Quote:
Originally Posted by Pants
Great work, man.
Did you enjoy the game?
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Yeah, with the modded info I'm using, the game is a lot slower and more deliberate. With fatigue turned off, the AI presents a decent challenge without having to give them the ridiculous bonuses that come with turning up the difficulty. You don't have to blitz and you don't have to finish off every last faction, they'll actually leave you alone if you build right. With things like slower city growth, you can actually enslave, setup frontier boundaries, and build a more realistic empire.
For example, as got close to the mid-game, I wiped out the Brutii and pushed into Italy so that I wouldn't have to face a post-Marian Rome. I crushed the Julii and forced them west, leaving them with the territories that they had taken from the Gauls, west of Massilia. They didn't attack me again for the rest of the game. I knocked the Scipii out of Italy and Sicily and left them with their African holdings.
They sieged me on Sicily once in the next 100 years. I fought 3 or 4 battles with them very late in the game because as you can see, I conquered Carthage to make it an even 50 provinces and win the game.
However, contrast that with the fact that I established a northern frontier by conquering Thracia in the first 5 years of the campaign. I was STILL getting sieged at Campus Getae by Dacians AND Scythians when I got my 50th province.
In other words, I subdued several "civilized" factions like the Greeks and Romans but was constantly besieged in my hinterlands by "barbarians".
My next campaign I'll be playing as the Gauls. I got REALLY comfortable with phalanx warfare in this campaign and started rolling. I had an especially easy time with the Romans. I kept the pressure on them and they just couldn't adjust.
I had some crazy stuff with Egypt and Pontus though. I ended up having to hole up in Halicarnassus and Pergamum and force the Pontics to fall on my pikes. Finally drained their economy to the point they couldn't afford troops but it took almost 25 years.