Roman destiny to win

[AMD4EVER]

Tired of seeing the Roman's dominate the board in single player I decided to see what would happen if the Roman's were total push overs. I modified their settlements to have 1200 population, town level, no military buildings, and left their generals without any troops to command. So they start out in 270 as the four weakest factions in the game by far and have no hope of coming out of this until they are at least able to hit large town level which would take them quite a few turns.

To my surprise by 255 when my Seleucid army crossed into Greek lands I saw the Brutii were in Appolonia and had another army in Northern Greece. I had thought that they would have been the faction most likely to survive because of their location in Italy so I still assumed the Julii and Scipii were at least finished. However, I instead found that the Julii had taken the two Gaul settlements to the North and the Scipii were in control of Sicily.

To see how this could have happened I restarted the game and removed fog of war. It turns out that no settlement near one of the Roman's would build a large enough army to try and compete with the weakened Roman position. In fact they would just sit around and wait for the Roman's to attack almost 10 years into the game and then would suffer a defeat to a pathetic thrown together army.

So I've come to the conclusion that the game is obviously made for the Roman's to win if the player doesn't defeat them.

Out of curiosity though, has anyone ever seen one of the Roman factions fall to another AI faction?

[Roy1991]

In my Numidia campaign, I took the 2 Brutii settlements in Italy, and the Greeks took the other Brutii settlements (about 15 I think), in Greece, Macedonia, Illyria, etc

https://img171.imageshack.us/img171/1823/numidiavicsw3.jpg

[Bob the Insane]

What campaign difficulty are you playing on? Removing all those troops might have given them a cash flow boost and I think they would build the barracks buildings first.

Did you strip out the Senate faction's army as well? It will do a good jump of defending the home provinces of the romans from invasion...

[Arciel]

That's odd... Usually in my games, the Romans don't dominate the map(I'm playing on vanilla RTW, unpatched). They move around huge stacks but still can't take a settlement from another faction, only from the rebels. An exemption to this would be the Julii taking Caralis from Carthage and the Brutii taking Thermon from the Greeks. I also started a thread on the Romans in the entrance hall but regarding their apparent inability to attack effectively.

[Bob the Insane]

That's odd... Usually in my games, the Romans don't dominate the map(I'm playing on vanilla RTW, unpatched).

Indeed, but try patching up to 1.5 and see the Romans conquror the world! Well the Romans and the Britians that is...

[Arciel]

Indeed, but try patching up to 1.5 and see the Romans conquror the world! Well the Romans and the Britians that is...

Yeah, I'll try that soon, just have to play the heck out of vanilla RTW though. If I'm not mistaken, BI comes with the 1.5 patch for RTW? I really don't want to dowload the patch as I only have a 56k connection modem so it might take me more than a few hours... But yeah, the other Romans do look quite stupid in my games...

[Azog 150]

I have once seen a Carthraginian army land near rome, but it was about a quater stack army so it got defeated by the senet, i was the greek so i thought about trying to help them out, but i had bigger problems to worry about.

[Quillan]

BI came with patch 1.3, basically. The later patch brings RTW up to 1.5, and BI up to the 1.6 version. Download it overnight if you have to, or go find RTW Gold, which I think comes prepatched already.

[Bob the Insane]

BI came with patch 1.3, basically. The later patch brings RTW up to 1.5, and BI up to the 1.6 version. Download it overnight if you have to, or go find RTW Gold, which I think comes prepatched already.

Man you should really patch RTW up to 1.5. You don;t need BI to do it at all and it is a big improvement over the initial release, particularly on the battlefield...

[Arciel]

Man you should really patch RTW up to 1.5. You don;t need BI to do it at all and it is a big improvement over the initial release, particularly on the battlefield...

All right then...I'll just prepare myself for an all-nighter..

[Quillan]

I think the roman "destiny" really boils down to how the computer handles auto-calculation of battles between the AI factions. In the first place, I'm quite sure it's simply a number crunch rather than simulating a battle. The romans have really good troops, both before and after the reforms, so given equal numbers they tend to win. In the second place, I'm also quite certain the campaign difficulty setting doesn't affect auto-calc battles that don't involve you. The result is that there would be no adjustment in the results between the romans and the greeks fighting when you're playing the Seleucids on hard or very hard. The mods simply slow them down.

[MSB]

Out of curiosity though, has anyone ever seen one of the Roman factions fall to another AI faction?

I have seen the Brutii and the Scipii fall to The Greek Cities and Carthage on vanilla 1.5 when I was playing as the Julii. However this was not a conventional defeat. The Scipii fell with Capua left due to death of all family members and the Brutii fell with both Croton and Tarentum to the same problem. The Brutii always seem to go on 1.5 when the difficulty is placed on Hard. This is usually due to the Greek Cities killing off all their family member's in battle.

[gardibolt]

All right then...I'll just prepare myself for an all-nighter..


Just be aware of the 237 BC bug, which will make you CTD on certain years if you play a game in 1.5 that was started in 1.3. Either install player1's bugfixer, or use my replacement historic event file here:
http://personalpages.tds.net/~mzimmer/historic_events.txt

BugFixer includes my fix.

[Avicenna]

The Genii eh?

The AI tends to be stupid like that. 1.5 is not a major improvement to me, but to be honest I can't differentiate between the mods well. All of them have stupid AI IMO, with suiciding generals, single skirmish units and people racing to see who hits my phalanx first.

Do you know that a few limanetei and archer units (4 in total) almost hold out against over a thousand franks in a stone walled city? They would have lost a thousand men had they not won and recovered around 100.

[Bob the Insane]

install player1's bugfixer

I would heartily recomend that to anyone playing the vanilla game...