Sieges Against the rebel

[Ramiro]

I have noticed that rebel controlled cities, even with strong garrisons are very easily taken by the AI even with much smaller armies.

I am specially concerned about this as the future demise of the illyrian (my favorite faction) is going to leave a HUGE power vaccum in the balcans and lots of potencially very rich cities that can be easily taken.

I am double speacillly concerned as the greecks have replaced macedonia as the new dominant AI faction in the region (in my opinion the are overpowered both in the economic and military aspects)

In my current campaing with rome and the previous with illyria the greecks took all the macedonian and rebel cities in continental greece and then beging expanding in asia minor. They quickly became a superpower as to rival the ptolies.

[Carados]

Bah!
I knew I overdid the Greeks a tad. I'd hoped the nerf in starting treasury and the addition of some Ippiko would give Macedonia a chance of repelling them. This is not a long term problem though, the Greeks are going to be seriously nerfed in the next version with the addition of the Chremonidean league and the addition of Ambrakia. There will be four (!!) factions fighting over Greece as a consequence.

If you want a momentary fix to the problem, one thing you could do is locate the strat.txt file in ExRM\Data\World\Map\Campaign\Barbarian_Invasion (or something like that, Quinn will tell you the specifics later). In there if you search for the start of the Greek cities section, you will find the starting treasury - you could reduce this even further, perhaps to 4000? This will enable Macedon to expand and to hopefully put up a fight. If this fails then the other thing you could do is instead of changing the treasury, you remove the majority of the spartan army - I wouldn't advise this unless you know what you're doing because you can mess things up otherwise. As always, make a back-up of the file before you do the changes.

You are correct about the Illyrians leaving a huge power vacuum. However this shouldn't be as much as a problem as you fear, because the Illyrians are still going to exist but as part of the barbarian 'superfaction'. Imagine the Greeks currently, but as a barbarian faction instead, and spread all over Europe. The computer typically favours taking rebel settlements over player and other factions settlements (though not always) and so these should last a fair while so that they'll be a nuisance but not a power (have you ever seen the Illyrians become powerful? It's crazy, I've seen them take all the settlements vertical of their starting position and even took Thermiskyra!!!).

About the rebel garrisons themselves. These garrisons typically use AOR units and these are extremely weak units, a single faction unit could probably take on two of those units. Elite factions units could take on 3 or 4, easily! There is a concept that I've used in order to combat this, I use the term "supergarrison" to describe it; rebel settlement with an extremely powerful garrison. By this I mean experienced as well as enourmous. These are brilliant at stopping faction expansion because the factions are typically not strong enough to take it early on and actually avoid the settlement altogether. One has to be careful not to overdo it though. A few months ago I did a few tests on these supergarrisons in Nicomedia and Phraaspa, it was probably in the thread "balancing the eastern powers". If you read that you can see my findings. I'm in favour of a few select supergarrisons. At the moment Aquilea (spelling...) should be an absolute definite, in order to stop the (soon to be) Cisalpine Gauls and Illyrians from joining together. There might also be a case for these supergarrisons in the epicentre of the German/Dacian/Sarmatian triangle.

[Quinn Inuit]

Hmmm...you're right, we need to carefully figure out which areas to give supergarrisons. I'll make a thread.

Slightly off-topic: for the superfactions, let's make their victory condition provinces all of their starting provinces (so they tenaciously defend) plus Rome and Carthage, just to keep them active.