Caesar III is a city builder that came out in 1998 that is based on, you guessed it, ancient Rome. It's the first city builder I remember playing and, in my admitedly biased opinion, one of the best city builders I've ever played. Whenever I play a lukewarm management game (which is rather often, I'm a picky bitch) I find myself falling back on Caesar III. Twenty years later and it still holds up.
The main mechanic is thus: whenever you create a building (say, a theater,) your building will create little dudes (in this case, actors.) These little dudes will wander the streets, and fulfil the needs of whatever building they come across. In short: if you have a household that requires entertainment to grow, you not only need to build a theater, but you also need to engineer your road in such a way that actors will pass by that house in a timely fashion. The challenge will therefore mostly be road planning to have as little crossroads as possible; your little dudes are sure to go where you want them to go if it's a straight line.
The game has a bunch of pre-made maps where you can fuck around and see how big you can make your city, and a campaign mode that also serves as a tutorial. For now let's talk about the campaign, since that's proabably what you will launch first when playing the game for the first time.
First of all: it's voiced! You get a little speech at the beginning of each mission giving you some context, and most importantly, the tutorial bits are voiced. That's great, because personally, nothing turns me off a game faster than having to read a bunch of text before I get to do anything fun.
The first two missions or so are here to introduce you to the basics of the game. Afterwards, the game will still introduce new mechanics throughout the campaign, but it'll stop being nice about it; you will have to deal with earthquakes, bandit attacks, and Caesar himself asking you for your finest wine. That's something I appreciate about this game; there's always something going on, but (unless your city is literally being burnt to the ground, which might happen) it's not a disaster feast where the focus is on survival either. You'll never find yourself sitting back for full minutes without doing anything, but also if you play your cards right you won't find yourself scrambling to save your city from the apocalypse either; it's a balance that means a lot in management games, and I find it perfectly suited for me. If everything is peaceful, you'll still be busy planning what building to creat next or what ressources you might need soon
I should probably warn at this point: Caesar III is not an easy game. It's not specifically a hard game either (if you're looking for something like Frostpunk you'll be disappointed) but it is very possible to find yourself bankrupt or with your whole city on fire because you made a mistake five hours ago. Thankfully none of these events are randomized, so through trials and errors you can learn that on x map there will be an earthquake on xyz coordinates in y year, or that in z year Caesar will ask you for oil so you better stock up now. If the game is too frustrating for you though, remember that you can change the difficulty in the settings- it's set on hard by default for some reason.
Once you're done with the campaign (or if you get tired of it; it's surprisingly long) you can fuck around with the premade maps. There are a lot of them, with a large diversity of challenges- some have military risks, some don't, some only have specific resources so you'll have to import the rest, ect ect. There's endless replayability to this game, and that's why literally twenty years later I still come back to it with fondness in my heart.
If this post has convinced you to give Caesar III a try, I really recommand using the Augustus mod with it, which brings many quality of life updates (such as making it fit modern screens lmao.) If for some reason you dislike ancient Rome specifically, the same team also made Pharaoh (on ancient Egypt) and Zeus (on ancient Greece) on the same principle.