[TW Guide] RTW: Greeks

[Garbarsardar]

Author: Morble
Original Thread: Not Available

RTW: Greeks

GREEK STRATEGY

Playing the Greeks successfully requires an entirely different strategy and outlook from virtually any other faction in RTW. They start the game time period with a unique historical background and a central location, which both strongly effect their strengths and weaknesses.

At the time the game starts, Greek civilization can be described as having been in decline since the death of Alexander and rupture of his empire. Appropriately, you start with a disjointed set of citystates spread across the Aegean and Adriatic. But to your advantage, the Greeks are still the progenitors of Hellene culture, and you gain considerable positive recognition from rebels and nearby factions in this regard.

Although your original territories are only connected by sea, their central location provides significant trade income, and the Wonder on Rhodes increases this yet again. But while Greek mercantilism is superior to all others, the Greek military begins the games as already mostly obsolete.

Hoplites and phalanxes were developed in a time when the height of military strategy was to line up your guys against the other guys, run them together, and then have them poke at each other with pointy sticks until one side was more dead than the other. The Greek states are still pretty good at this type of warfare, but even so, they are not the best at it in the game, because the Macedonian pikes can rip hoplites to shreds.

Hoplites and spear phalanxes are typically slow, fragile, and only dangerous from the front. As a defensive weapon, where the flanks are tightly controlled, hoplites excel. But against the more vibrant and mobile militaries of, for example, the Romans, they are weak. Greek archers and peltasts are mediocre at best, and Greek cav is reasonably good light cavalry, but the Greeks lack any true heavy cav. Greek warships are only adequate—superior to the barbarian longboats and Egyptian shipping, but not really up to the super-advanced warships the Romans can eventually build. The only units the Greeks have access to that are truly state of the art are onagers, and various mercenaries such as Cretan archers.

The Greeks are an advanced civilization, and thus can build with stone. This allows them to build huge, stable cities. Their god pantheon is strongly slanted towards mercantilism and management. Priests of every Greek temple add to management, with Aphrodite adding to the training of agents, and the Hermes priest adding to trade income. Aphrodite and Nike have no other ancillaries attached to them, although Aphrodite increases fertility in both cities and individual generals, while Athena has fasces that add to law and order. Hermes has a large number of ancillaries that all add to trade, tax income, and management.

Thus the Greek states are a faction that is strongly tilted to create huge stable cities that generate lots and lots of income. They benefit from being the epicenter of Hellenic culture and are generally admired by their neighbors. Their central geographic location, and their ownership of the Rhodes statue, positions them perfectly for very high trade income. But, they are saddled with an obsolete and defensively-postured military.

To play the Greeks successfully, then, you have to realize that the best weapons the Greeks have available for world conquest are stone walls, diplomats, long range artillery, and deep pockets.

The various hoplites available to you are ill-suited for offensive maneuvers in the open field, so you will mostly have to depend on mercenaries and long-range attack missiles for your offensive armies. Defensively, you can sit behind your stone walls and rip most attackers apart with your missiles and artillery, while protecting your city streets and any wall breeches with your phalanxes.

Luckily, nearly all of the Macedonian and rebel forces near you are highly admiring of your culture and readily convert directly into your armies. Rebel cities around the Aegean are also easily bribed and domesticated. More than any other faction, the Greeks must flood the region with their diplomats and spies, for bribery and intelligence, while assassinating the occasional enemy general holdout who becomes recalcitrant to converting to the Greek way of life. At the same time, you must concentrate on building up trade and developing your cities into economic powerhouses that can fund the diplomatic persuasion that is your most effective means of conquest.

On your first turn, build ports in all your cities. Build shrines to Hermes in Rhodes and Syracuse. Send one diplomat towards Halicarnassus and the other to the Scipii in Messana. Set all taxes to very high and start moving your nascent fleet towards Thermion. You know Syracuse is going to be a hot spot, so have your general there go outside the city and hire a hoplite and peltast. Yes, these are extremely expensive at this stage of the game, but you desperately need to beef up your defenses in Syracuse. You just as desperately need a navy, so you have to use Syracuse and Rhodes to build ships this very first turn.

On vh, you are certain to be attacked very early by Scipii and/or Carthage in Syracuse and by the Brutii at Thermion. Occasionally the Brutii fleet heading towards Thermion has a nasty encounter with pirates and the Romans get chased off course and don’t attack you so early—this only means the Carthaginians with their elephants will be knocking first on Syracuse’s gate, with the Scipii following up later. It is actually easier to deal with the Romans instead of the Carthaginians and their archery units.

