CivCity: Rome [PC]

The developers at Firefly have a long history creating city building games with their Stronghold series, which focused on castles. But in CivCity Rome, never mind about the castles. As you can tell by the title, a connection is implied to the classic Civilization games (not to mention the classic Maxis games, considering the title is just one consonant away from being a homonym for SimCity). But the more direct influence is the classic city builders from Impressions, such as Caesar, Cleopatra, and Zeus, with their historical settings, detail, and charm.

You build the city, one building at a time, and the people will come of their own accord. A lot of the gameplay is based on locating houses near services and goods. Each citizen has a hierarchy of needs; the more of these needs you meet, the fancier a citizen's house, and the more taxes he pays. You then spend tax revenue into meeting more needs to raise the income level of more citizens, and before you know it, you've got a bustling city of happy Romans. The challenge is to keep them happy and make them richer.

The economics of the game revolve around the different resources people want. The basics are easy enough. For meat, you build a goat farm and a butcher's shop. The butcher goes about the business of picking up goats and "converting" them to meat. As long as any given house is within range of the butcher's shop, its resident will swing by to pick up a slab of tasty goat, and his meat needs will be met.

The challenge comes from meeting multiple higher-end needs to get a lucrative upper class going. Rich people are fussy. They insist on fresh fruit, education, doctors, religion, baths, nice furniture, senate representation, slaves, and so on. As you add each of these elements to your city, they're presented in full detail. Every citizen is doing something, even when he's just resting.

You can click on someone to see his home, workplace, and current activity. You can watch a little man carrying a bed from the carpenter's shop back to his house. You can see people going to the local well. You can look into houses to see what goods they've collected. When you provide musical entertainment, a musician steps into the crowd around the piazza and starts playing. When you build an amphitheatre, the gladiators or wild beasts fight each other based on what fighting schools and animal stations you've built (hint: the crowd loves a good lion or elephant fight!).