As i finished my campaign with Baktria yesterday (Victorraayyy!), i want to give you EB guys some feedback.
First of all i have to say you really succeded in giving Baktria a unique touch. The mosaic GUI, the eastern backround music and the huge variety of greek, persian and indian units result in a great gameplay experience.
And to allow some "persian blood" in the familiy tree is a nice idea!
I really grateful for the extremly detailed unit/building descreptions, reading it really helps you to immerse into the era.
I played on H/H, large settings with BI-exe. After i´ve read the "How to play with BI" thread, i decided to make things not overly complicated and just changed the shortcut from RomeTW.exe to RomeTW-BI.exe and ... it works!
The only thing that might be not right is that i saw rebel stacks with gold and silver upgrades, but that happened only twice and not on my territory.
My campaign lasted from 272 to 228 and i had 2(!) ctds, one non-reproduceable on the campaign map (end turn) and one after a battle with reenforcements, but i fought many of those and it only happened once. So stability has vastly improved in comparison with 0.74, great job!
Progression over the years:
250
240
228
Economy:
Uh well, the mines. When i saw the mine upgrades for the first time
my thought was "+10000...wtf?!". At the beginning i really drowned in cash
and i started to worry about a boring campaign. At the beginning my bactrian warfare mainly was about bribing entire seleukid stacks and sendind them back to their actual owner. Great fun!
But as i expanded i desperately needed the mine income, because:
1. Due to the huge distances i had to field 2 high quality full stacks to defend
my borders effectively against Arche Seleukia. The armies alone arent the
problem, but their reenforcements are (per full stack half a stack of
reenf.).
Things got worse when Pahvala and the Sakae declared war on me and i
had to pay the upkeep for 3 additional armies to defeat them.
2. Garrison unit costs due "distance to capital" is a problem.
3. you cannot trade with your neighbours because you usually are at war with
all them and you have no cash cow like sea ports in the Mediterranean.
After all i´ve read you´re going to generally nerf the mine income a bit, but i suggest to leave Baktria as is or perhaps give them an additional upgrade (+2000, +4000, +7000?).
Military:
Well, as i said before the huge array of units is great and i love the heavily amoured horse archers and the Hoplitai Indoi! The only thing that bothers me a bit (and only a bit) is that they have no real unique infantry unit like the seleukid Thorakitai Argyraspidai. If historical accuracy allows it (though i doubt that ), perhaps merge the Baktrion Agema and the Pheraspidai and/or give one of them something like 12 attack and 28 defense stats. I think that would add a nice touch to a bactrian battle line as the rest of the infantry faction units are pretty much average (the stats, not the skins!).
Here is one of my full stacks:
I killed a lot of seleukids with these guys
Against Pahvala and the Sakae my stacks were mostly horse skirmishers/archers
I´m really interested in gameplay hints and formations of other baktrian players because it was the second time i played Bakria (one RTRPE) and I
certainly need some guidance from experienced players.
P.S. Thank you EB team for this great mod! It is really one of a kind and worth every single day of wait!
P.P.S sorry for my bad english
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