FAQs

31. How do I take a “screen shot” of my game?

Angel Omnivac recommends you do the following: (1) Press “Alt” + “Print Screen,” This will save one image. If you do it again, you will overwrite it; (2) Open up your favorite Paint Program, PhotoShop, Deluxe Paint, etc.; (3) Click “New” to create a new document. You will see also that the dimension of it will be your screen resolution (800×600 for example). (4) Then you simply use the command “Paste,” and voila! The screen when you pressed Alt + Print Screen will appear there. After that you can cut it, resize it, modify it, or do whatever.

32. What’s the point of building temples to a God if I don’t need their help? If I’m not going to be doing any sea-trading, for example, why do I have to appease Neptune?

While the favor of a particular god may not seem necessary on some maps, keep the following in mind: (1) As you progress, upper class citizens will want access to as many different gods as possible. Access to all 5 would be the best; (2) You may think, “who cares if Neptune is angry, there’s no water on this map!” Your citizens, however, will not share this sentiment. It will bring down the mood of the people in your city, and they will not like you as much. Right-click on them, and you’ll receive messages like, “the gods are angry with us!” or my favorite: “the governor is a heathen!” If the mood of your town goes down, you will begin getting messages like “one of your tax collectors was mugged—you lost $340 Denarii!”

33. I have a small temple to each of the gods, throw many festivals for them, but they’re still not happy with me! What’s wrong?

You probably do not have enough temples built. Temples are likes schools, or theaters: they can only serve so many people. Build a new set of temples to all the gods for every 750-1000 people or so. Build large temples if you can, plus an Oracle or two (which appeases all the gods).

34. What is the ratio for Entertainment structures and Industry?

For Entertainment structures, you generally need 1 training center per 4 venues. For industry, the ratio is 2 workshops for every 1 raw material building. In both cases, if walkers have to travel an excessive distance to their destination, the ratio will alter a bit.

35. If the Governor’s homes do not employ any workers—and only effect desirability—what’s the point of building them?

I can build a large statue instead of a Governor’s Palace for less than half the cost! Impressions concedes the point that the governor’s home is effectively nothing more than a big statute, with one important difference. Building a Governor’s home has a huge effect on prosperity—the larger the better. Only the Triumphant Arch has a greater effect on desirability, which will increase your chances of upgrading housing to luxury Palace level, thus the effect on prosperity.

36. How do I reliably export food?

Exporting food can indeed be difficult. In early scenarios, where you have only a few granaries, it is possible to flood your warehouses with food simply by overproducing. However, in larger cities with multiple granaries, even if you are massively overproducing, it is very likely that there will be at least one granary somewhere in the city that is not full when a farm cart pusher is generated and chooses his destination. In this case, little, if any, of that food type will reach a warehouse (particularly if it is the principal food type being eaten by your populace).

Impressions has detailed 2 methods that they have used to successfully export food (though neither is entirely satisfactory).

You can export a food type that you don’t really need to eat. For instance, if you are eating mostly fish you can tell all of your granaries to “not accept” vegetables and they will accumulate in your warehouses for export. This, of course, must be abandoned when you reach the stage of housing evolution where you need to start eating this food source. This is usually a minor inconvenience, however, because food is not worth very much as an export anyway, and the taxes from the higher levels of housing will compensate. Another downside to this method is that your people will be eating, as a whole, less variety of food (as reported on the Population Advisor). This removes a potential bonus from your overall “City Sentiment” modifiers (i.e., your people are happier when eating more types of food, and you can tax them more/pay them less/live with higher unemployment, etc).
The second method of exporting food is to segment your city. Create a bunch of farms, a warehouse or two, a little bit of housing, and some docks if necessary (plus engineer/prefect) and do not connect this to the rest of your city. The food produced here will be exclusively designated for export, while the food produced in the other part of your city will go for consumption. The benefit of this method is that you can export the same type of food you are eating. The downside is that, particularly if exporting over a naval route, you do not have complete control over the trade being conducted with you by other cities. If trade ships go to other docks, these docks do not have road access to your segregated farms. If the trade ships go to the docks by your segregated farms, they do not have road access to other warehouses in your city and this can affect other imports/exports. Due to this alone, this method is often only a temporary solution used early in a city’s development. The other downside, of course, is that it is an odd way of doing things and just does not feel right.

