In CaesarIII you designate areas for housing, rather than build housing directly. You must make your city attractive to immigrants if you expect people to move in, and every growing city needs plenty of new immigrants. Once people move in, they upgrade their housing of their own accord, should you provide a suitable environment.

In most assignments (and almost always in the City Construction Kit) you need to provide food for your citizens. This should always be your top priority, since it is very hard to attract new immigrants into a city without food, and hunger can quickly turn your population to crime.

Engineers are needed to maintain your city's buildings. Build engineering posts to send out engineers on patrol. Buildings are liable to collapse if they don't receive regular maintenance.

You will quickly see a large variety of people walking through your city. These all perform valuable tasks for your city, and you should think carefully about how and where you build roads. Whenever a road junction is reached, these little people must make a choice about which way to take; the fewer intersections you create, therefore, the more control you have over the routes your people will take.

Most services needed by houses are not “provided” simply if a building is nearby. Instead, most buildings generate people, who need to walk past a house in order to offer that service to the house.

Most buildings which employ people must have road access to reasonably close housing. If housing is too far away from a structure which seeks employees, even though there is road access and unemployment in the city, the building will not find any workers.

A Favor rating indicates Caesar's current opinion of you. Favor is important, since you will lose the game if it falls too low.

Terrain is an important consideration in city design, with higher land and waterside plots being more desirable. You will come across islands and need to bridge water at times to achieve your objectives. And different types of land hold different resources, from fertile land to areas rich in clay or iron ore.

Religion plays a large role in citizens' lives. There are five gods to keep happy; ignore them at your peril.

Simply building a theater or amphitheater is not enough to please your people. You also need to build actor colonies, gladiator schools and more to provide performers for these otherwise pretty (but dull) venues.

Caesar is a very “hands-on” Emperor and will interact with you occasionally. He is worth looking after whenever you can.

The Labor Advisor automatically allocates your workforce to jobs. This is all that you need most of the time. When there is a shortage of employees, you can assign priorities to categories of workers, ensuring that whichever tasks matter most to your city get first claim on the available plebs.