Technical FAQs

Please note that these FAQs were written when the game had just come out. Some answers may no longer be applicable!

When I try and install CIII, it crashes!

  • Make sure the C: drive has enough free space( 150 to install and at least 100 for the virtual memory needed to run the program).
  • Run ScanDisk and Defrag on the C:\ drive and on the drive Caesar3 was installed on(if applicable).
  • Make sure the windows temp file is empty. Usually the directory is C:\Windows\Temp
  • Be sure you have the latest sound and video drivers installed.
  • Restart the computer before attempting the installation. When the computer reboots, make sure ALL other programs are closed.(This includes desktop utilities, virus scanners, etc)
  • Be sure to install DirectX 6.
  • Set the screen to 16 bit High Color and 640×480.

What Version of DirectX does CIII use?

Caesar III was designed to use DirectX 6. www.microsoft.com/directx has the latest version for downloading.

Screen freezes/locks up while playing or Game crashes on Level “X”

Make sure you have the required 100 megs minimum free on the C: drive, Directx6 and current video/sound drivers. Run Scandisk and Defrag on the C: drive. Try restarting the computer and closing all programs before resuming the game.

If the game still continues to crash at the exact same point, remove and clean the CD gently (wipe with a soft cloth to remove dust and fingerprints. Check for any scratches on the CD).

There is also a chance of a corrupted CIII file(s) if the crash keeps occurring. In this case, back up all your SAV & MAP game files, uninstall and then reinstall CIII. When the game is reinstalled, copy your SAV & MAP files back into the Caesar3 directory, and run Defrag once again before playing.

Missing sounds/animations in CIII

While running the game, check under the Options menu for the Sound/Effects settings. They may be turned off.

For the animations: there’s a bug in the game that the animations will stop working after your computer has been turned on for 24 days on end (including sleeping). The animations will fail to show up for 24 days, after which they will mystically re-appear. A restart of your computer solves this issue.

The sound is garbled, making popping noises, stutters etc.

  • Download the latest versions of your sound card, video & CD-ROM drivers, also have the latest version of Directx6.
  • When you run CIII, make sure there are no other applications running on the computer. This includes any desktop utilities or virus scanners. On some machines windows seems to “hog” the extra memory which may be causing the garbled sound.
  • In the CIII game, make sure under the OPTIONS menu that the sound effects are ON.
  • Adjust the volume of all C3 sound components to about 70-80% and turn up your volume knob on your speakers (or the volume control in Windows95).
  • Switch to a lower resolution (640×480 or 800×600). This will also make the game run faster.

The mouse pointer keeps flickering/jumping.

Make sure you have the latest video drivers and DirectX6 installed. 
Try running in the game with 640×480 settings.

Assignment Editor

I downloaded the Assignment Editor, but it won’t install!

Try the zipped version of the editor instead.

I downloaded a map made with the Assignment editor, but the map won’t load!

If you do not have the map editor installed on the computer, make sure you downloaded the c32.emp file in order to play the scenarios made with the map editor.

Anyone who has not downloaded the editor has an older version of the c32.emp file and will not be able to play the created maps.

Also, for maps/cities that do not load, if they were unzipped cities you received from others or downloaded, they may have been corrupted. That has happened occasionally.

Misc questions

How do I run the game in “windowed” mode?

Be sure that your desktop resolution is higher than the resolution that you want to run the game at in a window.
Example:
To run a window in 640×480, set your desktop to 800×600 or higher.

Can I speed up the game?

Aside from Setting the game speed to “100%”, you can change the resolution to 640×480.Having mouse help boxes displayed will slow the game down. Before running the game, turn off any other programs you have running. Other than that, just relax and enjoy the game as it goes!

How do I delete saved games?

Open windows Explorer and navigate to the Caesar III directory. (eg C:\sierra\Caesar3 ) Delete the saved game from there.
The maps created in the Assignment Editor have the .MAP extension and the saved games have the SAV extension.
YourSavedGame.sav

It is a good idea when you have CIII running, to go to the LOAD GAME option and write down the name of the city(cities) you wish to delete. Keep in mind that every time you are promoted in the career levels, a map is added to the list (saved by the level name. Eg. Aedile.sav) You may want to keep these, in case you want to replay the level at a later time. If you do delete them, the levels are available in the CIII Heaven Download Section.

The spacebar doesn’t pause the game.

The manual was printed before the game was completed. The ‘P’ key on the keyboard pauses the game. For other hot keys (keyboard shortcuts) see the Readme file that was included on the CD.

Help! I cannot build anymore buildings!

Currently there is a building limit in the game. The maximum number of buildings is 2000. There is also a limit to the number of walkers the game can have. Cities have been built with over 25k people(done by Proconsul Conan, Impressions employee and C3 master).

Editing the C3model file

How do I edit the c3model.txt file?

This has got to be one of the most popular questions! The following information is from Lancer(Impressions employee) originally posted in the official C3 forum. Do make sure you BACKUP the file before editing it!


“The C3_model.txt contains building and housing info. Its a plain text file that you can mess around with at will, though you are of course advised to keep a backup of the original in case you want to go back to using it (or in case you goof and totally hose something).

Mess with this file at your own risk (ie. keep an original copy of it somewhere and don’t bug us if you lose your game on account of messing with it: as a last resort you can always reinstall). Don’t read any further unless you really want to mess around with the game model.

