Seleucid Campaign

**SgtLong** · July 10, 2010, 08:58 PM

Before I begin, i must say this is the best mod hands down, for RTW, and really It begs to be called Rome 2. The effort and difficulties combined with the suburb graphics and reskins, speaks not only volumes about your creativity but is above and beyond what I could even consider. This mod not only deserves a web page but a shrine to the creativity and game play it elevates us gamers to. This was a dream that came true for me and the many others I know who will feel the same.

I can not bring myself to play NTW or ETW or MTW2 because of this fabulous effort and I am addicted to the depth and AI replayability. I will say I was assigned to play the Seleucid Empire but with the shear added depth by this mod and the complicated building options, I choose first to play with smaller nations and then move up. I have to say 25 cities to start out with is a huge task with the building options and the space the empire takes up.

Now I have played with every empire now, so I am giving my perspective as a whole and as it should be in truth. I have beta tested BF2142 Add on, and now this. It was an honor and a privilege that we as testers should be grateful for. Also I did not get to play the specific empire campaigns until later after I found the mod to add into my steam launch options. So I got to play with the majority of units and fought many a battle. I have played and dl and installed many many mods, I have searched the entire TWC downloads and searched the web non stop for months for mods and I got RTW less than 3 months ago. So that should show you I have been busy and have seen it all. I have 480 hours ETW, 450 hours NTW, 100 hours RTW, and MTW2 a lot to. So I am well aware of content and mods for all those titles and the what is out there. I pretty much read and memorize the things i see, so my grasp never exceeds my reach.

Now these are of coarse my opinions and they can and sometimes might reflect this deep knowledge I have obtained:

The Good:

The mod makes other mods look like trash
Outstanding depth
Great graphics
Beyond any mod out there currently
The units available are beyond any other mods combined
The attention to detail is awesome
Addictive
Should Be Rome 2 (its that good)
Great features, additions, family trees
The overall game difficulty and AI is The BEST hands down
I played Egypt and my first battle: 4000 vs 3645 took me on H/H 2 hours to play that battle
The siege equipment is spectacular
Lots of Factions/Customizations available
Best down loader/installer mod wise
Great Support community and good response time
Best Mod out of all the titles
The availability of factions and replay value are +10 on a 1-10 scale

Yes, I tell everyone this MOD is the ! and any thing other than this, is a waste of their time!

I have not run my mouth other than: Its a must have and a must play and honestly should be called
Rome 2!

The Not So Good:

The need for a building chart in PDF form and instruction book or some kind and guides and advice, etc. This presentation of features should not only add to the professionalism of the game but make it a any level of gamer friendly application which will make it as i see it: the best anyone has done mod wise.

Can be very overwhelming for new people

To much space not enough cities, For Example: Middle East has no cities but yet the land is there, and the sheer size of the regions can be hampering to the game play and time
The lack of starting generals or governors is a stressful situation for the larger empires

There seems to be a good number of factions but they all are similar to each other, in terms of technology or units. Mostly the barbarian factions. Just look at the faction descriptions and they are pretty much the same, Good infantry/no Calvary, that is the majority of what you can play with.

The Eastern Factions lack a distinct advantages in unit stats, all the horse archers all have the same dmg, and a faction just west of them has horse archers the cheapest unit the can build and they have better stats than the heavy horse archers, so that does not make sense to me.

Give more diversity to factions of similar units, or remove them and add some other factions during the time period. This will increase replay value but also make this mod a lasting icon to shot for amongst the vast mod selections out there.

I would also in the faction descriptions rank the difficulty of the factions and make suggestions based on players ability.

Remove the empty lands and shrink the regions or city areas to help the game play ability

Lots of difference in the specific faction campaign then in the running the mod with the option to choose a faction in steam.

Make 2 Campaign modes: Early and Late

Make wonders add a value to the factions, its a common theme in other mods with RTW, but it would only add to the terrific additions present in this mod

Take a step out and look to were you can make a better campaign map, while removing the empty space and removing the same faction unit selections. Take some barbarians away and add smaller, lesser known factions with units worth a

.

Screen Shots (more to come):

**SgtLong** · July 10, 2010, 08:59 PM

For some reason my screen shots are not posting, so bare with me as i run through the tutorial!

**Rex Basiliscus** · July 11, 2010, 06:26 AM

I'm not a developer but I can tell you that wonders, map/faction changes and possibly any unit changes aren't going to happen this late into development.
I like the idea of an Early/Late campaigns, but for it to work, they would have to change all the modfoldered campaigns and that would take at least another couple of months (to my knowledge).
I am also for building charts, but since the developers are using all their free time on finishing the mod, there is no one who'd do this, except maybe us (beta-testers).
As far as Governors... you can recruit them as long as you have Tier2 barracks, or Tier3 for Romans, I think.
Regions are "missing" in some areas for a reason: some areas are just more important in this timeframe (eg.: Italy, Greece)... and some areas had to suffer lack of regions in order to give you 4 regions on the Peloponessus, for example.
Barbarian factions have a lot of diversity. You should spend some time playing them and you'll see

**dvk901** · July 11, 2010, 11:24 AM

SgtLong, I really appreciate your comments, both in the positive (because it's nice to be complimented

), and in the negative (because it's good to know what people will see as the good and the bad of this mod, and we know it has both).

Some things we did in this mod, for example how we handled 'Wonders', were done because of RTW's built-in problems. Wonders were handled very badly and 'gamey' in RTW, and gave bonuses that were hard-coded and way off the charts of what was reasonable. And, some of them didn't even exist anymore at this time, so we handled them differently.

As far as Governors, actually, the 'big' factions have many more of them than we originally started with. And it took a long time to develop a process where we could safely add these characters without causing problems down the road as you play your campaigns. The whole 'system' of named characters in RS2 was developed by myself, and is unique to this mod. So in truth, there are many more Governors than RTW would've originally allowed you to add.

The large empty spaces...I'm assuming you are referring to the areas we call 'Terrae Incognita'.....were used, as Basiliscus noted, to add regions to areas where they were much more necessary and relevant. So we could make Seleucid look like the Empire it was with many regions in it's control, or Greece and Sicily, as well as Western Europe, contain the regions that would make them highly contested areas and worth conquering. If we hadn't done this, we'd of had to steal regions from many areas just to put useless regions in Africa and Arabia, where almost nothing occurred that had any impact on the world scene at this time.

Factions.....truly, even if we'd had 50 slots for factions, it would still leave us with the issue of a limited number of unit and model slots. And believe me, we used every last model and unit slot as it is. There is no room in RS2 for ANY additional units. In fact, we even pushed the bubble here so hard that we had problems for a while with unit ques in cities that had too many units available in them...resulting in CTD's. So we rather carefully, I think, chose factions that would be relevant for a good 400 years in these campaigns, and gave them both shared and unique units. All this within the limits of RTW...which we pushed to the very max.

**Visarion** · July 15, 2010, 01:49 PM

many things "from not so good" are unachievable... as vanilla has some limits... like number of factions, units and cities... the idea of classing factions by difficulty is good though! so is your suggestion of creating a building browser in pdf similar to EB!

another idea would be a recruitment viewer like the one of EB so that people can know what areas they should conquer to have certain AOR units!