Difficulty at later stages?

[Jensemann]

Howdy

i havent played EB a lot mainley because of a lousy computer and because i get bored with a game when it gets too easy, so therefor i was wondering if EB has any features that makes the game more difficult at later stages?


because my experience with vanilla RTW is that once you have established about 10 cities nothing can stop you even on very hard..

Sorry if this has been posted somewhere else :idea2:

[Mad Guitar Murphy]

I don't think it gets easier, the ai will build full stacks of elite troops again and again. For instance, in my parthian campaign I own everything from india to syria and can only afford 2 full stacks of cavalry as mobile field armies. The ai however has something like 10 full stacks of elite troops. It is quite challenging

[Avicenna]

MGM: that's why you don't use full stacks of cavalry. I use (not including generals) 2 units of cav per stack, and I have four, and can probably afford five whole stacks of soldiers. I've got a decent half stack of naval ships as well, triremes and quinquiremes. The thing is, EB has made cavalry very expensive. Oh, by the way, I have 3 islands, and between the line between Byzantion and Epirus, to Sparta. I also have half of Northern Turkey: that is Ammaseia, Sinope, Ankyra and Nikomedia. The cavalry have been de-ubered from vanilla as well, so your cavalry stacks are almost definitely not worth it.

[eadingas]

It gets tougher and tougher, the more you expand the more factions you border with, and more wars you'll have to wage.. and the armies of AI are pretty much limitless.

[Mad Guitar Murphy]

hmm my cavalry armies are capable of destroying ai infantry armies with very few casualties, and they are very fast. I play on very hard, which completely sucks, my nizag gund infantry and so on mean nothing to agema hoplites with uber morale. Even when surrounded by infantry those guys don't break.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

The problem does exist in the game as a whole, but I think from what I've played that more often than not my campaigns ended because I was running into harder opposition instead of easier. The AI gets their better units more quickly than the human player does usually, so the middle of the game is better for sure. But the later stages can have a steamroller effect in almost any mod or version of rtw unfortunately. I know some factions will always have a harder time though, especially if you keep realistic armies. Full stacks of awesome cavalry or of uber phalanx units just aren't real and aren't fun to me.

[Fondor_Yards]

Well for parthia anyways, their armies were basicly only cavalry with some foot archer back up IIRC. As for the steamroller, it matters who you play. A good player with all the agean sea ports can basicly be unstopable. In my macedonian campain, I quit cause it was too easy by 240 BC. But with the same number of cities in germania or dacia, it's not so easy. Even owning greece as a barabrian it isn't so rich, as you don't get access of those nice "civilized" buildings to boost trade and such. I know in my averni campain, the epriotes have huge stacks of all very high exp units sitting around doing nothing. The germans sent huge stacks of all 3 exp units at me *cause they have some temple that lets them pump out 3 chevon units*. The britions in my first invasion made me return after only 2 battles *in which I took 2 cities*. And to make it worse, the bribed them after I left. Had to retake the same dam cities again...

[Musopticon?]

It's definetly harder than in vanilla. That's why I always do a horrible blitz with the starting armies in order to quell any nearby opposition, to get a kingdom fast and to prevent my neighbours from teching up to better units. Facing Macedonian stacks full of psiloi and taxeis isn't nearly as challenging than kicking back a huge invasion of pezhetaroi and pheraspidai.

Historicality aside, I want a campaign that I can succeed in and enjoy.

Then again, once the initial opposition seazes, I start building and paying back that huge mnai dept. :P

Edit: Out of interest, what is that lantern icon-thingie that's alighted in the very left lower corner of this post? Warning level? 'Cos, if it is warning level, I'd really like to know what I did to deserve it. Unless it was that occultus-slip thing.
Nevermind, it just shows that I'm online. Shows what I know.:sweatdrop:

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Lamp light on means you are currently online.
Warning sign is a way for you to report troublesome posts.

That's all. :grin:

[Musopticon?]

Yeah, I noticed. *ahem*

Just a brief question here: Are you guys going to further script the campaigns on 0.8 to provide more later stage difficulty, in the form of historical invasions perhaps?

[Conqueror]

Speaking of invasions, could the migrations of the Yuezhi be represented by making strong Eleutheroi stacks appear in the eastern provinces? Not a good solution I know but at least it'd be better than nothing, and might make things more interesting to Baktrians/Pahlavas/Sakas/whoever lives there at the time.

[eadingas]

We can't "spawn" troops, unfortunately.

[Ludens]

We can't "spawn" troops, unfortunately.
You can't? I recall having read some where that R:TR planned to include Hannibal in their campaign by having him spawn at the correct date in the alps. Or am I confusing things?

[eadingas]

There are walkarounds, but they are clumsy... and maybe it's different with generals. Or something new appered in last patch. Is RTR planning to do that on old RTW, or with BI engine?

[Ludens]

There are walkarounds, but they are clumsy... and maybe it's different with generals. Or something new appered in last patch. Is RTR planning to do that on old RTW, or with BI engine?
I think it was for R:TR 7, so that means BI. But doesn't R:TW 1.5 use basically the same .exe as BI anyway?

[eadingas]

Nope. BI has Invasions available. 1.5, AFAIK, doesn't.

[Musopticon?]

Yeah, emergent factions and invasions only work in 1.6.

[Ludens]

I see. Pity. It would be nice to add the Yuezhi in some form.

[Conqueror]

Yeah that's too bad. Would have been fun to try and fend off big stacks of invading nomads emerging by your borders. Perhaps an unofficial mod project could try to implement this for a BI version.

[The_Mark]

We can't "spawn" troops, unfortunately.
We can, thanks to Jerome, who gave us the correct syntax for spawn_army.

[eadingas]

O_O

I had no idea!
Then why aren't we doing this? :)

[The_Mark]

It happened a while ago, a while before the open beta or 0.74 went public.

We're not doing it because we have a serious shortage of active scripters - I'm preoccupied in the first part of my finals, Richard's got his hands full moderating forums and assorted RL stuff, and LorDBulA has his uni studies. Azek, now him I haven't seen online for a while.