I've got to ask...

[Latchman]

I've played through the Broken Crescent campaign twice and had great fun. First time I played through I was Oman, and the second time I was the Ghurids. And both times I was able to divide the game into three distinct stages.

Stage 1: Building the empire. Here I got my economy under control and struggled against the most imminent threat: the faction to my nearest and the independent states. I never even thought about the rest of the world and things were great.

Stage 2: Expanding the empire. Classic Medieval 2 experience, you act upon your cultural desires and dominate your immediate region, awash in the lifeblood of enemy kingdoms. In vanilla medieval, after this point world domination is a walk in the park, because your economy is crazy and you've built up some kicking cities. But here I was sure in for a surprise when I got complacent. Little did I know, that through the fog of war, to the west, was...

Stage 3: Rome. Each time, Rome was the endgame. They went all out. Now, I had seen the popups saying factions were being destroyed, but I thought it was due to several different wars, not Rome reclaiming the glory of ole. This was the boss fight, and it was even more surprising the second time I played through because I thought that it was a fluke of my first playthrough.

Seriously, by turn 120 Rome literally had around 70 provinces in each playthrough. While early in game I created divisions of light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, and archers on the battle map, Rome was doing the same thing on the strat map. If you didn't get my drift, the strat map was beginning to look like the battle map. At one point during my campaign as the Ghurids they sent 10 stacks against a single region. I countered with, like, seven stacks and eventually I lost the region when more reinforcements marched in from the endless provinces of Rome. Each territory gain was a seriously tedious experience, and I was constantly pumping out units from every city that could get them to the frontline in a timely manner. I don't think that I've ever used ships quite as much as I did, ferrying the wounded back to bimaristans and the fresh recruits out to my generals. It was quite a deal.

Well, I wanted to ask if this was intentional, or if this has happened to anyone else, either with Rome or another faction. I actually quite liked it. Oh, and, I was playing on very hard/very hard.

[wudang_clown]

Long story short: it was intentional, but it is also getting our of hand too often, or maybe always. It's rather an unpolished feature.

Beside that, campaign difficulty setting has influence on capabilities of the AI.

[Latchman]

I was impressed. That sort of progression really captured my fancy.

[The Despondent Mind]

I hate stack spamming so it's just M/M for me .There Rome also dominates ( so far ) , but it seems to have reasonable assets .

[Emperor Hantscher]

Yep, happened to me too, playing as Oman aswell. Before I even finished conquering Arabia I got a message saying the game ended becasue Rome accomplish the victory conditions. I was mad but at least I got to keep playing. I did what any good leader would do in that position......pay endless tribute and become allies. It was good fun, now that Rome had my back I was able to carry on doing as I pleased, and without victory conditions to worry about I just ran my empire how I wanted. It was actually really fun. For example I saw the Kypchaks start to gain territory from taken Roman Regions that fell to rebels. I Knew war was eminent so I sent a stack to the region and soon enough the war broke out and we easily crushed them. The Romans loved me! All hail the great Roman Empire of Broken Crescent!

[hameem123]

Yep, happened to me too, playing as Oman aswell. Before I even finished conquering Arabia I got a message saying the game ended becasue Rome accomplish the victory conditions. I was mad but at least I got to keep playing. I did what any good leader would do in that position......pay endless tribute and become allies. It was good fun, now that Rome had my back I was able to carry on doing as I pleased, and without victory conditions to worry about I just ran my empire how I wanted. It was actually really fun. For example I saw the Kypchaks start to gain territory from taken Roman Regions that fell to rebels. I Knew war was eminent so I sent a stack to the region and soon enough the war broke out and we easily crushed them. The Romans loved me! All hail the great Roman Empire of Broken Crescent!

hahaha i couldn't stand being under another faction,i play as the Seljuks of Rum and so far so good i made friendship with Armenia so to not disturb me on my campaign against the ERE,i easily counter their quality troops with vast numbers of melee fanatics and it works pretty well.