There are strategies that you can master in an eight-hour shift, go to the bitter end and safely forget not only their name, but also the main idea (however, it is rarely original).
And after eight hours of playing Caesar IV, hastily entertainers are just discovering that markets should be built closer to their homes, and roads paved with expensive pavements increase the attractiveness of the adjacent living space.
In fact, the old fans of the cycle, who remember the previous parts of it, need not tell anything much. It is enough for them to find out that Caesar has acquired a third dimension and no longer have to suffer with a flat map (remember, it used to be a block on it). This fact in itself will cause a catharsis for fans of a couple of years - that is how much time it will take for them to fully comprehend the basics of planning a perfect urban infrastructure. Then you can print out the plan of the dream city and, hanging it in a gilded frame, run to the store for the next part that has arrived in time.
People who are far from the genre of urban planning strategies will have to explain in more detail. Caesar is a game in which you have to carry out the instructions of the Senate of Rome to bring the entrusted settlement to perfection. Caesar IV starts on a completely blank map with only a few thousand borrowed denarii at your disposal. Experienced strategists at this stage have such plans, the complexity of which would envy even venerable users of AutoCAD. The main thing is to achieve a global goal by any means and build a prosperous city, despite the fact that not a single inhabitant of it obeys your orders. Fifty percent of the time you enjoy the construction of multi-colored houses, another five will have to be spent over carefully hidden sliders, and all your leisure time is spent in the restless contemplation of capricious popular masses who have come in large numbers to "permanent residence" from somewhere.
In fact, any city building game is interesting exactly as long as you make mistakes. Developers do not succeed in other ways of stimulating them. To confuse you as much as possible, they come up with a hundred or two houses of different, sometimes unobvious functionality, which need to be combined into complex complexes to meet the needs of all segments of the population.
At the same time, the requirements of the highest caste, which naturally pays the highest taxes, is a continuous headache for the ruler, caused, as you already know, by the malicious authors of the game. Desires of little polygonal blue-blooded models can make the compilers of mid-range pop star riders blush shamefacedly, and the impatient player will simply fall into depression from them. Whims are presented with enviable persistence, but always somewhat at length. Sometimes patricians are "dissatisfied with the social situation", and sometimes they can complain about the "instability of the situation." The perplexed player, of course, has the right to open the built-in manual of a frightening thickness and read something like “... just improve the social situation or stabilize the situation” on electronic tablets. And all this was accompanied by the cheerful cackle of the creators of Caesar IV, who enthusiastically and with complete impunity erected obstacles to the zealous mayor of a Roman county town.
Let's say you suddenly started to work out, let's also imagine that food and essential goods have finally been delivered to local markets, and even try to imagine that the rich and the middle class are completely satisfied with the state of affairs (which, of course, does not happen in practice) ... Here, according to the law of conservation of energy, a driven pigeon with an urgent dispatch from Rome knocks at the window of the consular palace.It instructs to send a hundred units of expensive dishes to the capital within three months, the production of which you did not even think to start. While you are rushing about a lovingly built village, freeing up a scarce space for the appropriate manufactories (needless to say, a fragile prosperity can be broken with one careless movement of the mouse), the level of the Favor parameter falls below the critical mark. Then a punitive cohort of praetorians appears and takes the dejected governor to a pre-trial detention center.
In general, all sorts of germs of militarism still take root on the basis of urban planning strategies with great difficulty. Nevertheless, the developers with enviable persistence are trying to teach the "settler" to fight, but either halfway they realize the futility of their undertakings and leave everything as it is, or produce a project of a completely different genre at the end. The rudimentary military appendage of Caesar IV, doomed to be ostracized by fans of the series, who play in the only interesting sandbox mode, was no exception. Understand that the Gauls' unmotivated swoops only distract from correcting their own compositional and organizational mistakes - the real salt of such fun. Perhaps by the time you learn to avoid mistakes at the planning stage, you will have gray hair and computer games may no longer interest you. Otherwise, the cycle will repeat itself.
