Hi, folks

[The Last Conformist]

After a lengthy break from Civ, I've finally acquired BTS and I've been playing the latest version of TAM a bit over the last week, mostly as Rome on the Huge Med map. A few comments and questions:


i. What tech, if any, enables Vassalization? The 'pedia says Feudalism, which doesn't exist in TAM.

ii. Some AI seems curiously reluctant to expand. In particular, the Carthaginians have pretty much confined themselves to Tunisia, except for a lonely ex-barbarian city way out in Morocco. There are a few more barbarian cities scattered around in the Maghreb (one of which the Egyptians eventually captured), but nothing that'd seem enough to hem Dido in. Similarly, the Persians and Medes, despite having only half a dozen cities each, don't expand much eastward. The Germans, Dacians, Skyths, Goths, and Kolcheans, OTOH, have happily colonized all the northern reaches of the map except the far NE, each having 10+ cities. Is this intentional/what causes it?

iii. Teuta remains a major warmonger and fairly successful at that. Perhaps the Illyrians should be toned down a bit to let the Greek and Roman AIs do a bit better?

iv. On the Huge map, Italy has no Horses at all. Perhaps add one in the south like in the Standard Med map?

v. A pop-up refered to the Thracians as "the Thrace". I don't recall exactly what kind of pop-up, unfortunately.

 

[Humakty]

I played three games on TAM huge map, and I did not experience the same as you did :

ii. It is true the AI tend sto massively colonise the russian steppes, I don't know how it can support so many (crappy) cities. In my games I've seen almost all kind of civs colonise there.

iii.In two of the three games, the greeks dominated their region, in the third one, I played the romans and invaded them, but they were doing pretty well before I did. I agree the romans did not behave how you would expect them to. (they rarely take a city outside Italy).

iv. Italy, like greece, had almost no cavalry before expanding outside of Italy. Even then, it was a very minor part of their army. With the bonus they have, it shouldn't be to hard to play without.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Tell a Tarentine or Capuan noble that his part in the army was minor. South Italian cavalry were sufficiently well regarded that a type of Hellenistic light cavalry were known as "tarentines".

Plus, while Rome is easy to play for a human, it might help the Roman AI to be a bit less pathetic. Alternatively, it might convince the Greek AI to colonize Magna Graecia, which it has no interest in at all right now (Sicily and Calabria were colonized by Illyria in my game!).

 

[Humakty]

I based what I said about Roman cavalry on the fact that in almost all reports on roman battles, there is no mention of cavalry corps, even during the punic wars. Surely nobles fought on horses, but maybe they were too busy to take part in the action...

 

[The Last Conformist]

Oh, there's mention of Roman cavalry in accounts of Punic Wars battles - mostly of them being defeated. But I was refering to pre-Roman Tarentines and Capuans.


Totally tangentially, for whatever reason my desk computer recently refuses to access CFC (I'm typing this from the laptop) - I just get a timed out message. It doesn't seem to be the firewall, since the problem persists when I turn that off. Does anyone less computer-dunce than me have a suggestion what might be wrong?

 

[Humakty]

Have you tried cleaning up cookies ? You can access the config menu by right clicking on your internet explorer icon (.exe?).You'll find the option (to clean cookies and other stuff) in the general menu.
It is as much as I can do , I'm no computer wizard.

 

[The Last Conformist]

(Turns out it is the firewall. For whatever reason, it not merely blocks CFC but also stays on when you click on on the off button. Grrr!)

 

[The Last Conformist]

A couple further observations:

vi) For Rome, the Infantry unit is worthless - it has no appreciable advantages over the cheaper legionary.

vii) Reached the end of the tech tree with about 80 turns to spare.

viii) Late in the game, Carthage has finally colonized part of Algeria and plopped down a second city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

Addendum:

ix) The Silk Road project and it's components are all very expensive. It gets kinda dull having all my best cities occupied building them for turn after turn while the outlaying provinces fend off the pathetic attacks by the AIs. (Most pathetic of all is the DOW by Agamemnon, whose little research/culture utopia is surrounded by my territory to the west, north, and east. He's going to go from a top three score to oblivion for not delaying my victory by a single turn.)