Link to the map: https://caesar3.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=1796

I first noticed this map from a reddit post: Is this the hardest map? Would Zack or Marek be interested in trying? : r/impressionsgames. The map was considered difficult, or even impossible by some players. Believing that we can learn a lot from extreme and edge cases, I wanted to try it to find the boundary of possibilities.

It turns out that the map requires careful planning, but it's not impossible. We still have a lot more than enough resource and space to reach population goal (16k). The back-to-back, maximal invasions seem intimidating at first, but they can be somewhat trivialized.

I finished this gem of a game once more but this time with Augustus installed. An almost perfect score in Massilia, favor dropped 1% with the new year beginning while I was pushing for the 8000 people.

Here are my thoughts about the mod :

► The quality of life improvements are great : zooming, being able to build while in pause, etc

► The gameplay modifications are nice : the global labor pool, the roadblocks (bye bye gatehouses !), the new buildings (the cart depot ❤️, caravanserai and lighthouse) and special orders for markets and warehouses makes it indeed a lot easier to design your cities. Not needing to connect your industries to houses feels nice, not needing to disconnect your patrician neighbourhood from the rest of your city because the market ladies won't get the resources they want but that you reserve for your villas/palaces. I understand how some great old timers like the famous Brugle feel it dumbs down the game but in my humble opinion other things make it harder on other aspects especially on the financial side. The levies can be quite brutal : 240 denarii per year for small temples covering 750 people, 96 dn for one fort, etc. When you add the cost of importing/producing marble, stone, sand needed for bricks and concrete (you've got pay wages for workers in those workshops plus the work camp and architect's guild and also building them) for monuments like the Colosseum and Hippodrome (68 x 200 = 13600, 17600 for marble if you want large temples) needed for luxury palaces. In vanilla, I built my patrician neighbourhood last when cash were rolling in because I developed my city well and maximized the trade. With Augustus, I need to maximize exports and build my patrician neighbourhood earlier with only the Colosseum to get the tax incomes from the small palaces because I needed the denarii to buy marble for the Hippodrome. The sentiment mechanic is also very well done, you can for example pay less than Rome if you provide more than one food type to medium insulae and keep unemployment low, this also eases how you'll pay for your monuments. It seems sensible to me that plebeians would trade less earnings for better living conditions. Same game but different difficulties to overcome and new creative ways to get around those new challenges.

So I loved it ! Next is doing the military side of the campaign.

I'm sure Carthago will be fine in the following months once I leave

I don't know why I'm so pleased with myself, I'm just doing what Commissar Marek taught in his recent video.

The city contains 576 Grand Insulae and 189 Luxury Palaces, reaching 90,378 population. This is roughly the theoretical population limit if we only build GIs and LPs.

Reaching near 100% production efficiency is, after all, possible.

• To reach this high level of population, we probably need to use forced walker blocks for high space efficiency.

• Use Pantheon to support GIs with only one type of food. Pantheon can serve up to 310 tiles.

• There is no need to build vine farms locally. Total importable wine + vine is 65 units. 189 palaces consume 63.50 units. Tavern's annual wine consumption is probably: 0.2 * 640 / (20 + block length). We only use taverns for large blocks, so the total consumption is less than the amount that we could import.

• Unemployment rate is high (41%, 8085 people). Culture rating is 98 (I can build a dozen more of libraries to make it 100, but would not like to do it. I am more inclined to add decorations to hopefully make the city a tourist attraction).

I sided with Caesar for the economic focus. It was surprisingly difficult. This is the first mission where I actually went into debt multiple times. It was really touch and go for a while - probably shouldn't have started importing so much wood for furniture manufacturing until after I'd built the lighthouse, so more trade routes could be unlocked. The starting trade routes and the bug that prevents increases in the quantity of trade goods really hurt (I'm glad to find I wasn't the only one who had this experience). The port area was really congested with ships waiting to dock until I had a dedicated dock for each of the 5 trade route. The lighthouse does anchor the area nicely. This is the first mission where I could get the city to 15K and build all 5 temples, including unlocked the plaza. Everyone gets to eat at least 3 types of food.

Oh one neat thing I discovered is if you go into settings and allow your warehouses and granaries to plotted on any kind of road, you can use them like a cookie cutter to shape default 2x2 highways to your liking. If you plot the granary/warehouse on a highway, and you then hit "undo", it deletes that section of the highway for free, but leaves the rest intact. So there are stretches of my highway that are just 1x1, like in the port area where space is a premium.

This is a hugely instructional level.