You are not going to be able to extract much money from selling trade rights to anybody, but it is worthwhile to haggle for them anyway. Start high, around 1000 (2000 with the Macedonians) and keep splitting the difference between the amounts offered. This way you can usually end up with about 300 from Brutii and Carthage, and about 600 from the Macedonians. I think it’s worthwhile to wait until you have roads in Pergamon and Halicarnassus before negotiating with the Seleucids.

In Asia Minor, your diplomat should first bribe the free rebel army near Halicarnassus, then bribe the city, then backtrack to arrange trade rights with the Seleucids. Both the Seleucids and the Macedonians will often agree to an alliance if you wait one turn after the trade agreement. I have yet to be able to extract any cash for these alliance agreements, but then, you need friends right now to help throw off the Romans, so even without money the alliances are worthwhile.

On your second turn, build a Hermes temple in Rhodes and a trader in Syracuse. You should definitely have at least one of each type of temple, for ancillaries if nothing else. But you already have a Nike temple in Sparta, and Athens will usually come with an Athena shrine. I typically put Aphrodite in Thermion. Otherwise, since you are playing an economic game, Hermes is your default choice of temple.

Also on your second turn, you must immediately move all of your ships to Thermion. (You should have started your flotilla around Rhodes towards Thermion on your first turn.) Only by getting 4 ships (3 you started with near Rhodes, plus the 1 you built in Syracuse) to the coast of Thermion by turn 3 will you be able to turn away the Brutii invasion. On vh, you MUST have 4 ships against their 3 ships to have any chance of winning this naval battle. Build a diplomat in Sparta. I often build one in Thermion at this time, too.

On your third turn, you should have your 4 ships at Thermion now and should be able to intercept the Brutii, who will be at your coastline. Naturally, this starts a war with all the Romans, but you have to figure that anyone who sends a fleet with an invasion army to your shores is not overly interested in just playing pattycake with you. Your 4 ship flotilla actually has a better than average chance of beating the Brutii at sea. (Surprise!) If you do beat them at sea, the Brutii army will not have the chance to land.

If they do land, you will have to bribe as many Macedonians and rebels as you can from the surrounding provinces and prepare for battle at Thermion. Most of the army you will have available to oppose the Romans will be militia hoplites and peltasts. In other words, your guys really suck. You can’t hope to compete head to head with the Roman hastati—who after all were developed specifically to beat the snot out of phalanxes like yours. In addition, your prissy little militia hoplites will crumble early and often in battle, and your general’s cav cannot stand up to a melee with the Roman bodyguard cav. Your only hope is to outnumber the Romans, and to flank them with the (mostly) peltast army that simultaneously sallies from Thermion.

With this in mind, if you have lost the naval battle, gather anyone you can, including troops from Sparta (I leave the Spartan hoplites and peasants in Sparta and take the rest) and park them next to the Brutii stack. The Brutii will assault the city on the 2nd or 3rd turn of their siege if you don’t bring reinforcements. During the battle, try to stall as long as you can before making contact. It is usual to take your hoplites out of phalanx formation to move them around, then switch them back when you are ready to close. But here there is no reason to hurry. Take as long as you can before the Romans get impatient and charge your lines. You want the AI-controlled general from Thermion to have enough time to come in on the Roman flank.

Even though you are only fighting with peltasts and militia hoplites, this is a pretty important battle. If you destroy the Roman force, the Brutii will have to go back and rebuild—though this is not too much of a problem for them on vh, where they gets scads of money. If the Romans win, you will likely lose Thermion and be on the defensive/losing end for a long time to come—possibly until the end of the game, when you lose. So it’s important that you win this battle; but, don’t rush to make first contact on the field. Take your time, keep your phalanx line well organized, your peltasts in tight and just slightly ahead of your phalanxes, and wait for your AI-controlled army to catch up to you before starting your attack. Also very important is to grab whatever altitude you can. The terrain is quite hilly in this region. Set up your army on a hilltop and wait for your reinforcements.

You can build another diplomat in Pergamon and send him walking around the Black Sea to sell trade rights. Also, bribe the rebel army near Halicarnassus at this time. This will probably use up all your money for the turn, but the rebel army comes with a couple of missile troops, including a precious archers. I use this army to domesticate Halicarnassus when I bribe it next turn, so I prefer to make sure I get the troops now. In Syracuse, I build a militia barracks—there are arguably other options, but I know Syracuse is going to be a hot zone very quickly and want to do whatever I can to prepare.

