Your house rules for EB

**Maion Maroneios** · 01-19-2009, 14:35

My house rules are the following:

1. Roleplay. Try to roleplay your characters according to their traits/ancillaries and character in general. This includes simulating civil wars by disloyal/selfish characters.
2. Divide your armies into royal ones (led only by FMs of the Royal Family, not adopted ones), regional (with regional unit compositions, used for defending regions) and skirmishing (for harassing/confusing enemy armies).
3. Never have your Basileus leave too far from your capital, unless he has people of his favor there.
4. Building priorities for conquered regions are as follows: Regional Pacification -> lvl3 government. Afterwards, Katoikiai -> lvl2 government (if there is a good Hellenic population). After that, chose between a military or economically-based region by building the corresponding buildings.
5. All cities must be kept happy (green face) at all costs. This means lowering taxes and building happiness buildings where needed.
6. War is only declared formally on an enemy faction after one of the following reasons: Attack on an ally, attack on a naval/land unit of your faction, siege of [one] of your cities. 'Minor' reasons of aggressiveness from an enemy faction (ie blockade of a port, failed assassination or spying mission) will first be dealt diplomatically. If no solution is found, proceed to answer military.
7. All campaigns of any scale are to be led exclusively by a FM. This includes members of the Royal Family, as well as hired generals and adopted members/marriage candidates.
8. 'Border guard' armies are to be placed in every city that is close to an enemy faction. When borders expand, so do the armies move to protect the new border city-ies.
9. One army has to be present in every region as to efficiently counter any signs of rebellion (spawned armies) and generally to roleplay public order.
10. Every major army is to be accompanied by a diplomat (for any negotiation/bribing along the way), a spy (for scouting for enemy armies and spying enemy cities/fortifications) and an assassin (for killing weak enemy FMs, diplomats, assassins and spies). All agents are to be trained in a city before attached to an army.
11. Never expel or enslave/exterminate a Hellenic city. Even if it belongs to your worse enemy.
12. Only enslave/exterminate populations of non-Hellenic cities, only if the faction they belong to has done great harm to your faction. Or for roleplaying reasons (mad FM).

Those are the rules I follow in my Makedonian campaigns. I find that, upon following those houserules, I get smooth and slow gameplay that gives me maximum gaming pleasure. It also makes sure my faction has always a solid defense and there won't be any economical 'cracks' at any point due to excessive amount of trained troops by just raising armies without any pre-thoughts or a sudden breakdown of your empire by an AI faction that decided to exploit your state of confusion.

Maion

**Dayve** · 01-19-2009, 16:45

Most of the rules i play by are here in this thread already in one post or another.

One I've come to love is not using full stacks, but instead half stacks. The only factions where this isn't feasible are:

Hayasdan - Because you need every unit you can get for the first 30-40-50 years of campaign.
Pahlava and the steppe factions - Because 10 units of HA isn't enough arrows to defeat a full stack of anything.
Rome - Because of the way a legion is laid out. 10 units isn't enough to form a triplex acies.

But every other faction, 10 units is enough to give you a front line of heavy/medium troops, some light supporting troops, 1 unit of missiles, 1 unit of cavalry and a general, and that is more than enough to defeat the stupid RTW AI, but not too much that you are always guaranteed a win.

I'd go a step further even and reduce that number to 8 units, if you were playing as, for example, Epeiros, and went to war with Rome, or even better... Gauls or Germans or Dacians.

Barbarian factions had a habit of hugely outnumbering their enemies on the battlefield... only using 8 units against them when playing as a phalanx faction would represent that quite nicely.

**SwissBarbar** · 01-19-2009, 16:52

You could also roleplay a revolt by giving one or two of your regions to your enemy.

**gamegeek2** · 01-19-2009, 18:34

@ Swiss, :p I'm already invading the Romans...

**SwissBarbar** · 01-19-2009, 19:31

and I'm slaughtering the Aedui

**Connacht** · 01-21-2009, 21:42

My only house rule is:

- enjoy the game!

However, if you want a more detalied rule, I might say this:

- do anything you want to do, be it total steamrolling/blitzing/extermination or slow and role-played gaming, until you enjoy doing it. It's only a videogame and you are playing it for pleasure. Feel free to enjoy EB in the way you want, even try to experiment different choices (from limiting your KH recruitments as Konny suggets to spamming full stack accensi armies everywhere). Let your imagination break free and have fun in the way you prefer.