Your first objective in almost any city is to get trade up and running. This will give you more income by far than sales tax or small villa property tax at the start.
In choosing which trade route to open, the costs to open a trade route are sometimes a hint as to which routes are best to start with. Luxury goods are usually my first choice, they can be running with the least delay. For basic goods, glass and pottery take the least delay; olive oil will take a few months, and clothing a little longer. All food resources have a delay in production, and aren’t really worth trading anyway.
Open one or two trade routes right away, and place the depot in your city. When you open a new route, you will have to wait until January for the caravans/ships to start arriving. (Sometimes a trading dock is unreachable, but the game won’t say anything about it. If no ships appear in January, you may need to relocate the dock.)
A typical trade route will want 50-60 basic goods or 15-25 luxury goods per year. That’s going to be an income of 2000-3000 denari for each good you are able to get trading. It is easiest to get one industry up and running at a time, considering the population management you’ll need to take care of in the first year.
Build the “harvesting” buildings first. For a typical trade route (50 basic goods or 25 luxury goods) three harvesters should be good. Put them in a cluster near the resource; walking distance isn’t really a factor in production time, unless the harvesters are 100 or more tiles away.
Here’s the trick to getting manufacturing going smoothly: only bring one or two factories online at a time, until they have 4-6 of the supply resource in stock. This is more important than building factories close to harvesters. When a factory goes to get supplies, the cart will get as many as it can carry back to the factory. If each harvester has only gathered 1 unit, the wagon will have to make a round trip for a minimal amount. By allowing harvesters to start with a surplus, the wagon trips will be more efficient.
Once the online factories have a surplus supply, open up one or two more factories. They, too, will fill up.
The rule of thumb is that you can build two factories for each gatherer. Once your gatherer:factory ratio is 1:2, you should be able to maintain a constant surplus in the factories. Let’s call this the distribution principle: the amount of raw resources stays constant (or increases very slowly) when there are two factories for each gatherer, due to buffering on each side. A corollary of this principle is that if you open all of your gatherers and factories at the same time, you will be stuck with inadequate raw materials for production, because the empty buffers will never get a chance to fill up. (If this happens, close/mothball most of the factories, let the buffers fill up, and reopen the factories one at a time.)
With three gatherers and six factories you should be able to supply 25 luxury goods or 50 common goods for trade each year.
Warehouses and trading depots operate on a similar sort of buffering principle. When they go to get goods, they will take as many as they can carry. With six factories to choose from, chances are one of them will have at least four goods to pick up. By the time the cart makes a round trip, another factory will have four goods available. Distance isn’t much of a factor if you have the correct buffers in place.
If you pick the right trade good at the start of the mission, you will almost always be ready for Caesar’s first demand/request for goods. He’ll usually want 100 raw resources, 50-60 basic goods, or 20-30 luxury goods. By the time he makes his first demand you should probably already have your second trade route up and running, so the demand won’t be too much trouble.
For storage, one warehouse (or trade depot) for six factories (basic or luxury goods) will suffice, if the goods are going to be consumed/exported. You might, of course, need more storage due to a demand from Rome. If Rome demands timber you will probably need three spare warehouses. With only three timber camps you can easily fill three (probably four) warehouses in a year.
Housing:
My rule of thumb here is that you will need about the same amount of land for each of the three housing types. Pleb housing takes 36 small squares, Equite takes 81 squares, and Patrician takes 144 squares. That is 36 Plebs homes or 8 Equite homes or 4.5 villas in the same amount of space.
Start with 12 Plebian homes and 4 Equites. Place all five temples (75 Equite jobs) so they cover all the housing. With perfect coverage they gods will give you good bonuses, and your Equites need something to do anyway. Pump house plus reserviour plus clinic will keep all Equites employed.
Make enough Plebian housing to start gathering the needed resources. Start a sheep farm right away so you don’t have to wait when you decide to start making clothes. Start an olive farm and a grape farm if the level allows. Wine is a good trade export. One grove/vineyard per factory, or one farm for two factories, is about right. Again let the buffer fill up before opening new factories.
With 12 Plebian homes you have a workforce of 840. With each basic good you supply you will get another 480 workers, enough to start at least one more industry. Once all Plebian homes are fully evolved, you can add additional Plebian homes for 150 workers each.
Annoyances:
Even though the rotation of buildings is not supposed to affect how they function, some buildings can still be blocked by neighboring buildings. All buildings are able to receive goods, but then carts can’t take items away or service people aren’t able to leave.
I have seen this with granaries — a granary will be full, but the food markets never take anything out.
Aqueducts are a particularly nasty problem. I had an aqueduct crossing a road, with a gladiator school on one side of the aqueduct and some building on the other side. The gladiator school could receive weapons and could train gladiators, but they couldn’t exit the building (the exit was on the aqueduct side). Of course the game didn’t provide any warning about this.
Prosperity:
Once you have food distribution and some common and luxury markets up you can create the villas. Give them plazas and Odium access (and a bathhouse?) and you will get decent property tax revenue from large villas.
For exotic goods you are going to take a 1500+ denari hit for each good. Set an import limit (from the trade advisor -> import/export screen) of 10 to avoid bankrupting your city. Once each villa has picked up the new exotic good, you will need only a small trickle of each exotic good each year.
I haven’t built any mansions yet, so that’s about all I know.

