Roma - Fledgling State to Mighty Empire

[thelord]

I have exams coming up (A levels) so I will unfortunatley have to spend less time on EB, I will still be playing it, but just less.

[thelord]

POST SEVEN - EPIROT WAR 242-234 BC

The Epirots were really starting to get on my nerves, sending a stack every other turn to Patavium and they had also started blockading my ports in Italy, which was beginning to do my economy a lot of damage as I was training armies and fleets round the clock to hold off their continuos invasions.

When the war began I mostly had Camillan units, with the Polybians just starting to come through. As it progressed however my barracks were upgraded one by one which led to a newly recruited Polybian army being trained the central Italian cities. Led by two young generals from Rome, I planned to sail across to the Epirots capital at Ambrakia and sack as many settlements as possible, to weaken them and hopefully stop them from attacking me.

Fortunately central Greece was lightly defended with the bulk of the enemy troops up north fighting either me or the Getai, if the other greek states had any sense they would invade but they seem to be busy enough fighting Pontos and Arche Seleucia in the East. I managed to sack 3 settlements in Central Greece then abandoned them to whoever they woudl rebel too, which mostly turned out to be the Koinon Hellenon.

I decided that I would take two towns and keep them aswell in Illyria, Segestica and Dalminion. All of my raiding had caused the Epirots to send what seemed like every army they possessed towards me however, resulting in several large battles for control of Illyria.



Many of the enemy units were either Levies or Mercenaries which both gave me an advantage and also showed that Epirus was struggling in the war.



This war was important as I did not want a huge superpower next door to me and I especially didn't want half of the other Hellenic factions wiped out. (by someone other than me )



This was one of those battles which is very difficult to keep things in order and is generally much easier to just charge your units in all over the place. The number of phalanxes incoming was slightly unsettling however. Fortunately I had a lot of cavalry to counter them.



Which is why I deliberately kept my cavalry out of combat until they arrived. Once engaged they made the difference for me, without them I most likely would have lost.



At the end of the battle the number of dead was over 2000.



This battle was decisive in the Epirot war.



Soon after that battle in 234 BC, I recieved a plea for a ceasefire from Epirus. Bringing the war that had lasted 8 years to an end. I had clearly dealt them a heavy blow as they lost several cities to Rome, the Koinon Hellenon and Macedon, as well as their capital being sacked along with several other major cities.



I was now free to begin my invasion if the Balearic Isles and western Iberia, I had sent an expedition a few years ago but it was unfortunately sunk by pirates. Killing a 18 year old family member in the process.

[hrrypttrbst]

very good story!!

[thelord]

argh I have encountered another game breaker, I installed bi and Alex to try and get EB working on alex.exe, but now for some strange reason when I load my rtw.exe save (still on the unmodded 1.1 with no changes) it just loads back to the main menu. Anyone have any ideas whats wrong with it? All I have odn eis install bi and alex which are in different folders to EB...

[hrrypttrbst]

Did you get EB working with Alex.exe?So yes, you maybe forgot to make it back for Rometw.exe

[thelord]

No I havnt changed any files or anything, All I did was installed bi and alex but before I changed anything I realised that my save would no longer work.

[Chaotix]

This happened to me a long while ago when I was still playing Vanilla RTW. The only way I could fix it was by copying my save files to a backup folder and then un- and re-installing RTW. You may have to do the same. Everything worked fine after the reinstall, including my old saves.

[QuintusSertorius]

Yep, when I switched to BI, and back to RTW again, the only thing that worked was a clean uninstall-reinstall. It's safer that way anyway.

[thelord]

I guess I will do it if I get a chance tomorrow.

cheers for the help.

[thelord]

ive totaly reinstalled rtw +eb, still not working. I guess I will start again and play down to 232 BC and continue from there. Thank god it happened early on.

This AAR is likely to return in a couple of weeks.

[QuintusSertorius]

Before you do that, what I always do when starting again after a reinstallation is make sure I start a new campaign (just start it and activate the script, then quit the game and restart) before trying to load an old save.

[thelord]

I just tried at and it still wont work. I have the worst luck in the world....

[QuintusSertorius]

I just tried at and it still wont work. I have the worst luck in the world....

Damn. Well you're more than welcome to use my savegame at 250BC if you like, which will give you a head start.

[thelord]

I'm very grateful Quintus, but I cant stand huge unit size with sieges. I will just auto resolve the first few battles or starve the rebels out which should take around 20 odd years so I don't really mind.

