First impressions about Imperium Civitas III

You’ll start the game by choosing your Roman family. Each family has its own strength and weaknesses.

It’s a good idea to start the game playing the tutorial first. Although the 2 tutorials are very short, they introduce you both the game basics and the military. You’ll have to discover for yourself what most of the buildings do and what they need: while laying down a building a message appears and brief you with useful information.

The first campaign mission is Cabreros/Cambrils. It’s a small island with no trade option. So, you must survive on your patron loans and city taxes revenue.

The City Center is already laid down on each mission. The forum (needed to the equities be available), it’s now a distinct building.

The economic system is simpler: each production building produces and consumes items to work. The “stock” available of your city is the net result of production minus consumption. The salves do not deliver the items anymore. Once laid down, a working building starts to produce immediately.

For each production building to work properly you need a house of plebeians/equities. Later on, you might change the workers from plebeians to equities (increasing the production ration) or to salves (decreasing the production ratio). Certain buildings only work with equities, though.

Through the academy technological search, it’s possible to increase the production rates of you farms, sawmill and mines. Also to get access to some advance buildings and services.

Each mission has some particular goals (both primary and/or secondary) to achieve. It might be food satisfaction, entertainment, religion, population, health or employment, among others.

Now you can level up your buildings using platforms/bases. The houses, either of plebeians, equities or patricians do not upgrade, at least that I could see. But they do need certain services available or else they’ll start to “produce” delinquency and your city might burn to the ground.

The military system rocks! It was largely improved and now we can have a really Roman Empire worth of that name. You can now train troops and each branch (Hastati, Archers, cavalry and gladiators) have their own abilities. You can also recruit mercenaries (elephants for example) and elite troops like praetorians, triarii or balistas.

Bottom line:

This beautiful game is completely new: buildings, economic and military systems. It’s really a step forward of the Imperium Romanum saga and worth every penny I’ve spent.

The down side:

There is no “remove” tool. Although you can delete a building thru its own information panel, the platforms and gardens once laid down, can’t be removed. There no “road” tool also. I hope the international version scheduled to January of 2009 will include those two.