The Great Wolf of the North - A Casse Mini-AAR

[Discoskull]

An update on my simply slow-but-steady Casse campaign...

RULES:
I ONLY play battles when a general is present. Captains are on their own in the auto-calc world.

CURRENT ALLIES:
Karthadast and Arverni

CURRENT ENEMIES:
Romani

CURRENT WORRIES:
Sweboz hordes massing on the Germanic Frontier...looks like my Aedui protectorates are gonna have a fight on their hands...

CURRENT PAIN IN MY @$$:
Iberian spies. I don't like red faces.



After being betrayed by the Arverni during the First Gaelic War, Barae got pissed. Diplomacy is disgustingly overrated, he decided.

After sacking Bibracte and slaughtering its people, the Aedui were forced to submit to permanent Casse rule, becoming client tribes (protectorate), as well as nifty buffers between Germanic and Arverni frontiers.

Now that Barae was free to focus on the treacherous Arverni, Burdigala - their only port city - received a full-force whack from the Casse war machine. It wasn’t long before the Arverni dogs, already at war with the Romani of the southlands, were scrambling for a ceasefire.

A couple years passed. Barae conquered the meager tribes of Vocallra, yearning to see the fabled Mediterranean ocean that he’d dreamed of since conquering Gallic Britain in the good old days. He saw those white shores, and dreamed of peace…and then a cowardly Romani assassin attempted to kill him in his sleep. To war!

In the following five years, after a brutal tug-of-war across the coastline of Vocallra and Greceoallra (or the Greco Coast, as the Casse called it), Massalia fell to the might of the Casse. Barae happily slaughtered the boot-loving Greeks that lived there, bringing a grand and rich city into Casse hands and paying for the campaign ten times over.

This same year, the ever-so-annoying pirates of the North Sea were finally crushed, allowing the disbandment of the fleet. Quarter-annual profit shot from around 5K minai to around 15K+ minai, no small feat!

Barae was not finished with the treacherous Romani, however. In a daring incursion into Italy itself, Barae sacked Segesta and left no structure standing, bringing even more great wealth to the already wealthy Casse Empire (current treasury totals are around 200,000 minai).

Though Barae intended to leave Segesta as soon as the snows left the ground, to live out his days in Massalia, this was not to be. Barae, Conqueror of Caledonia, King of the Goldis, ravager of the Gallic coast and killer of Romans, fell to a Roman assassin’s blade that very winter at the ripe old age of 71, sending shock waves throughout the fledgling empire.

The leaderless army left Segesta to stew in its own filth the following spring, intent on carrying Barae’s remains back to Massalia for a hero's burial. After intense fighting with Romans in the mountain passes, they succeeded, though morale was extremely low, and many men were lost.

Good thing Barae’s young and influential grandson, a gifted commander and stout tactician, was just arriving in Massalia that very spring…