Faction Heirs - new family members

[Quirinus]

You might want to check this thread out.

The AI in BI is slightly better, and you get a few minor features like swimming units and night battles. So you may want to try BI out when you're bored with RTW.

[RLucid]

Thanks, that was interesting.

I reinstalled clean, and try to unlock factions fast, but got bored of Jullii short campaign (yet again), fancied try Brutii (but I'm kinda bored and not progressed it last night with only Rhodes to bag). Did do a quick sack & destroy everything I could of Dacian capitol to see if I could hand it off to my loyal allies Thrace, who no longer trust me, it seems. You need an army to hold the place, or it rebels and reverts, but if you have it, they accuse you of immediately capturing it back, so very, very dumb.

All solveable if you could transfer to take over garrison, just holding a town with the changeover in 5 turns or something so your army can move on, may be town garrison of peasant unit locals, changing faction at same time.

The Vanilla PBM would add unpredictability, you may have noticed, how my game as Brutii progressed exactly as I suspected. Dacia only moved Westwards, eventually just building a Fort near ford into their territory after I moved an HC unit to hold the bridge as an early warning mechanism.

Rather spoils the fun, when you understand the rails that the opposition are running on.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

You might want to try Vanilla Balancing Mod if you find the predictability is getting a bit predictable RLucid. It evens the playing field, encouraging factions to expand more unpredictably.

I must admit that after a while the predictability got to me a bit. Britannia almost always taking over the entire Western side of the world, the Egyptians beating the Greeks back in Asia Minor and The Selcuids almost always ending up as the first dead faction made the rest of the world a little tedious to monitor.

I did seem to gain a bit of pleasure from somehow trying to break up this predictability though. For example, once, as Egypt, I simply left the Selucids to their own devices, only defending against them rather than attacking, and moving Westwards into Western Africa. The Greeks eventually managed to overrun them, but they survived a lot longer by any rate.

[RLucid]

Britains got booted off the continent, when I was Julii. Trouble with that was, that meant I had to roll over the Germans, which then caused me to have to roll over the Dacians to, and so on and so on...

RTW really needs a way to establish a friendly border alliance, where both factions can turn outwards on enemies. If you ignore diplomacy, and just know which bits to avoid, you have effective peace, and can leave areas very lightly protected. AI just too slow moving.

Better diplomacy would also have enhanced unpredictability, as small events could significantly alter course of history, with a working Diplomacy system.

The Vanilla PBM does seem hopeful. I really ought to "fairly" unlock all the factions again, and finish off current campaigns. Perhaps give BI a go, had been thinking Alexander though, once I'd given a Phalanx faction a try. So far only used merc Hoplites, which I am very underwhelmed with, as they seem too slow and ineffective compared to other methods (even in the breaches they should excel at).

Meant to try Online battles, which was my reason for dropping bugfixer, and going back to a clean vanilla 1.5.