How good is EB?!

**Dayve** · 12-28-2005, 00:40

I'd say that this mod does for RTW what butter does for bread... It's absolutely wonderful... And i can only imagine what the finished product would be like... I remember when my honeymoon period with RTW wore off about 2 months after playing it... I started to jot down all the things i would do to it if i knew how, to make it my perfect strategy game... And EB has done everything i jotted down on that list and more... The unit skins are great, the cost of units i find is great, although some may disagree... Defeating a large enemy army now actually has an impact on your enemy... It will be a good few turns before he can raise another one as large as the last, and the same goes for you...

I also think the high cost and build time of buildings is wonderful... This coupled with the high cost of units means that it will be a long long time before you have money to burn, and even then it will be only a small surplus of money... Not the 2 million denarii you had spare in vanilla campaigns... Also losing a city actually matters now... You will put a lot of time and money into developing a city and it's population... To lose it then would be a blow... If not to your economy then simply because of the time and effort you put into building it up...

Generals traits are so much better than in vanilla and other mods it really is unbelievable... It's like you can get to know the character... All the personal information in his trait list and on some characters even a history of what they really did in the Roman empire in the time they existed... You can't just send any old family member to command an army... In vanilla you could simply find a family member, command stars or no command stars, stick him in an army and conquer 5 cities one after the other, retraining all your best soldiers as you go... Putting a crappy no command stars general in an army in the EB mod will likely have disasterous consequences, as i found out earlier when i lost 3 quarters of an army trying to take a city from some smelly barbarian rebels, some of who weren't even wearing underwear!

Navies... By god they're expensive and time consuming to build and upkeep, but just like armies and cities, a 'naval army' is now a valuable piece on the chess board...

I could go on i suppose but i only came here to post a basic error i had found in the game... And now i'm going to go back to conquering...

**ScionTheWorm** · 12-28-2005, 01:45

I've played on Very Hard/Very Hard with Casse and Getai now, and it has only been a world of hurt coming my way.

Massive agressive armies quickly forced me to find another way to play than the rtw/rtr agressive mode (which always worked before).

Reqruiting is so incredibly hard with the factions I've tried to play as. Actually I cannot imagine how to get established with any of these factions since their economy is going down. I just try to block the negative balance from my brain, and hope for a miracle.

and in addition, I feel like the AI is vastly improved. but that's probably just my imagination

awesome

**Dayve** · 12-28-2005, 01:58

Actually i feel that the AI is improved when i play... Especially in battles... Gone are the days (and mods) where you could win any battle and lose only one 7th of your army... If i fight against an enemy of similar numbers to mine then i take considerable casualties, sometimes so high that the army has to be brought back to the nearest capable city of retraining them... It's great fun i tell you, well worth the long wait.

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 12-28-2005, 02:39

I'm wondering when folks will start posting about successful olympic competitors, about successfully breaking away from the Seleukids, about returning Alexandros' body to Pella, about successfully achieving triumphs, about having troubles maintaing good relations in Greece because of multiple factions continually breaking peace over Delphi or something else, about special traits they get for conquering a monument their ancestors had lost, about all these cool things that are hidden in here that folks still aren't even getting to yet!!!

**infierno** · 12-28-2005, 02:58

yes AI is better, imo it looks like BI's AI (for me VERY GOOD)

BI's AI + better ai armys + better stats = perfect :)

anyway the load times are ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz and it were always fine with rtr and rtw...

how can i fix this? buy better PC or wait to the final release?

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 12-28-2005, 03:02

I don't know that the load times will get faster. There are thousands of more lines of text added into various files - the huge amount of new text descriptions for buildings, units, and just about everything else just slows things down. All those new traits and the way they interact; the enormous scripts to get so many extra little things into the game; all of this stuff just slows things down some. It's a little slow for me, but I play with the -nm and -ne tags so I just pop over to mozilla while it's loading. And on the computer I'm currently using it flies by (but it's a pretty fast cpu).

**Dooz** · 12-28-2005, 03:07

Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou

I don't know that the load times will get faster. There are thousands of more lines of text added into various files - the huge amount of new text descriptions for buildings, units, and just about everything else just slows things down. All those new traits and the way they interact; the enormous scripts to get so many extra little things into the game; all of this stuff just slows things down some. It's a little slow for me, but I play with the -nm and -ne tags so I just pop over to mozilla while it's loading. And on the computer I'm currently using it flies by (but it's a pretty fast cpu).

What do the -nm and -ne tags do? And by popping over to mozilla, you mean the internet browser while the game loads?

**Big_John** · 12-28-2005, 03:08

imo, it's pretty awesome so far! i have played a few hours. admittedly, i'm basically just paying for fun and not testing. i haven't run into any crashes yet, though. i saw a bug where unit portraits were not showing (just a white box where they should be) but it disappeared when i went to another city, and i wasn't able to duplicate it.

anyway, i started as the karthadastim. i didn't read the gameplay guide so things were a bit strange to begin with! let's just say that by 270bc i was ~130,000 mnai in debt. read the guide, and after much disbanding i was back in black by 260bc baby!

very early in my game, i beat up on brigands mostly and sieged and took rhegion with relatively little effort. now i'm looking at expanding my african domain.. is this called an 'anti-barcid' approach? hanno was getting bored lepki and i thought i would have him sweep across northern africa and solidify my punic dominance in that region. ran into a little hitch named "eshmunamash" in kirtsan. killed the bastard, but now i have to wait for reinforcements before i continue my march to tingus.

the seige of kirtsan was probably the first "average victory" i've ever had. and i had the superior troops too!

loadtimes aren't that big a deal to me. maybe i don't have a beast pc (amd 2500+, ati 9800pro, 1 gig ram), so maybe i just don't mind these loadtimes. i've been playing a lot of civ4 recently (now that's some serious slowdown!), maybe that's desensitized me to loadtimes. also, i haven't played rtw in a long time.

anyway, it all looks freaking great so far. my generals get bored very quickly and i think they all have the "light sleeper" trait.. i hope they don't get stressed out.