Militia hoplites are virtually useless. They have such low morale that they really can’t fight much better than peasants. Because they can at least form a phalanx, they are better than peasants as a last ditch defense of your city streets. But their morale is so low that they typically bolt after losing just a handful of men, even with your general standing directly behind them. At least they don’t cost any more in maintenance than peasants. It’s ok to buy a couple of militia hoplites per city as an emergency reserve and garrison, but don’t waste money on stocking up on a horde of them. Thus, I prefer to build both a militia barracks and an archery range in Syracuse right away, and just hope to end up with enough time to complete them before the sieges start. You should have these two buildings near the top of your list for Syracuse.

Once you do throw the Brutii out of Greece, or keep them from landing, you need to consolidate your position. You might be tempted to expand a little by capturing the rebel town Apollonia. But Apollonia gives the Romans another close target to attack, so don’t take it unless you’ve got a lot of fighting forces left over from the battle of Thermion and absolutely everything else is secure. It is probably better to let the Macedonians have Apollonia for now, if they go after it. That way you don’t have to worry about protecting two cities from the Brutii naval invasions.

Athens, however, is reasonably well protected and will grow to a huge city quite easily. Don’t let the Macedonians capture it. Bribe any besieging Macedonian army (the Macedonian faction leader tends to sit at home and let others do the besieging), and then bribe Athens—typically with less than 4000 denarii. You should also send a diplomat and possibly a couple of militia hoplites to Crete to bribe Kydonia. Crete is a trade bonanza and will greatly aid your economic game.

Meanwhile you have rattled the Brutii at Thermion and must now take steps to keep them on the ropes. On turn 3, build ships in every port you can. Usually you need to win battles against an enemy ship 3 or more times before you can sink it. So, you need to have lots and lots of ships that you can place all over what you claim as Greek waters and can then chase down the runaway ships you have just beaten 2 or 3 times in battle. Otherwise, the enemy will simply dock, rebuild and retrain, and you have to start after them all over again.

It was surprising to me that I could actually win naval battles as the Greeks with less than 3:1 odds. After playing the Julii and Gauls, where less than 3:1 odds against even the lowliest of bilgewater barges resulted in an automatic defeat, the Greeks seem to get almost a fair shake from the naval autoresolve. Dedicate Rhodes (and later Crete) to pumping out ships. For now, ignore building ground troops in most of your cities and push out more ships instead. You really, seriously, need a strong navy as the Greeks, and the AI factions build huge numbers of ships. Throughout the game, don’t bother building military buildings on the island cities. Just build blacksmiths and armorers and build ships there turn after turn.

It’s best to have your ships gathered into flotillas of about 5 ships each at this point. Once you can sink the Brutii ships and blockade their ports, they cease to be an immediate threat to you, since their only provinces are surrounded by other Romans. You have to watch out, though, for the Julii and SPQR fleets that will be sent to help your most immediate Roman enemies. You also have to watch out for new ship builds that the Romans will fill up with invasion armies intended for your shores. Target any ship carrying army units with extreme prejudice.

Once you have pruned back the Roman navies, they will only be able to build 1 or 2 ships per turn each, and will never be able to regain enough naval force projection to get off of Italy—although they will certainly continue to try! (Of course, you must continue to maintain the extra ships scattered around the Aegean and Adriatic to smash the newly-built Roman ships. A single ship needs only 6 sailors on it to survive until the next turn and can still carry an entire 20 unit army to your shores, so make sure you completely sink the new builds, not just damage them.)

You must continue to build ships like mad while continuously upgrading your economic buildings. Because you need large numbers, try to retrain your ships rather than combine them after battle. This lowers your overall xp bonuses per unit, but eventually you will gain chevrons anyway as your superior numbers win more and more naval battles.

Take time out of your build queue to build blacksmiths and armorers to upgrade your ships. Send a couple of diplomats to the northeast and southeast to get more trade agreements, possibly even an alliance with Egypt. Bribe off any Scipii armies that start to form in Sicily. Bribe off any rebels that show up in Greece—these last will usually add directly to your forces instead of disbanding. If you can get Athens, Kydonia, and Apollonia for cheap bribes, then do so. Otherwise, it is cheaper to simply starve them out in a siege instead of assaulting them.

