CivCity: Rome

[griffitz62]

Has anyone here tried this out? I know it's received some mixed reviews, but I picked it up and am really enjoying it a lot.

[Aries]

It looks good, but I have heard it was buggy.

I would like to hear some more input before I honour that notion though.

[griffitz62]

I've heard a lot of people complain about bugs as well, but I haven't noticed anything jumping out at me. I know one of the complaints is that it doesn't support a really high resolution. You can go in and modify one of the files and force it into a higher resolution, but when you do that the cursor doesn't line up properly on objects and it becomes difficult to select things. I just run it at the max resolution the game offers and have no complaints.

The gameplay itself is a lot like the Stronghold games. You place a town center, warehouse and granary. Then a well for water, goat farmer for meat, butchers to process the meat, flax farmer for flax and a weaver to make tunics. Drop in a few houses for people to live in and away you go. It has a tech tree, but it's not as deep as Civ 4, but I think it does the job. Essentially, you have to balance production, income and happiness. Income comes from the amount of taxes collected which is based on the size of each house in the town. The houses need certain things to upgrade to a larger house. For example, you start with a shack which produces a couple of bucks each month in taxes. To move it into a small hut it needs water (provided from the well) and then it provides something like 4 bucks a turn. There are over a dozen different house levels to go through and the needs become quite complex. Temples, beds, fruit, doctors, schools, entertainment, etc.

There's a lot of production buildings as well as military forces to work with so it does have some depth to it. It's not turn based, but you can pause and look around. The only thing I don't like is the lack of any multiplayer element, but that's a small thing.

I would recommend it to anyone that likes this type of game.

[Aries]

Asuming you know of the game Majesty, how would you say it compares with it?

I've got Majesty, it's a doodle I got for my son. You build a castle environment
basically.

[griffitz62]

I've heard of Majesty, but I'm not familiar with it. It's too bad that they don't have a demo for CivCity, but the website does have a lot of pictures and information about the game. You can get there at www.2kgames.com/civcityrome (http://www.2kgames.com/civcityrome)