Caesar3 Augustus Ultimate Handbook

ousing is probably the single most important type of building in your city. It is the source of labor, and also of crime. It is also one of the best visual indicators of the progress of your city: as you provide more of the goods and services that your citizens want, they upgrade their homes and enhance the area around them. This is clear right from the start: instead of building houses directly, you select an area and designate it “for sale,” following which immigrants will move in and set up tents. These tents will hopefully develop into better housing overtime.

The house that a citizen lives in determines his or her income: the better the house, the higher the income. Fires spread more rapidly among tents than among more permanent structures, and crime is more likely to occur within poorer areas than in wealthier ones. It is always a good idea, then, to help housing evolve from its initial tents into good quality.

As housing evolves into better structures, the number of people who live in the dwelling changes. Initially, most of the changes are upwards: more and more people can live in dwellings as they grow in size. This means that when you need more workers in your city, you will usually have two choices: designate some additional land to be used for housing, or provide the services or goods that some existing houses need in order to grow.

This creates space in the newly evolved houses. People living in cheaper housing elsewhere in the city automatically move to a better home when room becomes available, freeing up space in their former homes.

Immigrants usually move into the now-vacant cheaper dwellings, as long as they find your city attractive (for more details on Immigration, see page 49, Migration).

Eventually, some houses evolve into villas. This is a significant step. Villa dwellers are much wealthier people, and can have all sorts of positive effects on your city, from a higher Prosperity rating to higher tax income. But note that far fewer people live in a villa, so whenever a house evolves into a villa, quite a few citizens are made homeless; you will see them dragging their meager belongings behind them as they search for somewhere else in the city to live.

So, how do you foster the growth of a tent village into a neighborhood of expensive villas? The short answer is to right-click on a house, and it will tell you what it needs next in order to evolve.

The things that a house needs fall into two categories: goods and services, and the quality of the surrounding area. Goods and services are l a rgely what you would expect: food, water, access to entertainment, education, religion, and so on. The needs change as citizens become wealthier: rich citizens want nicer water, a bath, different types of food, manufactured goods and possibly wine. They also want access to better education, more entertainment, more religion, and to have doctors and barbers close by.

When I say “access to” I mean that the citizens want these services within easy walking distance. Each of the services to which citizens need access is provided by a building. That building generates a worker, who wanders the streets near his or her place of work, providing services to all the houses he or she passes.

If you right-click on a house and are told that it needs access to a bathhouse, for example, place a bathhouse nearby on a road that's likely to lead the bather to walk by the house in question. The overlay reports (for more information see page 160, Overlays) are often an easy way to see precisely which route different workers follow, and hence where you may need to place another building.