Sarmatians (BI faction)

[Ayra]

Having just received BI, I figured I should try my hand with my favorite faction: Sarmatia / Scythia. Difficulty Hard/Hard.

The first important thing to know is that you WILL need to horde very soon. Both the Vandals and Huns starts a province adjacent to yours. I did a few tries, and every single time the Vandals went straight at me, and the Huns twice. No possible alliance.

So what I did was to build as many units as I could in the time I had free, then turn into a Horde and sacked the town (Sorry ). Looking at the victory conditions, Sarmatians need both a territory in the Sassanid land and the Eastern Roman Empire. Sarmatia turned Horde has about 4 full stacks in total (Including my starting units and the 4 units I had time to build). I didn't want to migrate far west away from my objectives just to stay away from two enemy hordes, so I headed East instead. I forced the Roxolani into a horde by attacking from the east since they rejected my alliance, forcing them west just to increase the damage on the Eastern Roman Empire in order to make it easier for me later on. I then continued toward Sassanid land.

I'm starting to regret my decision, though. Their frontier town had 1.5 stacks defending. I continued to a less defended one which I'm currently sieging, and I see another 1 full stack comming my way, with 1 stack from the first town heading my way also. So right now I see 2 poorly defended towns, 1 well-defended one and 3 stacks all in all. That's only at the doorstep of their empire, and I have only 3.5 stacks (Lost some against Roxolani), that I can't replace, which are mostly horde units with low morale. I made an alliance with the Eastern Roman Empire, but I'm not too optimistic about my odds against the Sassanid. My only chance is to reduce their strength dramatically before settling down, will 3.5 stacks be enough against their mighty empire..? At least Sarmatians have no peasants, so there's no completely horrible units in my horde.

I'll post an update, but chances are it will be to restart with a different strategy after my hordes are crushed. Not sure what though! Maybe to held on the northern steppes after the huns and vandals have passed and the Roxolani have passed... After all, from an objective point of view, the Sarmatian starting town is perfect. It's just impossible to keep at first.

[Bullethead]

Howdy. I don't think I've posted anything since MTW days. I decided to play the Sarmations because I'm descended from one, or at least that's the best theory for how I got that Y chromosome...

Anyway, like Ayra said, you WILL become a landless horde early in the game. Either the Huns or the Vandals will overwhelm you before you even get accustomed to your original part of the map. This has been a real learning experience for me, and I'm nowhere near done, but I think I'm getting the idea of how to run the Sarmations now. At least I can offer some things NOT to do...

#1. Don't attack the Roxalani right off the bat. They will turn into a horde while you're not, so will greatly outnumber you, take back their town, and then hurt your territory so bad (assuming the Huns haven't gotten you yet) that you won't have much of a horde yourself when it's your turn. So I restarted the campaign...

#2. Don't reject an offer by the Huns to become a protectorate. Things get pretty ugly after that, whereas accepting would have let me off the hook. However, I survived and have now had my revenge.

#3. Don't trust anybody. In the beginning, the other steppe nomads see you as a rival for space and loot, so won't like you at all, and will break any deals you make with them the very next turn. The Sassanids and the Byzantines are willing to talk to start with, and the latter will even ally with you as a help against the other barbarians. However, you're still barbarian scum yourself, so as soon as they think they can get away with it, they'll backstab you as well. So always be ready.

#4. Don't be surprised if factions which you've never encountered, and whose homeland you couldn't find even if you had a map, decide to declare war on you for no apparent reason. This may be the result of your horde settling in rebel lands which once belonged to them. Now they're a horde themselves, mostly several provinces away, but every so often an army will show up in your new lands, even though you don't share a border with them. Nor can your diplomats find them to try to resolve the situation.

Now for the things you probably (as far as I know right now) should do....

Immediately build walls around your initial town. You live in mud huts on the steppes with little plunder, and the Huns know nothing of siegecraft. So if they can't ride right in, they'll usually sniff around the walls for a turn, then head off west. They'll be back in a few years, but at least some of their energy will be expended on somebody else first.

Once they go away, expand westwards yourself in the wake of the Huns and Vandals. They go through and sack all that stuff for the money, leaving easily conquered rebels squatting in fixer-upper decent towns. So move in, fix up the damaged buildings, and take advantage of them while you can.

After a little while, things get really nasty. The Huns and/or Vandals will return to your original homeland, because they haven't sacked it yet, and they're now looking for lands to settle in. Meanwhile, the original owners of your new territories will be coming to reclaim them (usually Goths and Byzantines, with whom you'll probably have now-broken alliances). Hopefully, the Huns will come first with the ultimatum of protectorate status. I said above you should probably take that offer. Here's what you can expect if you don't accept.

