EB v.80 - First Impressions?

[Sdragon]

This version is a huge step up from the last one. The whole atmosphere has become stronger thanks to the music and interface, and the units are great. They add more flavour and fill in gaps that some factions had that needed to be filled. Such as none Companion cavalry for the Selucids and a cool Archer unit with the Syrians. The battles seem to last longer as well or is it just me? They feel just right and I like the new unit balance. Was worried when I saw the silver shields had 240 men but they don't feel uber from what I've used of them.

Playing as the Seleucid and the mines are making it far too easy. The year is 266BC(roughly) I'm raking in 28k a turn, pushed Ptolemy back to Alexandria, invading Bactria, beat off the Persians, and in the past 3 turns I've ordered mines that bring in 10k, once they are done I'm invincible. The game was hard as it should be at first, but once the mines started to get done... The empire seems easier to hold together as well due to a number of factors.
1. 2 most eastern provinces are Bactrian now, no worries trying to keep the people happy.
2. No longer in contact with the North East Steppe faction.
3. Cities grow slower (thank god) so you don't waste all your money keeping the peeps happy.

Persia and Bactria are far more aggressive though, in the last build it took them ages to bother me, this time Persia was hitting me after the first few years and Bactria has recently attacked. Rome seems to be the only faction really doing anything. Sabea, Casse, Getei, Iberia, both Steppe factions and Pontus have done nothing. Seems if they don't do well in the first few years the rebels end up with full stacks and the AI can't do anything. Eperos, Greece and Macedon are really digging into each other though, its far from one sided, it could go either way at this point. I'll keep playing and hope that the other AI s wake up. This is probably my fault though since I'm playing on m/m. Hate the rebel spams and the stupid ai diplomacy so I avoided VH this time. Still got around 2 rebel armies per province since I've yet to fight them, just sick to death of dealing with them in every RTW game.

A few things of note.
Babylonian spear men are mercenaries? I've yet to see them in the MIC buildings, are the supposed to be recruited this way or were they added in quickly due to lack of time? Their cheapish cost seems to be unmerc like.
Selucids don't have regular Hyspatis(sp)?
Spartans fight with a sword and a spear at the same time, in the same hand.
I started with a unit of Native spear men in Arabia for some crazy reason. :)
I had a Greek spy next to Babylon at the start, I assume the script forgot to take him out.
The news Steppe faction is already a client kingdom of Bactria.
Jewish spear men seem to have really high mass, either that or my Hellenic spear men have it very low. They got squished against a wall and slaughtered.
I like the way the classic hoplites work, they move more like how they should. Noticed that the Mejin(sp?) kingdom hoplites primary weapon is a sword. Doesn't that make them NOT hoplites?
Rome isn't spamming Triarii! Hurray! They are heavy on the Rorii though, but they do use some heavier infantry, a step in the right direction.
At the start of the game most enemy forces rely on little but skirmishers and other junk troops. Bactria has yet to send a pike man unit at me.

As a whole I'm truly impressed and will continue to look forward to the final product that's no longer 'if' but 'when'. :)
There was more I wanted to talk about but I can't remember off the top of my head... Pretty sure the post is big enough anyway. :P

[khelvan]

Sorry, Europa Barbarorum is who we are, not what we do.

[scourgeofrome]

My first impression so far is that it is AWESOME.Looked at my favorite faction from EB.74 (Bactria,and I should've checked the Sweboz but didn't get the chance) and the UI was great.Then went and tried out the new faction.Have to say Arabia was very lonely,but they are one of my favorite factions (I don't really know why).Now if only my computer would stop randomly crashing.Then I might be able to try them out and give it justice.

[Dayve]

Empathy is key. Understand how you yourself are percieved by others. Try to fold space and... sorry heh wrong meeting. Just try to imagine you are somebody else reading the post that you are writing.. it may help you.

It's ok to note your instant first impression whether good or bad though.. at least I don't think that's wrong. But we who make the mod are humans too, and sometimes need both positive and negative feedback.. Not consistently negative. And when it IS negative, it need to be so in a constructive way.

Well like i said, i've only played an hour due to tiredness, and because i only played an hour i didn't notice a while lot different other than a couple new buildings, so i'll post more first impressions later.

