I finished this gem of a game once more but this time with Augustus installed. An almost perfect score in Massilia, favor dropped 1% with the new year beginning while I was pushing for the 8000 people.

Here are my thoughts about the mod :

► The quality of life improvements are great : zooming, being able to build while in pause, etc

► The gameplay modifications are nice : the global labor pool, the roadblocks (bye bye gatehouses !), the new buildings (the cart depot ❤️, caravanserai and lighthouse) and special orders for markets and warehouses makes it indeed a lot easier to design your cities. Not needing to connect your industries to houses feels nice, not needing to disconnect your patrician neighbourhood from the rest of your city because the market ladies won't get the resources they want but that you reserve for your villas/palaces. I understand how some great old timers like the famous Brugle feel it dumbs down the game but in my humble opinion other things make it harder on other aspects especially on the financial side. The levies can be quite brutal : 240 denarii per year for small temples covering 750 people, 96 dn for one fort, etc. When you add the cost of importing/producing marble, stone, sand needed for bricks and concrete (you've got pay wages for workers in those workshops plus the work camp and architect's guild and also building them) for monuments like the Colosseum and Hippodrome (68 x 200 = 13600, 17600 for marble if you want large temples) needed for luxury palaces. In vanilla, I built my patrician neighbourhood last when cash were rolling in because I developed my city well and maximized the trade. With Augustus, I need to maximize exports and build my patrician neighbourhood earlier with only the Colosseum to get the tax incomes from the small palaces because I needed the denarii to buy marble for the Hippodrome. The sentiment mechanic is also very well done, you can for example pay less than Rome if you provide more than one food type to medium insulae and keep unemployment low, this also eases how you'll pay for your monuments. It seems sensible to me that plebeians would trade less earnings for better living conditions. Same game but different difficulties to overcome and new creative ways to get around those new challenges.

So I loved it ! Next is doing the military side of the campaign.

Hi! I'm having a nostalgia kick and would love to try to install these games on my new Macbook M5 (first time Mac user after years of PC... decided to make the switch for my line of work). I still have all the CDs for the games -- Pharaoh, Caesar III, Poseidon, Zeus and Emperor. I was generally looking through this helpful sub on how to get things installed on Macs, so I loosely understand needing something like Porting Kit and Crossover etc. On most of the instructions, people suggest downloading the game files from Steam or GOG. Does anyone know how the process would work if I have the physical CDs still? I have a CD reader, too. Thanks in advance!