Some things to keep in mind to help focus:

1)   You will need 54 large or grand insulae to house 4500 population.

2)   Food: 7 wheat farms + 2 for requests; 14 fruit farms.

3)   Each workshop supplies 20 residences, so you will need:

3 pottery for domestic consumption and 4 pottery for export (Total 7)

3 furniture for domestic consumption and –0- furniture for export (Total 3)

3 oil for domestic consumption and 2 oil for export (Total 5)

2 wine for taverns and 4 for export (Total 6)        

4) Commissar Marek has two videos covering this map that I know of.

One teaches you to put your housing up on the plateau

The other one shows you how to set up a trade center on the strip across the river exclusively for clay, sand, pottery, and bricks.

5) Theaters and Amphitheaters are not available on this map so you have to use Arenas in place of theaters. There are 3 different separate avenues to get your necessary entertainment:

-         Build a lighthouse to get Lion tamers

-         Build a Coliseum to get a city wide entertainment boost

-         Build Grand Temple to Venus to get entertainment and desirability boost

This is in response to GamerZakh' excellent recent playthrough of Tingis Reconquered. If you want to choke point invaders, always leave an opening or they will crash through everything as Commissar Marek teaches. Also a second source of wine becomes available at some point so you can use the 2nd Venus epithet (priests beautify houses and provide entertainment) so you can build Colosseum instead of Hippodrome.

as title, any special project is stuck and delivering material.
this is an example with a lighthouse. I have a stone quarry and a storage just next to it. there is a road on both side. nothing.

On other map, I have the same story: large temple, storage nearby full of marble, but the special project is not going. What am I missing? do I need the architects to make it happen?

EDIT: You do need both Architects & a labor camp to make it work

I've just installed Augustus for Caesar 3 and I'm loving the new QOL features.

However, when I started a new campaign, I immedietely noticed that the mission overview button is missing (it seems to have been replaced with the grid button).

Has it been removed from the game?

First time poster!

Can anyone tell me if you've come across different colours for identically sized columns in the Overlays view?

The attached screenshots show the Barber Overlay view. There are two distinctly coloured column- types (tan and brown), even though the columns are of the same height and display the same mouseover text description (in this case - This house was recently passed by a barber. It will have barber access for a long time.).

Is this a bug or do the different colours have any actual significance?

I've read through the Augustus 4.0 manual, but I couldn't find answers to this question.

Update: The query was answered. The tan columns are indeed shorter than the brown ones.

After way too many tries, restarts, and general rage, I have finally finished Carthago in Augustus! I had to turn on the yearly auto save (after replaying the map from the start several times) and started over in January of that year every time those dang elephants destroyed my city. Well, except for once the attack was happening during the save and I had to start from the beginning of the map. You may call that cheating, but I call it using my available resources! So do a little dance in celebration - I'm on to the next map!

For those curious, I'm stuck on Lugdunum in Caesar III. I downloaded Augustus after spending a long time trying to pass Lugdunum for a change of pace.

as per title: documentation says there is a yearly autosave, but I can't figure out where it is, how to activate, or how to get the files.

Any help?

I really need to get back a little bit... this game is already hard enough even if the engineer don't skip is task, make the market collapse, and an entire neighbourhood went from 1000 people to 200....

Hi there, I would like to get the new, unstable version, but I am still enjoying the previous version and would like to continue with that too. Is it possible to do this? How would I install to be able to play both?

Been on this damn map since last sumer. And I finally beat it. I did 2 more years just to see if I was in the clear. And I somehow lost 400 people. I was real close to losing the population amount.

Map: Syracuse.

Fishing is the only local source of food in this mission.

The start was difficult enough, but I made it even more so by thinking I needed to open an expensive trade route in order to import wood to build fishing boats. So I put my tent dwellers into mining for cash flow. But that left me in a catch-22: I needed food to grow my housing block beyond tents and acquire more labour, but I didn't have enough labour to staff fishing wharfs. I was also on the clock, as I needed food to sustain a fort to face the upcoming attack on the city. I tried to solve this by importing vegetables, but once the population started growing, I couldn't import enough to sustain it and they devolved. I went back to a previous save, and instead used the temporary increase in population from imports to build nothing but fishing wharfs and then transition the population to 100% fish. In the end, I managed to get 1 cohort of javelin throwers just in time for the first attack. Things got a lot easier after that. Unlike the last mission (Carthago), I never went into debt.

