Campaigns completed description thread

[StellarW]

Hi everyone,

I have been meaning to start another EB campaign but as would like to do so with a specific set of house rules and end date in mind i am quite interested in seeing what other EB players have so far managed.

As examples i am submitting the results of my campaigns so far first; i hope they can serve as basis for challenging set up's in your own future games.

Pontus winter 172 Vh/Vh V 1.0, RomeTW.exe ( Large unit size)

No pause in battle's
No extermination
No monument/unique building destruction

all the rest of the legal stuff i could think to use. :)



Arche Seleukia Summer 227 Vh/Vh V 1.0, RomeTW.exe ( normal unit groups )

No extermination
No mercenaries
No pause in battle's
No monument/unique building destruction
No Forts
No starting buildings or start training units without presence of family member/General
No time Limit in battle's
Always end battle's when enemy routing screen appears.
No attacking enemy units without presence of family member/general in your attacking group
No more than five archers or Slingers per stack or more than ten of any unit type ( range/cavalry/melee)
No horse archers used.
No autocalculation of battles ( gains exp faster)




Hayasdan Fall 200 Vh/Vh V1.0, RomeTW.exe ( large unit groups)

No extermination
No mercenaries
No pause in battle's
No monument/unique building destruction
No Forts
No starting buildings or start training units without presence of family member/General
No time Limit in battle's
Always end battle's when enemy routing screen appears.
No attacking enemy units without presence of family member/general in your attacking group
No more than five archers or Slingers per stack or more than ten of any unit type ( range/cavalry/melee)
No horse archers used.
No autocalculation of battles ( gains exp faster)



Well i hope to see many reports; if a like thread exists somewhere in the EB forums i have this all saved in text file so it can be deleted ( just send me a link) /moved there.

Thanks

Stellar

[SwissBarbar]

I like the Seleukid expansion in your Pontos campaign ;-)

why don't you build forts? Isn't it a bit unrealistic, that your armies don't camp (fort are for free)

[Rilder]

I like the Seleukid expansion in your Pontos campaign ;-)

I think thats Carthage.

No Victories here tbh, I've only ever Once in all of my RTWing ever got the victory screen.

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Some people just lack the patience to go forward. I'm one of them; my last victory ever was as the Brutii in vanilla back in 2006. The only other time I've came so close to it was as the Arverni in December.

[I of the Storm]

Yes, and some simply lack the time to pursue campaigns for so long, especially with all battles fought manually.
Impressing achievments though!!

[HunGeneral]

Amazing achievements I must say.

I don't really understand why you don't use forts or pause in battles. These features aren't that much ahistorical (everyone used forts and fortified camps, and pause I support because officers could also give commands and with some factions units fight very individually - nomads for example..)

Some players don't wait till the end others don't go that far and some (like me) didn't get that far and wish to try every faction in the first 50 years and play several campaings at the same time.

I plan to play most of them to the finish butt haven't gotten that far till now.

[StellarW]

Hi,

In retrospect i should have made it even clearer that these house rules were meant to provide me with added continues challenges without creating a situation where i needed to improvise to keep my attention. As for the question about forts in my original Pontus campaign i managed to seriously slow down the Karthadastim advance into the Southern Balkans& Greece ( i would have lost several more cities to that mass of stacks) so i decided that i would not use it again when i could so easily, and for so long, ward of such masses of troops by choking their approaches with depleted skirmishers manning forts. Additionally it provides added possibilities for ranged units away from cities which just hits the Ai where his weakest already.

I do use 'esc' in battle's if i need to leave the pc but i feel pausing ( stopping time, pause button) AND being able to scroll the battlefield is a advantage i would forgo in the interest of keeping things interesting.

In general most of these house rules are meant to make scouting more important ( no instant stacks of merc defenders) and battle's difficult enough to ensure that the heavy cavalry either burns a hole in your pocket all year long or that , without the cavalry, your infantry attrition keeps them from gaining much in the way of destabilizing experience.

