YMMV / City-Building Series

• Broken Base:
  • Caesar IV is either considered a small but marginal improvement, with the introduction of new mechanics, or an ugly, boring, poorly-rendered 3D retread of Caesar III.
  • Unified workforce: a handy improvement that solved whole bunch of issues or a simplification that makes the game waaaay too easy. It's not helping matter that it was introduced in Zeus, which is by itself divisive about being the easiest game in the whole series and by a large margain.
  • The fandom can't decide if Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile is really part of the series, or just too different from the baseline. Not to mention being delivered by other studio than Impressions Games, even if part of the staff worked in both companies.
• Even Better Sequel:
  • Caesar series was generally praised both in period reviews and in contemporary re-evaluations as an ever-improving with each part, starting from rather humble beginnings to one of the Trope Codifiers for city management games. Caesar III in particular also laid the groundwork for the rest of the series.
  • Ask any person which game in the series is the best. The most likely answer is going to be Pharaoh, which started out as just Caesar WITH PYRAMID CONSTRUCTION!.
  • As a whole, the series is seen as getting better and better with each part, elaborating on and polishing mechanics from previous games. Even Zeus, despite its contested status, still undeniably introduced many new mechanics that not only Emperor polished and kept around, but found their way to fan mods for Caesar and Pharaoh games (most notable being the global employment pool, which massively simplifies city management).
• Funny Moments:
  • Some of the buildings when operated can have some sort of humour to it, a Cheese Maker for example would hit his hand making cheese every time. While the wine agora gets drunk on the job, Caesar 4 given more funny moments involving the workshops who when they are not active muck around like witless idiots.
  • The (friendly) Gods of Zeus and Poseidon, who do not have a sanctuary in your city, will regularly pay you a visit, trying to encourage you to build sanctuaries to them. As you build sanctuaries to certain gods, the remaining gods will in turn come up with new arguments, and give additional reasons for why you should worship them and build sanctuaries to them. And then there are gods who becomes downright desperate, such as Atlas, who proclaims that "I hold up the earth, for crying out loud! Why won't you worship me?"
• Memetic Mutation: From II: "Plebs are needed!"
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Walkers, who are vital to get supplies from buildings to housing, but whose pathfinding AI is the definition of Artificial Stupidity. You haven't played a game in this series until a neighborhood goes splat (except maybe Emperor, which added basic means of controlling walkers) because some Worker Unit was off on the other side of the map doing Ra knows what.
  • Caesar III and Pharaoh took it a step further, as they had the infamous "employment" walker: each building requiring workforce was first sending out a guy to get people from nearby homes, enforcing existence of Industrial Ghetto. And to make it even worse, it didn't matter how big said ghetto was - it could be just single tile basic hut, operating entire industrial district, making the whole thing superfluous. From Zeus onward, employment walkers were removed.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Zeus is considerably easier and way more forgiving than Pharaoh
  • Buildings are automatically staffed, as there are no labor-seeking walkers anymore.
  • A single building provides maintenance and fires can be put out before the building is consumed.
  • There is only one single type of food and fewer types of goods and services required to fully evolve houses, and no fertility system.
  • Taxation can be implemented from the start, as unlike in Phraoh, the infrastructure to set it up is quite cheap. Wages can quickly lower or rise the labor pool.
  • There is no rating system, and no gods to appease by default (though the hostile ones can still damage the city).
  • There is no painfully slow recruitment system, as the basic housing provides weak but free and numerous soldiers from the start to defend the city, with elite housing providing strong soldiers and cavalry. Invasions are not always inherently deadly, as the enemy can be bribed off or the city can lose/surrender once and become a vassal, even to several cities.
  • Everything is cheaper, and fortifications are no longer prohibitively expensive. In campaign mode, all the treasury is carried over from one mission to the next, which usually translates to only the first episode being a financial challenge.
  • Water is available everywhere in the map in Zeus. In Caesar you need to transport it with reservoirs and aqueducts, while Pharaoh has a desert setting and water supplies can only be built on grassland. Emperor uses Pharaoh system, but water is often readily available because dry land is rare in most maps.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: To make the difficulty changes stand out even more, Emperor carried over almost all of the changes introduced in Zeus, but it's on par with Pharaoh's complexity, specially in the food and wares department, not to mention campaigns themselves, reintroducing many of the complexities present in Caesar III and Pharaoh but dropped in Zeus.
  • Several types of foods are needed to fully evolve houses (and not just elite housing; even housing for commoners requires at least two types of food), and a fertility system is again present.
  • Taxation takes a while to be implemented (and requires resources).
  • The appeasement of the gods mechanics returns.
  • No free militia exists anymore and the slow, recruitment process is again used.
  • Money is not carried over from one mission to the next; instead a fixed, limited budget is given at the start of most missions.
  • Just like in Zeus, you can (and often do) return to your previous cities, with your city remaining as you left it. However, not only do you not regain your previous treasury in such instances (which could be a good or bad thing, depending), but oftentimes you are tasked with some monumental construction, and you might have accidentally built your city on the only site that can fit said monument, requiring you to tear down sections of your previous city.
  • Wells and elite housing can only be built on grassland again.
• Spiritual Successor: If you count the games made by the staff that went on to create Firefly Studios, then the Stronghold series is probably the best example.

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