Scorched Earth Policy: good or bad?

[Vincent Butler]

I have done - sent 4 armies into southern greece to take out athens, sparta, corinth and another one. All sea trading is now blocked so income for the greens and blues is zilch (remember they need to pay their army). Obviously my name is now mud - but I had to take out the Brutii before they got too far ahead of me. (The game is in the balance - I am weaker than they are militarily but I can recruit and they can't.

Probably going to send my assassin to take out forums, which will further hit trade. It's a pity you can't see exactly how badly they are doing (income is down to virtually nil while mine is at 10K.)

One interesting event - The Blues were sieging a town, so I joined in and then attacked first. At the end of the day the blues had all sorts of casualties and I had the town. Does this always happen or does it depend who gets the central square?


Final note - re re-training. I can re-train troops to make them stronger, but not recover their numbers - am I doing something wrong that can obviously be corrected?

You blockaded Brutii/Scipii ports? I must be misunderstanding something, because you would not be allied with them and still blockading the port, the computer would not let you blockade them. Or did you blockade all trade coming into their ports, is that what you mean?

Yes, since you attacked first, you took the town. I have done that myself before, though my personal code of honour keeps me from doing it more. I also used to send spies into allied towns to force a revolt, but I have the same issue with honour.

AI will sometimes land armies, mainly if you take Sicily as say Greece, Scipii keep bringing mainland armies to Sicily to take Messana back. Other than that, they don't do invasions much, Kydonia stays rebel for a long time usually, and Rhodes rarely comes under attack as well. Palma and Caralis do get attacked quickly.

You actually can see how a town is doing financially, send a spy into a town and it will tell you its financial status, you double-click on the town and it will be near the bottom.

As Ludens said, you are getting the armour/weapons experience upgrades only, since town apparently does not have sufficient barracks, or possibly numbers to retrain (though that usually only happens at the town level).