Impressions has stated that they were aware of this problem during development, and a number of suggestions were put forward and debated. Each of them had their merits, but were defeated for reasons of either interface complexity or ease of understanding. The scenarios were balanced with this in mind. It was assumed that you would not be able to get a return from a food export, whether you could or not, given the circumstances of the trade options on that map. Instead, you would need to depend on exports of raw materials/finished goods to get your city started.

37. I am still having great difficulties understanding the special orders of granaries/warehouses. I just do not seem to understand how to use them efficiently.

You will find, on larger maps, that you need to transport large quantities of food/goods across vast distances. This is precisely what the “get” orders were created to fulfill: transporting goods/food across the map. Cart pushers from farms/workshops should deliver to a local granary/warehouse. These goods then are ‘pulled’ out by cart pushers on “Get” orders from granaries/warehouse spread across the map. Market buyers buy from local granaries/warehouses that are receiving their supplies primarily from “Get” carts.

Do not set the granaries near your farms, for example, to “Not Accept” food, so that the farm’s own cart pusher will take the food to a granary across the map which is “Accepting” it is not very efficient. Moreover, you are losing significant production potential. Impressions has explained that farms, workshops, raw materials, and wharves will not begin a production cycle if the produce from their previous cycle has not been hauled away by their cart pusher. This is why you can see farms full of wheat just sitting there waiting, or fishing boats sitting by their docks. They are waiting for their cart pusher to return from delivering to a warehouse/granary.

“Get” orders are the most important thing that the warehouse/granary cart pushers can be doing, and they are by far the most efficient transport mechanism in the game. “Get” carts, uniquely, can carry up to an 8x load in one trip (for granaries, warehouse “get” carts max at 4x loads). Far better not to let any raw materials ever enter a warehouse (unless importing or exporting it, or temporarily stockpiling it for Emperor requests). Let raw materials buildings deliver their wares directly to workshops, so that warehouses don’t waste their cart pusher doing this menial chore when they could be performing a “Get” order.

38. I’m having trouble getting the Game Hack cheat-program to work.

One user has offered the following example of editing something simple, like Population, just to understand how it works:

Activate Game Hack.
Activate Caesar III.
Start or load saved city.
Notice what the population is right then.
Bring up the Game Hack by pressing Ctrl. + Shift + G.
There is a button on Game Hack in the upper left hand side of it that says, “Process.” Push it and there will be a bunch of options. There is an option (probably the one on the very bottom) that has a bunch of letters and “C3.” Click the one with “C3.”
Now, remember the population before? Click on the button that says, “First.” On the line for “Data,” put in the population number. Click “OK.”
It might take awhile, but eventually, it comes up with a list of addresses or offsets on the left. Ignore that for now, and go back to play Caesar III for awhile, until the population changes.
After the population has changed to whatever number, go back to Game Hack by the way described before (Ctrl. + Shift + G). Click the button, “Next” Type in the population in the field that says, “Data.” Click, “OK.”
It will narrow the field to a few addresses. Now, the address that you can edit for population is one of those.
Repeat steps 8 and 9 until you narrow it down the max.
Once you have figured out the address, click on it, and click on that arrow button in between the two big sections. That address will move over to the right section. That is our population culprit! Now, to change the population…
Double-click on the address that you just moved. It will bring up a chart. The “Data” line will have your current population. Just change it! Go back to your game and watch! Your population SHOOTS up. (It might go back down again because not enough house space or food. Do not try to fit 15,000 people in one small neighborhood as I did! 😉 Not a good idea!) Once you mastered that, you can edit your Denarii, and basically anything else you want. Do not get frustrated. It might take awhile. The best thing is about Game Hack, is that it can work for ANY game.