Another quirk of the Caesar III walkers was that if you added some streets to a previously stable area you could really throw things off. Your prefects would go wander down some lonely road, meanwhile a building or two would catch on fire. Of course the most frustrating feature of the game was the market with its obstinate market ladies.
There were two market ladies, one for supply and the other for distribution. The distribution lady walked the streets at random, so again you had these chaotic shortage patterns. Worse was the supply lady, who would walk twenty miles to a granary instead of 1/4 mile to the granary down the road. This was due to the game’s programmed logic, wherein the granary that was the shortest straight line distance from the market was chosen, regardless of how far the walking distance. Put that together with a distribution chain of granaries also using the shortest straight line distance and you would get some baffling behavior. Houses would starve while nearby granaries were overflowing.
C4 does away with the random walkers, instead allowing services to “flood fill” outwards for some determined distance. New businesses also no longer use random walkers to find employees, they simply draw from any qualified housing in the city, instantaneously. This has a dramatic effect on gameplay, as there is no longer the delayed gratification in getting new services up and running. There is no longer the feel of keeping a system carefully in balance, you simply plunk down buildings and move on to the next thing.
They have also changed the granularity for housing. The smallest working class home will house 70 workers, and improves at 40 person increments to a max of 150. Everyone in a house needs a job, there are no children or elderly. That means your demand for employment is going to grow in chunks, not a steady trickle. Each industry has its own employment requirements, which you can only discover by creating a building and looking inside. (The manual does not include any sort of chart of this information. You’d think they could have at least printed an insert.)
While services are filled instantly, production of resources is agonizingly slow. It takes half a year or so for a sheep pasture to start producing wool, after which there will be a steady supply. As in C3 there seems to be a 1:2 ratio between producing commodities to manufactured goods, you’ll want one clay mine for two pottery factories and so on.
Most of the game elements for the main campaign are pretty blunt. Rome will demand resources without any fanfare (C3 had some animated clips), hostile natives will appear with only three months notice. Once you dismiss one of these notices, you’ll have to hunt around the interface for the correct advisor to view the information again. Frustrated yet?
Most of the reviews I have seen complain about the mouse controls in placing buildings. I don’t have as much problem with that as with the fact that the whole user interface is miserable: there are no hotkeys to change the overlay, there are no hotkeys for each advisor (F4 simply takes you to the last advisor you had selected), there is no [at least none documented] way to bookmark a camera view for quick navigation. Overlay keys and easy advisor access were part of what made C3 enjoyable to play.
If I hadn’t played C3 I wouldn’t know how to play this game. The system provides poor feedback about what is going on.
Aside from the nice 3D textures and special effects, the visual design is a failure. Overlays present risks using color gradations, chosen seemingly at random. A red-green color gradation is pretty much the worst user interface choice one could make. I feel pretty strongly about this. It bears repeating, with emphasis: Never, never, NEVER use a red to green color gradation to indicate value gradations. And don’t rely only on color gradations to present visual information.
The food icon, a loaf of bread and some cheese, turns green when food needs are satisfied. Green bread and cheese? Tell your designer to create more icons.
Perhaps it is my video card, but hilly terrain (can’t build) is hard to distinguish from flat terrain (can build), there should be a grid overlay that could be toggled. The build menus should provide way more information about the building you have selected, other than just its price.
More comments later.

