Full Carthage? I`ve actually seen it... to my surprise.

[♔The Black Knight♔]

Hey thanks for responding. This game has dissapointed enough, even the prime showcase was a lie.

I know there may be performance issues, but just make it an option rather the pull nice things from the game.

[DividingSolid]

The first thing I did was load up the Battle of Carthage and I was disappointed in seeing that were fewer siege towers. Heck they even took out the cutscene with Scipio.

[CrisGer]

Carthago Est

it was called Kart-hadasht in their own language.

I have long studied Punic culture and history and what fragments remain of authentic records and archaeological finds and digs around the city and other areas of former Carthaginian territory. I had hopes that they would attempt to re create an authentic version of the city. What I saw in the images i could find was a roman style city complete with typical Romano Greek public buildings. Carthage had its own architectural style which incorporated massive walls and very little decor of the classical kind they did have monumental statuary but it was more broad in style and NOT as realistic, and the city featured sloping roads and walk ways rather than the large arrays of steps that the Romans and Greeks favoured. Also the Naval military harbour was very distinctive, and included a double ring of wharves for the galleys and sheds for them to be hauled out of the water as gallleys rot quickly if left in the water all the time yet they also crack and wear if left out all the time too, so maintaining large galley fleets was a complex matter and they had mastered it to a higher degree than any of the other naval powers of that time.

It was nice to see a large city and I am glad it does develop but maybe in time we can mod it to bring to it the more realistic features of the true Carthage. It was frankly a matter of accident and fate that they lost and were not able to last to be an equal to Rome. They could have then countered the rise of the nomadic Arab threat which has had such a terrible negative result for world culture of the centuries. But I am glad to see people are looking to see what does happen with Carthage and i do like some of the mod work and detailing of the new units for Carthage i have seen.

Two large, artificial harbors were built within the city, one for harboring the city's massive navy of 220 warships and the other for mercantile trade. A walled tower overlooked both harbours.



The city had massive walls, 23 miles (37 km) in length, longer than the walls of comparable cities. Most of the walls were located on the shore and thus could be less impressive, as Carthaginian control of the sea made attack from that direction difficult. The 2.5 to 3 miles (4.0 to 4.8 km) of wall on the isthmus to the west were truly large and, in fact, were never penetrated.

The city had a huge necropolis or burial ground, religious area, market places, council house, towers and a theater and was divided into four equally sized residential areas with the same layout. Roughly in the middle of the city stood a high citadel called the Byrsa.









It is hard to realize how much Rome hated and feared Carthage. It was truly a totally competing culture with its own rich history, 800 years of it, a long heritage and a deeply established economy and trade and road network that connected most of North Africa and much of the Med. They were a strange culture in some ways, if one looks carefully at surviving records and moves aside propaganda of Roman origins, their religion included some arcane and rather odd aspects but then so does Christianity and just about every other religion. They had a huge Necropolis that was part of a worship and kinship with ancestors similar to Egypt and Japan, and they were some of the most able mariners and shipwrights of the ancient world. They had also a large literature and cultural traddion but just about all of that was destroyed and eradicated by the Romans who went so far as to build an entire city on top of the remaining ruins to try to erase foerever any memory of their great enemy and rival.

[Boicote]

The first thing I did was load up the Battle of Carthage and I was disappointed in seeing that were fewer siege towers. Heck they even took out the cutscene with Scipio.

-“Consul, the fleet is ready.”
-“Burn the city, Tiberius. No prisoners, no mercy. Kill them all!"
-“Yes, Consul. Forward!”

I suppose that cutscene was not good enough for reviewers and CA decided to remove it from the game. It was another victim of CA’s “brutal approach” to achieve high Metacritic scores.

[CrisGer]

He did indeed order the complete destruction of the city but most of the inhabitants that were captured were made into slaves as they were too valueable to just slaughter. Rome was determined to eliminate her rival once and for all and that ruthlessness gave the empire a long if not a happy life for many of its inhabitants. There were on some reports, nine slaves for every free person in the city of Rome in the late empire. Not a nice picture...but that was how ancient history worked. Not all triumphs and parades.

[BigEl_nobody]

Impressive post there CrisGer
I was always really interested in the "Punic" Culture, since I have the feeling it was a mixture from eastern and "barbarian - tribe" cultures, yet very unique and comparable to the greek culture in case of knowledge and wisdom in literatur and society. It somehow reminds me of the trojan culture, which unfortunately shared the same fate.
Even the greek culture, both in its pure and greeco romanic form, can be considered to be erased by wars and qonquests, finally with the fall of the western roman empire. So whilst the greeks already invented logic, democracy and astrology, many of those invaluable achievements were forgotten and lead to a primitive time period in comparison, the middle age and the renissance.

[Dago Red]

I just saw Carthage for the first time last night. It was a truly pathetic display of how badly implemented the core components of this game are, and how fraudulent the pre-release footage, screenshots, and claims were.

Humble please post screenies, because this is all I saw....

A smallish walled city with a tiny harbor -- nothing like the long canal we see in the YouTube video -- nestled below a hillside topped with a large compound, that is completely inaccessible and not in any way an actual part of the battlefield. Amid the floating eyesore icons and laggy FPS, I managed to still get a little excited with what was there, as Carthage counter-attacked their capitol that I had occupied (originally auto-resolved with rebel garrison from an ally who lost it). Yes I'm using mods to fix the battles and minimize cartoon graphics, etc, and was hoping for a fight maybe 20% as epic as the Youtube video. That would have been fun (hopefully with less jingoistic screaming).

