Hey people, since some of you asked for a "release" of the port of Julius/ Caesar III for 3ds, here it is, published on github. It's an early release of what this project can be, since there are many improvements to be made on the gameplay a visuals, however i think the performance is great and it can be fully played (actually, I don't know how it deals with overpopulated and big cities):

https://github.com/UhtredOfBamburg/julius-3ds/releases/tag/v1.0-3ds

To make it clear, all of this was made using gemini 3.8 flash high, on antigravity, and used the Julius open source code to make the port possible. To my understanding, distributing this code doesn't go against any copyright law, considering each one of you use your own copy of Caesar III.

Also, I need all the help possible to make the next release even better, so I need you guys to play the game and criticize EVERYTHING possible, then I'll ask antigravity to make the necessary changes. And to anyone who actually knows how to code (or knows how to deal with slop AI code) and could help with the project I would really appreciate it, especially for making this port run on old 3ds hardware.

Anyways, thanks for your attention!!!!

Hi everyone!

Like many of you here, Caesar III holds a very special place in my heart, and I've always dreamed of having the full game running in my iPad, without the need of dos box or any other sw in between.

Not gonna lie: I had Gemini working on this for hours. The result is satifying, so far.

Now that is 100% working, here is the Github: https://github.com/MargeLenders/julius

PS.: I know this was posted with other account. I just wanted to create a separate account for all my other ports (Constructor, Theme Hospital, Red Alert). Thanks for your understanding.

Capture zeus is a tool made with AI to screenshot a panoramic view of your city.

Available on:
Github: https://github.com/Vicinity4813/capture-zeus/releases

Zeus Heaven= https://zeus.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=1221

Source code and Readme are included but basically:
_ Run game
_ Pause game in city you want to capture
_ Alt+Tab & Run capture Zeus
_ It will put your game in full screen itself, mute it and starts to move in-game
_ Don't touch anything and wait for it to get back to capture Zeus
_ Panorama done and stored in a folder next to it (Capture Zeus.exe).

Took 50s to capture the city above.

Enjoy!

With the advent of AI slop, it's now easier than ever to make changes to these antique games. One thing I've found especially annoying over the years of coming back to Zeus is having to download the widescreen pack and change it if I want a different resolution.

Would there be any interest in me uploading this repack that allows you to flick between all of the HD resolutions usually found in individual folders?

I'm also trying to get a scalable map working - rather than having half a screen of blue 😆

Hello, I have recently completed zeus and Emepror, which I both loved , and I consider starting Pharaoh soon. I am not sure which version to pick as I read various arguments for and against.

1The remaster has bugs, but apparently, so did the original. It benefits from a community patch however.

2 some players criticize the removal of tactical battles in the remaster, although apparently, the mechanics were often described as awkward in the original.

3The remaster removes time limits imposed in some missions, which to me is a + as I dislike time limits, and adds a labor pool, which is a mechanic I enjoyed in Zeus and Emperor.

4 Some complaints mention the terrible UI of the remaster, calling it a major downgrade.

Overall it seems that people are quite divided, between people who feel justified in their criticisms of the game, and those who enjoy the game and feel that the negativity isn't justified and fueled by bitterness and rose tainted glasses. The game seems to have a very good feedback on Steam while on GOG a lot of 1/2 stars reviews can be found.

Was it purposefully done by the developers to create a way to create stability in the grand chaos of random walker paths? Later titles feature roadblocks and gates so the evidence implies no?

Here I show the game running, with sounds and music, the first mission.

It's much better now, with better use of the botton screen and a clear top screen. The gameplay is still a bit clumsy, a lot of polishing needs to be done but this current version is totally playable Throught the hole game! I didn't show it, but all missions are available and playable. (to make it clear, all of this was done using gemini flash 3.8 High, on antigravity).

The way I felt most comfortable to way was using the stylus to put things on the ground and the circle pad to move around. Then i look into the upper screen to see the "big picture" of what i'm bulding. Maybe add an option to zoom out or zoom in the bottom screen would be good too.

Making this post so I can share it with you and on the Julius discord of the developer of Julius. With luck we make it public in the future.

Thanks for your attention!

No installation, no compatibility fixes, no messing around with old Windows settings.
Just open a tab, load up Zeus, and suddenly it’s 2001 again.
Honestly, if someone ever manages to port the old Impression Games classics to the browser, I may never get any work done again 😂
Zeus, Pharaoh, Caesar III… all one click away.
A man can dream.

