Caesar is all about building a city with everything it implies. You will have to design and layout the city in detail, create road networks to facilitate the distribution of resources and provide homes access to entertainment venues, health care facilities, fire protection services, and so on. It would be easy if all you will need to do is all this. The most challenging area is to make your population happy by fulfilling their needs. You must keep them healthy, happy and safe.

The difference between Caesar IV and other city builders is that it's based around daisy-chained economic relationships and intelligent citizens, rather than the more standard "building influence" model of the SimCity games. Players place production, service and residential buildings on an empty map. Virtual Roman citizens move in, take up jobs appropriate for their social class, start producing goods and services to give them happy lives, provide lots of tax revenue for the player, and hopefully have enough stuff left over for the incessant demands of the Empire. It's in this intricate dance of supply and demand that Caesar IV is at its best.

Caesar IV captures the class system of the Roman Empire ably. At the bottom are the plebe, who work in the fields and factories and have only basic needs, such as food and clothing or pottery. Next up are the equites, or the middle class, who live in fancier structures and serve as the teachers, tax collectors, and doctors of the Empire. As such, they get paid more and have basic and luxury wants, such as furniture and wine. Finally, there are the nobles that live on huge estates. The nobles don't work for a living, and they require basic, luxury, and exotic goods to stay happy, but at least you can tax them to generate some real revenues. Any functional city needs to have a mix of all three classes, which makes striking the balance challenging. You need nobles because they're the only ones who can really be taxed, but to get nobles, you need to build a vast infrastructure to support them. All this will make the game more interesting and challenging.