I know many people say that the older games (caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus) are the best in this citybuilding series, but I was curious if Caesar IV was just as good, worse, or better. I was just curious why it was better, the same, or worse so I can decide if I am going to pick it up during these sales.

I enjoy Caesar 4, though it has a bit of a different feel to it.

Game Economics - The underlying concepts are still in play - houses will want food, clean water, goods, and services... and the more of these things they get, the more they improve. However, the distribution of labor, goods, and services is different in what I find to be positive, more logical way. The biggest gameplay change is that the walker system has been completely redesigned.

Industries no longer spawn walkers to search for labor, instead, workers always find their way to work all by themselves.

Houses spawn walkers to retrieve food and goods from the different types of marketplaces, as well as retrieving water from fountains. This is a huge improvement over wandering market ladies.

Service buildings effectively spill their services out into the road system, extending various tile lengths depending on the type of service. This makes it so that all houses connected by road to a building will receive the service provided as long as the distance by road is not too far. This is a huge improvement over wandering service workers.

The above combination means that intersections no longer need to be avoided like the plague. You can build your city in a way that looks like a city, instead of having all your houses on one long winding road.

Your population is more clearly divided by social class. You place apartments for your poorer laborers, larger, fancier apartments for your middle class, and villas that evolve into mansions for your patrician class. Plebians will only work plebian jobs and equites will only work equite jobs so you have two different unemployment levels to manage. This makes thematic sense. My only criticism here is that there are only three stages of development for the poor and middle class homes.

You are still graded on your basic ratings - culture, prosperity, favor, and security and these all still work the same way.

The military aspect actually seems worse than before. Conceptually it remains the same but I find the troops are slower to respond to commands. Not that this has really been much of a problem - if you have more troops than the enemy you pretty much win.