Help Getting on My Feet

[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.

[Foot]

1) c/programfiles/creativeassembly/RTW/EB is not the directory that you want to direct the installer to. You want to direct the installer to exactly the same folder that you installed Eb1.1 to, namely c/programfiles/creativeassembly/RTW. It really is that simple.

Foot

[Sylon]

You CAN in fact recruit Roman troops outside of Italy- you simply need to trigger the appropriate reforms. The Romans have three reforms, the Polybian, Marian and Augustan. The FAQ has more information (Scroll down to IV Gameplay).