I love the idea of pocketable games, and I LOVE Caesar III, it's the first game i've played because of my mom, who also played. Recently i tried on switch and it was great, but it wasn't on the freaking 3ds. After seeing the morrowind porting today (wich is AWESOME, i want a daggerfall one too, man, please), and after discovering antigravity basically yesterday, i had to try it (i've tried it on gemini before, in the browser, but it basically told me it was impossible.).

After only one RAM issue, it made it work like f@#$ MAGIC. I know, it's really clunky, but it shows how a complete layman (does this word makes sense?) can do these things now, the game is really changing.

Anyhow, I thought it was cool to share. I'll keep improving the gameplay, if you want me to share more with you just say in the comments. Thankss!

Is there any mod or work around to get past the data limit error? I currently play through steam, but I do have CD versions of the game. Would it be better to install those?

Playing this on a Windows XP VM (QEMU/KVM) on CachyOS. Just took snapshots with Spectacle and pasted them together in KolourPaint. I had to redo this map because the first time I couldn't fit eight elite houses for Odysseus lol.

Adapted SenetEr’s Common Housing Block around the pesky little rocks at the bottom of the island, and used the middle part of Grumpus’ Elite Housing Block to summon Odysseus.

It's not perfect (the upper part of the map I did last minute cause I didn't like the empty space, and did a couple of minor reshots here and there). I'm miffed I didn't think to flip Athena's temple so the Growers' lodges had easier access to the olive trees, but oh well.

The only reason I even did this is because it's a smaller map (too lazy to do the bigger ones, though I did have some I wish I could share). Also I tried my hardest to fit both the Forge of Hephaestus and the Arbor of Athena while preserving the aesthetics. The amount of housing block Tetris... ಠ_ಠ

Anyway, I have a 58 MB (9108x4500) image file if anyone wants the full thing. Would post the gofile link here, but not sure what the policy is about that.

Edit: Got an "undefined" error and it didn't upload the image... thanks Reddit. Here's the whole thing I guess

Edit 2: Smaller version. If you don't like gofile, here's an imgur link

24. LAGENSHIRE

• 4.000 People (Common) in Lvl.10 housing.
• 6.000 of each mineral (Gold, Copper and Iron) mined yearly.

Empress Victoria sets her next mission to you, Juliet Wash, to the mountain reaches of Lagenshire, to establish a large mining operation to meet large yearly quotas to sustain the region and potentially the whole Empire. Juliet hopes to see this city as more than a mining camp, but one worthy of the Breathing Mounts, even more as her brother Lloyd was assigned to build and innaugurate the Empress' vision of the future - the Zeppelin Hangar.

---

Finally, large enough spaces aplenty to build. Unfortunately, that happens to be the only good news on the mission, as resources (both Fae Mushrooms, geysers and mineral deposits) are spread out, you'll have to rely on Farms (Preferably Bread due to exportable factor) to feed your city and there'll be requests for CASH (yes, you've read that right), so you'll have to plan carefully and start an Absinth industry as soon as you're able to initially export to Midcester.

Planning will be required here, as well as careful stockpiling and coordination, especially of Faes. Get a warehouse to stock a quantity of them (at least 2.000) before setting the distilleries to work and remember to get a Townhall and taxing your housing blocks and setting the salaries to Low until you're ready to break the 1.500 population safety net. There'll be three requests for cash, which are to help finance a scientific expedition - firstly 2.000, then 3.000 and finally 4.000. When they're through and you have a modicum of cash from your Absinth exports, start moving into the mountains. Begin initially with Iron and Steel (Recommend leaving the Blast Furnaces next-door and the warehouse close to the Condenser/Canister Warehouse) and stockpile before exporting and then, when ready, pause it a bit and switch to Utensils to get the labor expanded for the final leg, which is Gold.

The 6.000 Iron, Copper and Gold goal might definitely require an extra housing block BEYOND what's required for the 4.000 people goal, as you'll require six mines of each mineral and they're apart from each other. You don't even have to stockpile the raw materials, it's simply measured into how much you produce per year.

These graphs track the rise of crime in Czechia alongside the number of new Caesar 3 maps produced by one particular police officer, and they matter because the near-perfect correlation strongly suggests that every aqueduct he places is a burglary he didn't prevent.

This is my tribute to the game. Cheers!

Hi! How is everyone doing?

I’m the director and developer of Oriontis: The Lost Kingdom.

I wanted to ask if you’ve had a chance to try the demo yet. I updated it very recently, and I’d really love to hear what you think.

We’re also going to be much more active and put more effort into growing the Oriontis community, so if you have questions about the game, feedback, ideas, challenges you’d like to suggest, or simply something you’d like to see in Oriontis, feel free to write here. I’ll be reading everything!

