keldath
yeah, you're right.
this is a fantastic MOD.
but no civ MOD has ever infuriated me like this one.
everything is great, extremely enjoyable... until the revolts over my "high taxes" start... and from there on in, the game goes to $h!t...
You have to keep the research rate at least at 50%, if you can't do that, change your strategy. I'm playing as the romans, I'm at something like turn 600 and the unit I've build the most are merchants.
You may not underestimate their strength in withdrawing and their strength in open terrain. Use mounted units to weaken the enemy (mostly with a big chance or extra promotions of withdrawal) and your infantries have an easy job afterwards. Horses are used for flanking but early horses against food soldiers had no chance. there was a Roman battle where the mounted warriors settled down to fight, because of that they won the battle.
Unlike in monarch and below, in my current game I don't have a bigger army then the AI, so it turns out there's more fights in the open, and since it's so late in the game, there's not that many forests last so horses are only really bad on cities now. I've being using the horses that defected to my side and it's true that they have their uses.
It's just that (unless of course, it was the case and they really were weak in those situations, I don't really know that much about ancient wars) I belive that a 50% reduction is too much, on forest is ok since it makes sense, but were they really that bad on city fights? From the techs we get it seems that they get better on horses with time so maybe a 25% reduction would be better? For example, a 12 str sassanid cataphract would have 9 str on cities, it's not too high but it's not too low like it is (6 str).
The AI seems to love using mounted units to attack, sometimes that's all they send, so they are only become a threat because of the cheer amount of units. But all you have to do is have enough units to counter that. In the beggining of my wars with the hittits (they are my strongest rivals) I've being only defending myself for most of the time because of the amount of units. The funny thing is since they can defect and I lost almost no units, even without building many during the war (units are expensive so altough I do have a huge army currently I try to not keep making them all the time) my number kept growing while their numbers were diminishing. By the end of this war we had the same amount of units because of this! That made me curious, why did this people defect like that on those times?
When I make the Numeri it will be game over for the AI, 7 str and 100% vs mounted units. They won't even stand a chance.
Btw, I talked about the Equites being the same as normal war horses but with a higher cost before but the Eques is also the same as the heavy cavalry (including the cost). Don't know if it is intended so that roman simply have a different mount but just thought I should mention.
The only thing keeping me from having more fun is that the game got to a point that it's using around 1.4gb of memory so I can only play it somethings when I can use my father's computer (I really have to upgrade mine!). There's too many units and cities on the map.
One thing that used to make a little mad was some things the AI do that is kind weird. Like I've seen they army revolting like 3 or 4 times on the same game because they keep moving a huge amount of units together on the same tile, I even stole a great general from one of those rebellion. They also have a lot of slave revolts going on. But when I started thinking about it since the goal of this mod is to try to simulate those ancient events then it's ok to have the ai do those "stupid" things in terms of gameplay because if they played perfectly those problems would seem like they don't even exist.
About the new vassalizing system, I do love it since I can "steal" my enemy vassals for myself instead of having to kill everyone. But it makes can create a really funny bouncing game of one stealing the others vassal back and forth, in my game I just stole boudica from the hittits but they stole pericles and alexander from me. They had random cities far away from me so the hittits captured them and I couldn't do anything to help. The ones close to me were protected by my soldiers and the enemies forces couldnt do much to take them.
I've build the roman forum and the mausolleum so I got 2 golden ages with double the time, it was great. Too bad that to make another golden age I need a great spy and it will be nearly impossible to get one since I didn't got first on the tech that gives it and from what I recall you can't put many spys on your cities to try to get one.
I can only build 2 Spartans, the pedia says I should be able to build three, though the mouseover in game says two.
The roman's Imperial Guard is like this too. I turned them into generals btw. They have city garrison at maximum and a lot of drill. This means that the city I put them on will be impossible to be taken. xD I have some cities with lot's of gladiators, the gladiators building and several buildings that increase the exp. My numbers and military techs are a little smaller then the AI but most of my units are really experienced and I have a great amount of generals so altough half of the map is at war against me, I'm the one with the upper hand.
So it's something else.
strange, but I am not sad about your post. it shows me sthg, that works well and is intended!
