How do you avoid eternal war on everyone at once?

[Vesa]

I am almost never able to convince anyone to go to peace with me.... even if I am twice as powerfull as the second most powerfull empire in the game and they are on their last city, and I negotiate with a lvl 9 diplomat in their capital.... and offer them my first born as a sexual slave.

I've played dozens upon dozens of games for hundreds of turns but I ALWAYS GIVE UP by the time I get far because eventually EVERYONE declares war on me and though mighty I may be, I can not afford to defend all my cities...

Usually what breaks my back is egypt declaring war on me for no reason and blockading my ports.

In my current game I have the better part of 150 ships blocking *EVERY* port on the north shore of the mediteranean I do not own, every one on the east of the mediteranean, most of the atlantic coast...(Brittain decided not to declare war on me. I have no idea why). I own most of the best port cities in the game... my income per turn is enormous.

BUT I CAN NOT FIGHT EVERYONE! >< The cost of having an army large enough to defend my territory is greater then I can ever handle.....

Any general tips to not dying of massive financial burden from trying to defend myself near the end?

[Shadows]

Well, knowing what faction you're playing would help. I assume that its the Romans. In that case, there is little that you ca ndo, mot factions ill declare war on you at some point in the game. I would like to point out that being at war with a faction and acutally fighting them is different. I doubt that you need the huge navy you supposedly have. I would suggest that you get several large navies and block off parts of your terrritories. If you're the Romans put a navy between Sicily and Italy, put a couple between Italy and Applonia and that right there should help keep the Egyptians out of a fwe of your ports atleast. and don't worry about being at war with several factions. as long as you only border one or two, maybe three ifits a weak faction, you should be okay. I suggest you go defensive in one region and offensive in another. DOn't try to expand in mroe than one region at a time. It will cause you to get too streched out. Play it safe in one spt will you pound the crap out of your enemies in another. Thats about all I can tell you right now. But if you post your faction, the territories you own and the factions you are at war with, I can help you more. A screenshot of the campaign map would be very helpful too.

[Vesa]

Merged double post. - Trajan

I am Greece.

I loaded back a bit and started replaying.... summary: Egypt, Selucid, romans, pontus, thrace are all at war with me. I have a large naval force near constantinople to stop selucid or thrace from blockading me.

I have every bruuti city blockaded with a huge fleet in each.

Every other port on the map which is visible(except carthages) are also blockaded but the non brutii ones have smaller forces which can't hold out forever l ike the bruutii ones are. The bruutii fleets are large enough they are never attacked.

Shortly after this point most of the other important countries declared war on me, I loaded back to when Egypt declared war, which is right here. Egypt declaring war really hurt because as always, they are the #2 player and I lost alot of trade money.

All of my cities are quite well defended.... except for sicily which does not need it and greece, which has 3 or 4 stacks all together between the cities... it does not need a huge occupying force in every city. My cities east of greece proper all have a large military prescence. I have a large economy in most of my cities and am making *ALOT* of money... but once egypt declares war, the cost of defending all my ports becomes too huge for me to handle.... selucids and thrace are hammering me with a seemingly never ending stack of units. I keep winning but its really becoming costly... not in terms of units, they do not kill that many, but having my cities sieged hurts.

As you can see from the map, I own some serious cash cow cities..... except that as the game progresses I am forced to put a descent # of the ones far from my capital to low taxes, to keep them from rebelling :/

My armies are composed almost entirley of standard hoplites, which are the long speared variety though I have started fielding armored hoplites latley... sometimes I include a unit or 2 of archers, or ballistas for sieges. I win most battles with very few casualties.

[NobleNick]

I am Greece.... summary: Egypt, Selucid, romans, pontus, thrace are all at war with me. ...Shortly after this point most of the other important countries declared war on me

I have every bruuti city blockaded with a huge fleet in each.

Every other port on the map which is visible(except carthages) are also blockaded but the non brutii ones have smaller forces which can't hold out forever l ike the bruutii ones are. The bruutii fleets are large enough they are never attacked.