First off, the ultimatum was delivered along with several full stacks of the Hun horde. They will now assault your original capital. They're not very good at this, however, and you can inflict HORRIFIC casualties on them as they try to get through your walls. Horses just ain't good for that. After winning several "Heroic Victories", however, they'll have worn you down and your garrison and whatever nobles are there will get dead. The Huns will sack the town, then take it again from the rebels and settle there. They'll also settle in central Europe west of there. This removes them as a threat, which was largely based on their horde numbers, and they'll have been considerably thinned out from losses after all this. You'll be able to wipe them out in a while, never fear.

At this point, the Goths and Byzantines will want your new territories back. Fight the Goths hard, hurting them as much as possible, then pull back to Dacia to face the Byzantines. You'll probably see this as a hopeless situation, because there will be a very large army of these erstwhile allies now moving on your last town. NOW is the time to become a horde. Abandon your only remaining town and go on a rampage. The Goths by this point are nearly out of the game, after suffering attacks from all directions. So the idea now is to hurt the Byzantines as much as possible, to give you time to breathe.

Use your now huge horde army to annihilate the Byzantine army in Dacia. Then take your horde all through the Balkans and maybe even down into Greece, sacking everything in your path. Most of this will be fairly easily done, because by now the Byzantines will have most of their forces fighting their own rebels in Anatolia and the Sassanids further east. The garrisons in your target area will also have already been depleted by the previous barbarian waves, but these are BIG, RICH cities, which withstood those waves. Now they can't withstand you, and you'll become fat with spoils. For the finishing touch, sack Constantinople and make a pyramid of over 22,000 skulls and carry off more money than you can imagine (plus set civilization back a thousand years).

You will now be able to settle comfortably in the northern Balkans. Basically, you're going back and retaking rebel cities that have already been sacked a time or two, but they're better than what you started with. And the Huns are a spent force, the Vandals have moved on westwards, the Goths are all but extinct, and you've driven the Byzantines completely from the European continent. And you've got a nice buffer zone of rebels between you and the major threats. So you settle down and become respectable, using all your loot money to rebuilt your new homeland. And about this time, your original homeland will revolt from the Huns and you'll get that back, too, although it'll be a HUGE money drain for many years. There goes all your plunder.

At this point, which will be about in the 390s AD, you'll be unable to do anything but put down roots, due to a lack of money. However, you will have created conditions in which you can do this in peace, thanks to all the devastation of the previous decades. So by say AD 425 or so, you'll be able to move on like a normal faction. Which is a good thing, because now you've got to deal with the winner(s) of the Byzantine civil war and the Byzantine-Sassanid war. Do all you can to help the Byzantine Rebels while the real Byzantines and the Sassanids kill each other. Try to get friendly with the Sassanids, too.

That's as far as I've gotten so far, except for a war with the Lombards that I can't figure out. I was sitting there learning to be civilized when their king and a small army showed up in Dacia saying we were at war. So I had to kill them all, and now I can't find any more of them to try to get a ceasefire going.

[Ayra]

Nice strategy! It's certainly turning out better than mine...

I managed to take down most of the Sassanid, and allied myself with the East Roman Empire. This is when things turned sour. I was planning on leaving a buffer between myself and the ERE, so that I could use part of the old Sassanid land to settle down in comfort. The ERE moved much faster than I expected though, and took one of the remaining Sassanid towns, and then made them their protectorate.

This means that I was forced at peace with the Sassanid due to my alliance with the ERE, so I couldn't finish the Sassanid off. I recognized I wouldn't have any peaceful time to settle down, so I did it at that point and took three of the previously-saked Sassanid territories. The ERE broke our alliance and sent a full stack at me, which I still managed to repel, due to the few units I had time to build at the start of the game. The ERE then took ME as protectorate, and I had no choice but to accept in order to survive. I tried to finish off the Sassanid capital so I could get one menace off my back, and my assault failed in the end (6 Clibanarii immortals anyone?). The ERE betrayed the protectorate, destroyed my fleeing troops (Some made it back miracoulsly, but my faction leader and heir both died there), and took me back as a protectorate the very same turn...

The situation currently is that I have 4 of the Sassanid provinces, and the two steppe provinces in the NE of the map. I'm having a small army taking over the rebel steppes (Three rebels to take still according to my spy, shouldn't be too hard) and I have about a stack and an half all in all and I still turn a 1.5k profit per turn finally after having burned all my looted money, but I'm not too confident. The Sassanids are nearly dead, with 1 territory and me having destroyed most of their army in my failed siege attempt. ALL the hordes are dying out, none went for the ERE. No ERE rebelions at any point either. Only the Berbers are doing well according to the faction graphs. The ERE is at the height of it's power, strong economy and no potential enemies at all since I destroyed the Sassanid for them; No potential enemies except for me that is.

