Caesar III

Caesar III features two modes of play: 'Career', in which players follow a progression of assignments of increasing difficulty with conditions for success, and the 'City Construction Kit', an open-ended mode without victory conditions. The Career mode of Caesar III follows a series of branching assignments requiring players to construct cities of increasing size and complexity. Assignments are set over time in historical Roman cities, such as Brundisium and Londinium. Players are given a choice at the beginning of each assignment to play a map that is 'peaceful' or 'military'. Military assignments include the risk of enemy invasion, whilst peaceful assignments contain more stringent requirements for victory, and additional challenges including earthquakes, fires and other hazards.

Gameplay in Caesar III involves the construction of cities on a map displayed in a two dimensional isometric perspective. Buildings are selected from an interface under submenus categorized by building type. Players are required to manage several interconnected supply chains in order to sustain the growth of their city, which increases as more needs are met, including the supply of water, food, religious services, entertainment, education, and health. Caesar III features significant changes to its predecessor, Caesar II.

The game that would become Caesar III was initially conceived by Impressions Games as a city-building game set in space. Developer David Lester cited initial hesitation to pursue a third Caesar game as "Caesar II had been so well-received that we didn't know where to take it...there were points we had considered and discarded for Caesar II that we could add, but they wouldn't amount to a new product." After six months of development, the designers returned to Ancient Rome as a setting for the project. Simon Bradbury of Impressions Games reflected that a key decision to continue with sequels to Caesar was that Ancient Rome contained a "wealth of material for a strategy game...there's a lot of epic history which I think a lot of people can easily identify with".

Many features introduced in Caesar III ultimately were developed in response to critiques of its predecessor Caesar II, including the introduction of mission choice to reduce repetition in the game and integration of combat into the city view. The decision to use 'walkers' to distribute resources across cities was another innovation. Simon Bradbury of Impressions Games stated the mechanic was introduced as "we wanted to do something different...we liked the SimCity sense (that) you place the building down and it affects things around it but we always found that was a bit static. The walker mechanic was an efficient way of coding the game (and) add a sense of randomness into the city."

Caesar III was a commercial success. It shipped 150,000 copies in its first month of release, at which time it was on track to top the sales of Caesar II. In the United States, the game took 10th place on PC Data's weekly computer game sales rankings for October 18–24, 1998. It was absent from the top 10 the following week, but ultimately claimed ninth place for the month of October as a whole.

According to PC Data, sales of Caesar III surpassed 93,000 units in the United States alone by February 1999. In the German market, Caesar III had spent 10 weeks on Media Control's computer game sales charts by early 1999, with placements of sixth and ninth for the first and second halves of January, respectively. Late that year, the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) gave Caesar III a "Gold" award for its commercial performance through September 1999, indicating sales of at least 100,000 units across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.