Help Getting on My Feet

[JetMonk1]

For many years I occasionally revisited RTW, quickly wore it out and then moved on. I loved the original game and I am absolutely thrilled to have found EB. In all honesty, I feel compelled to call it a totally different game from the original, and I really think the guys who made this mod deserve a medal of some sort! Anyway... down to business. I am still a noob to the game and I have a great deal of questions, the answers to which I was unable to find in the FAQ or other sources. Hopefully you all can have some patience with me.

Questions:
1. First big question is a technical one. For some reason I simply cannot get EB 1.2 to install correctly. I have done it several times and each time it always tells me I have installed everything correctly, yet the game still tells me I am running version 1.1. I checked to make sure I was directing the files to the correct place - c/programfiles/creativeassembly/RTW/EB and they seem to be doing so. I have noticed that there are some EB files in my program files folder named -EBdocumentation and EBtrivialscripts - but I don't think those are the correct install locations. If anyone has any knowledge on what the problem may be, or know where I can get better assistance, please let me now.

2. Now... game questions. I started out my first game as SPQR on VH/VH and I am finding it to be quite frustrating. The year is about 222, I control all of Gaul, Italy, Greece,most of Asia Minor, and have just blitzed Sicily, Corsica+Sardinia, as well as the 3 major NA cities of Carthage. All things considered, I am doing well, but I have only expanded so much because I have no other choice! Peace just not seem to be an option for the computer. I often offer to give them large sums of gold and the return of some of their cities in exchange for peace and they never accept.... even if I am beating the complete snot out of them. For example, I was besieging the last Averni city with a full stack army, while their garrison amounted to a grand total of 24 soldiers, and I offered peace. I offered to give them 10,000 Mnai, and a city back yet they still refused the peace.... let alone would they accept becoming a protectorate.

The essence of this question is thus: what in the world do I need to do to be able to get a reasonable peace from the AI? Is VH/VH just hard coded to make this virtually impossible? If so, what game setting should someone looking to have a challenging, yet somewhat believable, EB experience want?

3. Is it possible to defeat the Egyptians? In my game they have essentially absorbed all of Arche Seleukia and seem to be an unstoppable juggernaut. I had an alliance with them for a short time, but they broke it in order to randomly blockade Segestica... followed by no military actions. At least until I took a city in Asia Minor, after which the hordes of fulls stacks started showing up. Considering that Pontus is still refusing peace, even though I managed to take the entirety of eastern Asia Minor (6 cities) within three turns and destroy most of their army, they are still holding out and sending an occasional army to harass me. At any rate, is this just a fluke, or does Egypt always do this sort of thing? If so, what can i do about it later in the game?

4. ADDENDUM - I forgot to mention this bit in the first post... city governments. So far I have found that establishing Allied City States is almost always the best option. Other than in my homeland, almost every city that is not sorely undeveloped has been turned into an Allied State. I just don't see how any of the other governments can come close to comparing, especially since the training centers that allow you to recruit legions are only available to Italy. In the end, I see very few buildings in a "Romanized Province" that I can't build in an Allied State, which also brings along the bonus of making the locals very docile.

My apologies if these questions are somewhat elementary to some of you. As I mentioned before I am an old RTW vet and just love EB too much to let these questions go unasked.

Thanks again for your patience and help.

[Titus Marcellus Scato]

2. VH/VH in EB is very difficult indeed. In VH campaign, the AI is just determined to kill you, virtually ignoring other threats, and almost never accepts ceasefires, preferring to fight to the death. VH battle difficulty means that the AI gets massive +7 bonuses, so their basic levies are equal to your elites. You've chosen a very hard way to begin EB, even though Rome is one of the easiest factions thanks to an easy economy.

3. Another problem with VH campaign is that the AI gets a tremendous amount of money - about 10,000 mnai a turn on top of what they already get. This makes big factions like AS and Egypt super-rich, they can afford dozens of full stacks. Killing them at that point is very hard. VH campaign is basically for people who like to make like Alexander the Great and blitz the map as quickly as possible - not for slow role-playing based games.

It depends what kind of game you like. But in general, the slower you want to expand, the lower the campaign difficulty should be. If you wanted a very slow game with historical expansion rates, for example, you're better off with M campaign difficulty. AI diplomacy is more reasonable on M.

4. Allied State (Level 4 govt) is a good choice in an early Roman campaign, until you get the Polybian reform anyway. You can always destroy and change to a higher government later. Only drawback with Level 4 is that your family members can't be governors (they will get 'Interloper' trait and make the people unhappy) - you need to recruit a local general and make him governor for the best long-term economic effects - but the local generals will cost you a lot in upkeep too.

[Randal]

Agreed. I personally play on Hard/Medium (campaign/battle) because that makes the rebels occasionally attack and besiege your cities. Anything higher than that though tends to result in unbalanced battles (Archers become terribly overpowered because they're not affected by the boosted enemy defence) and endless war on the campaign map.

Lots of people here instead try to increase difficulty by making certain role-playing choices such as only fielding historical army-compositions. For example, Romans could field stacks of principes, extraordinarii and Triarii. But most players here field the hastati too because historically not all Romans were so well equipped.

Also useful for this purpose is the Force Diplomacy mini-mod that lets you force the AI to accept proposals. In situations like you describe with the Averni this can remove a lot of frustration.

As for governments... once you develop your cities further you'll find that there are quite a lot of high-tier buildings the allied governments can't recruit. Also, the allied generals cost a hefty 500-1000 upkeep a turn. Still, in more distant regions they -are- very useful.

[JetMonk1]

I keep hearing about this Forced Diplomacy, and it seems to be a helpful tool in correcting a lot of the problems I have. How does it work exactly?

[Randal]

Like this. Instructions included in the link.

[JetMonk1]

Sweet! Still trying to figure out why the 1.2 patch doesn't seem to be working though. Right now my game gets a LOT of crashes and I am hoping that the patch will fix it.... assuming that I can fix it.

I have gone into the folder and it looks like all of the contents of the 1.2 patch are just sitting in a seperate folder within the EB folder. I am pretty sure that the various little tweaks are supposed to go into the main EB folder, not be within a different folder within the EB folder. I don't want to tinker with any of it, as I am afraid I could just mess something up. If anyone has any knowledge as to how to handle this please let me know.

Another quick question, can you recruit Generals in EB? I have yet to find a way to do so.

[GenosseGeneral]

Usually with a lvl4 Government (always called something like "Allied state" as a building).
Recruit than a mercenary general unit and the script will place a general.