Faction Starting Conditions

[(insert clever name here)]

I have tried the first five or ten turns of Several factions such as the Epiros and Pahlav and have found thier starting conditions such as thier starting armies to be kind of monetarily draining. With the more realistic approach to unit costs in the game, campaigns are more expensive and mercenary troops are just a bad thing to have that early on in the game. The Pahlav's have like 8 mercenary horse archer units to begin the game. With 5000 to start with and an upkeep of 450 for 8 of those things, one of the starting provinces has an economy at around neagtive 2750. Considering that most people are just going to disband these guys so they don't cripple thier economy after two turns, why even have them there in the first place? I believe this should be adjusted to simply include a couple low tier units in each city to start for defense with maybe a small group of four or five decent units for your standing army.

[Marcus Scaurus]

I believe it's a good way to make the game harder. Some players will think that they can play EB like they play(ed) RTR, SPQR or Vanilla. In most other mods, your objective is just to conquer enough cities so you can recruit more units to conquer even more cities etc. But in EB, you will find out that your units are valuable, expensive and sometimes not necessary in your campaigns agains different kinds of enemies.

Having too much units (thus debts) will force the player to use the few units he has well, trying to avoid heavy casualties. It will also make the game harder, because you can't field full stacks at the beginning of the game.

[Mangalore]

Not sure but I think the point of the topic starter is mainly. Why have starting situations you can't support anyway? The first thing as Epirus was to disband those lephants. The first thing as Pontus was to get rid of a majority of my army, etc. etc. It doesn't quite make sense that the factions have troop levels they are obviously completely incapable to support economy-wise.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Yes, but it's better than having the AI start with nothing and having the human player roll over them. This way ensures that none of the AI factions start out too weak in comparison to a human player. Also gives the human player choices of what approach to take at the start of the game.

[Solar]

well, I've played at carthage a bit, and while the starting conditions were a tad difficult (as in, I had to disband a lot of troops), I have it maybe too easy now (ca.250bc), having conquered sicily and built lots of economic structures. I don't even remember how much I'm getting per turn; I didn't care to look, since nothing I do will spend enough money to make my treasury actually go down. right now, I've got almost 200k in my treasury...

[Malrubius]

Some players choose to go conquering at the start and get way into debt before they start becoming profitable. Some of these factions were on a war footing or had just ended a war at this time period (Casse, Rome vs. Pyrrhos, Pyrrhos vs. all his neighbors, Aedui vs. Arverni, Ptolemaioi vs. Seleukid Empire, to name a few).