Okay, I just had to turn off the Alliance colors option to get rid of the diseased deathclaw urine color everyone was wearing.

So Subbie, other than that visual unpleasantness, what are your thoughts about it so far?

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Jun 24 2017, 07:48 PM

TBH, so far it just puts me in the mood to go back and play RTW instead.

Hunh. Well, perhaps Khajiit will catch it when it's even cheaper

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Jun 24 2017, 09:07 PM

I am not really being fair to Attila. Some things leave me scratching my head, because I don't understand them. I just need to take the time to get used to the changes in how the game works. If I could find a manual for it, I would read it. It did not copy one to my hard drive with the install. There might be one on Steam. I should do the prologue and really learn the game.

I am disappointed that the only playable Sarmatian faction is the Alani. I thought the Roxolani and Iazyges would be playable as well. Apparently not. But I think I can do some mod work to make them playable.

How many Celtic factions are playable?

I just fired up the game and looked, and there are three - Caledonians, Picts, and Ebdanians. But I have the Celts Culture Pack. I don't think any Celtic factions are playable in the vanilla game.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jun 25 2017, 01:46 AM

Three are fine with Khajiit, and they are all from the British Isles! Ma peoples!

I don't think any Celtic factions are playable in the vanilla game though.

Oh well this one wouldn't buy the game without getting the Celtic pack too. Curse you DLC paywall!

So Subbie, will the AI in Rome: Total War ever launch seaborne invasions?

Almost never. You can edit descr_sm_factions.txt and change "prefers_naval_invasions" to yes for every faction. But they still rarely get on ships and invade.

The only exceptions are that the Brutii are likely to invade Greece by sea, and then Asia Minor by sea. Likewise the Scipii are likely to invade Africa by sea.

So started a new Egyptian campaign and spent a couple of turns making an alliance with Numidia, building barracks for training Nile spearmen in Memphis, and trained a couple of Nile Spearmen units. Then we loaded them and a General with 3 bowmen units, 3 Nubian Spearmen units, 2 chariot archer units and a skirmisher unit on a boat and shipped them off. Khajiit thought it would be a good idea to not waste time and wait for the Seleucids to come around and attack us, so, we landed our army on the beach just south of Antioch and moved to take the city. They had practically no one defending it! We took the town and then sent a force from Jerusalem to take Damascus, which was also only lightly defended.

After spending some time stabilizing our territories, Khajiit noticed that our city Salamis had been producing Nubian Spearmen units like crazy, so we loaded 12 units up in the fleet and dropped them off on the coast south of Tarsus. We then moved them up to assault the city which we discovered had decent sized mixed unit army of light cavalry and strong infantry. Once battle was joined, we divided our pure infantry army into 3 groups of 4 units and sent them through the gate (which our spy left open ) in 3 waves. The first wave trounced the defenders at the gate and then pushed up a side street while the second wave came in and moved up the main avenue to assault a large group of hoplites marching down to try and stop us. The third wave moved up behind the 2nd wave that had just routed the hoplites and moved into a street adjacent to plaza to the right and turned around. Then with all the units in place, we assaulted the plaza with the fresh third wave and then hit them in the side with the rested first wave that had moved up the side street to the left of the plaza. Horses died quickly and the infantry followed suit in short order. After that battle, Khajiit saved the game and will pick it up again maybe tomorrow.

Good going. Those Nubians are excellent early-game infantry.

The trick to taking cities in RTW is to understand how the town square works. All units within the town square are immune to routing. So if you can, it is best to avoid fighting within the square. Instead try to bait the defenders out of the square with archers, and fight them in the streets. Note that only the area within the flags technically counts as the square. A really tricky move is to to bait all of the defenders out of the square, then rush in a unit behind them and block their re-entry to the square.

The other thing is as soon as one of your units enters the square, all the enemy units on the map will immediately converge upon them. So they will abandon the walls, etc... to get to the square. If you can get between enemy units and the square, you can effectively block them off, and they seem to be quicker to rout that way.

In our earlier abandoned Egyptian campaign, we were attacking Antioch when they had built stone walls and they had a bunch of hoplite units stationed on the wall. Now, Khajiit doesn't know if it was a bug or maybe the easy difficulty he was playing on, but he took the square then and the hoplites remained on the walls and we won when the timer hit zero.

Usually they don't stay stuck in place like that. Unless they are in a state of Fighting To The Death

Lol, well they certainly weren't doing any fighting! More like watching nonchalantly as their city fell!

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Jun 28 2017, 01:33 AM

Ugh, the flippin' game locked up right in the middle of our taking of Seleucia and it had been awhile since Khajiit manually saved. Hopefully the Autosave is fairly recent, otherwise this one is abandoning this campaign.

The logic for auto-saves in all games seems to be:



I used to think it was just Bethesda games, but I find they all work that way. Bethesda just adds the subtle variation of a useless auto-save overwriting a critical one wherever possible. Such as auto-reloading the player death so it can be re-experienced and re-saved, until the last "live" auto-save is overlaid.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Jun 28 2017, 07:43 PM

Lol, yeah it certainly seems like that sometimes