is hard enough, but is made all the more difficult by the other requirements you need to fulfill. These are, in order of importance: police/firemen, engineers, water workers and soldiers.

The prefectures provide protection from fire and crime. These structures send out patrols to protect your neighborhoods. You can’t have too many of these around. This is priority number one in assigning people to jobs. Nothing can ruin your city faster than fire and crime (riots). Next to most of the prefectures you should build an engineer’s post. These send out the men who maintain the roads and prevent buildings from crumbling. These get the second priority for labor.

Third priority has to go to water workers. Your people will pitch tents just about anywhere there is a well for water, but the tents will not become houses unless there is clean water. While you can dig a well almost anywhere, you have to build a whole infrastructure to get clean water. Clean water comes from fountains which are served by aqueducts which need reservoirs. All of these cost money to build and require people to maintain them and make them work. On the bright side, this water network allows you to build bath houses, which make people prosper and keep them happy and healthy.

Each of these three job positions have to be filled or your city will literally fall apart. Just like a computer, "99 percent compatible" is worthless. If your city needs thirty prefects, give it thirty or watch the city burn. If the city needs twenty engineers, parts of it will start to crumble if there are only nineteen engineers. If it needs fifty water workers, assign fifty to the task or parts of the city will go dry. You get the picture. Now this does not mean that everything is safe; you have to monitor where you put the prefectures, engineering posts and baths, or else disaster will still strike. There are overview screens for that. Learn to use them – or else get ready to be like Nero and pull out the violin to fiddle while your Rome burns.

Satisfy these three public works jobs and you can then start playing around with assigning people to farming, industry and the bureaucracy, as well as the health, education, entertainment and military duties needed to protect and serve the population.

Here’s a very important hint for managing workers: Your labor adviser will put people in jobs as they are available. He will evenly distribute them, except where you tell him to prioritize certain jobs over others. Unfortunately, several types of job are jumbled together – especially in the industry category. If you want to make sure that certain industries (like markets or the wharves that serve the fishing fleets) get workers when there are not enough around, you can go to the Trade Adviser and turn the non-essential industries off. This is a an important technique for micro-managing workers when you are short of labor.

While your people are working, the gods are watching. Like the people, the gods have needs. Fail to met their needs, and disaster strikes (literally). There are five gods, each of whom watches over a particular sector of city life (food, commerce, health, happiness, war). You keep gods happy by building temples and holding festivals. Temples cost money and require workers (a temple without workers is almost useless). Festivals just cost money (except for the really big ones, which require wine and lots of money). On the positive side, people like to live near temples. Temples encourage people to be happy and to prosper (build better houses). Temples and festivals can not only improve the overall temper of your people (a happy city attracts more people and they work better), but they can also gain you favors from the gods. This can result in rather obvious things such as bigger harvests and increased commerce as well as thunderbolts that will, literally, strike invading armies and fry the flesh from their bones. (Yes, I have seen Mars send down death from the skies on a Greek army – one of the few things in the game that is not impeccably realistic).

On the obverse of the coin: fail to worship the gods, and disaster will strike. Their wrath can be something minor, like storms that keep traders away, or something worrisome, like a plague. Really anger the gods and you will see your soldiers desert, your people rise in rebellion and (shudder) the earth quake. Unlike SimCity, an earthquake is a true and unfixable disaster. Huge rents in the earth create ravines, gullies and canyons which can never be filled in. Your whole city plan can be unalterably ruined by an earthquake. If it happens early enough or with a small enough city, you can recover by building elsewhere on the map. If this happens late in the game with a packed map, it is just about "game over."

This of course makes sense. As I noted before, you are the next best thing to being a god – and since you can’t be a god, suck up to them. Treat them well and reap the reward; ignore them and feel their wrath.

Keeping the gods happy helps keep your people happy, but it is not enough. The people demand (actually, they whine) a lot to make them happy. Listen to their needs. Happy people work harder and build better homes, and happy homes attract more and happier people. Happy and prosperous people also pay more taxes (see below).