Even with these house rules the challenge declines towards the end and the impetus to continue comes mostly from setting the fastest possible end date; many experienced stacks have gotten wiped out completely ( setting back end dates some years) in these 'rushes' to set challenging dates so i can't say it doesn't help to keep things 'fun'. :)

Basically i want to switch to medium for battles ( my tactics have 'develoved' while fighting the super soldiers) but i am not sure how to best balance that out with additional house rules.

I am thinking that retraining is out completely and that i would have to reduce training to two seasons per year but even with that and a few other things i have in mind i can imagine wholesale destruction of enemy stacks...

That is why i would ideally like a set of house rules& end date that seems on the face of it challenging enough to take on without breaking my head over coming up with them all by myself. :)

Either way thanks for the kind comments so far! If anything i hope a thread such as this one gets a few more players to complete campaigns ( and post the details& house rules here) where it might not have seemed worth doing after the initial challenges had been removed.

Stellar

[jhhowell]

Your Hay victory screen suggests that I may misunderstand how the raiding targets work in EB victory conditions. Do you still satisfy a raiding target condition if you hold the city continuously after capturing it? My understanding was that those didn't count unless they'd been released (and optionally recaptured), since I still saw the flashing white boxes around Sidon and the Crimea when I checked my victory conditions in my 1.0 Hay campaign. That's part of the reason I put the campaign on hold a second time - why keep slogging through the endless repetitive battles towards Greece and whatever I still needed in the east, when it looked like I wouldn't reach the victory screen anyway unless I illogically set free some perfectly good provinces I'd held for decades. But your victory screen is all blue in all the right places... Winning without horse archers is very impressive, btw! You didn't give in and use them even in the first war against AS?

That's by far the closest I've come to a formal victory in EB. I tend to get bored by frequent, repetitive large battles. Hayasdan's final series of reforms were good for keeping interest, though.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

In order to achieve the "raid" objective, all you need to do is end one turn in possession of the settlement. If you then leave it or if you own it for ever, it doesn't matter.

[StellarW]

Your Hay victory screen suggests that I may misunderstand how the raiding targets work in EB victory conditions. Do you still satisfy a raiding target condition if you hold the city continuously after capturing it? My understanding was that those didn't count unless they'd been released (and optionally recaptured), since I still saw the flashing white boxes around Sidon and the Crimea when I checked my victory conditions in my 1.0 Hay campaign.

As MarcusAureliusAntoninus (next time it's going to be MA or MAA:) ) said once you took the city for a turn you can either leave it or keep it depending on what sort of problems it brings or profits it yields. I took those crimea provinces right towards the end of my campaign as i didn't want my decades old bribe of 1000 M to go to waste. :)

That's part of the reason I put the campaign on hold a second time - why keep slogging through the endless repetitive battles towards Greece and whatever I still needed in the east, when it looked like I wouldn't reach the victory screen anyway unless I illogically set free some perfectly good provinces I'd held for decades.

Well i had a nasty CTD i couldn't solve so i in fact started and finished the AS campaign before returning to my Hai one and rounding it up with advice i didn't notice before. What your saying is right and that's why i would like to encourage both strict house rules and a date to aim for to keep the campaign interesting right up to the end. After defeating AS i was never seriously threatened but i wanted to see if i could complete the reform process before completing the campaign. As it turned out i kept misunderstanding the goals i needed to meet to my reform process didn't go very deep into Persia...

But your victory screen is all blue in all the right places... Winning without horse archers is very impressive, btw! You didn't give in and use them even in the first war against AS?

Well all of my ignorance didn't manage to get me killed in the Pontus campaign i decided to aim high and horse archers where the first off the list. :) I didn't use even a single horse archer unit ( would have LOVED to try out those faction unique units thought :( ) as they are just inherently something the successor AI armies can't deal with for lack of cavalry and archers of their own.

That's by far the closest I've come to a formal victory in EB. I tend to get bored by frequent, repetitive large battles. Hayasdan's final series of reforms were good for keeping interest, though.

