TSE and Macedonia opening turns, what do you do?

[Total Roach]

Thinking about starting a new campaign as my Roman one is never going to get victory in time, so I opened a new campaign as TSE to check it out and to be frank, got completely scared off. Hardly any units and most of them are basic Doryophi (sp?) militia. Not much infrastructure either, WTF am I to do with that lot. So questions:

What are your 1st builds or do you just spend your opening cash on units?

Do you get rid of the provinces that have eastern culture and if so who do you give them to and why?

How long do you have before your neighbours attack you?

Any more pieces of info on your opening 20 turns that you think will really help would be great too. Not sure if it will convince this wuss to give them a go but you never know.


As for Macedonia, played a turn, managed to defeat 1 Indie Gaul stack, terrible troop quality, then went into the red financially next turn, had not even built or hired any units. Again same questions as above apart from the 2nd one.

[DimeBagHo]

With TSE campaign you need to be very careful about recruiting early on. Spend most of your money upgrading the economic infrastructure - roads, markets, law temples. Militarily your first move should be to capture Side and Salamis, then push the Ptolemies out of the Levant. After that you should work on slowly gaining ground in Asia Minor. It is very hard to defend the far east of the empire, so you should probably just try to slow the advance of Parthia and Baktria. If you can buy some Indian Elephants that helps a lot.

With Macedon, all you need to do is break the Galatian threat and then conquer Greece.

[Total Roach]

With TSE campaign you need to be very careful about recruiting early on. Spend most of your money upgrading the economic infrastructure - roads, markets, law temples. Militarily your first move should be to capture Side and Salamis, then push the Ptolemies out of the Levant. After that you should work on slowly gaining ground in Asia Minor. It is very hard to defend the far east of the empire, so you should probably just try to slow the advance of Parthia and Baktria. If you can buy some Indian Elephants that helps a lot.

With Macedon, all you need to do is break the Galatian threat and then conquer Greece.

You make it sound so easy. Going to have to think about it more. Do you have any particular build orders/priorities?

[Dog Fart]

Total Roach, search the AAR subforum. There are a couple of AAR's for these factions that give good details that may help you. Magister Equitum made a Macedonian AAR called Makedonia Dreaming that provided alot of detail on how to be successful in that campaign. Dictator Fish made a Seleucid AAR but that was a while ago, the campaign maybe different now. But it may still help.