Caesar III complete

Finished up the last peaceful mission in the Caesar III campaign, and with that I have finished every single one of the missions on Hard difficulty!  Don't think I'll try Very Hard anytime soon (pretty much the same, only with less starting cash, less favor/mood to start with, slightly harder invasions), so that means I'm all done with Caesar III for now.  I could move onto Pharaoh + Cleopatra next, or maybe Emperor, but I might take a break first and focus on other games -- I just nabbed Hades on sale, have to finish 4BC in Dead Cells, want to try Coffee Talk at some point and of course there's always rando runs.  There's some other options as well....there's always Fire Emblem: 3 houses, of course.  But I haven't decided to take the plunge into that one.

The last peaceful mission, Massilia, felt like a really good culmination of everything that Casear 3 has to offer, minus maybe the military stuff, but I definitely feel like it was a really good capstone to the Caesar 3 city-building experience.  There are =some= military attacks here, but they are relatively easy to fend off with just a couple of javelin squads (javelin squads are the MVP in all military encounters) and don't require any towers to be built or anything like that.  Honestly the Caesar 3 combat engine is just not terribly exciting, and though you can do some amount of kiting micro with the javelin squads, it's rather inefficient and should only be used when you absolutely have to.  Other than that it's mainly just a test of "did you build enough troops / towers / walls", even though yes there are some tactics that can help out.

The military missions are generally a lot easier because of this, even though it's also easier to just lose them outright and have to restart because you didn't get your military rolling quickly enough.  But provided you do, the actual rest of the city-building is a lot easier.

I should mention that I've been playing all of this on the "Augustus" open-source port/mod, which adds not only a lot of quality-of-life features and bug-fixes (also included in the "Julius" port, which stays closer to the original), but also changes some gameplay features in the spirit of the latter games, and even adds the ability to construct monuments.  Augustus adds a new "Supply Post" building which is required to start training troops, and requires that you provide food to it in order to feed the soldiers.  This actually makes getting soldiers up and running a little bit harder because the Supply Post costs you another 1,000 Dn on top of the barracks and fort(s) (and optionally the academy), plus you need the food itself.  But to make up for that, if you provide your soldiers with multiple types of food, you end up getting a morale bonus that makes them even better than they would have been in vanilla.  Because you can't actually control how much food the supply post stores, I learned pretty quickly that it's actually best to just have the supply post have it's own completely separate set of farms (one of each type of food) to supply it, rather than having the supply post take from your main city granaries, as that can totally throw off your city's food supply.

Anyways, for Massilia, the invaders aren't particularly powerful, so that's not the real problem.  The real problem is that there's a severe lack of farmland and natural resources.  There's only two spots of farmland -- both on islands on the west and south corners of the map.  Fortunately there are fishing spots, so it's pretty clear that you have to rely on fish to feed most of your population, and then reserve those plots of farmland for providing multiple types of food to the villa/palace blocks that you'll need to construct.  And the prosperity target is quite high in this mission, so you WILL need to build those palaces.

The natural resource shortage is a pretty big issue, as the only resource you can naturally harvest from the map is timber (which is used to make furniture).  That, and vines, which you can grow to make wine (but of course that takes up some of the precious little farmland that you have).  You have to import clay to make pottery, and you need to import olives to make oil.

So the first order of business, as always, is to get your exports up and running -- harvest timber, export furniture.  Then import clay and export pottery.  And then import olives, set up a dock, and export oil.  While you're doing that you'll need to set up all of the fishing wharves and granaries to feed your population.  And unfortunately, the main river border isn't very straight, so you can't just spam wharves all along the coast like you'd ideally want to.  Instead you have to build ship bridges over to the isolated islands and build wharves there.  You definitely need to make use of single-tent labor-providing housing on these islands, no real way to do anything else.

So once you've gotten all that running, and you have your military set up as well, you need to start working towards a better city and higher level housing.  But there's a trap.  Since the only way you can make pottery and oil are to import the raw materials, this puts a limit on how much of those goods you can make per year (cities will only trade a certain amount with you).  There are two cities that will sell clay to you, so that might cause you to think, as I did, that it's going to be feasible to provide pottery to most of your citizens.  But that's a trap.  Not only is that prone to unreliable pottery supply, it also cuts into your pottery export, and you're going to have to pay a bunch of extra money to import all that clay as well.  And money is =quite= tight in this level, even if you carry a bunch of money over from previous levels.

You could try to evolve maybe only one or two blocks of your plebian housing with the pottery and furniture and oil, but that's actually an issue as well since you probably want your granaries to all be connected so they can draw fish meat from the islands.

After having an attempt at this and miserably failing to keep my economy up and running, I ended up going back to the drawing board and instead keeping all of my plebian housing at small casa level so that they wouldn't require any goods besides food.  Of course, your prosperity rating is directly related to the quality of your housing, so this means you need to compensate by building a lot of palaces.

So off to work I went trying to construct the palace blocks, utilizing the farmland in the lower area to provide wheat, fruit, fish from wharves, and a little bit of wine from vines.  My first palace block was looking more or less OK, and I have maybe 6-7 luxury palaces up and running.

That wasn't enough to reach the prosperity goal, so I set up another luxury palace block.  Fortunately by this time the first palace block had provided enough tax income that I didn't really need to export oil and pottery anymore, so I could turn those industries off to A) save employment and B) make sure my palaces are supplied with enough goods.

But then I run into problems.  You can only build one hippodrome in your city, so my second palace block was complaining that there wasn't enough entertainment.  And I had a bigger problem -- now that there was twice as many people, I was running into shortages on wheat and fruit.  And that was a huge problem, as once the markets ran out of food, they stopped being able to provide the rest of the goods, causing mass housing devolution.  Not good.

I tried a number of things to solve this -- I tried getting rid of all but one of the vine farms.  I tried reorganizing my granaries.  I tried building a grand temple to Ceres to reduce food consumption, and a grand temple to Venus to stall housing devolution.  But in the end I realized what I needed to do was actually to import wheat from the sea trading route!  So then I had wheat coming through the dock to a warehouse, then shipped over to two other warehouses near the palace area, then transported to an accepting granary there.  And that solved everything.  Phew!

Next, the entertainment issue.  This was the first time I had to set up multiple palace blocks in a single city, so I wasn't sure at first what to do about the lack of hippodrome.  Turns out that you need to build enough theaters, amphitheaters, and colosseums in other parts of your city to achieve "perfect" coverage for your population, and that ends up providing extra entertainment points to your housing.  (I also had one of my colosseums in the palace area misplaced so it wasn't providing access correctly)

With all that solved my palaces were finally evolving to stable luxury palaces and my prosperity target was reached -- and then it was just a matter of spamming schools/libraries/academies to get the culture rating, while making sure to build more plebian housing since I needed to keep worker numbers up (so much of my populace was living it up in palaces, I didn't have enough workers!).

So yeah, that mission felt great to conquer, it really felt like a challenge and you had to use every trick in the book to get everything working together in the end.  Brilliant.