Germania

[RLucid]

Have you tried luring the Scythians into a town without the military recruitment buildings they need, and then immediately re-besiege it, so their cavalry are forced to fight to death in a confined area?

Might need a chain of forts to avoid attrition, which may be too expensive.

[Praetor Rick]

Have you tried luring the Scythians into a town without the military recruitment buildings they need, and then immediately re-besiege it, so their cavalry are forced to fight to death in a confined area?

Might need a chain of forts to avoid attrition, which may be too expensive.

That is better than a field battle, and is how I've been dealing with them - fight them in sieges where their horse archer mobility is gutted and my shock infantry can destroy them. The problem comes from the size, both of their starting empire, and of the provinces themselves. The big provinces don't just mean that I have a lot of marching, they also mean that I have to spend extra cash to fort up every turn because I'm out in the field where their archery heavy unit roster will crush me. I have lost a few big armies that way until I started using forts, and Germania isn't a wealthy nation by any stretch of the imagination.

My goal, ultimately, is to win a short campaign without having to blitz Italy or prop up the Seleucids or Carthage. If I weren't a purist, I'd change my victory conditions to elimination of Gaul and Britannia, since those are the enemies I actually have to fight by inclination. Dacia and Scythia are uniformly peaceful neighbors until I attack them. Not sure why, either - Scythia, at least, never has anywhere to go for expansion other than Germania's extremely squishy eastern frontier. Dacia is usually pounded by Macedonia and Thrace, so I can see why they usually don't bug me.

[RLucid]

When I looked at the victory conditions I found them hard to believe. It seems ridiculous to expect the Germans to take out both Dacia & Scythia. I like the idea of Germania having to take out Britannia, as the Germans did become Dominant in England post Roman abandonment. Whilst their kingdoms in Spain, Africa and Italy all seem to hardly leave a trace.

I think the answer to the conflict points is that the strategic 3D AI has some ridiculous line of sight issues, which determine it's targetting. Picked it up from thread in the mods forum, and their model of game behaviour seems to fit quite well.

Dacia, heads off for Aquincum, and from there it sees Losice, and finds Luvavum, but it only explores southwards later on, and appears to respect strong factions, willing to trade with them and not attack southwards towards Segestica & Salona. The only non-Roman besiegers I've had of Segestica (excluding Gauls in early part of game), are the Macedonians, who appeared to find the weakly defended Salona invisible, due to mountains.

When the Germans go south of Danube, they eventually see Luvavum and that appears to be the trigger for conflict. I don't understand why the AI, given the victory conditions, appears to prefer moving westwards & south to Lugdunum, over rapid eastward expansion into rebel held territory (which would cause earlier clash with Dacia).

Presumably you're picking up the HA mercenaries (Northern) and Sarmation HC mercs available in Dacian heartland, to bolster cavalry arm. Hard to think what else you could try, as the LI missile element should be necessary to ward off Light missile cavalry, when you have a deficiency. The open steppe terrain is going to make setting an ambush with spearmen rather tricky.

[Praetor Rick]

I'm more-or-less resigned to just racing things as much as possible and hoping for the best. Scythia is even more dirt poor than Germania, so there aren't that many big armies. My next plan is to try out an army of all or nearly all light cavalry, which comes quite a few turns earlier than Chosen Archer Warbands. The missile-heavy Scythians seem like an ideal foe to face with such an army. When I don't have to tech up to tier 3 before I can get a well-suited force to fight Scythia with, I might be able to beat Egypt to victory conditions.

Basically, I'll sweep up field armies with my light cav, and bring a heavy assault brigade along to take down settlements. Luckily, Scythians are barbarians, so no heavy assault lifting is going to be needed to deal with their city walls. Simple axemen should be plenty to do the job.

[RLucid]

Had a look at one of my Bugfixer/Vannilla PBM games, and due to the play balancing, the Seleucids seem to be doing rather well in my Julii game. Actually at one point, they were the "Most Advanced Faction". That might make it doable to take the whole of the North, before another faction makes the short victory conditions.

The game appears to be coalescing into a number of larger empires, but not the same predictable ones as in RTW 1.5. The strategic position, actually looks like it might be interesting enough to take through civil war, with the Brutii doing rather well in modern Greece, and no obvious way to slow them up. The Seleucids have started fleet building and patrolling the Aegean.