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Oracle
The Prosperity rating is very hard to increase if you have high operating costs at the beginning of province development. You have to have a surplus in order to get promoted.- The Empire rating is probably the easiest one to increase. All you need to do is connect your city with other towns and build a trading post or two, and your rating rises to 40%. I use the Empire rating to get my average rating up to the required mandate.
- It’s easy to move the culture rating to "As high as it can be for your city’s current size" by building a whole bunch of basilicas along the edge of your city, and maximizing entertainment in at least a third of the city.
- The more you fight (And Win), the higher your Peace rating will rise. Building walls (Both on the City and Province levels), as well as cohorts will also get this rating to go up. The Peace rating will also rise naturally over time. The prosperity rating also grows naturally over time.
- When building in campaign mode, first develop your city then when you have enough money develop your province for fastest promotion. Sometimes you don’t even need to develop your province -Pendragon
Plebs
- Adjust Pleb welfare in 5dn increments. This will allow you to get the plebs you need more quickly, and will provide some extras in case of emergency.
- How to get free slingers: You can simply take plebs from the province level, where they work in industry and train them for a month as slingers. After the battle, back to work! So this actually cost you nothing, provided at that time you have about three industries running you train (e.g. 60 as slingers and let 30 to run the ind. at 33% capacity, it won’t kill you) –Sorin Cristescu
- Provincial Work pleb quantities do not always have to meet requirements, especially at easier levels. Often, you may get away with providing 25 plebs per industry while maintaining maximum production.
- If you pause the game while building, the pleb requirements might go up significantly once you unpause, so prepare yourself by having idle plebs ready at all times.
Centurion
- If you lose some of your auxiliaries in battle, they will not be replaced automatically when they return back. Move the spending done on them up by one and then down by one, and the problem will be solved.
- The Centurion will increase your total operating costs dramatically. It’s important not to start off with spending more than 20dn a month. The soldiers take time to train anyway, so high salaries will do nothing but reduce your prosperity ratings. It is of course safer to give them high salaries when your budget has more surplus.
- If you haven’t figured it out already, the "Major, Minor, etc." settings designate soldier distribution in your cohorts.
- "Major" Cohorts have many soldiers, and their readiness is excellent.
- "Minor" Cohorts have little soldiers, and their readiness is reasonable.
- "Normal" Cohorts have a number of soldiers that’s between the "Major" and "Minor" Cohort types, and their readiness is high.
- "Demobilized" Cohorts have no soldiers at all, and the flag representing the cohort is immobile. The soldiers’ readiness is unfit.
It’s important to set the soldier distribution settings before your soldiers are trained. You cannot "transfer" soldiers between cohorts by changing the distribution setting.
- Auxiliaries are less likely to be available on islands or in provinces with much water.
Treasurer
- If you cheat, set the taxes to zero. If you want to make plenty of money, set the population tax at 5 or 6%, and the industrial tax at 8%. For a happy populace, set the population tax at 3 and the industrial tax at 6%.
- If you monitor the budget table regularly, consider removing the Construction Costs from your calculation. This will give you a general idea of how much you could be making, and you’ll be able to figure out how much to spend on construction in a year without losing money.
- Industries don’t riot. Set the industry taxes at a higher level than the population taxes. You’ll know if you set it too high when all production across the city goes down at once.
- Taxes usually only cause unrest among poorer communities, especially those near industries. If you develop a city full that’s of rich people, increase taxes. If you have many industries and/or poor communities, lower them.
- You could raise pop. taxes gradually month by month until the population growth changed from Extremely Good to Quite Good, then crank it down a point. A note of warning: You have to re-check the pop. growth (Good, Poor, Quite Good, etc.) periodically after raising taxes. The people will tolerate tax increase for a while, but then they change their minds. I have finally come to the conclusion to just leave it at 5%, period!
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hey, so first of all i wanted to thank the uploader of caesar 2 and the wonderfully informative admin on this forum, got it up and running, some kind of dos/windows version hybrid, but it works.
So now i`m thinking back to grade school when i used to play caesar 2, and i seem to remember some mellow background music wthat i was expanding and conquering empires to. IS this a figment of my imagination? or is there some missing file i can aquire? thankz
sincerey, a hardcore dos gamer
Comment by bigleftplaya — August 20, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
You’re not imagining, my friend. The Windows version has music, but the DOS version does not.
Comment by SimpsonsFanatic — September 21, 2008 @ 11:24 am
The DOS version DOES have music. I play the DOS version through DOSbox and I do indeed have music. I suggest going to the DOS prompt and running SETSOUND to configure your sound settings. General Midi or MPU-401 provide the best midi playback. Good luck.
Comment by Diogenes — November 11, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
Actually, there are two versions. The CD version has music for DOS – the floppy version doesn’t.
Comment by Diogenes — November 11, 2008 @ 1:42 pm
i just want to tell you
that Caesar II no longer available for download at abandonia
does anybody know any alternative download?
Comment by Shiro — November 26, 2008 @ 5:04 am
Both the Win and the DOS versions of Caesar2 have music.
But they are different, but the win version has the better music, in my honest opinion.
Comment by arkanis — December 7, 2008 @ 4:30 am
I am currently playing Caesar II on Vista, and got it to work, but no sound at all. . . Any suggestions?
Comment by Joe — February 18, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Only religious and entertainment structures that have FORUM ACCESS count towards your Culture rating. Not knowing this held me back for some time!
Comment by Neil — March 14, 2010 @ 8:19 am
Hey guys! I love this game!
I am at my 3rd province in the campaign..I was looking forward to my first battle…but when I wanted ti take charge and fight the battle myself, the game crashed for this reason:
Error loading battle data: RO2SWDA.PL8
Is this file missing from my version? Do you have it?
PLEASE HELPPPPPPPPPP!
Comment by DAN — March 30, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
@DAN: This file is on the CD. If you’re playing in Dosbox, the most convenient way is to make or download an ISO of the CD (not all abandonware sites have the ISO, so you have to search around), then load it by typing (in dosbox):
imgmount d path-of-iso -t iso
This will mount the ISO as drive d:, then play the game as usual and battles should work.
Comment by kleine — May 13, 2011 @ 12:55 pm
Why when I build some houses after some time they starts to burn?
Comment by Richard — December 4, 2011 @ 10:30 am
@Dan, if you are still around I will try to post up a full version of the game here (if that is legal of course, I have no idea).
@Richard, you need to build a prefeacture in order to put out fires. To avoid them totaly you need to assing plebs to fire prevention duty. As you build more and more you’ll need more plebs for this duty. Actually this is one of the most manforce consuming duties.
Comment by Jorge — January 5, 2012 @ 1:47 pm