Forum Novum Scenario available

I’ve worked out the kinks, and the Forum Novum Scenario for Caesar IV is available here.

Forum Novum: a market in the Sabine Hills - scenario for Caesar IV

This is my first attempt at a scenario for Caesar IV. It is based, loosely, on the site of Forum Novum in the Sabine Hills north of Rome. What I have always found fascinating about this site is the way it didn’t develop into what we would recognise as a ‘town’, per se.

A student playing this scenario as part of a class on Roman urbanism would try to reach the ‘winning conditions’, but would be encouraged to look at the underlying assumptions the game makes about social, civil, economic, and religious life. Specifically, by using the game as a kind of Roman socio-economics simulation engine, the student is forced through game play to confront the Roman economy…

It’s late right now, so I’ll write more about how the game would be used in a class, and what playing it might teach. In the meanwhile, you can download the scenario here into your ‘data’ -> ’scenarios’ folder for Caesar IV. No doubt there are bugs and other problems that need to be worked out, so let me know how you get on…

(by the way - the game puts an ‘apron’ around the scenario for aesthetics… but the one I chose doesn’t really fit, as you can see when you follow the Aia river by the town towards the edges… the painting tool in the scenario editor is absolutely abysmal!)

• postscript: I discovered that my scenario had a bug in it that caused catastrophic crashing of the game. So I’m rejigging it, and I’ve posted over at Titled Mill Forums asking for help… which I duly received. The ‘production version’ is available here, as will be any future updates.

FYI - Caesar IV tutorial

A tutorial covering just about everything related to scenario building in Caesar IV may be found here.

My ambition is to create a Forum Novum scenario, with as close as an approximation to real Roman economic realities built in as possible…

postscript: A small program for checking your scenario for errors is available from this thread (scroll down). It checks for the following:

“When you load a scenario, it will check for these things:

- factories that are missing raw materials
- missing natural resources such as clay pits and iron mines
- resources that are available but can never be used
- resources that can be exported but are not available
- requests for unavailable goods
- scenario goals that cannot be achieved, including building and resource goals, and prosperity and culture rating goals

It will attempt to load the XML file and check some more things:
- missing keys for empire level cities, requests and goals
- wrong values for rating goals

In addition to this, it will show you:
- Maximum level that housing can attain (housing tab)
- The number of available foods and basic/luxury/exotic goods (housing tab)
- A list of all used resources, including their total import/export amounts and trade prices (resources tab)
- A list of trade cities with what they buy and sell, including the route type (water/land), cost to open, and their ID in the scenario (handy for writing the XML file) (trade routes tab)”

Handy, that!

The Ancient Mediterranean Mod - Civilization IV

You know a mod is popular when it gets its own website. The Ancient Mediterranean Mod has been under constant development and in constant play since the days of Civilization III - check out the official page for more information about peoples, technologies, and other modifications.

On Caesar IV and the Ancient Economy

Having spent a great deal of time in my thesis pondering (amongst other things) the mysteries of Roman economics, it is curious to see how a city-builder game like Caesar IV demands many of the same skills - working with cost ratios, determining how much of a particular resource certain kinds of activities consume, distance & profit calculations - see for instance the discussion here and the tables here. Then go and study something like The Baths of Caracalla by Janet DeLaine. It is all strangely similar. I would have done better to have spent a few months playing the game and then looking at my copy of Finley or Hopkins. I’m not saying that the assumptions that underlie the game mechanics are analogous to the actual workings of the Roman economy; I’m saying that the game foregrounds the interconnectedness of production, consumption, taxes and society, which in my opinion is extremely important when working with the archaeology.

Imagine a seminar on the ancient economy where the aim is to mod Caesar IV (or similar) to reflect the latest thinking on the ancient economy, and then playing it out… I am constantly running out of money & resources as I play the game, which brings a whole new appreciation to the problems of monetary supply…

Caesar IV and the Empire Online

I’ve enjoyed playing Caesar IV, a Roman city-building game. I’ve always gotten a kick out of city builders, ever since playing the first Sim-City on my brother’s 286 in college. Having read Bogost’s ‘Persuasive Games’, I’ve been wondering about the procedural rhetoric of the game, its anachronisms v. its historicity , etc. I’ll probably post something to that effect, eventually.

I haven’t played the online version of the game yet, and today I came across the website for the online game. It’s quite interesting in that, for once, there is no MMO, no MMORPG… it seems in fact to be a series of challenges and downloadable scenarios. Play the scenario, upload your results, voila, bragging rights. There’s an ‘empire’ mode too, where you end up creating your own little province… and again, you get bragging rights depending on how large your population is, what kinds of structures you’ve built, how your economy is going, etc… Stats from the website: 4,109 cities by 1,742 governors. 17,021,836 population. 87,761,505 denarii. 32076 years, 7 months played (Clearly, time flows differently within the game). The site keeps track of who had updated which province, and what exactly they’ve done there.

What is neat is that new scenarios get added all the time, extending the game for you (the in-game editor looks like it needs an enormous manual to explain… which it doesn’t have, of course). What is particularly good is that all of this gets tied into some basic social networking type stuff, forums, and so on… so a game, that has quiet a lot of historical drapery on it, could become the locus for *real* historical discussion. A learning-through-doing situation. I wish I was better at the game though. I can only get through the first two scenarios.

Civ scenarios for teaching and learning

At Robert Welch University, I’ve gotten the green light to start designing a history class aimed at gamers. I want to make scenario building in Civilization IV (and maybe Caesar IV) one of my main formative assessment exercises. Over at Civfanatics, I’ve asked that community what they think of the idea…

Roma Victor

There is a saying about eyes being bigger than dinner plates. Roma Victor perhaps suffers from this. Ostensibly, this is supposed to be a multi player online world that simulates the world of Rome ca AD180. Iron age Europe. An historical MMORPG. Imagine the possibilities!

…sigh. Once you figure out how to download the game (and pay the fee), it takes forever to get setup. It is not an all intuitive what you’re supposed to do - page after page in the community forums on the site are variants of the message, ‘how do I start this game?’ - and then, once you’ve accomplished that, it’s nigh on impossible to get logged into the world. I first downloaded the game back in October, and I still have yet to get inside. I’m trying right this instant, and there were over 3500 updates to download…. perhaps these updates resolve the numerous glitches.

Meanwhile, back in Caesar IV, Tilted Mill have released some bug fixes which means I can now play THAT game. Aside from some anachronisms, this is actually a rather good simulation of Roman urban dynamics. I can imagine using certain missions from this game in my classes - pairing up game play with a study of Pliny’s letters to Trajan about the governance of his province….

“Roma-Victor Patcher v2.2.1, 918 updates pending…”

See what others are posting about Roma Victor and Caesar IV.

Caesar IV

….ah christmas morn. Opening the new toys… and a copy of Caesar IV! Can’t wait to get into it… it has a ’sandbox’ mode, allowing you to disregard all the preset scenarios and to build your own. I’m going to build me an Ostia, and a Pompeii, and see what emerges out of the simulation. I’ve done some city simulations with Netlogo (see the agent based modeling page) where I’ve built the interactions from scratch. William Urrichio argues that games embody different epistemologies, so I’ll be interested to see how the game designers envision ancient life… and to compare against my own simulations. Theirs of course is much more aesthetically pleasing than my wee netlogo creations, but all of them have value…