The demo received a pretty big update recently:

• One of the most requested features is finally here: you can now save and load your game. Building a city with over a thousand people is no small task, and we don’t want you to lose all the progress you’ve put into your city. Now you can save your game and continue whenever you want.

• Another highly requested change: the city camera zoom limit has been increased by 40%. Ship navigation zoom remains unchanged. Remember that you can also customize your camera controls from the Options menu.

• If you’re already familiar with classic city builders, you can now jump straight into the mission and start building, without going through the guided tutorial.

• If you want to learn the different systems in Oriontis, the tutorial has been expanded considerably, especially around trade, ship controls, docking, and resource distribution between Warehouses and Granaries.

• A second side mission has been added if you decide to reject the first one.

• More mini-islands are now available on the world map, giving you more places to explore and more shipwrecks where you can search for lost treasures.

If you try it, I’d really like to hear what you think!

Play the demo on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4795270/Oriontis_Demo/

And if you know someone who might enjoy Oriontis, feel free to invite them here too. We’re just getting started building the community around the game.

Discord Community:
discord.gg/Bp7tyVHnCN

Zeus: Master of Olympus is probably the only game that I play at least once year, every year, for the last two decades. I love it, it's my cozy, comforting thing.

But I would love to get more maps, more scenarios, maybe some mods to see a new side of it. Is there anything you'd recommend? Some community made stuff worth getting? Where should I even start to look?

I have some good housing, but can't properly fix the prosperity for 2 tries, (today was an early save from the last game). Hard game, maybe I'll try the other map...

This is the reconquered campaign map 17, using the augustus mod (caesar 3). I guess I am reaching the end of the series now.

The previous two maps, damascus and caesarea had pretty interesting twists. In caesarea you had to import food, and in damascus you did not have access to fresh water (initially). In contrast, this map is much more straightforward - the only issue is that you cant get academy so you need to build a pantheon eventually. The other thing is that you have a high population requirement - 17.5k.

Btw, I didn't think either damascus or caesarea were particularly hard (I went into it thinking it would be very hard). In Caesarea you can sell sand initially for a lot of money (remember that sand produces faster than clay), and you can/should build a highway early. In damascus, trade is even easier (huge iron quota, just sell iron), the highway is very short, there are no water routes, the terrian in more flat, and the lack of water is offset with wells+latrines that let you get to small casa. Generally, being able to sell raw materials at high quotas can really trivialize the financial difficulty (as long as you get things like highway, mercury gt or caravensari). Anyway, enough digression.

If you have been playing as much as I have, by now you have probably gotten a hang of selling large quotas, and you are probably bored of it (after damascus, I was getting a bit tired of this). Well, get some rest because in this map (Londinium) you have a large quota to sell too, and to encourage the reliance on trade, the tax rate is reduced to 4%. You sell mostly finished goods here, pottery and furniture. Since it takes a bit of time and investment to get the industry going, you can sell some raw materials in the beginning (you still have the subsidy mechanic going). The map is huge, so you have enough space to build as much furniture and pottery. I like to build my first industry close to the entrance - that way I don't need the cart depot initially.

I started the game with two big housing blocks at the north east (closer to the invasion points), and some fishing wharfs. One of the first things you have to do on these maps is to look for the potential highway. I made a mistake initially and did not see that you could build a bridge to the exit. Generally, you want your highway to be as short as possible.

Regarding housing, don't worry about the 17.5k pop limit. There is plenty of space for housing blocks. By the time I reached 20k, I still had a few potential spots left for housing blocks.

I also rushed a grand temple to mercury, to help me sell things and get the plaza unlocked. This was very expensive and happened slowly, as marble costs almost 1k and stone is expensive too (fortunately, you have bricks, timber and sand locally produced). At some point, the military activity ramps up significantly. Fortunately, the enemy only comes from one side, so a kill zone takes care of them. There are warnings when the military activity ramps up and you are expected to build more forts.

Because you have a huge map and a large population quota, I think its best to build all the grand temples (if you have that option enabled. I digged a bit deeper to understand the value of certain epithets like mars or neptune.

With Mars GT, you have the option of 10% reduced goods consumption, or, automatic food generation for supply posts. My conclusion is that either one of those two would do great. The food option would save you around 9 farms (for 10 forts and ~10k population assuming you make only 2x2 houses). So you can easily feed your soldiers without farms, and use that food for civilians. I picked this. The other option is probably better, as oil imports are expensive. By my calculations, it should save you ~3-4k every year in oil imports.

The neptune GT can increase the population of your houses by 5%. So a grand insulae would hold 88 people instead of 84. This actually affects the consumption of goods, because goods are consumed per house. For large populations, this is another ~4.8% reduction in goods consumption, making it a pretty good deal.