I might eventually go back to Hai as i think i can complete the reforms and meet the victory conditions , with the same house rules, maybe 15+ years faster. Then again i do want to get away from the Vh battle's and i have some good ideas for additional house rules to make things even more challenging. :)

Admittedly those massive stand up fights against half dozen full stack army groups isn't 'fun' but if you get in any way bored the battle's are in my opinion too easy. In my opinion once you get your house rules to a point where such prolonged wars are stressful bloody affairs you have just right; if you can't and don't lose large battle's your not in my opinion going to complete campaigns.

Either way i am still hoping for players to start posting descriptions of their completed campaigns!

Do you think i should post these details on the general EB forum , MarcusAurelius? Would that sort of thing be frowned upon in this context?

Thanks

Stellar

PS: The more i type the more it appears that i created the thread to talk about myself so this would be a great time for others to pitch in with their accounts.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

If it is concerning a battle or campaign review, this is the appropriate forum.

[jhhowell]

MAA, thanks for the clarification! I'll have to find time to finish that campaign someday...

StellarW - you did miss out on a great unit (Zrakir Netadzik, the cata-HAs). Though if you've played Parthia their version is basically the same.

We obviously have very different play styles, since you finished Hayasdan in 200 BCE. My game is a decade or two beyond that. I prefer very slow, deliberate expansion, which fits very well with the Hayasdan reforms. IIRC once you've taken a layer of provinces it takes 30 turns or more to get them fully reformed... I don't codify "house rules" per se, but I rarely expanded to a new layer of reformable provinces until the precursor layer was near completion. Thus a very slow campaign with literally hundreds of sally battles to turn annoying besieging Greeks into pincushions.

The down side of a methodical play style like that is that one doesn't finish many (or necessarily any) campaigns, while the VH/VH blitz style does appear to lend itself to completing campaigns. I play on M/M, for reference - correctly balanced battles, and a campaign AI which occasionally refrains from instantly declaring war when a faction borders me.

One option to make your campaigns more interesting would be to use the console to manage the AI factions. QuintusSertorius was an enthusiastic proponent of this in one Rome and two Epirus-as-Pergamon AARs, if you can find them in the forum archives. For example, try Hay with horse archers, but every time you face a major Hellenic army fill in empty slots with Prodromoi and Syrian or Cretan Archers as seems best to fill in the gaps in the AI's composition. Or spawn entire armies from scratch if you like (I remember Sertorius put a lot of effort into trying to script a Hannibal full stack to pop up outside Capua in 216 BCE, can't recall if he got it working). You can also do console and FD tricks to give yourself a civil war. Check out MAA's AAR for an example, where he gave half of a huge Arche Makedonia to Baktria and then eventually conquered it back from them.

I've been doing this console management more to keep a lid on Yellow Death superpowers and keep minor powers from being eliminated if possible. FD a few provinces from the out of control faction to a deserving neighbor (shifting the Pontic capital back to them after Ptolemaioi take it, for example), teleport armies to twiddle their thumbs in remote locations, that kind of thing. Or give KH a hand by teleporting their full stacks from Rhodes to someplace useful, if they've lost their navy.

[lionhard]

I like the Seleukid expansion in your Pontos campaign ;-)

LMAO @ seleukid expansion.

Quite impressive stella, have u completed any more campaigns?

Its funny how on your campaigns its normally carthage that takes the west. Normally On all my campaigns (macedonia) , (hayasdan), (baktria) and (carthage) by 190 bc lustanna has owned everyone in the west and is challenging my kingdoms for territory.

Ill post some ss's when i finish my Bactria campaign, Iv started playing rise of persia atm :P

[penguinking]

My 1st completed campaign, on VH/M

This is the best total war game I've ever played. Casse victory conditions don't take too long, and they have really cool units, so I was able to maintain interest in the campaign long enough to finish it. I'm not sure why the victory screen talks about Rome when Italy isn't even in the victory conditions, though.

[StellarW]

My 1st completed campaign, on VH/M
This is the best total war game I've ever played. Casse victory conditions don't take too long, and they have really cool units, so I was able to maintain interest in the campaign long enough to finish it. I'm not sure why the victory screen talks about Rome when Italy isn't even in the victory conditions, though.

