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Strategy Tips

Experienced players will find most if not all tips not new. But I wish I had known some of them when I was a Caesar III rookie. Most of the information provided here was taken from forum posts.

• City startup
• Sizes of houses
• As the crow flies
• Worker shortage
• Army requests
• Import Limits
• Native trade
• A precise tax formula
• Prosperity
• Gods
• Crime

City startup

Lower your tax level to 0%. Raise your wages to 2 denarii over Rome's wages. In the early game tax income does not matter, and you can easily afford to pay the two extra denarii for your few workers. As a result, people are in good mood, and many immigrants desire to live in your city. Start your city with an export industry, and open a trade route. At this point, you should have a regulary trade income. Then begin to feed your people. The main rule is: export industry first, food second.

Sizes of houses

Up to and including small casa level the sizes of your city's houses are not important. Beginning with large casas, houses consume non-food goods (pottery, furniture, oil, wine). Because these goods are consumed on a per house basis, larger houses (2x2 tiles and up) are more efficient; e.g. a 1x1 large casa with a single resident consumes as much pottery as a 4x4 luxury palace with 200 residents. Whether a newly laid out block of 2x2 lots evolves into four small houses or whether it evolves into one large house is decided by chance. (Technically, it depends on the lots' placement on the map. However, there is not much that you can do to force 2x2 houses in this situation.) Large insulae and grand insulae are always 2x2 houses.

Therefore it is usually a good strategy to evolve plebeian houses to large/grand insulae or to leave them as small casas, especially if your city is short of pottery, furniture or oil (or workers to produce these goods). You can use small statues to control the evolving process of houses.

As the crow flies

A farm cartpusher delivers food to the closest granary that has space for it. But what is the closest granary? You may be surprised that it is the straight line (measured in tiles) between a farm and a granary that matters and not the travel distance by road. I discovered this behavior for the first time when I was playing the Damascus assignment. My cartpushers were travelling all the way around a large mountain, passing an empty granary on their way. Consider this behavior when you plan the locations of your granaries.

I think other destination walkers, like market ladies choosing a granary or a warehouse, behave the same way.

Worker shortage

If you have full legions and no towers, give military the lowest priority in the labor advisor panel. Your 30 workers in barracks and military academy are idling anyway.

Army requests

Three academy-trained troops (2 legions, 1 auxilary) are enough to win every distant battle. For a "small force" one legion and for a "medium force" two legions will do the job. However, if you send more troops, they will suffer less casulties. Do not send all 6 legions, because Caesar III has a bug in the calculation of the army strength, and only very few of your troops will count in this case. Winning a distant battle will boost your favor rating, and the emperor will also send you material to build a triumphal arch.

Import Limits

Besides the limits of a trade route, traders also consider the amount of already stored goods in your warehouses when they decide how much to sell to you. The import limits for manufactured goods, marble, and food are a function of your population size:

For raw materials, the traders will at most sell you 2 basic cartloads plus 2 additional cartloads for each active workshop using that material.

Goods in warehouses without road access are not included in the trade advisor's list and don't count for the import limits. Therefore, to maximize imports of a good, it may help to temporarily disconnect warehouses storing that good.

[The import limits were first posted by catilina.]

Native trade

Native trade can be very profitable, often more profitable than exports to other cities. A native trader can make a shopping trip each month, provided that you have placed a warehouse with export goods not too far away from the chief hut (not more than 26 tiles away, to be precise). On each trip he buys three units, i.e. up to 36 units a year. The native trader goes at first to the nearest warehouse storing export goods, which means you can control what he will buy (preferable your most expensive export goods). If he can't buy three cartloads there, he will move on to another warehouse with export goods. You still have to open a regular trade route for the goods you want to sell to the natives.

A precise tax formula

The term 'tax multiplier * 6' is a constant and can be considered as the (taxable) total income of an inhabitant of the specified type of housing. The tax multipliers are listed in the housing table.

Example 1: fully occupied small casa, tax rate is 7%
2 * 6 * 0,07 * 68 = 57 dn (rounded down)

Example 2: fully occupied small villa, tax rate is 15%
9 * 6 * 0,15 * 40 = 324 dn

Prosperity

The details of prosperity are featured elsewhere, for example at The Appian Way. I will remark a few points that could be helpful if you want to raise your prosperity rating quickly or keep it up at a high level.

Place new housing lots early in the year, so they have time to develop to a higher form of housing until the end of the year when the new prosperity rating is calculated. Vacant lots count as small tents and can hold back your prosperity cap considerably.

Making a profit and paying tribute to Rome is crucial for the rise of your prosperity rating. If you have earned much money in a year, e.g. after a blessing from Neptune, try to invest most of the money in the same year for additional constructions and imports. This will make it easier to make a profit again in the next year and will lower the tribute by the way. Conversely, if you know you can't avoid a loss, try to move expenses from next year into the current year. Instead of having two years with moderate losses, it's much better to have one year with a heavy loss and another one with a tiny profit. In less successful years you can spend some of your personal savings to ensure that the city makes a profit. Paying yourself Caesar's salary (100 dn) from January to November gives you the necessary freedom of action.

Building the hippodrome early also helps to raise prosperity quickly.

Gods

There's no need to build temples for gods who can't hurt you, i.e. for Mars in peaceful scenarios (where you can't build forts), for Neptune if you don't fish and don't trade by sea, for Ceres if you don't have any farms. However, full coverage for all gods will reward you with 30 culture points.

Mercury's blessing can be a good start for the initial food supply of your newly founded city. On the other hand, it can have a devastating effect on an established food distribution; imagine all your market ladies, even those from the most distant parts of your fish-eating city, starting a trip to get some wheat. Under this circumstances, quickly delete the filled granary to avoid the worst.

Neptune's blessing is probably the most valuable blessing, note that it also doubles the revenues earned from goods sold to land merchants.

How do you get more than one blessing from your choosen god? If you keep the god exalted all the time, you will never benefit from a second blessing. Instead, try to oscillate the god's mood between displeased/angry and exalted. To worsen the mood, simply tear down temples devoted to the god. To rise the mood, build more temples for him/her than for any other god, possibly tearing down temples devoted to other gods, then hold a large or grand festival to your choosen god's honor. Be careful not to risk the god's curse, though. Note that each map seems to have a randomly specified spectrum of months in which blessings can occur for each god. Therefore, it may not be possible to get a blessing from a particular god in a given month, even if you try as hard as you can.

Crime

Crime can quickly turn into a serious problem in large cities with high unemployment or high taxes. The tax rate has an effect on all houses, no matter whether they are visited by a tax collector or not. Tent zones are predestinated to become crime zones, especially when most of the remaining population lives in rather wealthy housing. If you can't avoid tents, tear them down from time to time, preferably at the begin of a year, and replace them immediately with vacant lots. The new citizens will stay lawful for some time.

XIV.IX.MMII