User Guide

DESIGNERS’ NOTES
The product you now hold in your hands may seem like
an obvious extension to our original Caesar, but you’d
probably be surprised by the heartache and twists and
turns we went through to get it to where it is!
One of the hard parts about designing a sequel to a very
popular game is deciding what to change. Change too
much, and we might lose the magic of the original;
change too little, and we don’t really offer value to you,
our customer. There were some things which were easy
to decide — we were frustrated by the original interface,
so that had to go; SVGA was now possible, and enabled
us to produce the spectacular graphics before you today,
so that, too, was easy. We also wanted to make the
game easier to pick up, with a “gently” rising difficulty
curve that provides a steady challenge right through to
the end. That was the easy part.
The combat in the original Caesar was designed to be a
very simple, quick-to-play element, with added links to
the miniatures-game Cohort II for those that wanted
more detail. Unfortunately, Cohort II was not as strong
a game as it might have been, and didn’t provide those
“battle-hungry” customers with the food they
sought. So Caesar II had to improve on that. The
question was — how? We really wanted to focus
on enhancing the game’s city level, so to put too
much into the combat section would have made
Caesar II a different product. This became even
tougher when the combat came together so
well, particularly in terms of its graphics. Many
ideas were generated and put aside — possibly
for future games — in the interest of focus!
GAME MANUAL
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