All of my cities are quite well defended.... except for sicily which does not need it and greece, which has 3 or 4 stacks all together between the cities... I have a large economy in most of my cities and am making *ALOT* of money... but once egypt declares war, the cost of defending all my ports becomes too huge for me to handle.... selucids and thrace are hammering me with a seemingly never ending stack of units. I keep winning but its really becoming costly... not in terms of units, they do not kill that many, but having my cities sieged hurts.

As you can see from the map, I own some serious cash cow cities..... except that as the game progresses I am forced to put a descent # of the ones far from my capital to low taxes, to keep them from rebelling :/

My armies are composed almost entirley of standard hoplites, which are the long speared variety though I have started fielding armored hoplites latley... sometimes I include a unit or 2 of archers, or ballistas for sieges. I win most battles with very few casualties.

Vesa,

Good communication on your situation. But I don't think I saw: what difficulty are you playing? I've comleted several campaigns on H/H or VH/H in 1.5 vanilla RTW. Severous and I are currently in a SWAP game as Greece, on VH/VH; but it is still early in the game, so I don't have any solid Greece experience on which to pull, yet. However, I see several things that you can do.

1.) First off, I think you are doing the right thing with your blockades. As was mentioned, it might be possible to do the same job with fewer ships. Are all your ships trained in a city which has an awesome/Pantheon of Nike and a foundry?

2.) You can control costs by cutting down on your military a bit. Since you say that you are having this problem over and over, not just this game; my guess is that you have a systemic problem that has nothing to do with the faction you happen to be playing now. And my further guess is that you are using too much muscle to get the job done. I have the same tendency: wanting to kill a flea with a meat axe. If you are winning very easily, then you can get by with fewer troops on land and on sea. It is O.K. to lose occasionally, and it can even help your bottom line. (I notice that my budget surplus always shoots way up after I have suffered high military losses.) Oh, and make sure that the troops that you do have are all upgraded, so that you get the most bang for your buck. (My guess is that you are already doing this last part; with, say, Nike Pantheons AND foundries in all your military build cities.)

3.) I believe trade is by cities. So if you want that Egyptian trade back, take their cities.

4.) You want an empire that is easy to defend. Again, taking Egypt seems the right thing to do, since their territory is very easily defended if your ships control the Eastern Med.

5.) If your military is as good as you say (and I believe that it is), park the stacks that are defending your cities outside each city. Then, when your stack gets engaged, your city is not being seiged.

6.) In general, divde and conquer. I know that this is not a direct answer to your original question on how to keep everyone from ganging up on you; but having every important faction ticked off at you in the late game is par for the course. You **CAN** win with everyone at war with you, as long as at least a few of them are also ticked off at each other. The way I do it is to figure out who the easiest or most profitable thorn in my flesh to get rid of, and then obliterate them. I would not personally chose to take on any Roman faction, at this time, other than to fend them off your shores. Egypt seems like a likely candidate for you. Once you get into the Egyptian underbelly, you will find that they have almost no garrisons, because their temples give them awesome happiness bonuses. Keep those temples, and follow their example of very light garrisons in the heart of your newly conquered territory. This will balance out those other cities in your empire that need large garrisons.

7.) Sometimes people get into trouble because they built too many farm upgrades, and then have to maintain expensive garrisons to keep the larger population in check. Make sure this is not your problem.

8.) If some hole-in-the-wall faction, like Thrace, is being a pain in the posterior, mount up a stack, take one of their cites, exterminate it (lots of cash), RAZE all buildings you can (more cash), leave the burnt out hulk to the rebels, and move on to another city. Repeat as long as necessary for them to get the message. If their stacks are busy trying to retake their own devastated cities away from rebels, then those stacks are not parked in front of your cities. The same "scorched earth" dirty trick works well against Egypt (but don't raze the temples).

