Strange Roman bahaviour

**Fwapper** · 06-04-2007, 17:54

I was starting a VH/VH Julii campaign as normal, and sent some armies into Greece to cut off the Brutii. I took Segestica, That Macedonian One above Thessilonica, then Byzantium and then moved down to take all of the rest of Greece. This meant that the Brutii never even got a single province in Greece or anywhere else for that matter.

The Scipii also behaved rather oddly. After taking Sicily, they started to build up armies in Capua, five full stacks! However they never did anything with them at all. So by the time I owned everything between Spain, Britain and Greece and the civil war had begun, the Brutii still had just two provinces and the Scipii had four. Very odd...

It was also interesting to see Dacia turn into a great power for once. They owned everything between Arminia and Germania, which I've never seen before.

Has anyone else ever seen the Romans acting like such chickens before?

**Omanes Alexandrapolites** · 06-04-2007, 18:25

Hi The Fwapper,
Yep, I've seen this strange event too. It seems to occur on VH when the player is a Roman faction. In this case, all the other Romans often behave very pathetically and other factions behave very aggressively - often to the point of absolute recklessness. On VH I have even seen the Romans, including myself as the Scipii, suffer utter destruction at the hands of many stacks unleashed by Gauls, Greeks and Carthaginians which normally would be victims of the big Roman monster machine on lower difficulty levels. It's a peculiar problem, although I don't think it can be resolved.

**Fwapper** · 06-04-2007, 18:31

I've actually seen a very similar thing on Easy/Easy level. The romans just sat tight and left the rest of the world to it. (Although that time the British became the number 1 superpower in Europe)

**Aradan** · 06-04-2007, 19:26

Yep, this very common when you take control of one of one of the Roman factions. It happens mainly when your conquests cuts-off the other two families from their usual targets, because of the ways the AI uses to find its next target. These ways include (among other things, like line-of-sight etc) starting relationships betweeen factions and region proximity.
So, if you take first the regions they have targeted and intend to conquer, the AI gets trapped in an endless priority struggle, trying at the same time not to attack you (due to the roman-works-together thingy, which breaks only when the civil war begins) but also take the provinces you currently hold (due to targeting).
So, while doing this perpetual thing, the AI builds and builds armies that doesn't use, usually because it can see no path connecting its cities with their new targets (if any) or because the AI very rarely uses naval invasions. The latter is evident in the case of the Scipii, where many times (not always) they amass huge forces near Capua but never-ever even board a single unit to take it to Carthage.
This whole roman-chickenship thing results in turn in factions with expansion prespectives getting overly strong, since there are no Romans to stop them, as it usually happens. So Gauls, Greeks, Carthaginians etc become quite powerful being unchecked by Romans and you have this very unusual and interesting development... :)

**Fwapper** · 06-07-2007, 16:02

Another very strange thing that happens sometimes is that the Scipii seem to send full armies off to remote and random parts of the world, for example, a full Scipii stack might roam round a Brutii owned Greece for no obvious reason.

The strangest thing I've seen was when I was playing as Parthia. (Easy/Easy :P) The whole campaign was going rather badly so I basically decided to abandon my puny empire and send everything I had off to take that northern province with the Amazon chariots. On my way there I spotted two full Scipii stacks in the province just to the left of the Amazon one. I sent a diplomat to get map info and was rather suprised to see that they only owned Capua and Sicily, so I have no idea why they were up there. Maybe the senate was trying to stretch them and make them send all their armies away for some henious reason...

**Omanes Alexandrapolites** · 06-07-2007, 16:19

Hi The Fwapper,
Unfortunately, the senate probably was not the reasoning for their departure from home. I'm not too sure, yet I think that the senate only sets missions in places bordering another Roman faction, explaining the stack in Greece, or at sea. May I ask what version of R:TW you are using. You can check this by entering the options member and checking the number in the left hand top corner. Perhaps that could be the cause of the path finding issue - the AI was improved slightly in 1.2, 1.3 and 1.5.

Hope this helps, cheers!

**Fwapper** · 06-07-2007, 16:36

I have RTW, BI and Alexander all installed. However in RTW it says '1.3' in BI it says '1.4' and I'm not sure about Alexander.

I also downloaded the 1.5 patch recently and it seemed to install... however RTW still says 1.3.

**Omanes Alexandrapolites** · 06-07-2007, 16:45

Unfortunately, the 1.5 patch has a terrible hatred of R:TW and BI together. BI, sadly, likes to drag your R:TW back down to 1.3 unless they are patched together in unison. To do this, the almighty 1.6 Patch is required - R:TW is automatically upgraded to 1.5 and BI is upgraded to 1.6. This handy dual patch can be downloaded from this location. Hope the upgrade resolves the Romans' run around issues, good luck, cheers!