In general, wealthy Runescape players who want to improve their skills will buy items in bulk from the middle class of players — those players who have sufficient skill to gather valuable resources that the wealthy will buy. The lowest class of players lack skills to gather these resources, these are mostly new players who will need to invest a good amount of time in order to develop skills.
One effect of the new construction skill is that it has created a huge money sink among the wealthy class of players. Now there are lots of these players who have been sitting on vast hordes for quite a while, but money that does gradually end up with the middle class. Construction, however, is draining this money out of the game entirely, and aside from the immediate boost to certain commodities, such as steel nails and exotic woods, it is likely that there will be a net loss to the amount of trading done in the game as these bank accounts diminish.
This effect is actually the intent of the new skill, which was added as a way for the wealthy to show off their status to other players. But while the market is in upheaval I imagine there are a lot of people who are going to leave the game discouraged as the implications become clear.
Related to the new construction skill was glitch on World 111 in which players were able to attack other players in normally safe zones after they had been kicked out of an overcrowded player house. There are a number of rare items and discontinued items in the game that are considered status symbols, and with player killers running loose in the safe areas, a lot of people were panicking about lost items (as well as plenty of looky-loos curious about what was going on).
It will be interesting to see what happens to this situation in the next few weeks to come.

So I dug out my copy of the game and tried to install it.

The Neverhood requires:
Pentium 75 mhz
8 Mg RAM (16 recommended)
1 Mg VRAM
SVGA monitor
Quad speed CD ROM
8-bit sound card & speakers  (16-bit recommended)
10 Mg available hard disk space for Installation
Mxcrosoft Wxndows 95.

Unfortunately I’m running 2000, and the installer insists on 95 (though I bet 98 would also work).

Staff building:
Land use office 1/2/3: When you create the level 1 land office, you get access to an adjacent lot for prison construction. Presumably levels 2 and 3 give you more land.
Clerical office 1/2/3: The level 1 clerical office reduces your maintenance costs by 50%. Since maintenance costs appear to be equal to the original cost of construction for each turn, this is a pretty hefty savings! Level 2 reduces costs by 66%, and level 3 by 75%. Supposedly an existing office is required to build the next level, but due to a programming bug you can delete the offices once they have been built and still keep the maintenance savings.
Small guardroom: This provides you with one guard who will patrol the prison. A guardroom is cheaper than a guard tower, but provides less surveillance (if there is such a thing).
Maintenance room: This provides you with one repair guy.
Visitor’s reception: Although you can build a reception area and even a visitor’s center, I don’t think there is any code in place for this to do anything. I’m sure the original design had some mechanism involving visitors, but the feature got cut.
Staff rooms: Another feature that seems to have been yanked, as none of the staff ever make use of the staff rooms (maintenance always stays at 100%).
Health services building:
Hospital: Each hospital provides you with a medic who will wander around the prison. Injured prisoners will sometimes use one of the beds, but this is rare.
Therapy rooms: Each therapy room provides you with a counselor who will wander around the prison. Prisoners will sometimes visit the therapists if they aren’t busy with other things.
Services building:
Library, classroom, laundry, theater: Prisoners will go there, but serves no clear purpose.
Chapel: Each chapel provides one chaplain who will wander around the prison.
So some of these areas provide units which wander around the prison yard. I think they are supposed to autonomously perform their duties as needed, but I’ve noticed a large disparity when there are, for example, two medics: one of them will be ranked with a number of “jobs”, but the other has done zero.
An amusing thing about these units is that their animated behaviors are rather strange if not deranged. I think they are canned animations used by the developers to test certain features, and were supposed to be replaced before the game’s release.
If you select one of the units, you can click the green “do your job” button.
Handyman: He fixes whatever needs maintenance.
Guard: The guard will approach a prisoner and proceed to clobber them with a nightstick, the prisoner will fall to the ground. The prisoner will then be “happy”, meaning the action has satisfied some character need.
Medic: The medic will approach a prisoner who will fall to the ground (and a medical beep will sound). The medic then hammers at the prisoner’s leg a few times. This somehow heals the prisoner, and they can leave “happy”. (It is far less sexual than this description may sound.)
Counselor: The counselor plays some sort of juvenile trickery, waving his hand and then slapping the prisoner. The counselor then sobs, and slaps the prisoner again. This leaves the prisoner “happy”.
Chaplain: It’s a Catholic prison, and the chaplain blesses the prisoners, making them “happy”.
Prisoner moods:
I found a list of moods in the language.xml data file. The order of moods, from good to bad, are:
VERY HAPPY
HAPPY
QUITE HAPPY
QUITE PASSIVE
PASSIVE
VERY PASSIVE
QUITE BORED
BORED
VERY BORED
QUITE ANGRY
ANGRY
VERY ANGRY
There are three special moods:
HUNGRY
INJURED
BADLY INJURED