People need several basic services: shops, schools, entertainment and health care. The markets are the shops: as mentioned before, the markets have to be accessible to the people and also to the granaries and warehouses that stock the food and goods they demand. Figure out that dynamic, and the more esoteric needs are comparably easy to meet. There are several levels of education and entertainment, all of which require money and workers. Variety of education and entertainment is important, as is location. You can build a "theater district" or a "campus" if you wish, and that will help meet the needs of some people and advance some of your ratings. For a large city, however, scattering these about makes more sense. People are lazy. They like to have things nearby. You can trick them a little if you put theaters and a coliseum on one end of the city and put the actors colonies, lion tamers and gladiator schools at the other end. The actors, lions and gladiators will march through the city (a nice parade to watch, I might add) and "tell" each neighborhood they pass about the plays and games.

Schools, academies and libraries, unfortunately, do not act that way. They only cover so much of the city, so these edifices have to be scattered about to meet the public’s needs.

Making people happy by meeting their needs is a joy in itself; fortunately there are more tangible rewards: taxes. You start with a good deal of money to build your city, but that money does not last long. The taxes poor people pay are not worth collecting. I highly recommend setting your initial tax rate to zero. This attracts people and makes them happy, and does not hurt you. As I note, peasants are not worth taxing: they do not have two sesterces to rub together, and taking money from them only makes them more likely to rebel. A tax haven, just like in the real world, attracts people and more important, it attracts business.

Businesses are the real source of wealth in your city, at least until it develops into something grand. Industries which can export to other cities on trade routes will bring in a lot of cash, and will do it without making your city unattractive or unhappy. Commerce makes the city prosper, and when it prospers it grows. As it grows, the neighborhoods will improve into middle- and upper-class areas. Once that happens, and really not before, you can start taxing the people. Happy, prosperous people can easily bear five or six percent taxes. Seven percent is the game default and that is fine. Going above that is tempting fate – unless of course you reach a point where you want to hold down population growth (this happens sometimes, especially if you have met the scenario population goals but have not meet the cultural, prosperity or other requirements set for you by the designer or electronic Caesar). Anything over ten percent is just plain asking for trouble, and should only be contemplated if you are in dire need of cash in the very short term, and even then, think of another way to make money, perhaps with more commercial ventures. As Brother Terrence used to say, "mus non uni fidit antro" (a mouse does not put its trust in one hole; i.e. a wise person has a backup plan).

As if making money and making people happy were not enough, you have to protect them. Fortunately, you always have a choice of assignments from the emperor. At each level of the game you can choose to govern either a peaceful or a bellicose province. The higher you go, of course, even the peaceful provinces are merely relatively peaceful when compared to the other choice. If you take a peaceful province and ignore the military, even the random appearance of a small band of raiders will devastate your city.

For an example of that, I give you Miletus, a peaceful fishing community in Anatolia. (Level Five out of the eleven levels in the game). After about two game years of building a nice little city, three raiders appear on the edge of the map. No matter how many prefectures you build or string together, the police will not be able to stop the raiders. For one thing, you can not give orders to the police, so they only encounter the raiders as part of their routine patrols. For another, as the policeman will tell you when he meets the raider: "this soldier is too strong for me – aargh!" If you rush to build a wall between them and your city, that will gain you some time, but they will breach it and hit the city. Once loose in the city, they will systematically destroy it, building by building.

If you were not far-sighted enough to start building an army early on, you can stave off disaster by building a series of walls between your city and the invaders, and then building a fort, barracks and academy to start training auxiliaries. These lightly-equipped, unarmored infantry do not require a weapons industry to be outfitted. They throw javelins. If they outnumber their foe and can avoid hand-to-hand fighting, they can weaken and wear them down.