Disclaimer done, for those of you who just love to mess with things:

Housing section:

Each item below is listed in the file as a single number separated by a column. The numbers represent, in order:

  1. Devolve #: Desirability at which the house drops to the next lower level, be sure this is less than the next number.
  2. Evolve #: Desirability at which the house evolves to next higher level. As you can see, both evolve/devolve can be negative, the top end of the scale is 100.
  3. Entertainment #: Scale is 0-100, I just posted elsewhere a detailed explanation on Ent.
  4. Water requirement: 1=wells, 2=fountains needed.
  5. #Religions needed. Don’t bother trying to bump this number to 5, I wanted to for luxury palaces just to make more of a difference between them and large palaces but couldn’t due to a big hairy bug, so 4’s the max (nothing blows up: the previous level house will say it needs a 5th religion, but it will evolve even if it has only 4).
  6. Education requirement: 1=school or library, 2=school and library, 3=school, library and academy.
  7. Market access (really food requirement, 1=they are eating) – unused in the game.
  8. Barber access, 1=needed
  9. Bath access, 1=needed
  10. Doctor/Hospital access: This was changed, much for the better, at the last moment (you don’t want to know the oldmethod), I believe it is: 1=doctor or surgeon walker access (surgeons come from hospitals) 2=doctor and surgeon access.
  11. #Food types eaten. We have 0-3 as the range, feel free to try a requirement of 4 if you like: it may or may not work.
  12. Pottery required?
  13. Oil required?
  14. Furniture required?
  15. Wine required?
  16. Crime increment: this is the number of points the crime level will increase for that type of house every so many game ticks. So, the higher the number here, the faster the crime level in the house grows.
  17. Crime base: [doesn’t do anything].
  18. Prosperity cap. I know you’re all very interested in this one. This number, multiplied by the number of occupants in the house, summed with all of the other prop. cap #’s * occupants and divided by the total number of houses on the map is equal to the limit on how high your prosperity can go. Don’t think these numbers were easy to come by, so mess with them at your own risk: if they’re too low you won’t be able to meet your prosperity requirements in certain scenarios. Raising these numbers makes the prosperity requirement easier to reach, and vice versa. Any number >0 (don’t use 0 or negative numbers or you’ll risk a divide by 0 error) will do. At one point I had 2000 for luxury palaces rather than 1750, for houses 1-12 (up to grand villas) I myself play with lower numbers for more of a challenge, tho I like a few of the numbers for patrician houses a bit higher. Email me if your curious as to what I use for personal play.
  19. Population limit. The number of people in the house. Note that for housing up to the medium insulae level, this number is for a single tile building and NOT for the 2×2 (which holds 4x more people). Large insulae and beyond only have one size for each house#.
  20. Tax rate: This is the tax multiplier for the house. Actually its double the tax multiplier (we needed a broader range of numbers for finer control). To find out how much a house pays in taxes,take the number of people it can hold (or, in the game, how many it currently holds), and multiply by this tax multiplier/2. This is the base tax rate, the actual taxes paid is ((base * (current tax rate in the city))/ tweak constant). The ‘current tax rate’ is simply a number from 0-25, not a percent, the tweak constant ended up at about 8.5.
  21. (and above) None of the remaining numbers are used by the game, they’re mainly the results of formulae in excell used for balancing the earlier numbers, especially the prosp cap and tax multipliers.


Building numbers:
Not everything you think you’ll be able to do here will have an effect, and not all of the numbers in existence in this file have any meaning: some of it is hard-coded due to the uniqueness of certain buildings. This already has a key in the file, I’ll follow it here:

  • a) CST: Cost of the building.
  • b) DES: Desirability. This is the initial desirability effect at range 1 (ie. the tiles surround the outer edge of the building) Can be positive or negative or zero.
  • c) STP: The ‘step’, this is the number of tiles the desirabilty remains at a certain level before it changes (can be positive or zero, but not negative).
  • d) SZE: The ‘size’, this is the amount of desirability change at each step (can be positive,negative, or zero).
  • e) RGE: The range of the desirability effect. Ranges greater than 6 are treated as range 6 in the game. Had to make this limit for speed reasons.
  • f) EMP: The number of Employees the building requires.
  • I don’t know what the last two numbers are, I think they’re unused but wouldn’t want to mess with them.

 Example Desirability effect:
 Large temples have a listed rating of 8, 2, -1, 8
 This gives a desirability effect of (8, 8, 7, 7, 6, 6)
 The effect changes every 2 tiles because the ‘step’ is 2, it changes by -1 each change because the size is -1. Note that the actual range in the game is 6, and not 8.

Additional notes: 2 senates and 2 forums are listed, only one of each is used in the game, you can tell by the cost of the building. I would refrain from changing the listed labor requirements for reservoirs/wells and governor’s residences: things could get ugly. The cost for bridges is per tile, like roads/aqueducts and other obvious things. ‘Warehouse’ refers to the tile of the warehouse containing the pulley, the ‘warehouse space’ refers to each remaining tile (experiment if you want, but no promises). Be warned: desirability effects are per building and overlap, so even a tiny change to a single tile structure’s desirability effect gets multiplied quickly due to the overlap(this is why gardens, plazas and small statues have a big effect, but be VERY careful of messing with housing desirability effects as they overlap on each other repeatedly and changes greatly effect evolution/devolution of housing). The ‘Fort’ row should not be touched at all, if you want to modify forts play with the ‘Fort – javelin’ type rows for the 3 specific types of fort.

Have fun, and try not to screw things up too bad, and don’t forget to backup the original file before messing with this or trying out someone else hacked file. This is really about the only ‘easy’ way to hack around in the game model, most everything else is saved in a compressed format. “