Sort of. I am finding the AI factions to be extremely hostile. I think that by turn 10 or 12 I had Aquitania, Aedui, Massalia, Emporia, and Gallii all declare war on me. And that is still playing on the lowest difficulty level.
Not sure what to make of this.
If this is the way the game is written, so as to produce difficulty where realistic AI would fail to produce difficulty, I am going to be unhappy. The one bit of evidence of this is that Aquitania and Aedui declared war on me both on turn 5, and the Aquitania referred to the Aedui declaration in theirs. Since there is no game mechanic that would allow the human player to do that (allies with high diplomatic relations will declare war on anyone that their ally declares on, but it would not be possible for the human to obtain an alliance or high diplomatic relations by turn 5). So I would rather think that within the game mechanics, Aedui declared first, and this just colored the wording of the Aquitainia declaration which happened to come the same turn.
On the other hand, if this is just AI factions acting in their self interest, regardless of which opponent is the human, I love it. I started with the largest army, so would be seen as the primary threat. So especially the weak factions like Emporia are just waiting for a chance to benefit from a larger neighbor fighting a war against multiple factions.
None of these, however, had sought cooperation. I do remember reading in the rules, though, that cooperation treaties do not prevent a declaration of war unless diplomatic relations are fairly high. Which struck me as odd.
The AI countries are as aggressive and opportunistic against each other as against the player, you can notice that as the game goes on.
I guess an argument can be made that sometimes they are a tad bit more aggressive than they should be, we might end up tweaking that a bit, but there is definitely no anti-player mechanic at play.
The reference of one country’s declaration of war in a message from an other was a flavour message, I believe.
The objectives are semi-random. Each country has a list of possible ones and depending on their route of advance so far, they get assigned new ones from that.
I bought this (and FOG II in the bundle) on Steam. I always have loved ancients, though I’m also at this point in my gaming life deeply skeptical of the need for any new games. But the itch is still there occasionally.
Only tried Rome for a few turns. I, um, didn’t do well. Even after watching the tutorial videos I am still somewhat baffled by some of the economics, and need to really figure out how to build up my military-industrial complex before I go forth and fight. I built two more legions and went after the Sonones or whatever they are…and got my butt handed to me. Next turn, the Etruscans came calling. Oy vey.
Still, it seems very nicely done and very colorful, and I look forward to figuring it out more. I also played a couple of tutorial fights in FOG II. That game is much more intuitive, as it’s somewhat more straight forward (move up, stick the other guy with a pointy object). Unfortunately, I wish I had bought this much earlier so I could have gotten the DLC on sale. Might have to wait for another sale, because I think I have to have some Persians.
Thank you for the clear response and thank you for the breakthough in this type of game. The cliche of “blobs become invincible so the total goal is to paint the map” had me really discouraged. I love how this game handles it.
Hopefully you will not mind if I toss questions and minor suggestions your way:
a) I see that 10.5.7 discusses fatigue levels. Now, I can see where this comes into play during a battle, when a skirmisher or head-to-head reduces an opponent to tired or exhausted. But the rulebook text refers to movement and fighting affecting this. So if my units are moving from one region to the other and then fighting during that turn, are they supposed to get a reduced level? Is there a place to see this? A way to predict this? If this mechanic comes into play beyond the skirmisher thing, I am confused as to how.
b) I am frequently confused about region names. On the ownership overlay, they are not visible unless I tooltip each region separately – easy when you have only a small number of provinces, frustrating when more are involved. On the provinces overlay, they are visible at a certain zoom level, but this is frustrating because the color zones are based on provinces not ownership – valuable information, but disorienting for many of the purposes where I am looking for a particular province. Is there a screen somewhere that combines a clear view of ownership and region names? Because if so, I am overlooking it. And if not, this would be sooo useful.
c) I have now wrapped my mind around the mechanic that determines the winner of a battle, and leads to the pursuit phase. (10.7.6) Not head-to-head victories, not unit deaths, but rather when one side inflicted 3+ total points of health and effectiveness loss, as compared to the enemy. (I am only foggy on whether the skirmisher phase counts, but I think not.) If I could suggest that it would make the battle much more compelling (and understandable) to view, if there were a running counter in the corner of the screen, keeping score.