One thing i can say is that the battle time now is brilliant... Battles take ages, which is how it should be. I was playing a siege battle last night and i battered 3 of the walls down with rams and sent in two Samnite spearmen and 1 Samnite swordsmen, it took a good 5 minutes before they broke the eenmy and i was able to properly move my army inside...

One question though... It may be because i've been playing M2 lately, and the campaign map on that is kind of dark and gritty, but has the RTW campaign map always been this bright? It seems to look a lot smoother and brighter, but it maybe just because i haven't played RTW for months.

[Septimus]

With 0.8 being the first time I've ever played EB I have only one thing to say: Wow. This is what I've been hoping for with every single TW game since I first played Shogun - that is, something so realistic, so immersing, and astonishing that I can't stop playing for hours despite the fact that I have an Ancient Philosophy paper due date in less than a week. I want to congratulate, and again congratulate the EB staff, I would give you the highest award if only I had awards to give out.

[Ajantis]

Its beautiful...

[Zastrow]

Tried my hand at the Baktrians for about 20 odd turns. Overall I'm quite impressed, the load times for such a massive addition to the game aren't that bad really, no worse than .74 versions.

The graphics and music for Baktrians make them incredibly cool, even more so from the original. Mosaics, Eastern Greek music, GUI, it all blends together into an incredibly well done and thought out picture. It brings immersion up to a whole new level.

New units and buildings here and there, some nice additions, and Baktria with three provinces is a whole lot easier, not to mention the Saka are much nicer neighbors to have the the Yeuzhi, they actually do stuff! It'll take some time for me to find out the new units and how they fit into my traditional Baktrian Army setups, but I noticed myself having larger, more "eastern" style armies than so many phalanxes and archers in .74. They new setup for Baktria's armies is more realistic and expansive, kudos.

I fought a couple of battles against rebels, sporting all forms of cavalry and light infantry, thank god the massive stacks of horse archers are gone. Now they actually are balanced armies that give battle instead of running around the map shooting at my men.

I love how about an hour of gameplay left me feeling like I hadn't played anything yet, there is so much more out there to try. I have an itch to try my hand at my Carthaginian campaign again, with their new voices, GUI, music and units.

Overall great work, and quite amazing a group of amateurs (if only because they aren't paid for it) can keep together and be organized enough to produce something like this. The wait was long, but you produced a fine product worthy of much praise. If I was incredibly rich, I'd be sure to pay all you guys to do this stuff full time. We need more strategy games with this much depth.

[nikolai1962]

Comment on the mines thing. As mentioned the value you get when they're built is different to what it says on the card (always is in RTW for some reason edit: checked vanilla, same value there, just a lot of mods the two values are different for some reason) e.g Mastia for carthage, the card says 3000, the settlement details say 1650.

Also, taking lilybeo as an example:

Start of game, pop: 3190--brings in c.2500 in tax, farms and trade
6 turns later, (finish bigger port), pop: 4096, c.2,900 income
8 turns after that (finish temple with trade bonus), pop: 5551, c. 3300 income

So after 14 turns and a couple of good buildings lilybeo's income has increased by c. 800 i.e half a mine. Most of this is because of the port upgrade but there is a steady increse too because of the pop growth.

The point being mines are more noticeable--partly because you just notice more when you build a mine for some reason but also because of the wierd way the game shows a higher value on the building card. Much less noticeable but just as significant is how your income is also increasing quite rapidly from other things.

Population growth has a steady increasing effect on income but more importantly it allows the jumps to different city sizes which give access to new buildings which give big jumps in income.

The amount of money in the game plateaus eventually but with high pop growth you hit that plateau quite fast and the balance of unit upkeep and income that worked well at the beginning gets imbalanced very quick.

(Hence my mega hordes of komatai stacks :) )

Personally, I like it at the moment because by endlessly spamming hordes of komatai i can keep the AI factions from bothering me, which gives me time to read all the unit/building/trait descriptions lol. But if EB decides to tweak down the economy I think the start population and population growth rates are just as significant as the mines, just less noticeable.

[Obelics]

i've read somewhere in this forum or in the rtr one, that the Roma GUI will be changed a bit, pheraphs in the colors? If so please it is perfect, a masterpiece.