[thelord]

My new campaign is under way, I have found out how to import the textures from the Roma Surrectum campaign map to the EB campaign map after some problems at first (the map was bright pink at one stage). I got it working in the end however. Here's a picture :

[Chirurgeon]

Holy Fecal matter batman that map looks so real. It has such an organic feel to it!!

[thelord]

haha yeh, it was worth the 30 mins it took for me to get it working.

[thelord]

I've had a few hours to play down the turns in the last couple of days, so I'm down to 242 BC, so I should be able to continue this AAR much sooner than expected as I only have 10 years left before I am back to where I was. Only this time with the improvements of the new campaign map textures I put in and the Alex.exe

Thanks for sticking with this long enough for me to get back on track.

[||Lz3||]

um I have a question , are you playing on VH-M difficulty? cause I started mine with H-M but it looks like I'm the only faction moving on... all the others seem to just sit there, and your campaing seems interesting


great AAR btw

[thelord]

I play on h/m, the ai gets a shed load of bonuses on vh. It also takes a while for the ai to get going and start expanding into rebel territory.

[Vasiliyi]

Can't wait till this aar is back! I've enjoyed it so far and I have to say I love reading roman aar's, although I have read a quite a few other good ones. Great aar! Hurry back!

[thelord]

POST EIGHT - THE BALEARIC ISLES

Seems as its been a while since my last post and this is a new campaign game, I thought I would update everyone on the situation in this new game. I have made it as accurate to my previous game as possible without cheating and I control exactly the same land at the same year as before. Which is All of Italy, Cisalpine Gaul, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily and Ilyyria.

In Gaul the Audei seem to have the upper hand at the moment as they are taking the rebel settlements whilst the Arverni seem content to do nothing. In the east the AS seems to be doing remarkably good for a change, they have most the coast of the holy land and also took Salamis, they have the Ptolemaioi pretty much boxed up in Egypt, further east and the Pahlava are expanding well into AS territory however and Baktria and Saka Rauka are expanding. Most of the other factions are just slowly expanding into rebel territories before they will start fighting each other (or me)

It is 232 BC, I have decided it is time to begin my expansion further ashore, in particular on the east of Iberia, hopefully before the Karthadastim take it. Before I do that however I need a base to retreat too if things go badly and also one to supply it with quicker reinforcements than it would take to ship Italian troops across. The Balearic Isles are a perfect choice for this purpose so I trained a tough stack in Italy and sent them across the Ocean to take the town, which I doubted would be very heavily defended.



Upon arriving on the Island in the winter on 232 BC, I discovered that I was right and only one unit was guarding the town, there was however two Karthadastim fleets nearby so I had to sink them in order to prevent reinforcements from Iberia or Africa, luckily I had trained the best ships available to me in Capua.



The following turn I took the Isles. I now plan to spend several years building it up to a level upon which it can supply both ships and troops for my invasion of Arse.

[Timidus]

Very interesting progression thus far with your expansion - I've never had much success with military expansion in the Balaerics, and the Recruitment Viewer doesn't indicate there are many options there (Celtic Lesser King with a level 5 Native MIC and otherwise post-Marian units, but nothing else), so while it provides a good naval power location, I don't think you'll find it helps you much in building up troops for your Iberian campaign (other than possibly some mercenary slingers?)
With your eastern front calm for the moment, do you plan to withdraw the bulk of that Army to Italy to retrain (and provide a home defense force, just in case the Aedui get aggressive?)? It doesn't appear you have much in the way of garrisons for Italy at the moment?
Good luck!

[thelord]

Yes I usually have a competent army in Italy to defend from invaders or rebels, I am currently retraining most of my troops however because of the reforms.

Bochorris doesn't offer very many levy troops but it is still a shelter and a good supply of ships and also is a good trading outpost once it is built up.

[Illian the Mediocre]

[QUOTE=thelord]I have found out how to import the textures from the Roma Surrectum campaign map to the EB

Where/How did you find out? I love the look of those textures and i'd like to do the same thing. Is there a thread somewhere explaining how? If not could you start one please, that'd be really cool.

Thanks...Oh and an excellent AAR

[thelord]

I found out on the .net forums in the sub mods section, I won't start a thread here as I don't want to take credit for someone elses work but I will post how to do it in this thread:

Make sure you back up the files before switching them.

