Quote Originally Posted by alpaca
Yeah it's a poor way to make the game challenging but it's better than the ease in which you can beat vanilla I guess (if it actually makes the game considerably harder). I'd like to see some reports about how this stuff plays.
dont know if you just want to know about kingdoms, but I have some pretty longterm games in a modded vanilla game of Rome wich basicly changes their unit-roster a bit so better units are by default more costly and their economie always in the 10.000s of credits they become a heck of a lot harder on the "campaign" map, ofcourse they still remain the tactics-less idiot in battle ..

they seem to swarm around with clusters of armies and really lay siege to a settlement and even react to you attacking them
(I once launched an assault on Carthage with 3 full stacks of post-marian troops, ofcourse was victorious in taking the settlement, but failed to notice their 3 full stacks of men laying around the country-side now being redirected to their new enemy ..
so in the end I took a settlement with 3 armies and lost one to 3 armies, later on whiped Carthage's 3 army behind on an open battlefield ..)

comparing like vanilla Rome and modded Rome in a Julii campaign means basicly that you dont get swarmed by 1/2 to 2/3 full Gaul/German/Briton armies, but you get swarmed by 2full stack armies of Gaul/German/Briton men.
Not to forget they gain the ability to react/counterattack cause they actually have a spare-army.
differnce in gameplay is also that you actually get more decent goals, dont need to go for that large_village as that large_village now in a modded game has grown to large_city, something worth taking...

generally it just plays better if the AI isnt "also" having to deal with a bad economie to wich they can not adapt, gving of an impression they can actually compeat with you, of even beter make you somewhat feel like the underdog


G