Living here i can say i grown with a lot of roman ruins here around, and frequented a lot of museums, i know it doesn't means nothink, and im not specialized in roman hystory, but i can say the feel is exactly that.

So i post just here to say this GUI is perfect (even the colours and the graphics) in my opinion. And that pompeian red is great.

I hope you will not go to change what was already good in the next patch.

I also read around that the money are a lot more easy to gains, thanks mines etc. I can't confirm this cause the only faction i tryied more extensively is pahlav and it is still difficult as usually. But if so (money=easy to gain) than please dont try to make happy everyone (making this mod easy) . I think it is very good that some people dont like EB, and there is no need to want to have everyone become a fan.

Please dont think this post as "i want to teach you somethink" kind of post, i was just a bit worring about this money affair, and the roma GUI that i found is simply the best in the mod.

salut!

[Teleklos Archelaou]

There will definitely be some changes in the mines, but I don't know what they are at this point.

The Roman GUI will be tweaked a bit in future builds, to make the message background lighter so the text is easier to read, but there won't be big changes in it.

[khelvan]

Money is more free now as an unexpected consequence of some changes we made. We have always been very proud of the fact that in our mod the player really has to choose between spending money on buildings or units, and that the player cannot always field a strong army. The mod will reflect that again in the future, though how we get there is still up for debate.

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

Has anyone ever tried this?

[QwertyMIDX]

Yeah, it was a great way to blitz with Carthage in vanilla.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

I've noticed some pathing errors with elephants attacking walls (way back in vanilla, I don't remember the patch #). They just would walk back and forth along the length of the city/fort and get attacked by towers/archers. I don't try anymore.

[Tuuvi]

I love it! The first faction I played was the Saka, They are my favorite faction now, but I am waiting for a patch to play them for better recruitment. The only problem I had was that the music was too repetitive, after a song was done playing the same song would start playing over again, once it repeated like 5 times. The barbarian music kinda bugs me, but I love all of the other music.

[Chester]

Some of these first impressions are hilarious. People will load up the game, minimize it, then quickly post here on how slow things are, I mean come on.

"you said first impresssions!" Smeg off.

[Tuuvi]

I've been playing for a couple of days...

[Zastrow]

Trying my hand at the Carthaginians, love them! They were fun in .74 but now they are a blast in .8! I love their music and the Carthaginian names, new traits, etc everywhere. So immersive! I find myself envisioning the great harbor of Carthage and the magnificence of the city every time I click on it! I keep building ports so I can have more little boats to graphically represent my mighty commercial empire! Excellent work mates!

[Shigawire]

Carthage will be even better with a Punic voice-mod.

[Noir]

Greetings EB team,

just a regular congratulations after a year of playing, EB 0.74, lurking in these forums and waiting for the current build.

.8 is very stable in my machine and plays great. The amount of detailed work in the interfaces, skins and descriptions is amazing; the factions play great too.

Just to report that the casse chariot sprites have a problem from medium distance (they look higher than they should) and also to comment that katafraktoi could have benefited from secondary weapons after the charge (swords or maces). I am well aware that this is a labor of love and a beta, i just report my observations/opinions.

The music is inspired but it fails to function as a long term back round piece; imo a slow repetitive & catchy piece is needed to fill in the gaps for the campaign.

Again congratulations for all the hard work, that pays off not only in terms of satisfaction for us players but also as a landmark work in terms of inspiration, direction and quality for the community.

Well done.

[geala]

It is just great.

I was a fan of MTW but RTW disappointed me a bit and I stopped playing TW games for a longer time. Came back because of M2TW and saw EB by coincidence. Tried it and have problems since to decide whether to play M2TW or EB 0.8. It will depend on my momentary interests for the periods I think. At the moment I stick with the ancient times.

Being totally new to EB there is still a feeling of disturbation. What shall I build, what shall I recruit? It's great fun to try.

I played a few days and I am very pleased. It is the atmoshere I had hoped to get from RTW. In RTW the Seleucids were my favorits but the abundance of cities is too much for me now. Instead I took the Ptolemaeans which no longer being like bronce age egyptians are great fun.

