Augustus

Augustus is a fork of Julius, the open-source re-implementation of Caesar III, Impressions Games’ Roman city builder from 1998. Its README: “Augustus is a fork of the Julius project that intends to incorporate gameplay changes.” Julius copies the original rules exactly; Augustus keeps its interface improvements, such as widescreen and touch controls, and then changes the game itself. Like Julius, it is only the program: the graphics, sounds and text come from your own copy of Caesar III.

What it changes

From the README and the notes for version 4.0.0:

• Running a city: roadblocks, special orders for markets, a global labour pool, partial warehouse storage, higher game limits and zoom controls.
• New in 4.0.0: highways, “2x2 roads that provide a significant speed boost but are only usable by destination walkers”; new resources (stone, sand, bricks, concrete and gold); a City Mint, a Cart Depot and altars; meat and fish as separate foods; and scenario events and custom empire maps for map makers. The original scenarios and campaign maps were adjusted to include the new resources.
• A warning before disaster: “Obstructing the road to Rome will now pause the game and give a warning, to give an opportunity of fixing the problem before destroying the player’s city.”
• Its own saves: Augustus opens Caesar III and Julius saves, but its own saves don’t open in either.

New buildings need new pictures, so unlike Julius, Augustus carries its own graphics; see the credits at the end.

What you need

• Caesar III: an old CD-ROM version, or a digital copy from GOG or Steam, “patched to 1.0.1.0”. Augustus tells you if the patch is missing, and Julius’s Patches page has it.
• Android 5.0 or later, with OpenGL ES 2.0.

Setting it up works exactly as in Julius. The first time you start it, Augustus asks you to copy your Caesar III folder to the phone, or, for the GOG version, to unpack GOG’s offline installer on the phone with the Inno Setup Extractor app and use the app folder it creates. You then choose that folder in Android’s folder picker, and Augustus confirms with “C3 files found. Path saved.” It needs no storage permission, and your saved games go into the same folder, so they survive uninstalling the app. Our guide to game files for Android engines covers the steps for Julius, which are the same here.

Playing on a phone

The project’s documentation: “Augustus has full touch support.” Mouse support on Android is limited, with right clicks “notoriously flaky”, but Samsung DeX works. One open report says the right-hand panel gets cut off in landscape, and the suggested fixes are a smaller display scale or the development build.

What goes online

Nothing. Augustus has no internet permission and no network code; its only permission is an internal one that Android libraries add. The only web addresses in it are links it shows you, such as the project’s issue tracker in error messages and Julius’s patches page.

About this file

• This is the project’s own build of Augustus 4.0.0, from its GitHub release of 28 December 2023, the same file as on the project’s download server. It is the latest release; the code has moved on a lot since, through development builds (see the questions above).
• It is signed with the project’s key (“Augustus Dev Team”). The keystore in the repository is encrypted, and only the project’s build system holds the key to unlock it. Augustus isn’t on Google Play, F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid.
• The 23.6 MB file runs on ARM and x86 phones, 32- and 64-bit. It contains the engine, the SDL2 libraries it uses and Augustus’s own graphics; we checked that no Caesar III files are inside. Our scan found no trackers.
• The app’s own Android screens are in English only. Augustus’s added in-game text has a Portuguese translation, used when your Caesar III files are Portuguese; with an English GOG or Steam copy, the game is in English.
• There are no screenshots on this page: every picture of Augustus in use shows Caesar III’s artwork, which isn’t ours to republish.
• Augustus is licensed under the AGPL-3.0. The source code for this version is at https://github.com/Keriew/augustus/tree/v4.0.0.

Credits for the bundled graphics

The graphics Augustus adds are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence (CC BY-SA 3.0), as assets/LICENSE in the APK says. The APK names no artists; the project’s repository credits most of them to Areldir, with others by Lizzaran, Ouaz, MSTVD, Marwana, PrettyFlower, MonoNavidegno and crudelios, and concept art by Tomasz. A few are described there as rotated or corrected versions of original Caesar III buildings; the repository doesn’t say whether those were redrawn. The app’s icon, a photograph of a Roman coin of Augustus on marble, has no stated source.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Recent releases on the project’s GitHub. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.