Hey everyone,

I'm a fairly experienced TW player, but I have no experiences with EB. I'm currently playing my first campaign with the Ptolemaic Empire and my problem is that it turned into really boring grinding against Seleukeia.

I enjoyed the early part of my campaign a lot, I started with expanding to the north. Seleukeia still has Side, but other than that I took all its western cities. My northernmost city is Karkathiokerta and my easternmost city is Susa. When I reached their borders, Pontos and Hayasdan allied with Seleukeia against me and they attacked me, so now I am fighting Pontos in the East, Hayasdan in the North and Seleukeia in the East and North.

Pontos and Hayasdan are fairly realistic, they harass me with smaller groups and I'm strungling against them because most of my army is in the East. However, Seleukeia is a joke. I have to fight a battle every turn at Susa and about every third turn at Babylon against at least 1/2 stacks and often full stacks. I win every time because of the VERY experienced troops I have there, but it is getting really boring. I assume the AI cheating because it doesn't matter how much territory it loses, it still has enough money to throw these troops at me.

How do you break such a deadlock in EB?

Normally, when I reach this point I can either build up my economy to a point where I can support enough stacks to go around the deadlock and attack other cities or I bleed them dry in military victories. However, I can't do either in EB. Military victories obviously don't affect the AI and I can't build anything because everything is so expensive and I use all my money on troops to fight on three fronts.

I tried ceasefire (by offering trade rights and Susa), did not work. Pahlava and Baktria do not attack Seleukeia (which doesn't really make any sense because but whatever), so it doesn't have to fight on multiple fronts.