I'm their protectorate, but I know hell will break soon, and I'm not sure that a stack guarding 4 territories is enough to stop the full might of the ERE... We'll see though!

[ChaosLord]

I started a VH/H game with the Sarmatians. The Sarmatians certainly have an annoying start, since it seems you really have to horde to get anywhere. In my game I decided to try holding Vicus Samartae and expanding outward from it. Unfortunately I made some mistakes early on(Hiring mercs, building armored horse archers) and while I was able to build up a good enough army to fight off Vandals and Huns I ended up 4k in debt.

But I had survived, so I considered that somewhat of an acomplishment so I kept playing. I sent my spare cavalry up north taking Tribus Vandali and Locus Bararicum since they were rebel/abandoned, and managed to dig myself out of debt. Sadly, this didn't last very long as the Burgundii decided that the 700 pop city was essential to their empire and sent 3/4ths stack after it(perhaps this is why the Burgundii never seem to go anywhere). Then as if this wasn't bad enough the Lombardii sent a full stack at my main town in an unprovoked war.

I lost Tribus Vandali(forced it to rebel, to make it hard for Lombardii or Burgundii to take it since I couldn't defend it) and returned to Vicus Samartae. I fight off the Lombardii stack, and then a couple more Hun stacks since they had apparently not got enough in the previous war. I spiraled back into debt because of this of course, but was able to net about 2500 gold after my forces got knocked down a fair way and it let me build a decent sized army while putting me back in debt.

Now at this point you'd think the Lombardii after losing several stacks against me and now that I have a larger/better army then them would quit? Hardly, they just keep coming. Finally at 398 AD after spotting yet another full Lombardii stack heading my way decide to abandon the city and horde. I still think that it might be possible if you're careful with your cash early on and the Huns/Vandals don't get too interested in destroying you. I beat them back because they only sent one stack at me at a time.

After I horded I turned on the only Alliance that had been faithful to me, the ERE and rampaged through their balkan cities. I sacked Constanstinople/Sirum/Salona to creat a screen of rebel cities, and seiged Athens/Thessalonica and timed it to get both the cities on the same turn. Unfortunately that took me like 15 years to do, so now i've got to race if I want to meet the goals. All these balkan cities are developed quite well though, so assuming I can win a war agains the Sassinids(who now own the Middle East, thanks to me demolishing the ERE in the balkans) I can pull it off. I don't want to go north though, as the Huns are sitting in Tribus Lazyges and the Goths are still in Dacia.

Oh and I was offered the chance by the Huns and Lombardii several times to become their protectorate, so perhaps with that I could have come back with just Vicus Samartae, but my pride made me refuse.

[Bullethead]

I think calling the Sarmatians a "moderate difficulty" faction is an understatement. I've played the Sarmatians numerous times now and have yet to win. I've never been wiped out, but I can't satisfy (sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot) all my victory conditions before some other faction wins. The problem is that it's impossible to have a coherent stragety in the early game. Because you're weak and totally surrounded by powerful enemies, you have to play the early game in reactive mode instead of being proactive. And because the other factions have always acted quite differently in all my games, I've had to react in different ways each time, without being able to carry over lessons from the previous games.

In a perfect world, the Vandals would quickly move west, never to be heard from again. Meanwhile, the Huns would waste themselves obliterating the Goths and putting a big dent in the various Germans and WRE, leaving you free to occupy the deserted lands. Then you and the Sassanids carve up the ERE and you win. I've never seen this happen, however, although things have looked deceptively to be heading that way sometimes. But then either the barbarians gangbang you, or the ERE wastes the Sassanids and then turns on you, or the ERE and Sassanids decide to get along and come at you around both ends of the Black Sea. Not to mention ERE and maybe WRE amphibious ops all along the Black, Ionian, and Aegean Sea coasts.

The Sarmation victory conditions (own Panonnia, Illyricum et Dalmatia, and Colchis, plus 12 others) requires the creation of an empire stretching from ex-Yugoslavia to Georgia. This imposes a few certainties in what otherwise is total unpredictability:

1. The Goths Must All Die
They live in the middle of your desired territory and are required to remain there to win. Thus, genocide is the only answer, because they'll never leave as a horde, but will just try to retake their homeland.
2. The Huns Must All Die or Be Marginallized
They need to own most of your desired terriroty to link their required conquests of Rome and Constantinople. Being lazy, they'll start in the east where they are already instead of marching off to Rome in the beginning. This means you have to kill them all, or at least enough to drive the remnants west out of your way.
3. The ERE and Sassanids Must Bleed Each Other
You want these factions to fight a never-ending, expensive, bloody, inconclusive war. That way, they keep each other occupied and out of your desired territory, without either gaining enough to win the game.