Nice to see more victory screens but could you perhaps list your house rules and a some more details?

Thanks...

[StellarW]

Finally finished My Romani campaign!

House rules as follows...

Romani Summer 142 BC M/VH EB 1.2 using -Bi exe ( Europa Barbarorum for BI installer ; thanks Ferromancer!)

172 Spring -

As before :

No mercenaries
No deliberate pausing in battle to give orders
No monument/unique building destruction
No Forts/watchtowers
No time Limit in battle's
Always end battle's when enemy routing screen appears.
No more than five archers or Slingers per stack or more than ten of any unit type ( range/cavalry/melee)
No horse archers used.
No auto calculation of battles ( units seem to gain experience too quickly/unfairly this way)

new:

*Training only allowed in two season per year.
* Troop ( generals anywhere) training only allowed in Italy ( including Po valley) and Sicily when you gain those areas.
* Must occupy; no enslavement or sacking
* Can not move capitol from Roma
* General/Fm can command five units + number of command stars in description panel.
* Army composed of up to 100% skirmish\levy units ( two or more per five unit base stack) 40%% line ( two per five base stack) and 20% elite ( one elite per five base stack ) : any armored cavalry ,excluding your General/Fm, is counted as elite. After Polybian you can still use skirmish as skirmish or use line instead; old elites are still considered elites as well as the new veterans and guards/elite skirmishers.
* No more than two Generals/Fm's per stack ; largest stack possible 16 units( Fm/General + 5 base stack + 10 command stars allowance)
* No stacks larger than five units without general/FM in own territory; stack rules apply.
* Can not attack without presence of Fm/general in assaulting stack- No sallying from sieged city without general/family member in relieving army.
* No more than six units ( 5+ Fm/G) per 'ship'.
* No retraining; depleted units should not be moved to garrisons where auto retraining may happen.
* In hostile or neutral territory units which does not fit stack rules should be retreated towards nearest province.
* Army cost not should exceed tax income ; if does do so by accident disband units if there are many or use up the one or two that will bring you back to balance.
* City garrisons of a typical 5 unit army stack allowed without, or in excess of , presence of general; 20 units allowed in cities
* No more than five Generals
* No shieldwall / night fighting ( but i don't really know why i did not do the night fighting or how it changes much....)

261 spring -
* General or FM must be present for the duration of training or construction period in cities.
* No more than 15 Generals
* Training only allowed in one season per year

* Can not attack enemy formations in winter/summer ( basically in whichever season the movement penalty in that region would normally apply) and can not move at all without the presence of roads in
that province
* Ships must move to nearest friendly/neutral port in fall and do not move at all in winter ( if anything, as i understand things at least, to simulate Rome's reluctance to transport large formations of troops over oceans.)
* May only disband Axillary territorial troops or basic roman levy formations.

227 spring -
No more than 30 generals
* No more than two generals/Fm's and their allowed stacks per enemy or neutral province. Generals/Fm's can be shifted between stacks but at the end of movement allowances all units not allowed by Fm/general rules should be moved/'strategically redeployed towards the rear/nearest friendly province.
* No more than 16 units per stack; General/Fm + five + 1-10 command

218
Army cost + all wages must not exceed tax income; only belatedly figured out that the cost of generals fell under wages...



Since i missed a few victory conditions ( raids :( ) the campaign took me at least a decade longer than it should have but given that i think i am probably close enough to make a attempt at reaching the Augustan Reforms...

As always i would like to hear about other completed campaigns&house rules. Mine were really rules, not guidelines, and while losing armies isn't fun it does keep you interested and normally gives the AI time to build strength.

Thanks,

Stellar

[ximxim]

Koinon Hellenon victory, VH/M.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

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Houserules:

No "generals" - expansion must be done as an expedition, led by a FM who then becomes the city governor.

Minimum use of cavalry.

No enslavement or expelling.

No "heroic victories" - Must have at least equal forces.

No horse archers.