If you set your labor priorities for the military and build barracks on the walls, some ballistae and guards will show up to defend the walls. They can snipe away at the enemy, but will not stop them. When the enemy comes through the breach, the javelin men can shoot at them, but you still need to keep backpedaling and firing. These "Parthian tactics" will weaken the foe enough for the prefects to take them out, provided you put some prefectures in their path. These prefectures work best if you build short roads from the prefectures so that the cops patrol only the area in the path of the foes. If you tie the prefectures into the city system, the cops will wander off and let the invaders inside.

Of course, such stop-gap, reactive efforts are not only wasteful of resources, they are unnecessary – provided you build a fort early on in the game.

Professor Carrol Quigley, under whom I studied at Georgetown in the early seventies, broke down all human history into seven layers of study. The first and most important layer, the prop upon which everything else depends, is the military layer, or more accurately, "security." An animal who cannot drink safely from a pool of water will die of thirst; the same goes for a city: if it is not safe, it cannot survive, let alone grow and prosper.

Within the first year of building a city you must create a fort, a barracks and an academy. The barracks recruits people from the city to go to the fort and join the military. An academy trains the cadets who make better soldiers, and make them better soldiers faster than the fort alone. There are three types of soldiers. The first, simplest, cheapest and best bang for the buck are the auxiliaries. These guys can take care of minor threats (like a handful of raiders, wolves – yes, wolves – or small groups of rioters). In combination with other groups of auxiliaries, walls and prefects, they can defeat a small invasion. One fort and one auxiliary unit is a good start. Two are better. Three will get in each other’s way.

The second type of quick, cheap soldier is the cavalry auxiliary. They are not as good in combat as the infantry auxiliaries. They do not shoot and they are not very good in hand-to-hand combat. They also take up a lot of maneuver room on the battlefield. They do, however, have their uses. First, they do not require iron and heavy weapons, so they are cheap and fast to raise. Second, they can move very quickly to a threatened area. Third, they can trick an enemy into following them away from your city. This is a vital tactic. Put the cavalry in harm’s way and then keep them moving. The enemy will chase them. This will give you time for the foot soldiers to catch up.

If an enemy unit is engaged on the front with your infantry (auxiliaries or wall guards or prefects or legions) the cavalry can move around and strike the flank or rear. Used in that way, they are devastating. If the enemy is not pinned, however, they will turn around and slaughter your horsemen.

For both the horse and the infantry auxiliaries, maneuverability is the key. They need to strike, retire, and strike again. To stand and fight with them is to watch them evaporate. Once they break and rout, they will not be able to recover in time to save the city. Better to use them a little, rest them and save them for a second attack than to stand and die – for die they will.

The third type of soldier, and the best, is the legion. The heavy infantry, however, require weapons, which means you either need the combination of iron mines and weapons workshops or you need to import weapons. Both options take time and money, and until you start stockpiling weapons it is no sense to worry about legions. Build the cheap stuff first, and use them to buy you time to build the real soldiers.

The legions, especially if you have two or three of them, can handle just about any threat. Support them with the auxiliaries and they are devastating on the attack. Used in conjunction with the ballistae on the walls, however, they are unbeatable. There are two ways to use the walls with the legions. One is to put them behind the wall and let the enemy breach it. The ballistae will wear them down and they will come through the wall in small groups. Your legions can cut them apart while the light infantry throw javelins overhead to further weaken the foe.

The second option is to put the infantry out in front of the wall and to use the artillery on the walls to support them. This is necessary in cities where you do not have sufficient open terrain behind the walls to maneuver troops and are thus forced to meet the foe in the field. Otherwise, the first tactic is the preferred one.

The military is a small sub-game. While it is a lot of fun, it is not as detailed as the combat was in Caesar II, and of course is nothing like the Great Battles Series, nor is it meant to be. You can really screw up if you do not pay attention to the military, but on the other hand, it is the easiest part of the game to get right.

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