Campaigns completed description thread

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

If it is concerning a battle or campaign review, this is the appropriate forum.

[jhhowell]

MAA, thanks for the clarification! I'll have to find time to finish that campaign someday...

StellarW - you did miss out on a great unit (Zrakir Netadzik, the cata-HAs). Though if you've played Parthia their version is basically the same.

We obviously have very different play styles, since you finished Hayasdan in 200 BCE. My game is a decade or two beyond that. I prefer very slow, deliberate expansion, which fits very well with the Hayasdan reforms. IIRC once you've taken a layer of provinces it takes 30 turns or more to get them fully reformed... I don't codify "house rules" per se, but I rarely expanded to a new layer of reformable provinces until the precursor layer was near completion. Thus a very slow campaign with literally hundreds of sally battles to turn annoying besieging Greeks into pincushions.

The down side of a methodical play style like that is that one doesn't finish many (or necessarily any) campaigns, while the VH/VH blitz style does appear to lend itself to completing campaigns. I play on M/M, for reference - correctly balanced battles, and a campaign AI which occasionally refrains from instantly declaring war when a faction borders me.

One option to make your campaigns more interesting would be to use the console to manage the AI factions. QuintusSertorius was an enthusiastic proponent of this in one Rome and two Epirus-as-Pergamon AARs, if you can find them in the forum archives. For example, try Hay with horse archers, but every time you face a major Hellenic army fill in empty slots with Prodromoi and Syrian or Cretan Archers as seems best to fill in the gaps in the AI's composition. Or spawn entire armies from scratch if you like (I remember Sertorius put a lot of effort into trying to script a Hannibal full stack to pop up outside Capua in 216 BCE, can't recall if he got it working). You can also do console and FD tricks to give yourself a civil war. Check out MAA's AAR for an example, where he gave half of a huge Arche Makedonia to Baktria and then eventually conquered it back from them.

I've been doing this console management more to keep a lid on Yellow Death superpowers and keep minor powers from being eliminated if possible. FD a few provinces from the out of control faction to a deserving neighbor (shifting the Pontic capital back to them after Ptolemaioi take it, for example), teleport armies to twiddle their thumbs in remote locations, that kind of thing. Or give KH a hand by teleporting their full stacks from Rhodes to someplace useful, if they've lost their navy.