I am new to EB

[zarasophist]

I have a few questions:

I am having trouble with $. Playing regular RTW, I always liked to have something being built in all my cities and have at least 4 units of troops in all my cities. Correct me if I am wrong: This is not realistic in EB. I have been using the $ cheat in my first campaign; I want to get a feel for the game.

This game seems like it is going to take a LONG time (4 turns per year), not to mention how long the turns take. Will more RAM make the turns go by quicker? Is there anything to make the turns go quicker? I wanted to have a more hitorically accurate game, unfortunaltly I don't have that much time. I know Rome wasn't built in a day, but how about 4 weekends? It will take a year to complete this game.

Everything about it seems great though, just what I was looking for.

[Hooahguy]

hm.... money.... ill get back to you on that- in short- disband any unnecessary units, make trade.

w/ speed- yes, RAM will help it go faster- how much do you have?
EDIT: if you are talking about turn numbers, well, thats the game- trust me, it wont take a year...

[zarasophist]

I have 1044 MB RAM. I am not doing too bad.

[Hooahguy]

not bad, id suggest you get another 1 gb is possible. whats your video card?

[zarasophist]

Radeon X1300 512 MB

[Hooahguy]

nice! mines the geforce 8600GT 512 mb

[Parallel Pain]

From what I can tell it is unrealistic at the start of the game to try to always have something building in every settlement and have 4 units of garrison in each town.

I usually put one-non general unit as garrison in each town, and then put just enough troops in some armies to defend my border and barely attack. Even then I don't have enough money to build something in every settlement every turn. So usually one or two cities build units, while everyone else goes port, roads, mines, and markets. And I also have to wait and safe up money to build expensive mines.

The down side of this is if one of my armies are destroyed in battle and the AI have sent enough troops from different directions to exploit its destruction, I could loose half my empire before I could recover, or really the whole empire.
But that's really the best way to do it anyhow.

Of course I was playing on Saka Rauka VH/VH so it's not like I had a choice.

For the start usually you have two choices: disband or attack
Attack and attack until you're back in positives. Or for diband, attack a few settlements, and then disband your units and build up your economy.

[Watchman]

Battle difficulties above M are heartily not recommended by the way. Not unless you like the whips&chains sort of challenge of having elites chewed up by levy skirmishers.

Campaign difficulties above M are also a little on the dodgy side, as the AI starts getting increasingly obsessive-compulsive about erasing your existence.

[Dayve]

It's your first campaign so you're obviously playing as Rome. Here's what you do:

*Disband one unit of cavalry.
*Disband one unit of Triarii.
*Disband one unit or Rorari and Accensi.
*Set taxes to as high as possible without the face turning yellow.
*Merge the two armies EB gave you to start with.
*Pick a general to lead them, replace him in the city with the unit of Leves you didn't disband.
*Conquer Taras and Rhegion with army.
*Watch the money flow into your treasury.
*Build your buildings, conquer more cities.

And a good time was had by all.

[zooeyglass]

It's your first campaign so you're obviously playing as Rome. Here's what you do:

*Disband one unit of cavalry.
*Disband one unit of Triarii.
*Disband one unit or Rorari and Accensi.
*Set taxes to as high as possible without the face turning yellow.
*Merge the two armies EB gave you to start with.
*Pick a general to lead them, replace him in the city with the unit of Leves you didn't disband.
*Conquer Taras and Rhegion with army.
*Watch the money flow into your treasury.
*Build your buildings, conquer more cities.

And a good time was had by all.

a firm starting plan.

interesting to note that the assumption is all new players start with romani. my first two campaigns were epeiros and sweboz. but i think that was because before that i'd been playing a "scipii" (as rtw called it) campaign on rtw and was sick of it.

only came on here once i tried the romani later on, and got all the troubles with their weird arrangement for building MICs.

[Strategos Alexandros]

I've still never played as Romani for longer than it takes to capture Taras and I've been playing EB since january last year.

[Chris1959]

First thing any Roman player should do is disband the fleet!

You won't need it for several years and its 1k mnai per turn, 3 or 4 inf units worth.

[Korlon]

Usually, I disband all ships and cavalry that I have at the beginning of a campaign because I generally don't need them. I find myself not to be a large cavalry person anyhow and only use, at most, 4 units per stack. They cost too much to be used this early in a campaign anyhow. The Romani has a relatively good economy as far as economy goes; I believe at the beginning they're actually earning money! This is in contrast to some barbarian factions where they have at ton of money in the hole if you don't move fast or the smaller factions in the eastern part of the map.

Anyways, just try out what you can. Generally you won't find yourself being able to blitz like RTW or as fast anyhow. Some factions you may need to disband all units and wait out a couple dozen turns so you can get a good amount of cash to start conquering. I did this in my Casse and Hayasdan campaigns for example. After you conquer a couple towns, your economy will get better. In no time, you'll be building buildings in all your towns. That's one of the things I also aim to achieve. I don't want to waste any sort of time as I want my cities upgraded quick and fast. So I generally always have less than 50,000 mnai, except for this one Koinon Hellenon campaign where the money was just rolling in and I couldn't build fast enough to counteract it. The economy in EB is generally like that. First you're dead broke, then after a while, rich as hell.

[stupac]

As romani I never seem to have money problems starting out, I like to maintain my 2 starting legions and other garrisons and the fleet 2. I just raise taxes and capture taras and rhegion. Main problems seem to occur with smaller, or landlocked factions.

I've finally got an economy section in the WIP manual, might check it out, I could always use some feedback as well. Public comments should be enabled on the wiki:

http://ebmanual.wikispaces.com/Economy