Julius
Version: GIT Web: www.bit.ly/2yUaMxg
In the pantheon of city-building games, CaesarIII is one of the most beautiful and captivating. It is a proprietary game for Windows, developed by Impressions Games in 1998; after nearly two decades it became typical abandonware, or a great retro time-killer, if you like.
Julius is a modern open-source implementation of CaesarIII, with all game mechanics and logic carefully recreated from scratch, partly using reverse-engineering of the original game. Julius to CaesarIII is like OpenTTD to TransportTycoon Deluxe, and if you enjoyed playing around with transport companies, you should fall in love with Julius too. In order to launch the game and play you still need the original CaesarIII resource files for graphics and music, but that’s the only serious limitation. The main objective is to build your career in the Roman Empire, from citizen to the highest grandee ranks, by completing tasks from the emperor.
Each task drops you to a wild part of land somewhere in the Mediterranean region, where you govern the construction of a new city. You should build residents’ houses, provide it with fresh water from aqueduct, protect your buildings from fire and collapsing by building prefect’s posts and city engineer offices respectively, give your citizens enough food, create production facilities and so on. Julius is a 100% match to CaesarIII in terms of supported features and capabilities, but it is an independent implementation of the CaesarIII logic, so there might be slight differences in economy balance and units’ behaviour, especially for large cities with thousands of units and buildings. It also supports saved CaesarIII game files, which is nice.
“An independent implementation of the Caesar III logic”