1) Install Roma Surrectum - be careful as it breaks rtw and is not compatible with other mods, what I did was copy all of the vanilla rtw folders and files into a new section and installed Roma Surrectum there so it did not affect EB.

2) Go to RS/Data and copy descr_aerial_map_ground_types.txt

3) Paste it into EB/Data

4) Go to RS/Data/terrain/aerial_map/ground_types and copy every file in there.

5) Delete every file in EB/Data/terrain/aerial_map/ground_types and paste the copied RS files in.

6) Open up the RS descr_aerial_map_ground_types.txt in the EB data folder and infront of every word with .tga on the end paste this in front of it : ../../../../eb/data/terrain/aerial_map/ground_types/ in front of every tga file name in descr_aerial_map_ground_types.txt. Note Do not fill in your drive or the exact direction in ../../../../ because it makes the map right pink!

Hope that works for you.

[Illian the Mediocre]

Thanks for the quick response. I'll try this out as soon as I can. Seems worth it I was really impressed with those textures.

Thanks again.

[QuintusSertorius]

Very interesting progression thus far with your expansion - I've never had much success with military expansion in the Balaerics, and the Recruitment Viewer doesn't indicate there are many options there (Celtic Lesser King with a level 5 Native MIC and otherwise post-Marian units, but nothing else), so while it provides a good naval power location, I don't think you'll find it helps you much in building up troops for your Iberian campaign (other than possibly some mercenary slingers?)
With your eastern front calm for the moment, do you plan to withdraw the bulk of that Army to Italy to retrain (and provide a home defense force, just in case the Aedui get aggressive?)? It doesn't appear you have much in the way of garrisons for Italy at the moment?
Good luck!

In fairness you don't really need the Balearics from a military perspective; the AI will rarely invade it so it's more about the big boost it gives to your economy. Whatever mercs there are is more than enough garrison-wise. Same goes for Sardinia, which only has it's native troops and mercenary slingers.

There's no need to withdraw armies to Italy if you replace reinforcements by merging detachments. Ship them out and have them sitting in nearby settlements ready to be deployed when you've fought a few battles.

[Timidus]

QS - I know it's not historically accurate to do it this way (bringing units back to Italy to 'retrain'), and that your suggestion of bringing new replcements from Italy to "the front" to merge into existing units is the way it was done most likely, but in the "game" world don't you lose experience levels by merging units?

[thelord]

I'm not sure, doesn't bother me to tell you the truth.


POST NINE - FIRST MACEDONIAN WAR

After my blitzing of the Epirots the Macedonians took most of central Greece pushing them to the north. Unfortunately for me however their expansion didn't end there, they decided to was time to invade Dalminion (wow that was familiar ) Also the first faction was destroyed this turn, the Seleucid's are an eastern superpower and have wiped out Pontos, I don't mind as I would like to fight the AS in the future as I never have before.



You can just see Macedon's invasion in this picture, fortunately the forts I built held out long enough for me to ship some troops out from Italy to meet the invasion. Once they arrived however the Macedonians decided to withdraw most of their troops to Epidamnos, I did manage to besiege a small force in one of my forts which they captured.



Once I had taken the fort back I sent the stack down to Epidamnos to besiege it and hopefully sack it to teach them a lesson.



However before I could assault a reinforcing army attacked me, the winner of this battle would get the city.



The two armies attempted to attack me on both flanks at the same time, I had a good amount of cavalry, spearmen and infantry, which was bound to give me an advantage.



I like the look of the Hyspaspists, their shield design ion particular looks brilliant, they have my principes a tough fight aswell.



A good portion of one of the armies was of local levies, which are no match for trained Roman principes.



After a long battle which involved chasing a lot of skirmishers I managed to win.



This victory gave me control of Epidamnos, which I sacked straight away, enslaving the population and destroying every building. Another Macedonian stack was sent at me as I withdrawed to Illyria, which I again defeated. The Greek States will never defeat me in battle when they only send local troops and light phalanxes with only 1 or 2 competant units.



By 226 BC I sent a diplomat to Macedon and secured a ceasefire, ending the 5 year long war, there was no clear winner really as no permanent gain in territory occurred for either side and both sides lost considerable amounts of cash and troops.

In the East the AS seems to be getting stronger and stronger, as they have no wiped out the Hayasdan as well! I think I will have to send a diplomat out there to find out exactly what is going on.