Wrath of Sparta! impressions and discussion

[lars573]

Yeah, but in 10 turns?

When has TW AI ever been able to handle a tough strategic situation well?

[Veho Nex]

Persia is supposed to be Wrath of Sparta's "oh shoot they are getting too strong we should slow them down" faction. It only attacks after a certain level of imperium.

[easytarget]

Hmm, well, they certainly aren't waiting around in my campaign, I'm not that high on imperium. And Persia is busy attacking as you can see by the map turning orange, so when you say they only attack after a certain level of imperium is that against the human?

[easytarget]

Btw, I'm starting to make some ground in my campaign finally. I decided to say the heck with the diplomacy penalty and started after some capitol cities near Athens that were causing me no end of grief, I figured what difference does it make if I take a server diplomacy hit from someone I have every intention of wiping off the face of the earth.

Got a question though, I think since the last patch maybe the corruption is out of control, it's running like 50%, and no matter what I'm researching it doesn't appear to be making much of a dent. Is corruption the new squalor that you're just stuck with or has anyone figured out a solution to this?

[Bramborough]

I've noticed the same thing about corruption with EE, both in the Augustus campaign and even more so in the GC. I've hit as high as 78% corruption in some recent games, despite going quite high in the legal tech tree. I used to get Economic Victory somewhat regularly, but not since EE came out. Must admit I haven't really tried to do so yet and I'm sure it's do-able with some dedicated effort, but a 90,000 income seems rather daunting.

Edit: also occurs to me that an Eco-Victory would be quite difficult to obtain in Augustus anyway, due to the "Number of Trading Partners" requirement. Seems like mid/late-stage Augustus campaigns devolve to fewer available factions on the map to trade with. Which makes sense, with the various Roman factions starting with so much territory (And Antony/Lepidus, unlike Octavian, seem to do a pretty consistent job of keeping themselves more or less intact as long as the player doesn't mess with them).

[easytarget]

Yeah, i think going for an eco victory would drive me batty. I'm having enough trouble with CA's efforts to take money away from me via this artificially high corruption component they've just up and decided to throw in the mix. If I ever got the impression that CA play tested anything thoroughly I'd be ok with it, but it sometimes feels rather ad hoc.

I understand you don't fully develop every settlement and you pick and choose what you dedicate them for, but this corruption thing just feels over blown to the extent that it drives me down a certain development path that in my opinion is the antithesis of what TW games are about, which is providing you historical settings to "what if it" w/in a game design framework that makes choices a trade off. That requires balance and a more unified design vision than I feel R2 has ever had, or alas, ever will.

Oh well, I'll soldier on, I still quite enjoy all the DLC campaigns even in spite of the tweaks I don't agree with. Funny how games are no longer games really, they just change over time so much they end up being like BladeRunner where Ridley Scott just wouldn't leave well enough alone and all told has like 6 or 7 versions of the damn thing at this point. Seriously: which one is the real movie?

[Patricius]

My dislike of WoS is the really basic city battle maps. Athens looks like a generic ancient town with a wall. The Grand Campaign had a good map. Why was that not used?