I like the units, the different government styles, the mercenaries and and and. Kind of epic battles may be back again, too. I will wait and see.

Next I will try the Lusitani. Should play the German tribe but I don't like barbarians with trousers.

[HamilcarBarca]

Carthage has no elephants!

I am up to 230 BC. I have built everything at Carthage. Everything. No elephants. I have taken Cirtan and built everything there. No elephants. The elephant resource is found throughout North Africa. But, you guessed it, no elephants.

Any answers or fixes?

H.

[Sarkiss]

Carthage has no elephants!

I am up to 230 BC. I have built everything at Carthage. Everything. No elephants. I have taken Cirtan and built everything there. No elephants. The elephant resource is found throughout North Africa. But, you guessed it, no elephants.

Any answers or fixes?

H.

hm, that's weird.

mod is awesome!
excellent music, beautiful skins, and map, outstanding work on traits, ancillaries... forgive me if i missed something. government system is revolutionary!
the only things i wish the mod had are BI's new features, loyalty, religion (maybe converted to cultures) new unit abilities. but that is a different story and would require porting to BI, i guess.
the deepest mod that was EVER, EVER built for RTW!
congrats EB team! truly an outstanding achievement!
thank you guys!

[Numahr]

Hello,

After playing a few hours as Pontus, I've just though it was about time to report my first impressions...

Overall, I am amazed by the team's work. It it hardly believable and really impressive to me that the EB team could reach this level of profesionalism and level of quality. Excellent organization, skills and working spirit.

The version is very stable and I exeperienced no bug except for a graphic glitch I reported.

The game in itself is wondeful. I like very much the overall feeling. In particular, the trait system, the government/recruitment system and the diversity of local/ethnic troops make this mod outstanding to me, and contribute to the general immersion feeling.

As Pontus, I appreciated all the Role-playing elements offered by the ethnicities of my characters. I enjoyed the realistic feeling of the landscapes, that I never saw in the other MODs (I traveled to Amasya and the Black Sea, worked in Kayseri i.e. nowadays Mazaka... what I saw of the Anatolian steppes in game really looks like my real-life experience, and this was very important to me).

Compared to 0.74, I enjoyed more the battle dynamics. The strategic composition of AI's armies together with the AI tactical behavior result in wonderful battles! I have to say by the way that the AI formations seem to work very well. Compared to 0.74, battle physics seem to have more effect: heavy infantry pushing lighter ones etc.

The money is maybe too easy to win, as some say... although when you actually rule the tiny Pontic kingdom, you never have too much money against such neighboors as the Seleucid Empire!

I am impatient to have more time to play and to go on in the game....

Congratulations to the EB team!

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Thanks again for the kind words guys. It really is the only payment we get for working on this, besides our own personal enjoyment in playing. And believe it or not, a number of members, even some directors, have never even played the mod yet!

[Conradus]

Then, TA, I can only advise those members and directors to play it asap. It's in advantage too, I think they'll double their efforts for a definite version then (if that's humanly possible ;))

Played some hours the last two days with the Getai and I must say it's beautiful, though on my ageing comp, it goes slower then the 0.74 version, but I'm glad you could finally port it to RTW 1.5 so that I could play it again.

[Kull]

Then, TA, I can only advise those members and directors to play it asap. It's in advantage too, I think they'll double their efforts for a definite version then (if that's humanly possible ;))

Some of those people wouldn't play a computer game if you put a gun to their heads. They are doing this because they are historians or archaeologists or have some esoteric skill they'd like to see "brought to life". In short, everybody brings something different to the table.

[fallen851]

Thanks again for the kind words guys. It really is the only payment we get for working on this, besides our own personal enjoyment in playing. And believe it or not, a number of members, even some directors, have never even played the mod yet!

Real modders don't play games.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Do I have to change my usertitle then? I play the hell out of EB. But I'm always only getting a decade or so in before I want to try out another faction to test something out, or am anxiously awaiting someone else's updates to see something new. In comparison to others then, I suppose I'm not a real modder.

[Dayve]

Well after playing now for 3 days nonstop i have to say everything is brilliant, except for the Roman background colour which makes it difficult to read the writing and the music which i cannot find it within me to like at all, but that can be changed once i figure out how.

Very well done...