With Athens, if you could not muster the cash to bribe its allegiance, you can often pull the trick of separating your general from the main stack and having him besiege the city by himself. The rebel forces will often attack him, resulting in only the general’s unit in front of the city, and your entire captain’s stack coming in as reinforcements. Run your general over to the reinforcements, and the rebel sally attempt will chase after him. You will get to meet the rebel forces with your re-united army far from the city. It should then be easy to rout the enemy and kill them all before they can get back inside the city walls, thereby winning the entire city. Of course, you must be careful to stack all your generals together and leave the main stack in charge of a captain. If there is a general commanding the main stack, it will be AI-controlled. You must also be careful to reduce each and every rebel unit to 5 men or less, so that no rebel units survive.

In general, develop your cities by checking the city details screen to see which new build will add the most income. Build 3 or 4 diplomats in Greece, a couple in Asia Minor, and one more in Sicily, but make sure you always have enough money to retrain any damaged ship units. Spend any leftover money available on building new ships.

Once you have thrown back the Brutii and captured Athens from the rebels, you are ready to embark on the cultural conquest of the world. Keep your diplomats out and active and bribe every army you find in Sicily, and every Macedonian army wandering the countryside. Bribing the Macedonians keeps them weak, which you want because Macedonia will eventually attack you, alliance or no. Both the Carthaginians and the Scipii really need their cities on Sicily, and without them the factions are simply not competitive. Keep these factions as weak as you can by bribing every army of theirs foolish enough to venture out of town. Eventually you plan to hire/build a strong enough force to take over Sicily for yourself.

Bribed Macedonians will transfer their low level units directly to your armed forces and, while they are crappy units, they are good for garrison work and for subduing newly conquered cities. Meanwhile, you want to continue to beat the Brutii down. Lacking any other outlet, the Brutii will build armies, then load them into ships and try to cross the Aegean to you. Pound these invasion ships mercilessly until you sink them. By the time you are ready to invade Italy, the Brutii will be a mere shell of a faction, with a tiny garrison in their two measly cities.

The Scipii will also expend themselves by trying to offload at Messana. I usually go after Messana first, even though this has the consequence of letting Carthage remain relatively strong in Lilybaeum. Geographically this makes sense, because the Carthaginians are much further west, and you will not be able to pass through the straits of Messina securely until you have virtually eliminated all the Romans. Once you capture the city of Messana, the Scipii will exert all their efforts at trying to re-capture it, and you can post a strong garrison and a diplomat there to keep them from any success until you are ready to conquer Capua. (Later you will need a skilled assassin to attack armies that have landed there and are led by the Scipii leader or heir.)

Diplomatically, you will have trouble making alliances once the war with the Romans starts, because all four Roman factions will have diplomats out trying to whip up worldwide support for their cause. This has a snowballing effect as more and more nations bring their own allies into the fray, and you can easily end up in a world war scenario. Only the Egyptians seem immune to Roman blandishments, and you can usually get an alliance with them that will help you when the Seleucids declare war on you. The Eastern factions, Armenia, Parthia, Pontius, and even Scythia, typically squabble among themselves during this time, but the Gauls, Dacians, and Thracians often declare war in support of your enemies, Roman and otherwise. Once you get entangled in 6 or so wars, it is difficult to unravel this Gordian knot. The easiest solution is to simply cut through it by eradicating one ally, then suing for peace against the other. (Or just kill them all and let God sort them out!)

Being at war with just about everyone in the world except Egypt and the faroff East can be scary, but you can handle it if you have enough money. Like the in-game Cicero quote says, infinite funds are the sinews of war. Bribe any army you see walking around, then bribe the nearest city. Macedonian, Seleucid, and even some Thracian units will convert directly into your armies, and you can then use these to garrison the city you just bribed. So, it is not too difficult to expand slowly to the north out of Greece and to the east in Asia Minor. Keep up your economic development and, by the time you push the Macedonians out of Europe, you should be making 20k per turn, even on vh.

(Incidentally, it is not uncommon for Cyrene to revolt, then convert to the Macedonians. If you have captured all the Macedonian cities in Greece and still didn’t get the “faction destroyed” notice, you will find the remnants of Macedonian hegemony in Cyrene. Thanks to the shared culture, a diplomat is often all you need to capture this former outpost.)

