The land that EB forgot

[Jaywalker-Jack]

I too miss Dumatha

Im afraid we may be alone! You seem to know your Arab history, anything else from the books to support this province's inclusion?

Reason 1) It simply does not make sense to have this area under your control? I mean who's gonna police it, eh? "Well guys, today we're on patrol duty; erhm that is we're to cross the entire breadth of the desert and we better be careful or we won't get there." "-Tell me again, why did we join the army?!"

The same could be said for large areas of the map which are counted as being under a faction's control. As I said, ownership of territory, as represented on any map, is very often only a nominal claim.

Reason 3) Now we get an extra province which is actually more useful and important. (Babylonia / Atiqa.)

True, but there are still some useless provinces on the map which we could swap for Dumatha. E.g. Augila, Gaetulia.

Reason 2) Now the AS and Ptolies don't come after Saba the instant they share a border; or rather vice versa. (In 0.8 the AS would conquer Dumatha and subsequently the Saby'n would attack it. In a matter of years the Saby'n would be wiped out; impaled on some nasty 6ft pikes.)

Well the AS and Ptolies didn't ALWAYS attack Say'n, I remember many campaigns where they'd get bogged down fighting each other, and only one time when the Sabeans got impaled as you describe.

And when there was a town there, the AI would just march across the desert. Since there isn't a town there, the AI doesn't want to walk through someone else's territory and will walk around the edges of the Arabian desert, as they would have to have done historically.

Can't argue with that. Except maybe to say that plenty of walking through deserts already goes on in the game, even though historically, naval transports would have been used.