But no. The AI split it's forces in a daring move of raw idiocy, half posturing at the walls as they were shot by arrow towers and half moving to attack the red boundary line.





And to top it off, the only unit that actually made an attempt to do something (after some hoplites threw magic torches at bronze doors) was the general. Unfortunately the brave Carthaginian general had some weak links in his unit and all they did was stop inside the doors and fart.



I exited to windows with 90% of the AI still on the battlefield, and looked for paradox games to download.

[Boicote]

And this is how Carthage looks like after being conquered and converted to Roman culture...



@ Dago Red
Sorry for the offtopic, but what did you do to make the UI to look like this?



When I have more than 10 units, the UI displays the unit cards in two rows. This is annoying because the unit cards occupy 1/3 of the screen and I cannot see my soldiers in the battlefield.

[Dago Red]

@ Dago Red
Sorry for the offtopic, but what did you do to make the UI to look like this?



When I have more than 10 units, the UI displays the unit cards in two rows. This is annoying because the unit cards occupy 1/3 of the screen and I cannot seem my soldiers in the battlefield.

Yeah that is annoying as hell. However I only get that effect when there are more than 20 units -- reinforcing armies or almost every siege due to a naval garrison. I'm not sure what you're experiencing there, the unit card panel should expand up to 20. Another bug? Is it related to screen resolution/size? I'm in 1080p on a 21.5 inch.

On a related note: Even when you specifically do not choose "Control large army" before a battle, the damn UI still gives you that expanded panel. So you might be controlling 5 units but still have the double decker panel window taking up your whole screen

[Humble Warrior]

lol, Dago Red that bad gas joke made me chuckle and your sig`s kinda funny too. Anyway...

Looking over it, It`s not the Carthage of the Utube vid we were shown. It`s still pretty big, but not as impressive. Still with all my troops it took a good while to take it, probably because I had no siege towers. carthage didn`t fire anything back at me (you`d think they`d have some standrad siege defences,but they didn`t). It was a good fight but not as dramatic as the vid, obviously.

It still looks good, though. CA`s mistake was making it look better when it wasn`t.

See what you guys think.

[Ganossa]

Seriously guys?
How about just going into custom battle, pick city assault, pick carthage, pick extra large city size and start the battle. It is all in there!

[Humble Warrior]

Campaign is where it counts if you read earlier. Campaign!

It`s not the utube version either.

And have you got a Mod in there, cos it isn`t that dark on my version... unless you set the Gamma that way.

[Ganossa]

It is obviously another time of day. You know there is progress in the campaign game. No faction starts with full expanded city. So unless someone expands the city to that extend during the campaign, you of course wont see it like that. Does not mean its not in the game.

[Dago Red]

Still... where are those more unique huge buildings? Where is all the graffiti we saw on them? Where is that long canal -- perhaps that was just a trick of perspective. But what of the siege defense units? I saw none, and in fact have yet to see any, even in level 4 cities. There are no siege units on the walls/battlements in my game in any city.

[Metallistic]

Still... where are those more unique huge buildings? Where is all the graffiti we saw on them? Where is that long canal -- perhaps that was just a trick of perspective. But what of the siege defense units? I saw none, and in fact have yet to see any, even in level 4 cities. There are no siege units on the walls/battlements in my game in any city.

The "large canal" appears when the city is fully upgraded.

[Boicote]

Yeah that is annoying as hell. However I only get that effect when there are more than 20 units -- reinforcing armies or almost every siege due to a naval garrison. I'm not sure what you're experiencing there, the unit card panel should expand up to 20. Another bug? Is it related to screen resolution/size? I'm in 1080p on a 21.5 inch.

On a related note: Even when you specifically do not choose "Control large army" before a battle, the damn UI still gives you that expanded panel. So you might be controlling 5 units but still have the double decker panel window taking up your whole screen

Maybe this is related to the screen size. I have a 17 inch monitor. Maybe that's why I only need 10 units to get the card panel expanded.

Sorry for the offtopic.

[Lionheart11]

more pics or it did not happen

[smilydude]

They scaled it down. I remember interviews with CA saying that they were expanding the map size up from 2x2km to something else (might have been 4x4km. Would have been nice... and actually made a good deal of the mechanics work better such as land/sea combined battles, battles with 40 unit stacks, the Line of Sight mechanic especially). But then they decided to scrap that great idea, stick with small maps, and so obviously they had to make Carthage smaller to fit on the tiny 2x2 battlefield.
Maybe in the inevitable expansion/dlc we'll get those features they promised in previews.

[alhoon]

Wait...
Humble Warrior, after ranting for weeks about the state of the game without having it... now that you actually DO have it, you find it OK with a couple of mods?

In any case, the simplest and easiest way to slow down battles is ... increase hit points. Do you want your battles to take x4 longer? Increase hit points x4.

[alhoon]

Wait...
Humble Warrior, after ranting for weeks about the state of the game without having it... now that you actually DO have it, you find it OK with a couple of mods?

In any case, the simplest and easiest way to slow down battles is ... increase hit points. Do you want your battles to take x4 longer? Increase hit points x4.

Where is all the graffiti we saw on them?

About that, I think you have to keep the city besieged for a couple of turns. in the CA video, Carthage was being attacked after 2 years (2 turns) of siege.