Theoretically, it is possible to play an entire Greek campaign with only about 20 battles—one each for each faction’s leader and heir stacks. In practice, you will have a number of city defenses and other battles. You will not always have the cash to bribe the next city, since you still have to be pumping out a competitive navy, so you will want to besiege some cities. Use the general and captain stack trick for most of these, and it is probably best that you almost never actually assault a city. Remember that your military is slanted very strongly towards the defensive. So anytime you can manipulate events to where you can choose the terrain and wait for the attack to come to you, it is greatly to your benefit. The AI will usually try a last ditch sally out of the city in any case, so there is really no rush forcing you to battle things out as the attacker.

When your own garrison is besieged, you want to have taken appropriate preparation and use this preparation to sally early and often. Build stone walls wherever you can, and protect your cities with 3 or 4 archers, be they merc Cretans or your own builds. Put the archers on the ramparts over the main gate, then march your infantry and peltasts out the front door. Line them up just in front of the city gates, so that they are under the protection of your archers, and this is often enough to entice the enemy into charging at least their cav at you. You typically have inferior forces in your garrison, compared to the attacking army, so don’t try to fight to the death outside your city walls. Melee and do as much damage as you can without straying too far outside, then let your units rout back into the city. Don’t bother to regroup and send them out again. When everyone is back inside the city, hit the escape key, and the pop-up will say your sally was successful and you can leave the battle with a “draw” result. You have lost some men, but so did the besiegers. Your main killers, the archers, were mostly out of harm’s way up on the ramparts, and you can sally again next turn. By sallying each turn, you can whittle the besieging force down to a manageable size that you can finally attack. Even better is to kill the enemy commanding general, which removes the entire heavy cav bodyguard unit, and then makes the entire army stack available for a cheap bribe at the start of the next turn!

So, continue to expand north and east. The nearest factions are all of Hellenistic culture and will not prove too acute a problem for you. Just take it slowly and consolidate each city into your empire as you go along. Dacia will likely go to war with you, but even though they have a different cultural base, they are not much of a problem since their best unit, falxmen, have no shields and are very vulnerable to all kinds of missile fire. Plus, Dacia typically has lots of territory, but no ports, which makes them a poor nation, and they cannot easily replace the armies you bribe to disband.

The Gauls are scarier, once they start fielding foresters. Since the Julii have probably spent their time trying to help out their cousins against you in Greece and Sicily, the Gauls likely are a formidable faction and still own northern Italy. You really don’t want to have to fight the Gauls and forester warbands if you don’t have to, especially since your phalanxes are vulnerable to missiles. Take lots of diplomats and cav. Bribe them when possible and send your cav to knock out the foresters first when you can’t. If you have managed to get one of your cities up to over 12000 pop, then by all means build onagers. Barbarians are very fearful of fireballs, plus a few onagers make a quick hash of the wooden walls around barb cities.

Seleucids are a piece of cake for the Greeks. I have found they are extremely cheap to bribe—in effect, they are anxious to join up with your faction, which is leading the re-ascendancy of Hellene culture. But you want to be careful about going too far against the Seleucids. As long as they are weak but still alive, they stand as a protective buffer between you, the Egyptians, and the Eastern factions. It’s good to keep them from building up huge armies, and you certainly don’t want them marching up next to your cities, but it’s probably best to just toss them out of modern Turkey and let them stew in their own juices, bribing off any wandering armies, until you have secured Italy.

I have actually found that the Egyptians make excellent allies for the Greeks. The Egyptians are far enough away that they don’t covet your lands, yet you and they share a common neighbor in the Seleucids—and the Seleucids will often unexpectedly declare war on you. As long as you don’t bother the Egyptians on Cyprus and allow them to hold onto it, the Egyptians will later send lots of very large fleets northward to patrol the Aegean and around the Bosphorous. These Egyptian fleets come in extremely handy in that they pretty much patrol your eastern seas for you so that you can concentrate on the Adriatic and the crossings to Italy and Sicily. This can be especially important when you are fighting a mixture of Macedonians, Thracians, Seleucids, and possibly the Pontiacs, all of whom are launching ships at you, while you are also at war with the 4 Roman factions and Carthage. The sheer numbers of the Egyptian ships allows you to win a large number of naval battles in the Aegean against a number of enemies that would otherwise overwhelm you. Once you get an alliance with Egypt, keep on their good side, support their wars, and keep their alliance for the rest of the game. You can make the 50 provinces needed to win the game without heading further south than Seleucia.

