Ah, Rome, the eternal city! Sic infit. A difficult start, but a worthwhile one :-)
The next chapter in our story is entitled meet the neighbors. I didn’t chose the name the game did in the form of an objective regarding our immediate neighboring cities who are of the same culture yet independent. Read cities ripe for the picking at the right price.
First off we picked up Ostia. A coastal city with a deep port, quite handy. Gabinius their leader was willing to offer up the city for 600 gold and his own services for 250. Seeing as how our nearby mine had been working over time filling our coffers, we accepted. And I just say he comes with a fairly nice set of military attributes so we’re immediately putting him at the head of an additional army we recruited.
Another neighboring city called Lanuvium had a leader named Calpurnius offer to join us in our crusade to make Rome great again if we’d only take out the bandits and their fort near their home city. We accepted and then had to knock back 4 waves of bandits that we only just managed to handle (the side benefit of some freshly minted slaves took some of the sting out of it). And once again we’ve got ourselves another unit commander with rather stellar stats:
And lastly we got a request for help from Pompilius of Carsioli, the bandits in his neck of the woods made off with some workers they wanted rescued and gave us the general directions of where they were last seen. Off we went found them, took out the bandits holding them and sent the survivors packing back to Carsioli upon which that city joined our worthy cause as well. And while Pompilius has less impressive stats we’re still up for putting him to use either as a governor in a city or leading a unit in the field:
While we were busy recruiting our immediate neighbors to become fellow Romans enhancements to the cities we took over were made, primarily warehouses to store in food for the winter which was upon us. Crop yields fell well below production but we’d anticipated this and had no issues getting thru the first winter.
Here is a overview map of things as they stand once completing this objective (that also netted us our first Hegemony point, 1 of 10 needed for victory):
And in closing, spies have informed us the leader of a city nation to our north has been replaced by an aggressive one and we should anticipate war. I’d hoped to head south instead of north so I’m considering just leaving an army to defend against that possibility and push south regardless. The reason being these cities we’ve taken in this initial expansion are all of the same culture and didn’t require conquering but rather joined us willingly so the usual slow process of colonization and repair is unnecessary. No repairs, no rebellion and immediate recruitment available. We should be fine.
Edit: Played bit more this afternoon and quickly discovered the campaign programming had other plans for me. The closest city state to the east called the Sabine declared on us and almost immediately attacked with 6-8 units and shortly thereafter their diplomat convinced the Marsi (who I incorrectly call the Mausi on the screenshot below) to join in and attacked with 4 units. So much for heading south.
The original plan not even surviving until contact with the planned enemy? Yep, that sounds like Hegemony as Rome alright, haha. Unplanned war with the Sabines it shall be then!
Well, let’s see if the “mausi” will reveal themselves to be mousy…!? Historically, the Marsi were rather the opposite of mousey, though :-))
As it just so happens as I was waiting out our second winter weighing ours options when the Marsi offered peace at a price.
This offer was made shortly after we took a nearby fort of theirs that was inconveniently blocking our supply lines to a logging camp and farm. We took out three units of theirs doing it and they attempted to retaliate by sending in 4 more to take it back. It ended badly for them as their survivors from the engagements now have the honor of living out their days as Roman slaves.
Judging from our relative current power estimations shown below (they’re #1 but trending down as a result of our recent battles and Rome is red in 3rd among the city states we’ve encountered so far) they must think they have the upper hand and wanted 50 gold a week for this truce. We respectfully declined.
The southern offensive is on hold. The demands of local hegemony cannot be ignored. Two objectives have presented themselves that net Hegemony points:
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The first is called “defeat the other” and asks that we defeat and control all the native lands of two nations.
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The second is “the end of them” and demands we end an ancient rivalry by defeating the Sabine and taking their cities, currently listed as two.
Spring is 4 weeks away, at which point we will commence our eastward offensive for the season:
Edit: just added an example of map zoom scale, assuming this actually works as I’ve not posted a vid from imugr before:
Looks like it does work, if perhaps a bit crude, but you get the idea.
You’re making it out as if this was a technically crude video, but the shakiness could have entirely different reasons: THE DIE IS CAST ;-]
Haha.
