WTF is Carthage up to?
For starters, let me congratulate the guys that put together RTR Platinum. AWESOME mod - thank you!
But tell me, WHAT is Carthage up to?
I am playing the Egyptian faction, with campaign map difficulty set to 'medium'. I control most of the eastern side of the map, with the Seleucids destroyed, Pontus limited to just three provinces in the extreme north east, and little Armenia limited to its original provinces totally surrounded by me, but neutral. Bactria has just declared war on me and are regretting doing so. Obviously my initial focus was on destroying the Seleucids, so I managed to conquer Anatolia, at which time the Macedonians decide to have a go at me. I have managed to club them back to a few provinces in north central Europe and I now control everything up to Salona on the Adriatic coast.
Carthage rules absolutely everything in the west, including all of Italy.
'Total War' is the name of the game, so that is how I play it. I have swarms of spies and assassins roaming enemy territory. They foment unrest in enemy cities and sabotage their facilities. I'll put in enough spies to reduce public order to 0% and then send large groups of assassins to wreck their temples, arenas and military installations, all in the hope of getting the people to rise up and rebel. If ever there is an outbreak of plague, I send hordes of spies, get them infected, and then move them on to other enemy cities, infecting them all! Fun, fun, fun!
But then I tried a new trick. I created a large, very powerful force of my best units, all equipped to the highest standard I could manage at the time, and sent them from Thermon to Tarentum. I didn't have the wherewithal to take and hold provinces on the Italian peninsula, but such a huge city, with all its wealth, was just too tempting a prize to be ignored! It was only very lightly defended, and, swamped with spies, I just walked in. As I had no plans on holding the city, I slaughtered everyone and then levelled everything in the city, clubbing it back to the stone age! LOTS of money!!! Then I did the same to Croton, hopped back on my ships and sailed merrily back to Greece.
Then the weirdest thing happened! Carthage moved ALL of its armies into Italy. FULL armies. There were so many armies that I gave up counting when I reached 40. They almost completely obscured Italy. And then they just sat there...
Perhaps they wanted to strike back at me, but I had made sure that I dominated the seas, so they couldn't ferry their troops over to Greece. Had they stuck south through Illyria I would not have stood a chance - I would have put up a good fight, mind you, having put in place complex defences in depth, protecting every bridge, road and mountain pass with strings of forts, whilst developing my cities in the region to cope with high recruiting and retraining demands - but it would have taken a supreme effort to fight them to a standstill and I would probably have lost most of Europe before I would have been able to go onto the offensive.
So maybe a mod who has had the patience to read all of the above can explain to me what the AI is up to with Carthage.
(Incidentally, the raids on Tarentum and Croton were so successful and yielded such great wealth, not to mention the fact that it seriously impaired Carthage's ability to wage war in that region, AND that it would cost them time and money to redevelop them - time and money they can't use to raise more armies - that I have since gone on to raid Sicily, Sardinia and all their core north African cities.)
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). Can you show some screenshots?
