I’ve been playing this game pretty much exclusively since I got it…but I can really only play on the weekends, and not to much then.
Here’s a few things:
No, enslaving doesn’t suck, especially against larger towns, since the population is distributed to your towns. This can really help boost your towns up above the 2000 population limit. Below 2000 population and your cities are essentially worthless for building troops.
I have the larger cities concentrate on building one line of military buildings. One city will upgrade stables and always build the best available cavalry, one will build barracks and build the best infantry, one practice ranges and build the best archers, etc. Since you can only build one unit per turn, or every other turn for elites, it doesn’t make sense for a core city to be able to make several weak unit types, much better to be able to make only one superior unit type.
If you are having cash problems, it is probably because you have too many units. I really noticed this one time when I was playing as Carthage and netting about 3K per turn. Then I sent an uberstack into battle against the greeks, and got totally creamed…their archers owned my slingers, my iberian infantry couldn’t compete with their cheap hoplites, my general got killed by a lucky shot, my elephants went berserk, it was a complete disaster. Once the bulk of your troops rout you are finished, even if you can rally them they will be devastated. By the end I had a few slingers who were out of ammo trying to compete with small formations of surviving hoplites. Even 40 slingers can’t fight hand to hand against 6-10 hoplites, even if you hit them from behind. The hoplites chased my guys around and around the battlefield until the timeout…a crushing defeat.
Anyway, next turn I noticed I was rolling in cash, and I started paying more attention to the support costs of troops. For Carthaginian slingers, the support cost is greater than the recruitment cost! All those units add up to a huge cash drain. So my new strategy is to garrison my cities with as few troops as humanly possible, even if it means they are vulnerable to attack. So what if a crummy border town gets taken? I can always take it right back, and I won’t have wasted hundreds of denarii a turn supporting garrison troops that probably won’t be able to stand up to a determined attack anyway.
The key is destroying enemy armies in the field, then walking into his undefended cities. In my current game I really noticed this. As the Selucids, I was in a 5-way war against every one of my neighbors…greeks, egypt, parthia, pontus, and armenia. I was holding on, but just barely. But the enemy factions would throw a big stack at me, and I’d defeat it. Then they’d scrape together another stack, and I’d defeat that. THEN I’d move in and attack them. I’d find that their cities were very lightly garrisoned, because they’d raided the garrisons to make expeditionary forces. Right now all those powers are either exterminated or down to one or two provinces.
Oh, and I noticed that Tamerlane had the same experience I did as the Selucids, all neighbors attacking. I have a theory about this. I think the enemy AI has something equivalent to core provinces. If you own one of his cores he will always DOW you. I was very energetic grabbing up the various rebel-owned cities at the beginning, in the theory that I could grab them before the other powers and get a really good economy going without having to DOW anyone else. But every time I grabbed a rebel province in a power’s sphere of influence, they would attack me next turn. And no one ever wants to make peace if you have one of their cores.
Of course, in a game like this you have to have enemies or you can’t expand. It’s just that you want to wipe out one faction before you move on to your next victim. But the Selucids seem to be a very powerful faction, except against Parthia. Those militia hoplite units that take the place of town watch are really strong troops that can be used on the front lines. A cheap hoplite wall screens your archers, and your chariots, light cavalry and elephants can wheel around and slaughter units that dare to go into melee with your hoplites. That’s how Alexander the Great did it, and it works like a charm in the game.
The only faction I had real problems with were the Parthians, with their missile cavalry and heavy cavalry. True heavy cavalry is pretty rare in this game, and so is true missile cavalry. Javelin armed light cavalry is nice, but they run out of ammo very quickly and then are merely light light cavalry. The parthian missile cavalry could shower my hoplites with arrows and the hoplites couldn’t respond. Move up archers and the missile cavalry retreats out of range and the heavies show up to crush them. Try to catch the missile cavalry with your cavalry and they run around and around the map and refuse to engage. My only recourse was to slaughter the infantry and missile units and wait for the timer to run out, or hope that the missile cavalry would break or I could catch them on some terrain feature. I couldn’t compete with the missile cavalry on the field, so I had to take the cities ASAP. And in city assaults the advantages of missile cavalry are negated, since they can’t stop your troops from taking the town square and it is much easier to trap them and force them into melee. Luckily the Parthians only have a few cities at the beginning of the game and they are all within striking distance of the eastern Selucid cities, except for some godforsaken hellhole waaaay up north in Scythia. I’ve built a one-boat Caspian fleet and have loaded it up with a few troops, they should be enough to wipe out the last one.
One more thing. You don’t have to disband cut up units if you can’t repair them, you can just combine them. Drag and drop one unit card onto another. This is a great way to preserve veteran troops by combining two weak veteran units rather than repairing them. This also makes repairing a battered uberstack much easier…you can bring slighty damaged units up to full strength by combining, then you only have a few heavily damaged units to repair.
Oh, and the Selucid retinue type of “Priest of Asklepios” totally rocks, and you can combine them with Chirugeons. A general with both can recover huge numbers of “dead” troops after a battle. I’ve had units heal back 30 soldiers.
Another thing. Elephants are cool, but never ever ever autoresolve a battle where you have elephants, even if you’re just attacking a few peasants. The elephants invariably get massacred. Always. I don’t know why, my elephants usually do fine when I control them. And never ask your elephants to go through a gate in a city with stone walls. You’ll lose most of them to boiling oil. Infantry and cavalry take a light hit from the oil, but you’ll lose half or more of your elephants. And since elephants are usually a bitch to repair (captured cities usually don’t have an elephant resource), you’ll have to ship them back to africa to repair them…better off just leaving them outside even if it means not having overwhelming force.
Most of the other advice is stuff I am already doing…except that I have been encouraging growth instead of discouraging it as Tamerlane suggested.
), making the achievement of naval supremacy difficult. I’ve done it with an unfinished Carthage campaign, but it is hard.
:mad: