Quote Originally Posted by Bramborough View Post
Interesting difference in experience with early Pontus campaign. Galatia, Cappadocia, and Cimmeria have all acted pretty aggressively toward me, I've had to defend starting capital and port vs full-size invading army several times. They've also repeatedly blockaded Sinope...driving me to completely change my near-term strategic plan in order to deal with it. I will agree that Armenia - formally at war with me - was strangely passive while I was preoccupied with these other folks. Other than that, I've got no complaint about AI aggressiveness. I began the campaign on Patch 3, but this kind of spunky AI behavior has continued with patch4beta.

This has been on Normal...counterintuitive that AI would get less aggressive on a higher difficulty level. Maybe I was just lucky.
No such experience for me, but im not sure, if there is something wrong with the patch 4 because i started the campaign just after i instaled the 4 beta.

I started being at war with Cappadocia and an unfriently attitude from Galatia.
So i gather an early army of slings and eastern spears and invade the lands of the Cappadocians, after few turns i have destroyed the faction.
Galatia remains unfriendly but makes no move.Trapezon is at war already with Colhis, Armenia and Karlii and im not sending any troops to assist them since i want them out of the way in order to take Trapezon for me.I assume that sooner or later they will be destroyed, but no, no one is moving away from its settlements.

As i see the time passes, i assept the invitation from Trapezon to join the war with Armenia and i acept for 2000 dinarii, i cupture their western settlement and next turn i acept a peace trety for 3000 dinarii.

Finaly i decide to wipe the Gallatians, so i invade them with 2 armies and destroy them as a faction at turn 25.

And a detail, i only have the starting fleet and 4 armies from the 6 i can have and dont need more.

After i got access to higher level units, level 3 barracks, i declared war to Armenia and destroyed them in 3 turns.

And by watching also other factions behaviour, sending spies around to see what is going on, Seleucids, Media, Media Apopatene, they all standing around their settlements, starving....

Only further west there is movement, Sparta destroyed Athens, Rome is geting strong, Cyrrenaica is expanding.

Oh and other factions agents are passing through a couple of times.

I dont think you were lucky, because as i said, with patch 3 the AI was aggresive and used its armies and agents with efficiency.

By the way your Walkthrough of Pontus campaign is great, im looking forward for the next chapters.