That's a pretty tall order. From your weak starting position, you have to become strong enough to inflict decisive defeat on the Hun horde, doing at least enough damage to drive them far to the west. You also have to totally irradicate the Goths when they're a full-blown horde. And you don't have any direct control over #3, although you can give it your diplomatic best.

[ravinnder]

1. The Goths Must All Die
2. The Huns Must All Die or Be Marginallized
3. The ERE and Sassanids Must Bleed Each Other

That sounds about right. I have experimented with different strategies on (VH or H)/H with them. I agree Moderate difficulty is definately wrong, the Sarmatians are hard not just because of their position, but becasue of their victory conditions, so there is no strategy that makes the most sense. However, I think that Kotais being your last required province to win might make sense. I haven't been able to win either, but I can't die either.

I've experimented with several strategies, numbered below:

1. Borrowing from Vanilla RTR Scythian province distribution, I built some infrastructure in Vicus Sarmatae (starting city), turned into a horde and used the horde to turn away any other Hordes (like Huns, Roxolani). Then I carved out a 3 province area similar to the RTR Scythian area using the hordes after I was sure the Roxolani and Huns were gone. At this point I was at peace with the factions closest to me. Then I just wanted to survive and eventually attack the ERE. Unfortunately the Lombardi and Burgundi became too powerful and I didn't have enough money to retalitate.

Another variant on this strategy was defend Europe from the Huns. By using Sarmatian hordes to counter the Hunnic ones. I managed to marginalize the Huns after winning and losing some large battles (3-4 stacks on each side) around the starting city, but also became too weak in the end.

2. In this strategy, I tried attacking the Sassanids (at Kotais) after hording, unfortunately, they seem to have quite a lot of forces in that area so several times I tried that strategy, I was too weak after settling. I considered an Asia Minor attack on the ERE, but the problem would be that once the ERE is weakened too much, the Sassanids will come in the long term, not to mention the ERE still attacking from Antioch. However, Asia Minor and the islands there have good financial backing through sea trade.

3. My last strategy seems like the historical one and I'm guessing the one intended to be pursued. Immediately horde and attack/sack Constantinople and basically attempt to settle in the areas possesed by the ERE in the Balkans. There are several advantages to this strategy.

- Constantinople and Greece is close thanks to the road network and have good trade routes, so you won't be wasting turns walking 1/4 through the map.
- Most of the cities in that area are pagan, which is also the religion for Sarmatia.
- You have a protected flank from the east and once the ERE is weakened enough, your enemies are probably from the north and it's a one front war.

Hopefully the WRE will have been weakened by attacks and won't be able to retaliate as you take the victory provinces in the west. The only problem after this point is holding your initial areas. The ERE is probably out of the picture for you; however, the Huns, Goths, Lombardi, and maybe the Roxolani like to attack your areas. Also, it is extremely hard to move after settling in the Balkans. It's possible to attack Asia Minor and then go for Kotais to win, but the Sassanids and ERE will pose problems. Also, the Sarmatian navy is really weak and pirates/ERE will make that difficult.

After that point, I'm not sure how to proceed.

[DojoRat]

I took a different approach. (H/H) After a few turns to add a few cav units and a diplomat I went horde and headed south. I avoided the Goths and was able to cross the Danube over the eastern bridge before the ERE covered it.

As my armies were moving I used my diplomats to get as many alliances as I could before I went to war with ERE.

The ERE field army retreated to Constantinople so I struck at the lightly held Thessalonika instead and took it as my new homeland. Athens was also lightly held so I took it next and got a house at the shore. The ERE field army left Constantinople to give battle, dumb, they were overwhelmed and after a few turns of seige I assulted and took the imperial city with acceptable losses.

So now what. With my horde gone I needed to build new armies and had plenty of cash from putting Athens and Constantinople to the sword. What i didn't have was time as the Goths came down to party followed by the Vandals. It was an intense 10-15 turns but I found that if I let them come to me their horde stacks were easier to handle on the defensive. Money became an issue as I constantly rebuilt and recruited (and needed large garrisons to hold down the masses) but I found if I streamlined each city to produce one type of unit I could cash in on the other buildings as well as aqueducts and academys.

After coming up for air I went west and took Salonika and Sirminum (sp?)
By now my units had high experience and were able to push staight through to Milan, Ravenna and Rome. This solved my cash problem so I was able to push north of the Danube and across the Aegean to Ephesus. Right now (414) only a lightly defended Sinope stands between me, Kotais, and victory.

I would definately consider moving south right away because if your going to battle for territory it might as well be rich territory.