One of the things I find interesting in this game is the impact of your faction naming territorial objectives. Supposedly this comes from your current leader, but in terms of gameplay, it feels more like you are the leader and these objectives come from other powerful groups within your nation.
The obvious impact is that conquering these objectives gives you progress tokens, always an important currency. Also, holding these objectives adds less decadence than holding other regions.
But in important ways, these objectives prevent the game from drifting into the normal strategy title where you make rational decisions based upon what is the wisest course of action.
Sometimes the objectives turn out to be objectionable to a neighbor, and even if you do not take action to achieve such an objective, the neighbor is aware of this current in your internal affairs, and it poisons any attempts to make nice with them. (Or the other way around, their internal politics push them to be hostile to you, because you own one of their objectives.)
But beyond that, I might rationally desire to take only regions to fill out a province, or only regions to add valuable resources. Or I might think it prudent not to head too close to a much stronger faction. But objectives can be in exactly the wrong direction, and not necessarily adjacent… But it can be a tough climb without those progress tokens.
Obviously an abstraction, but I like the take on how internal political necessities can be at cross purposes with the your overly rational views as grey eminence.
I have had no issues. Turns are not instantaneous, but the progress bars fill steadily over a few seconds, and you are then ready to proceed with the next turn.
No in game tutorial. The Initial pop-up box either launches the game or for Tutorial sends you to a 5 Episode (about 5 minutes each) series of YouTube tutorial videos narrated by DasTactic.
The PDF manual though is 214 pages and (from a quick glance) seems pretty hefty on details/pictures/info.
Rayfer says " I just discovered a detailed, step by step campaign tutorial in the manual, pages 172-196, taking you through 14 turns of a Rome campaign. Helps a lot in what to do and why you’re doing it."
Haven’t checked it out myself yet but am going to. I did the same thing everyone else seems to have done… jump into the 15 turn Rome thing and get smoked by turn 2 and wonder what happened. Apparently that is intended as an intro to combat. They probably should have labeled it as such (unless they did?).
I watched the first episode of this Das Tactic mini-series while I was on the stationary bike at the gym just now, and that cleared up quite a few things for me.
I’m still not sure how the various columns on the army screen in the strategic game line up with formations in the tactical battles. It’s probably something incredibly obvious that I’m missing.
In any case, I’m going to bang my head against this again now and see what happens.
EDIT: Lolz. I got mauled quicker than ever this time. But at least I understood why it was happening this time.
I still haven’t gotten around to pulling the trigger (company came over) but I did give the manual enough of a read to get a pretty good idea of what and what not to do. Plus the mini-AAR helped.
i think once you grok the concepts of culture/decadence and how factions evolove/devolve the rest will follow naturally.
I just stayed up way too late trying a campaign game as Marcomani, a small one-territory nation in Germania. Early on, we had a hard fought war against an invader from our north, but we drove them back and then expanded to about seven territories. All was awesome, but then we started getting hit with a horrific decadence score which crippled us from within. Then just as rebels started popping up everywhere, the Saxons declared war on us. Within 20 years or so we were back down to one territory (a much weaker territory too), and only survived because someone else hit the Saxons from the other side just as they were ready to finish us off.
So yeah, I think I’ve got to figure out how decadence works next.
But the game is really fun. I really like the pace, the decadence mechanic, and the blend of going wide and going tall. AI seems reasonably functional from what I can tell so far. I’m excited to play more.
Dacia seems to be a good faction to learn on. You are pretty much left alone for a little while, giving you time to figure things out.
It is really isolated, which I did not find to be the case with any of the barbarian tribes in northern Europe. And they have good defensive structures, which relieves a lot of the pressure that some enemies can take a bunch of your provinces quickly.
That shorter scenario as a tutorial is akin to being taught to swim by having someone throw you into the deep end of the pool.
