The advanced Caesar III game engine Augustus has a new release up

To play the classic city-builder Caesar III on modern platforms there is the FOSS game engine Julius, however there's also a more advanced version called Augustus that had a major new release.

Much like Julius, you need the game data files for Caesar III with this being a free and open source game engine only. It differs from Julius in quite a lot of ways too, and it's actually a fork of it so another developer took the Julius and built upon it to make something different. The idea with Augustus is to enhance Julius for Caesar III with customized gameplay, UI enhancements and much more (rather than sticking to being accurate to the original). Some of the additions include roadblocks, zoom controls, market special orders, a global labour pool, increased game limits and more.

Augustus 2.0.0 and 2.0.1 went up this week, and along with lots of bug fixes there's quite a lot of new features and overall enhancements to the game. Some highlights of this major update include:

• Allow indefinite play of campaign mission: after extending your mandate for a few years, the player will be asked again to accept the promotion or extend the regency.
• Soldiers on Forts now require food. Food is supplied through a new building, Supply post. A supply post sends a walker to collect food from granaries. Lack of food causes morale penalties and slows down recruitment. Multiple types of food provide a morale bonus. Only one Supply post can be built on a map.
• Added support for building rotation, add rotate building options. Works for gatehouses, Warehouses, Forts and hippodrome, as well as new Paths.
• Added support for loading outside images, to be used for new content.
• Added console, along with some cheats.
• Added new permissions to Roadblocks: labor seekers, tax collectors.
• Added a number of new aesthetics buildings (gardens, statues, etc.) for more visual variety, desirability effect is the same as statues of respective sizes.
• Added monuments: buildings that take resources and special buildings to complete and grant bonuses to your town when complete.
• Monuments added: Five Grand Temples; one to each of the gods, a Pantheon dedicated to all the gods and a Lighthouse.
• Added new buildings used in monument construction: the Work camp and Engineer’s Guild.
• Added building upgrades for Grand Temples and the Pantheon. Select and pay for one of two upgrades that empower priests in your city.

There's lots more to it big and small but those are some bits that really jumped out at me. Augustus really is advancing the original Caesar III and then some.

You do need the original game assets, which you can grab easily with a DRM-free copy of Caesar III on GOG.com or Steam. Get a copy of Augustus itself on GitHub.