Things to Improve

[lars573]

- Rotating depleted armies slows your campaign and gives your enemy time to recover.
- It's always better to retrain depleted units because they keep their experience. With care, you can get extremely veteran units by the end of the game, that are equal to elites but easy to retrain.

-A slow campagin is a good campagin
-It is always better to retrain but sadly not always possible

- I recently played an entire campaign using nothing but Carthaginian Round Shield Cavalry. It was incredibly easy.
- Previously I tried all-bow Egyptian armies and they slaughtered everything in their path.
- Another time I tried all-armored-phalanx armies and they were unstoppable.
- On another occasion I stomped over my opponents using pure elephant armies. It was a walk in the park.
- As the Seleucids I crushed everything and everything using nothing but chariots.
- Hmm... what was that myth again? Remember, this is single player against the AI....

-Any all something has a weakness
-I could never bring my self to field an all something as a field army

Except you have to pull out the garrison and chase down the bandits, and it's incredibly tedious. Especially because you have to fight each and every battle or accept the autocalc which will cost you alot of troops and money.

-That depends on how you garrison
-My garrisons are usually 6 units, 4 militia 2 better ones. For a Roman city that will be 4 town watch and 2 urbans, praetorians or gladiators
-autocalc doesn't cost that much fighting bandits

Then tell me: what is the proper counter vs enemy spies? And don't say assassins because those aren't available until late in the game, and they fail much of the time anyway, even with stated odds of 90% or better.

-In city or army the cheapest counter to a spy is another spy
-You will always see them and there is a chance you will catch them and kill them
-This will lead to the governor (there be one) to get high security skill

If I wanted realism I would join the navy and scrub toilets.

All you people who complain about realsim are like this you want it, too a point. Make up your damn minds do you want realsim or not.

Except we end up with cases like: a horse archer who runs away the entire battle, thereby forces an enemy retreat.

-If you have a unit you can't catch just herd them into another unit
-Tricky but completely possible

Any slower and we might get to see some actual fighting. There needs to be a "low gear" on the time control.

-For some people (like me) the battles in vannila RTW are to damned long as is
-I get bored half way through the average field battle

"Column" is not a useful battlefield formation except in sieges. The problem is, the AI spends all it's time scrambling to get on your flanks, even at the expense of its line's integrity. Not only does this result in bizarre battles, but there are no built-in formations where your flanks are covered. Quite the opposite, many formations deliberately extend your skirmish units far out to each flank where they are guaranteed to die instantly. The exact inverse of Hannibal's formation at Cannae, where he built up his flanks and left the weak units in the center.

-The formations are designed to put skirmishers on the flank
-CA intended for skirmishers or other light unit to protect the flanks
-The reason that Cannae was so brilliant was because Hannibal threw away standard (and his subordinates might have though sane) military thinking and inverted his line arrangement with heavies on the flank and light in the center

This is the problem, isn't it. Historically, many cities WERE port cities, and couldn't be cut off entirely by land forces. While others were able to maintain connection to their ports while under seige. Athens, for example, was besiged for years but built a fortified corridor to their seaport.

The problem CA would have run into was which city had a seperate port which didn't. so it's just easier to have them all seperate and have sieges totally cut them off from the outside world.

Maybe so, but when I see full stack of Macedonian cavalry, independantly operating in the field, it looks like a whole army to me, and fights like one too.

Bet you it wasn't all cavalry. Bet you there were some hoplites and peltasts in the army.

Obviously cavalry should only be limited for factions like Rome, Gaul, etc.

No, I said it was a bad idea and I mean't it. i've mad up my mind and you shall not convince me other wise.

But 99% of the time you can slip past and blockade the port. Even if there is a huge fleet inside.

You mean if there inside the port itself? I've though about that some. To me that square bit that juts into the water from a port is the sea wall that shelters the harbour. When you blockade a port you block the enterance to that sea wall. You can't go in because it probably has defenses.

What's really sad is somebody who doesn't take the time to insult me properly, but uses copy-and-paste when they run out of good rebuttals....

You didn't deserve special individual rebuttals for each one.

Assassins appear late in the game, are expensive, can only target diplomats in the open, and fail often as not.

Assassins only appear in the late game for barbarians and maybe Romans. Every other faction starts out with or near (pop. growth wise) a minor city. Most people pick up on how to groom a good general but get totally confused with assassins. They are no different than a general they need to groomed and trained to get good at slitting throats. All you need to do to train him is find and kill other assassins. Also a fresh assassin's first kill is usually the hardest to get. But once you get the first kill (and I mean litterally the very first you miss that first one and the assassin can be ruined) and it will lead to a long and bloody carrer paved with many corpses

Well my poor feeble little brain gets overloaded with boredom when I see some guy with 8 ancillaries and 19 attributes, most of them causing multiple effects, all of which are hidden until I scroll down and mouse over each item one by one.

Once you learn what the more common traits are you can tell at a glance if it is good or bad, same for ancillaries. Then you can try and deal with them.