Well...usually it's calming.
Apparently, back in October, when the last 6 hours of the marathon ended and I went into my sleep coma, I had left the game in the middle of a high stress campaign that required some skill that I had built up in those 6 hours of play but had since lost in the months that followed. The mission required me to send bushels of wheat to Rome whenever asked...which was frequently. Pushy emperor... If you missed the deadline, Caesar got pissed. I had forgotten everything I once knew in this game since I had successfully ignored its existence for 9+ months. Not knowing stuff made it difficult to plan a proper city. I needed wheat farms and mills and a trade dock and a large boatyard, a shit ton of wood... It was all very stressful, and as the months passed and each wheat deadline approached I watched my little workers scurry around, and I yelled at my screen, "HURRY YOU LOAFS!"
This was the opposite of calming. Because of my mad dash to mass produce wheat, I didn't organize my city very well, and it made it hard to upgrade my housing later because everything was thrown together...like Homer trying to put together a barbecue pit.
I couldn't for the life of me get their houses to upgrade to Large Insulas. The lazy bastards wouldn't go across the street to the bathhouse. More yelling of "IT'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE!" ensued. So many hours wasted trying to relearn the game and reorganize this shit show that I had created. (No more stopping playing a game halfway through. This I vow.) I finally completed this mission and had the chance to move on.
Moving forward, there were oodles of cities to choose from. Some peaceful missions, some military. Too many choices. Hate it. That's the same reason I hate Subway. Do I have to tell you every fucking thing? Can't I just point at the board and say gimme that one?
I have digressed.
This was one of the problems I have with this game. There is clearly a progression from easy to hard that is present in the missions presented, but cruelly they just give you all the options on the map and say "Just pick one, idiot." while I'm sure they quietly laugh amongst themselves at your expense. I looked up all the missions online, and I had apparently been a moron and picked one of the fairly difficult ones previously. If there's a logical progression of difficultly in the missions, make me do them in the right order. Save me from myself. The system they use is terrible because:
1. It makes it possible to play a mission that's way above your skill level, which makes you say bad things about yourself, and could result in rage quitting.
2. Having a shit ton of missions to choose from is kind of overwhelming. I thought this game might go on forever, but thankfully, the internet was helpful in debunking those thoughts.
3. When you complete a mission, that city isn't removed from the map. You can play it over and over. Why the hell would I want to do that? Your game is fun, but it ain't THAT fun.
After the growing pains of my first return mission, I got back on the right progression path and slowly eased into the rest of the game. It was back to being calming again. I built slow and managed my output of goods better. There's a bit of pride that happens when you only have to use one Granary, which fills up and empties out consistently, and everyone gets their rations. I found the exact right balance of food production to people. Awww yiss.
Each new mission, I got better at building up my city and upgrading the houses quicker. I mostly stuck to the Peaceful campaign, not because I'm averse to fighting or some such shit, but because the combat system in the game is really kind of terrible. You build structures to house and train your military, and then when people come a fightin', you take your soldiers out and run them toward the attacking horde. They clang clang clang a little bit, and then it's over. It's not fun. It's not hard. It just...is. Le sigh.
While we're on the complaint train, I just want to say that Civilization Rating is a bitch as a mission objective. I never quite figured out what made it go up, and it's infuriating because it slowly decays, decreasing your Rating over time. I thought building a Wonder (giant showy structures) would bump up my Civilization Rating tremendously. No dice. You gain as much with a Wonder as you do with adding a shrubbery. COME ON! Plus, because it takes a long time to build and they're ginormous, they play this ridiculously long video where it pans around the Wonder to show off the "beautiful" 3D structure. By the time they're done ogling the Wonder, what little Civ Rating I gained has already decayed away. Great...
This was the biggest hurdle in the final mission. I had gotten really good at upgrading housing so that I got to the Palaces stage without too much consternation. I just had to get loads more people and bump up my Civ Rating to 95. Getting more people was easy. Build more structures. Ones that don't create any new materials or products because it'd screw up my delicate warehouse inventory balance. More structures mean more jobs, and more jobs bring all the boys to the yard. Population huge. Check. Onto Civ Rating.
Like I said, I still haven't quite figured this out. It did seem that temples bumped it up 1 point for each temple. This led to much chaos. I just wanted to finish the game, and I was so close, so I just started throwing shit anywhere. More temples, more temples...okay, stop temples. Now, gardens. A shit ton of gardens! Now some purdy statues. AHHHHH! The Civ Rating is going down the longer I wait. Just throw stuff anywhere! Click, click, click, click...clickclickclick! God, this looks awful. My nice organized town looks terrible now. Fuck it, more trees!!
That did the trick, but I felt kind of dirty afterward. It was like a giant statue vomited baby statues all over town.
Despite the issues I mentioned, "CivCity: Rome" is still a good game. Once I started getting the hang of managing my town efficiently, the game became incredibly addictive. Who wouldn't like a game that makes you shout things like "Go take a bath!", "Go to church!", "Shut up! It's fine!", and "There's olive oil in that warehouse, ya fucks!" Once I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I ran heedlessly toward it. I played til 3 in the morning last night; I played during my lunch hour; I played during our 20 minute break at work. I have a nasty habit of not finishing these types of games because they require such a time investment, but I kicked this one's ass, and I'm proud to knock another game off my backlog list.
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