If you have done your job properly in defeating the Roman navies, all the Roman factions are by now mere shadows of their historical selves. Throwing the initial Brutii invasion of Thermion back into the sea pulls the linchpin out of the entire Roman gameplan. The Brutii have nowhere to go but to try and re-invade you. The Scipii will focus on trying to take Syracuse from you, even to the point of ignoring Carthage and Lilybaeum. If you hold onto Thermion and your other mainland territories, you will make enough money to repulse the Scipii and even take Messana from them. This leaves the Scipii with only Capua, and they will thereafter dedicate their sole efforts to recapturing Messana. The Roman Senate is never very aggressive, but will join all the ships they normally build into a single big armada and send them to the Aegean/Adriatic to fight with your navy. With the other Roman factions stymied, the Julii will give up all thoughts of western conquests of the Gauls et al. and will start building boats and armies to try and aid their cousins by invading Apollonia or Thermion.

You have to have been continuously pumping out new boats, upgrading with dockyards, blacksmiths, and armorers as you can afford it, while retraining (not recombining) damaged ship units in Thermion. All this naval activity will eventually get your starting boats up to gold chevrons, and you will be quite successful at stripping the Romans of all their dreams and aspirations as long as you always attack at sea with odds of about 1.3:1 or better, assuming equal xp chevrons and armor.

Sinking a Roman invasion force always gives me a special feeling of satisfaction. Each Roman army unit represents 400 gold and a full turn of production from one of their 2 cities per faction. Chasing their transport down and finally sinking a boat(s) containing an army of 9 or 10 hastati and a couple of velites is simply devastating to all Roman hopes, regardless of the faction the troops belonged to.

If you have been assiduous in attacking and eventually sinking all the Roman ships sent at you, then all of Italy will be a paper tiger by the time you have finished off the Macedonians. Send a spy, a trained assassin, 1 or 2 diplomats, and a general, if not an actual invasion army. The general is needed to buy mercs once you get there. The diplomat is to bribe wherever possible, whether it be cities or armies. The spy can spot approaching armies so your general doesn’t get caught by surprise, and the assassin is to remove faction leaders and heirs, so that the diplomat can bribe the remainder, and to soften up cities just prior to besieging them. If you have properly stripped down the Romans, you should be able to rip through the Brutii as fast as you can generate/hire enough garrisons to control the former Roman cities (after you have exterminated most of their populations).

The sticking point in Italy will be the main stack from the Senate. By this time the Senate stack will be headed by the faction heir or leader. The Senate will not travel so far as to help the Brutii, but they will come to the defense of Capua. You will have to buy all the mercs you can, and will likely have to ship an army of your own to Italy in order to attack Capua. Take care to place your army on the hills around Capua when you begin the siege. The higher altitude is invaluable in the battle that is sure to occur when the Roman stack comes to relieve the siege of Capua. Archers, onagers, and your hoplites as a defensive bulwark, should all be placed high on a hillside and will win this battle for you against superior Roman troops and numbers.

Once you win this major battle, the Senate and the Scipii will be exhausted and will fall quickly to your assaults. This leaves only the Julii, which have huge cash reserves as an AI faction. However, your denial of the Adriatic to the Brutii will have caused the Julii to neglect any western expansion. They will have lots of money, but only 3 cities to build out of each turn.

So, you can expect some reasonably big battles to eradicate the Julii, but by this time you should have worked your way through the Dacians and are knocking on both their north and south borders. Dacia is mostly a pure bribe play. They are so spread out, they have difficulties mustering major armies. Bribe every Dacian small army before they can connect together. Once you take Porrolissium and Campus Iazygus, the Dacians are dead but just don’t realize it yet. The rest is simply mopping up.

Generally, this is the same approach you should take against all of your enemies, including the Macedonians, Thracians, Dacians, and Seleucids—as well as the Germans, although typically the Germans are too focused on the Britons to bother with you until very late in the game. Support the Egyptians in their war(s) with any of the Eastern factions, conquer Sicily and the Romans in Italy, and you will soon be able to claim your Greek victory.

In all, the Greeks seem about as pure a strategic and economic game as there can be in RTW. 80% or more of your battles should be just auto-resolved naval battles, with only a few required defensive efforts and siege sallies played out on the battle map. The rich treasury and high cultural influence of the Greeks, coupled with their military being suited best for defense, makes expansion by diplomacy the most logical and straight forward methodology for the Greeks. As long as you prohibit the Romans from getting a foothold in Thermion, build enough ships to control the Adriatic and Aegean, and continuously upgrade your economic buildings, you can afford to pay off virtually the entire rest of the world to join your faction, and this makes the Greeks one of the easier factions to play in RTW.