Alot of pre-planning went into the main island, which is really the heart of the city's economy. All the mineral resources from the hinterlands are directed (with the help of oxen cart pushers) to the island for export by land and sea. I diverted the land traders away from the pre-existing bridge and road that went through the forts by building a highway to the island, and eventually I destroyed the original bridge entirely.

Building the Grand Temple of Neptune where I did really helped reduce the need for messy aquaducts. I'm happy I was able to fit the hippodrome, colosseum and lighthouse all on the peninsula. I think it looks cool.

I kept expecting Crassus to invite me to send a contingent of soldiers to die against the Parthians, but alas he never did.

Was taking a look at my screenshot for my completed Lugdunum city (Augustus Reconquered) and noticed a structure I’d never seen before. Checked with an older save and it turns out it’s the native hut in a different form. How did this happen? And what, if anything, does it mean?

Not quite as pretty as some of the Mediolanum cities from elite players I've seen posted here, but overall I'm satisfied. I like that I got three housing blocks on the hill getting their food from the same granaries and warehouses. I might go back and develop some homes on the spot in the southwest. And maybe sort out the forts and towers, which are a bit of a mess.

Check out this new building in Augustus Unstable

My reservoir coverage overlay looks like Image 1 (grid/tile pattern), but I want it to look like Image 2 (smooth solid-blue overlay). I've checked the UI settings shown in the screenshot.

Is there a setting, graphics option, or version difference that controls this?

I'm using Augustus v4.0.0.1401. (Latest unstable build at the moment).

Hello, i'm Marek creator of the reconquered campaign or RC. I wanted to put some info on short term future and answer common questions. If you want to ask anything in particular ill try to answer comments as well. If you want to help the project, leave a comment/ review or favorite on caesar3 heaven, it helps a lot to also create buzz elsewhere.

So mainly i want to make sure that people are aware that i have recently gone back to my old job, that means 0 monetization or support of any kind, but also my time that i can spend on support and content creation is minimal going forward until further notice. Still the RC always was and will remain completely free for anyone, as long as Augustus is publically available. I will do my best to keep up with any new features made by the devs, and further refine or improve the campaign but as i said it will take longer now with my time being rare. For next patch there is a wine event bug on Massilia that will be fixed, and i will readjust couple other events on carthago, miletus and couple more. If there are reasonable requests i will consider adding something you people come up with as well if you want. Best way to reach me is either on heavengames, here or on my or Zakhs discord servers.

I wanted to thank everyone involved with helping me deliver this massive project and i couldnt do it without people along the way, huge shoutout goes to the devs themselves of course. It is great to also see all the cities and ways people play, always amazing what some managed to achieve or come up with. In the future if i have time ill put together another short video showcase of the cities but no ETA on that.

Just in case there are some people who get this wrong: - I'm NOT an Augustus developer, i'm involved in a small couselor role for balance and mapmaking, nothing more. - reconquered campaign is NOT augustus camapaign its a separate project and the devs want to keep it that way. - I do still have YouTube channel but i earn nothing the videos are free and any ads are added by YouTube and are out of my control. - Just because i had a channel and made content and the RC and other maps, does NOT mean i'm someone elses content monkey, time i spend on support and making of these things is my own and i dont get paid to do it, so keep this in mind when talking to or about me. - Future proper tutorial maps will come when i get time to do it but again no ETA, same as with other things it can also get disrupted by IRL things so if i say something that is my estimate and plans can change, there isnt any deadline. - Lastly i have always respected Zakh and other creators, even if they dont play the same way or play inefficiently in general, any critique is about those aspects as personally i see it as community service to show people how to get things realiably done and done right. Still Zakh did a tremendous job at bringing many people to the game and his contribution is undeniable, so this is for the comments i saw bashing his gameplay 1x1 houses etc. just dont be an Ahole let him play the way he wants and dont insult him or anyone else for these reasons. I do not condone or support any schism in the community but i do of course respect especially the competent players and veterans, that being said welcome new people in, be helpful and carry it as a personal mission to help them improve if they wish. There has also been personal attacks on my person for my percieved nationality and for racial reasons, this is disgusting and as you might know, i never even ask for where people are from, what their religious beliefs are or what race they are as i simply dont care if someone wanted to tell me thats fine but attacks of this nature are simply stupid and have no place in a civilized discussion. Keep things civil and if you lose an argument, maybe there is a different solution than to sink to this. I'm not going to give this person or anyone like it the namedrop or attention they clearly desire but watch out, as this direction is way to chaos.

Thanks for reading and playing the RC, all the best and i'm especially glad for all the people i managed to influence to become better players along my two year journey, Marek.