The Romans begin their spring offensive against the nearest Sabine city. Apparently their counter attack earlier exhausted them because the defenses are looking rather sad:
As expected our army made short work of the defenders (turned out to be three units). The Sabine city of Amiternum is ours and with two very nice prizes. The commander of the army seeing the writing on the wall offered up his services so we have a new commander with nice stats for vision, morale and recruitment:
And as a bonus the city has stables! Calvary are incredibly useful for running down routing units and converting to slaves.
The catch however is one we’ll now be dealing with for the remainder of the campaign, that of assimilation. And while ordinarily we’d build improvements to speed this process along, here I’d prefer to leave the stable in place and recruit cavalry.
Research into colonization is a priority so we can transport Romans from our original founding set of cities to recently conquered ones and teach the barbarians how to use utensils and not defecate inside. It’s the little things in life.
In this seasons offensive we also took what our spies had told us was the 2nd of two Sabine cities called Reate. This proved a bit disappointing for a couple reasons. First as the picture shows below it’s nothing to write home about. And sadly our spies were misinformed as upon capture it was revealed to us yet another remaining Sabine city needs to be found and conquered to complete this Hegemony point objective.
Nine weeks until winter, scouts are out searching for the remaining Sabine city. We’ll see if we can find it before winter sets in.
Just curious and to have more context for the Sabines’ pityful defenses: at which difficulty level are you playing?
Pretty sure this is novice or whatever they call the easiest setting.
If I switched it to normal what attributes does that impact?
From novice → normal → expert the difficulty setting will impact the aggressiveness of the AI, the size of their armies and how much of a resistence they will put up. I think it will also impact the morale of your cities in some way (not sure how exactly) and starting resources (but that’s not applicable anymore since you’ve already started :-). Unlike many other strategy games, it will not buff the AI in any “unfair” way with more resources or +100% attack or anything like that. You can always change difficulty settings mid-game if you feel like it.
If this is just primarily impacts army size and aggressiveness I’ll switch it, because that’d make it more interesting. What I didn’t want however is to spend vast chunks of playtime fighting rebellions and doing nothing for years at a time while assimilating conquered cities. I did that first campaign quite a bit even on novice and it frankly got a bit old.
Assimilation is slow and bogs down the campaign so much it was painful as I literally had to just sit out entire years of the campaign colonizing captured cities and building monuments/forums.
My thoughts at this point are switch to normal and see what it does to assimilation speed on the current batch of captured cities I need to convert.
You might want to consider building “nightwatches” instead, they are relatively cheap and since you’re probably going to garrisson conquered cities anyway, their “additional city morale from garrisson” comes in handy. Maxing out the food slider in the city tremenduously helps with morale (procvided you can spare the food ofc :-). Once you have researched colonization, assimilation shouldn’t really be a problem anymore, just drop a few colonists and you’re fine (provided you can spare the manpower ofc :-)
These are already a lot of “…you can do… provided…” and I see how this may feel like carrot and stick. Ahh those strategy games…! Anyway, looking forward to how this campaign will be going with increased difficulty!
Switched to normal and the initial impact has been:
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Morale and rebellions are proving a headache, but that might have been the case regardless. So just chalking that up to the headaches of building an empire.
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The Sabines and Marsi are proving a right royal headache. They snipe supply lines and resources from multiple directions at the same time seemingly working together. This caused a severe economic problem. We hired more units to deal with it but the pillaging does it’s damage and income goes negative. We’ve been forced to spend the winter building an upgrading markets just to get back into the black.
The campaign for the moment has gone into a temporary holding pattern to afford us the time to colonize some of the cities and get them under control (beelined research for colonization):
And we brokered a truce in the south (so much for that whole heading south business) with the Volsci to avoid as much as possible fighting a two front war and just deal with the eastern front:
So far the biggest change from novice to normal is aggressiveness and number of units the enemy is throwing at us.
Sounds about right, the AI does love conducting a bit of “Small War”. Fortunately, what the AI can do to you can be reversed and done right back at the AI with good effect. No one appreciates having their economy and supply lines disrupted.
Yeah, I’ve spent the last two seasons trying to right the ship and while I’ve gotten things sort of back on track I’m now experiencing a whack a mole problem where two different city states attack from different directions at the same time.
It’s proving difficult to respond in timely fashion before they wreck stuff which then leads to the troops who show up not getting properly supplied.
Quite the little conundrum. But I suspect your observation two can play this game is ultimately the solution and going on the offense is the only way to put a stop to it. I’ve tried just counter attacking defensive stuff and it’s just not working.