9.) Do a cost analysis of your troops. For instance: for Rome, the Urban Cohort cost over 1.5 times as much as Legionary Cohort ("LC" for short), but were only 1.33 times as effective. Auxilia cost only half as much as LC; but were only one-quarter as effective. I haven't done this for Greece, yet; but I've already noticed one thing: the Spartan Hoplite upkeep seems to be way too spendy for the advantage they give (if any) over Armored Hoplites. I've also noticed that they die way too easily from arrow fire to be paying that much for their upkeep. I would think that Armored Hoplites trained in a city with a Nike Pantheon and a foundry, would be a much more cost effective way to spank your opponents into oblivion.

Hope that helped.

[Goliath]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.


To put it simply find who most of your enemies are at war with and ally. But always keep troops garrisoned at your borders, even when their against you ally.

[Vesa]

I don't mean to be rude... but that advice is like saying "When playing RTW, make sure you use your mouse, thats the funny plastic slidy thing next to your keyboard." heh .

No one wants to ally with me at any price and I keep strong borders. Alliances are worthless anyway, the AI breaks them as quickly as they make them even when not beneficial.

My problem is not a military one, my problem is I can not afford to defend myself..... my expenses are huge, but my income is also huge... but when it gets disrupted, I loose... but I have no real way to lower my expenses or drastically increase my income.

[Kscott]

Your situation really does not look like a terribly hard one.

I personally would avoid asia minor, there really isn't any reason to persue options there at the moment.

Your greek homelands should be able to produce an army much stronger than thrace can handle and your Italian cities should be able to fight off the rest of the Julii. The Eygptians will be annoying, but as long as they aren't sending troops there really is not anything to worry about.

Starting producing armies in all your territories and you will soon find yourself with more troops then you know what to do with.

Anyways, good luck.

[Trajan]

Moved to the Total War Battle Planning sub-forum.

[EmperorJulian]

In my campaign as Macedon I've been facing a similar trial of strength. Holding all of Greece is a very good position to be in, but I recall a period of about 20 turns or so where I was essentially trapped in Greece, while Thrace, Dacia and all the Roman Factions were attacking my cities repeatedly. It became something of a stalemate in which they could make no headway against me, but I could not break out of Greece either. I've not had the oportunity to expand into Asia Minor, and in hindsight that's probably a good thing, I certainly don't need yet another front for war.

Getting into a tussle with the Romans is certainly going to take alot of time and effort regardless of who you are and what your position is in the RTW world. They never stop coming, they don't accept ceasfires, and they don't surrender until, in my experience, they are completely obliterated. Being at war with Rome means at least 4 factions will be on your case pretty much permanently. Bear in mind that RTW has this "nested" diplomatic structure in which if, say, Gaul is allied with Dacia, and Dacia is allied with Scythia, and Scythia is allied with Thrace; if you are at war with Thrace, Gaul, Dacia and Scythia will not ally with you and may become new thorns in your side.

It also seems that the more powerful you get, the less likely people are to ally with you. In my case, since the start of my campaign I've been at war with Thrace, the Greek Cities, the Bruti, the Scipiones, the Julii, SPQR, Dacia, and Germania. Due purely to the efforts of my enemies I've been forced into the unfavorable position of expanding from Greece into Eastern Europe, rather into Asia Minor (where I would prefer to be). No one will give me a ceasfire even when they've been pounded into absolute submission, as they say it is total war. I think, by looking at your provincial aquisitions, the game is just judging you to be in too good a position, and is thus making life hard for you on all sides.

One other thing, as Macedon, once I take a city I'm virtually impervious to assault. The Phalanx Pikemen I clog the streets with are very good at preventing anyone from actually winning a siege against me, and thus even while 4 or 5 of my border cities may be under siege, I rarely worry about loosing them. If you have tons of Hoplites and Armored Hoplites your cities should at the least be in a fairly secure position too. They may not be pikemen but if you block the roads with your men the enemy, whomever they may be, will find it most difficult to dislodge you. I wouldnt' worry too much about war on every front, so long as you keep your fronts small and your lines of communication open it's just a matter of biding your time until you can send out a few stacks to crush your enemies.

