Whom should I play as next?

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

I would say Getae; they are not very easy as it sounds, and besides they have the potential to expand into Greece and Rome early on. Not counting the "feel" barbarian factions have, which makes for a cool game IMO. I'm playing Casse now and will play the Arverni or Aedui when I finish.

[zooeyglass]

I would say Getae; they are not very easy as it sounds, and besides they have the potential to expand into Greece and Rome early on. Not counting the "feel" barbarian factions have, which makes for a cool game IMO. I'm playing Casse now and will play the Arverni or Aedui when I finish.

i was tempted by arverni and aedui...but after the battles in gaul i've had with them, i wanted something different.

i have in fact tried sauromatae before, back on 1.0 i think. it was fantastic, but those wastes do seem vast, even with the speed of the HAs and all.

thank you for everyone who's been responding. morte66, thank you in particular for your estimation of the pros & cons of each faction, gratefully received. I suppose I'm fairly attracted to pontus/hayasdan simply because they start small, like casse. I imagine all three factions will have fairly different troops (all cavalry strong) from my all-infantry casse style fights. so yeah.....i'll wait and see how the votes pan out. thank you again everyone.

[TruePraetorian]

I said Pontos, mainly because i've played all 4 of those and Pontos was the most interesting.

Though, if you are just coming out of a Casse campaign and want to have the same general "flow" of gameplay, i'd choose the Getai..barbarian is as barbarian does

[penguinking]

Play Hayasdan! Hayasdan, along with the Casse, are my favorite faction. They are challenging but not impossible and have an excellent unit roster, with great horse archers and heavy cavalry and high-quality late game heavy infantry, together with excellent foot archers. I played Pontos and it was pretty good but not nearly as cool as Hayasdan.

[zooeyglass]

I said Pontos, mainly because i've played all 4 of those and Pontos was the most interesting.

Though, if you are just coming out of a Casse campaign and want to have the same general "flow" of gameplay, i'd choose the Getai..barbarian is as barbarian does

oh no, i don't want to play another very similar faction, hence steering clear of arverni/aedui/sweboz. obviously there are differences for all of those factions, but yeah, thought i'd head further east. :)

hayasdan vs pontus it seems now...what to choose, what to choose.

[zooeyglass]

so as it's 12 to 10, pontus it is. just taken sinope but feel i must disband just to stay alive financially.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Getai sound fun. They have a nice starting position and a great unit variety. Unit variety is really why I did not choose Sauromatae. One gets mostly all cav/HA battles with them - which are fine in their own respect, but it is fun to play with infantry as well, not just cavalry. Pontos has phalanxes, and I do not like phalanx-based factions. It is just too easy and boring to fight battles with phalangites IMHO. As Hax said, "he can't hide behind phalangites with those factions" if you are not playing a phalanx-based faction.

Phalanxes, even the levy ones are almost invincible in EB. It is very difficult for soldiers to pass through those pikes. Phalanx will inflict hugely disproportional casualties on your enemy, as many as a thousand soldiers dead for a single unit on Large Unit Scale. All the while not tiring even a bit. If you keep a phalanx in guard mode and let the enemy come to you while pressing "Backspace" every time you notice a phalanx unit is actually fighting (the crossed swords on the red background on a unit card), the phalanx will kill just as man men with no tiring at all.

Haysadan is is another possibility, but I did not choose it because i simply do not like the units they get. Plus, I am not really a big fan of the Eastern factions anyway.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Getai, absolutely. Nothing better then to rampage into Greece and totally show them Greeks what a "barbarian" empire can do.