Games like Caesar II

[Brother Mark]

Having recently upgraded my rig to a core 2 duo, Nvidia 7950gx2 beast, I find that a lot of my older games that I still enjoy are increasingly hard to get to run and more to the point - they aren't exactly getting maximum use out of my 1gb of video memory. Therefore, I'm on the lookout for a game that is in the style of the Caesar series of games as in...

• Build up your city
• Build up your province
• Launch out and strike at your enemies

I enjoy RTW because it is a bit like Caesar, but there isn't enough emphasis on the civic infrastructure for my liking. I want to be able to do more to improve my people's way of life than just give them baths to improve their hygene. I to be able to build them hospitals, forums, roads, statues of my brilliance so that they multiply like rabbits until they're a force capable of overrunning the ancient world.
Oh and ideally the game would make at least some use of my satanic machine. It needs to be stretched like it was when a friend lent me Oblivion (OMFG that game looks so real - in so far as elves can look real).

[Al Khalifah]

Apparently Civ City: Rome is meant to be a city builder that's very similar to Caesar II. It's also partly by the good people at Firaxis Studios.

Link

See what you think of that. Not sure if it will make a dent in that monstrosity of a card though. Is that card really all it's made out to be? I've heard its not as good as some ATI cards for handling Oblivion?

[Brother Mark]

Looks pretty cool, thanks Al. The tech specs don't look too imposing, but I suppose I can just crank things up to maximum details and enjoy no-slow down.

It runs Oblivion with pretty high graphics settings just fine, although I remember a bit in the forest where it started to feel the pressure. I didn't get to play the game for much longer than a week because it wasn't mine, but if you want to play it then you can't go far wrong with this card. I don't recall it ever going below 35 fps under nearly top settings on a 1280*1024 display even in the most hectic of sequences.
Apparently the game would look better with an ATI card because of the HDR support, but because ATI don't manufacture a card this powerful as this one the Geforce ultimately wins out. This game really just is all about GPU muscle. To get the superior ATI solution you'd probably need to go Crossfire. Bear in mind there's also a big processor with quick RAM as well in this system, so just upgrading your GPU won't necessairly give you matching performance.