Pros: Very Detailed. Deep. Very Challenging. Good Manual.
Cons: Steep Learning Curve. Sometimes Too Challenging
The bottom line: Those with patience will be rewarded.
"Build a Better Rome," is the slogan on the box of Caesar III. While you don't actually get to build Rome itself, in career mode you do get to build various Roman cities throughout the ancient Roman empire as a provincial governor moving up through the ranks. You begin as a Citizen and can move your way up through eleven different ranks all the way to Caesar. Before you start each level, you are given a choice between two cities, one of which is relatively peaceful and the other one you have to focus more on the military. To win a scenario you have to have a certain population and raise four game ratings (Culture, Prosperity, Peace, and Favor [with Caesar]) to a level set by Caesar. There is also a city construction kit which allows you to build a city without have to worry about Caesar's demands, much like SimCity.

To build a successful city you need to build good housing that is provided with all the Roman necessities such as different types of food, pottery, furniture, olive oil, and, of course, wine. You do this by either building raw material producers and manufactured goods workshops or setting up trade routes with other Roman cities for the goods you need. You also need to provide your citizens with entertainment, access to religious services, education, and health services as well as engineers to keep the buildings standing and prefects to prevent crime and fire.

The way services and goods are spread throughout your city is unlike any other game I have seen. Instead of each building having a radius in which its service is provided, each building has workers that walk through the streets and offer their services to the houses they walk past. It really makes you have to plan the street layout for your city. For instance, instead of putting an actor colony and theater right next to each other it would be better to place one at one end of a residential zone and the other at the other end of the zone so the actors have to pass by the houses on their way to the theater thereby offering entertainment to the houses they walk past. The system is quite subtle and requires careful planning and I rather like it.

The graphics are very well done. The sight of hundreds of different people walking through the streets, plazas and many buildings you built is quite amazing. The buildings have little details that tell you how they are doing. If a pottery maker has clay and is making pottery there is an animation of a pot on potters wheel going round and round and there will be stockpiled clay laying off to the side. If the workshop doesn't have enough workers or no clay the potter's wheel will remain still and there will be no clay in reserve. Every building has little details like that to show you how things are going. There are also CG cut scenes that mark an event or milestone which are fun to get.

The sound effects are just as detailed. Every building has its own little sound effects and when you click on your citizens they will tell you what is on their mind. The music is also good. It sounds Roman (I don't know what Roman music was like) and it is appropriate for the situation your city is experiencing, when there is a battle there is battle music and when every thing is going well there is happy music and so on.

The learning curve is pretty difficult though. It will take you a couple hours to get comfortable with all the details of game play and I recommend you read most of the 230-page instruction manual. Don't worry, the manual is also very good and it doesn't get boring fast. Some of the latter scenarios are very difficult to complete because of catch-22 type occurrences. (I need to raise my population to get more farmers but I need more farmers to raise my population.)

Overall, if you have the patience to learn all the aspects of this game you will be richly rewarded.