Making these calculations and getting a better understanding of food/goods consumption is what I learned from this map.

Speaking of imports, oil is expensive. I started buying oil very late, so I didn't really feel the pinch. My export was enough to offset, and I was having reduced oil consumption anyway. I also used the lighthouse to reduce import price by ~20%. The initial import cost around 28k, but constant oil import is much less (~9k) - which is a bit surprising, I thought it would be much higher. I did use the vegetable->oil option.

Anyway, the last challenge is prosperity. To reach 100 prosperity (you actually only need 95), you a bit less than ~20 large villa. To construct a large villa, you need the pantheon, otherwise you are stuck at medium villa due to lack of academy. I dont know how many medium villa you need, probably double the number because they give less than half the prosperity. Besides, 20 large villa should fit easily in one housing block (you dont need to build temples since pantheon gives access to all gods). So large villa is the easier path to 100 prosperity.

23. HEMWICH

• 5.000 People (Common) in Lvl.10 housing.

Juliet Wash's (Your) next assignment is the bizarrely shaped peninsula of Hemwich, which seems apparently incapable of housing a large, functional city. Still, Empress Victoria wishes the area colonized for it's mineral wealth, and Juliet must find a way to best this "puzzle"...

---

To call Hemwich itself bizarre is an understatement, as it's complicated as ever to set up at least two large, functional housing blocks in this hand-shaped peninsula. In addition, the Steam Geysers are on each finger, except one which is close to the starting point and the farmlands for Barley and Wheat are far way, which makes Utensils and Steel (Both Copper and Iron deposits are on the central island) your primary exports before you can even consider going for Garments. Fortunately, there are no requests for this mission, either, so you can build in relative peace and start carefully.

If you can set both large housing blocks, each to sustain at least 50 houses each, you're set for most of the mission. Since you'll have more coast options for Fisheries (in contrast to the previous mission), at least 8 Fisheries will carry you up in the long haul. Try and get started as soon as possible on a Steam Condenser and expertly piping your way to the Geysers (2 should do for nearly all the mines in the map) and then on at least 3-4 Copper Mines and the respective Utensil Workshops, stockpiling before you can get exporting. Start with Utensils before proceeding to Steel, later on.

In one of the events, you'll learn a new city (Standbach) is opening up, but it's not even worth the effort as you can't export anything and you can only import Sand or Glass, both useless to you here. Your previous city, Midcester, will also be useless as you can't import or export anything of use.

In regards to the Barley industries, set the industries close to your city and have a Granary to receive the Barley from your farms. Same for your Mills and Bakeries when you're ready to set up your 2nd food type.

Elite house is practically needless here, simply meant for the score. The 5.000 people in Lvl.10 housing, however, might require you set up at least one housing block on the mainland to the far east. Just be sure you got plenty of goods stockpiled in both Granaries and Warehouses as this will surely be a long trip for the Shoppers.

I'm loving this game. Zeus + Poseidon via Steam. I bought it a long while ago and had it in my library but got distracted and forgot about it. I've been doing this deep dive on base and city building games recently and someone mentioned Zeus in a thread, which reminded me I had it.

Installed it. Got into the swing of it. Now I'm totally hooked! I picked up Emperor on sale couple days back too. Funny how similar they are. They just reskinned it 😄

I often found myself frustrated with the 'intentional chaos' of SimCity. In Zeus everything is pretty mechanical, you can botch it at times, and some challenges are tricky, but when designed well it seems it'll go on independently forever!

I love that mechanical design. It' like you're building an engine and when it's done right it just keeps on working, then add parts, polish and expand.

I love the walkers and roadblock design too.

Now I'm getting dizzy trying to figure out the history of this series and what successors I might also enjoy. There's a lot of them.

Which are you favorites from this original Caesar -> Pharaoh series and what are the major differences that stand out between them?

If you're a like-minded fan what other more modern titles would you recommend?

Nebuchadnezzar? Hinterland? Pharaoh: A New Era? Children of the Nile?

Personally, I never enjoyed the missions where I started with a small settlement that needed to be fixed or built up. I didn't like having to spend the time figuring our how it worked. I rather just build my own.

What about you guys? I'm building a historical city builder inspired from the impression games and have been thinking about what types of levels to create.

Hello I just got Emperor during the current Gog sale, ad looked or hot fixes and patches, unfortunately I did not find anything other than the resolution patch for this game. I was wondering if there was hope for those games to get fixes and compatibility support in future. For example, I heard the catapults are still bugged in Emperorn ad Emperor is apprently more bugged than previous titles in the series. I think those games would benefit from some fixes, whether it comes under the form of remasters or fixesd provided by modders or OG Themselves.