Another option would be to fortify your border with more walled camps/bridges, city walls, battlements and palisades for resource nodes. As a latin faction Rome has access to relatively cheap Leves units, ideal to put into a garrisson. I also love to place a few archers / ranged units on one side of a river so they can shoot at the enemies on the other side - a great way to back up a walled bridge.
Before resuming the AAR one further observation/rant:
I’m struggling a bit with the impression diplomacy is gamey. I broker peace with city states in the north so I can concentrate forces south and east on my biggest threat the Marsi.
I spend a season assembling forces and begin to make some real progress fortifying positions and resources plus I took one of their nearest cities that had proven a headache for sometime.
Then like clockwork diplomatic messages pop up saying not one but two of the city states north of me have declared on me, one of which I’m paying for truce and the other that is terrified of me and has one city and 1/10th my power (based on our relative ratings).
If you can’t rely on allies to stay on side even when you’re paying them to do so it’s unclear to me how to effectively set up a focused engagement against an enemy w/o being endlessly sniped to death from other directions. And when you couple that w/ the damage done to resources taking forever to repair and yet it insanely fast and easy to wreck the recipe is set for a stalemate. Because when I move in force to work on one enemy the game invariably pops off diplomacy events that trigger attacks as far away as possible from where my forces are.
You say “allies”, but there are no allies here. Just wolves you pay to stay away. And just to get this right out of the way, so to say, there are also no “peace treaties”, just temporary truces that can be canceled by either side on a blink :-) In my humble opinion, it’s actually the opposite of “gamey”. Suppose you could pay them for peace and they would pliably wait until you’re ready to turn your sword on them (and I know a couple of strategy games that do it like this), then I’d call that gamey.
You may feel it to be “unrealistic” that one little neighbour declared on you - but then: why not? Should it sit there like a duck and wait for you coming for it? Probably you have driven the majority of your forces south in the (oh so foolish :-) belief your northern borders were secure. Alas, no, there are no borders at all, only quite penetrable zones of influence. Once your northern “border” was unprotected, your enemies duly seized the chance that was so riply presented to them. Welcome to the world of “normal” difficulty!!! :-)
However, there is one gamey thing here, and that’s the fact you can alway barter another truce - for a price in gold. The art to master this game is not "concentration of force, but “balance of force” - and economic ressourcefulness, a habit to plan for contingencies. The “border” must always be fortified and garrissoned, a fast strike force readied in the hinterland, while your main army is on campaign. At least, make sure you’ve got enough resources to raise an army quickly. Always watch your back, since you’re surrounded by backstabbers. Good luck! :-)
Ok, so no allies. I can work with that, but would point out that makes diplomacy less useful than it is in even in the Total War series that literally has the words total war in the title. I’ve had no trouble establishing and maintaining alliances in Shogun 2 for entire campaigns (that includes post realm divide where you suffer like a 5 point per year ding against you, and that really starts to add up).
As for nations declaring on me that are 1/10th my strength, let’s just say I’d view this thru a realpolik lense and would humbly suggest any state diplomacy that doesn’t have as its most basic principle the concept of self-preservation should be considered fatally flawed. I’m now going to make a point of finding there one city and ridding myself of this meddlesome priest. That the game fires off declarations at me at the very point I’m making some headway is, if not gamey, then shall we say conveniently timed?
In Imperiums: Greek Wars this nation would have had the good sense to either offer co-federation to me or gladly accepted it if I offered it to them. And I’m pretty sure Rome in RL did this all the time. ;)
Thanks for the additional input, I’ll dive back in and see if I can implement them with success and get this campaign back on track (along with this AAR)!
I’m really enjoying the latest posts on this game!
That whole diplomacy issue is a matter of how diplomacy is folded into the design and not at all about how actual diplomacy works. I have no problem with diplomacy being nothing but a temporary stopgap on the way to conquering E V E R Y O N E !, but a game really needs to make that clear up front. “Diplomacy” means so many different things to so many different players in so many different games. So if you don’t communicate the role of diplomacy in your game, someone is invariably going to try a peaceful playthrough and declare your game broken when it doesn’t work.
(Not saying that’s what you were doing, @easytarget, but instead that I understand your frustration if Hegemony doesn’t communicate somehow that there won’t be persistent alliances.)
In order to make that reference work, you can’t ride out there and do it yourself! You need to get some loyal follower to do it for you. :)
-Tom