CivCity Rome is an empire building game. Your job in the game is to build towns, or even an empire in Roman times. Start with little shacks, dirt roads, and just some basic buildings, and then grow.... expand your empire to include rich exports, imports, house a great army, conquer your enemies. The goal of the building areas of the game is to collect tax money from your housed citizens, the bigger and badder their house are, the more they will pay you. As your little guys grow, get married, have children, their wants will increase, and you will need to supply more and more items to keep them movin' on up. You can watch your dudes and dudettes move from shacks, to huts, insulas, and then even domas and palaces of their own. Getting a palace in your town is a bit of an achievement in itself. Now to me, this is my type of game. For a little excitement you can move to a military campaign, and build outposts, staging cities, and go offensive.

I love to build, to calculate, to figure out the game mechanics and optimal patterns and methods of a city. It also has a great learning curve, to figure out the basics is simple enough, but to master the game takes a long time. So why am I unable to even say what I think of the game...

So, lets talk about the good of this game, alright? No? Tough, we are gonna. I absolutely love starting a city, building shacks, and small roads and watching everything upgrade. I love to sit by and watch my citizens live their lives, get supplies, and how they interact. I am very impressed by the complexity of the game, there are dozens of needs for various levels of housing. It requires thought, planning and some good analysis of your areas and town to really excel. Want to make a palace? That's great and all, but do you have that much flat and free land close by? Do they have access to entertainment, wine, the senate? What if they are across town, can you arrange transportation, or do you give up on that spot? Will making this palace even pay off? Do you need more money then quality of housing? There are so many factors the game keeps my interests peaked.

A neat little feature in CivCity is the Civopedia. It is basically a tiny encyclopedia of how all the industries, peoples, technologies and even gods worked in Roman times. I enjoyed sitting and reading how bread was made, and the importance of fruit, goats and ducks and all the aspects of the Roman life. I really applaud the developers for including this feature of the game, especially in such a well done method.

Many games around have map editors, and scenario creation tools. I often don't get too far into them. But CivCity Rome is different. Their map editor shines, from placing decorative touches, missions, ambient sounds, and all your normal terrain/resource editing tools in a very easy to use format. I was impressed, I created a mega map to play around on, and learned how to play the game. One thing that was missing though, was a empire generator. You see, in the game you have your city map, and an empire map of all the towns around. You can't create an empire map, only use some very very limited prefab maps. The replay value certainly drops a ton without this tool. How can you create a challenging scenario if you can't create a proper empire to support a town missing, say, 3 resources? The beauty of the editor really falls on its face when you realize there is so much complexity, but they forgot to add in a way to customize the empire you live in.

Now for the bad...

I make people happy, that's what I do.. really. I need to get a job in that, but I really don't have any skills. But I do love to play a game and make my little people all warm and happy, and then have them dance and celebrate my name.. and.. well, you know. This might be where CivCity Rome gets a little too realistic. I'm not sure I quite enjoy this game's immigration methods, because if your people are happy, they just pile into your city. You have no control over this except to make them unhappy, but, you see, thats not what I do, that isn't me at all. I make people happy, I told you that.. and you believe me...... So I build a awesome city, and the people are happy, but I don't want thousands of immigrants pouring into the city and raising unemployment, and lowering my housing (eventually making them unhappy), so I have to starve my own people! But I make people happy! I said that right? This really goes against everything I enjoy, but it gets worse.. I am too good, so I not only starve them, I decide I don't want to pay them any wages. My people.. slaves?! This is not making people happy, and not making me happy. Here I am trying to make a glorious city, where I have to starve my people and make them basically slaves just to play. Does this seem right?

One thing you quickly learn in Civcity is that supplying a good living for all your citizens is pretty much impossible. The larger the housing you need, the more industries you need, the sizes of the housing grows very fast, the industries grow just as fast. Big houses + lots of industries = very few housed workers. This doesn't make me happy. You can attempt to have a decent median of housing and supplies, but you can never really make everyone live in a nice civilized home. You will always have slums.

Romans are known for their armies, so what game wouldn't be better without armies and combat built in? Well, this one for starters. Creating an army is.. simplistic. Step 1 – Buy expensive barracks. Step 2 – Fabricate weapons from wood/iron. Uh.. ok... so some guy made this game with a beautiful and complex civilization, then they just threw in the military side in the last hour of coding or something? As you get more weapons, you get more soldiers (magically as your town population doesn't seem to get affected). When being attacked in your city, you move your soldiers to the enemy and they fight each other. It is very basic, there is very little control or combat maneuvers. There is no flanking the enemy, and static town defenses are so bugged up the enemy AI just avoids it by exploiting limitations in the map editor, or walks through them. Attacking enemy camps is a little more basic. You send your dudes out of the town and pick a legion to attack that town, if you are feeling especially brainy you can intercept enemy parties moving to your town, or even group up two or three legions close together and attack a town! Brilliant! Really, the level of the military side in this game makes me sad when you see how nice the civilization part is.

Alright, so I'm sitting in my chair here, wiggling my butt at least attempting to make my guys kinda happy in a neutral sort of way, ignoring the dumb AI attacking my town. What ruins CivCity Rome is simply the bugs. I can pretend there are no armies, and my people love being whipped and stuff. But I can't even use the mouse to point to the spot the pointer tells me. Everything you do in CivCity Rome will be figuring out how to play around a bug. Your mouse will not work, your fruit just disappears from granaries, making upgrading housing a challenge. You are setting up defenses not based on realistic choke points or anything, so instead you are blocking off exploitive routes with walls. You are sitting around wondering why all the houses except 2 have upgraded, and why your placed Insulas won't ever be moved into. Why are your lumberjacks lazy bastards that just sit around all day? When I delete buildings (there is no ability to move industrials), why do I lose population to my city? Why are my troops not leaving my garrisons and my town being eaten away by enemies? Why did I just delete a granary full of my town's food when my mouse wasn't even close to there? Why am I playing a game that is frustrating? Every move I do has a bug in it. It is over 4 months since the release of this game, and there is no patch out, very unfortunate. But.. after all that, I like CivCity Rome, at least I try to. I do like what the game tries to be, but right now it is more frustration then it is worth. Like I said, there is one great system there to build and develop a city. It will take you a long time to try out patterns and methods to get the best city you can. I could almost play this game for a long time, if the bugs didn't drive me off the wall. If the mouse bug is so bad, it ruins me from playing other games (trying to correct for it constantly). After a couple weeks, I just said this is not worth it. I was not happy.

Update – "Coming Patch"
As I am getting ready to submit this thing I figure I better make sure there is still no patch out. Well, of course they announce a patch coming in a week or two now, and a list of fixed bugs. While list of fixes are massive, I can't help but wonder why they didn't release an empire editor into the game. After this patch, CivCity Rome shouldn't be a hair pulling experience to play, things should be pretty smooth and run decently (however it seems they didn't fix some major bugs still), the replay value of the game will remain somewhat.. limited. Without an empire to match the limitations to your city, you can really only do so much before you do the same thing over and over again. There is very little you can do to make both a challenging war scenario and resource scenario, it simply doesn't exist. The game mechanics are also unchanged, so I'll still not be able to make my guys happy, I'll load up the game after the patch, see how it plays out, but will I keep playing? Maybe occasionally.