Despite its credentials, and/or because of the lack of documentation, there have been a couple of questions here on my blog on how to play. I would suggest that people go to the GameFAQs page for information, but there isn’t much there. (GameFAQs has a surprisingly draconian forum policy, without which it would be a far better game resource. Oh well.)
After two or so hours of play, I was able to complete the first challenge. The interface is clunky; you can move the camera in 3 directions, but you can’t change the angle, so there are a lot of occlusion problems. (I have now been told that you can hold down CTRL to change the camera angle.) The environment is actually in 3D, as you can view six “camera” views inside of each building, thought the only really useful one being a top down angle.
It took me a while to finish the challenge because twice the game ended abruptly, telling me that I had run out of funds. This happens at the end of the “day” (a timer which runs from 06:00 to 22:00, and each day actually represents a year of game time), when apparently some kind of maintenance or salary calculation takes place.
So my tips for challenge #1:
- Don’t build too much right away. Maybe build a factory the first year, and a service building the second year.
- Add the level 1 clerical office. This will cut maintenance costs in half.
- The initial layout is crappy, but rebuilding is expensive. Bulldoze the exercise yard and the useless fences to free up walking space, and build things around the perimeter.
- The big factory houses six work areas, for twice the cost of the small factory which only houses two work areas.
- The more expensive factory work areas seem to make more money.
- Each work area (and each area in general) provides services for a maximum number of prisoners. Six can work in the auto body shop, four in the printing press, seven in the metal shop, and eight in the upholstery shop.
* * *
I have now played the free play version, and it is more interesting (or less broken) than the challenge scenarios.
There seems to be some hidden factors which control prisoner moods, like The Sims only you don’t know what the characters are lacking. I’d guess these factors are something like: comfort (having a nice bed, someplace to sit and relax), entertainment (various activities that probably depend on the character’s star sign), mental health. and spiritual health. These combine to determine the character’s mood, happy or passive or bored or angry.
Tips for building a self-sustaining prison:
- New prisoners arrive twice a day, once in the morning, and again around 13:00. The number is random, at low levels it seems to be from one to four, increasing as your prison rating goes up.
- You get $1000 for each minimum security prisoner per day. Since you only get two to eight prisoners each day, it will take a while to build up a population that makes decent money. You need to keep maintenance costs low.
- To maximize the prison population, use bunk beds. These probably aren’t very comfortable, but they fit the most prisoners in a dormitory, which is crucial starting out.
- To get prisoners, you need a dormitory with beds and at least one guard. To get a guard, you can build a guard tower or place a guard office in the services building.