As a last bit of advice, avoid Ptolemaic Egypt, they are far more annoying than their worth. With that, I bid you a good night, cheers!

[mouthofsauron]

I am playing Greeks and have gone a little past the situation you are in; I've moved up the Adriatic coast to occupy Patavium and occupied all the states that form modern day Turkey.

I would say that Sardis in the Seleucid empire is normally quite vulnerable to being occupied as the Seleucids are normally busy defending against the Egyptians. They normally can't be bothered to take it back, and this gives a springboard to taking on Pontus and occupying the rest of Turkey.

Most of my cities have 4/5 units of Town Militia to keep order and are busy sending armoured Hoplites and Spartans to the borders. My normal army mix is about 6-8 Armoured Hoplites, 6-4 regular, 4-5 archer, 1 general, couple of cavalry (useless for anything except mopping up and raids on any artillery unless you have a greek faction which gets Cataphracts and Companion Cavalry).

My phalanx army normally forms up as a double line. The front line are the weaker hoplite troops which exhaust the enemy and absorb javelins before the armoured hoplites commit.

On top of this, I see you've occupied Crete and have western Turkey, which means you should be buying Cretan archers when they are available and using them to kill your enemy at long range. Just make sure that you preserve these units as they're one of the few archer units which can punch holes in the most heavily armoured troops. I have them walk out in front of the main phalanx, shoot rounds till the enemy start running forwards and then run back behind my phalanx line. At this point the enemy should just be advancing into range of your normal archers, but (here's the important bit) will turn round as your cretan archers go behind the phalanxes, opening the enemy to being shot in the back. If they don't turn round, they'll simply walk onto the spears of the hoplites.


You perhaps should be more agressive and less defensive. Even if one of your attacking armies is itself attacked, you can normally find a steep hill or a corner of the battlefield to defend with your phalanxes and keep the enemy in front of you. I have the few cavalry and a couple of the archers try and make them bleed and exhaust themselves before they reach the main phalanx line, by which time they're too tired to do anything but lie down and die at the end of your spears. Exterminating enemy cities is also a prime source of income for your empire, which stagnates if you try to keep it the same size.

It seems that "long spear" phalanxes i.e.Pikemen beat out normal Hoplites in face to face combat, you need a unit to bleed and one to hit them in the side or rear for success on this topic.

[Vesa]

Julian, I could utterly crush the romans... the scipii have one VERY small city left I did not waste my time with and I could just crush the Brutii. However utterly crushing the romans would open up a new front.... I'd need to expand out of Italy-which can be defended in 2 cities. Would crushing Rome make it easier to make peace with others? I do actually hold the city of Rome.

[Decimus Equitius]

Yes crush the romans and slaughter them all ! Push north to the Po river so that you have a natural defence. And Hold there until you destroy the Brutii, Thrace, and the Dacians in the east. The Julii shouldn't be much of a problem after you take their homeland, plus they should be at war with Gaul. You are bordered with too many different factions, so concentrate on destroying them one at a time. I'm not much for diplomacy so I couldn't help you on that front. Good Luck

[Hannibal Barca]

Your situation looks pretty good to me. I'm used to fighting everyone and (at least on VH) i consider everyone an enemy, regardless of diplomatic stance. This is because I know that sooner or later they will attack so why dont i attack first when it suits me.

Anyone, back to your situation. Greece alone, through sea trade, brings in soooo much money. If your ports are being blockaded then this is your number one priority. Build ships at every port in greece. Create a super fleet that will destory any that has blockaded you. I usually two strong fleets patrolling my coasts attacking ships that dare to blockade. Eventually, after many battle these become veterans to and so being blockaded lasts for 1 or 2 turns max. Plus it takes a faction like egypt a while to get ships over so defending should be easy.

If you take a few years to consolidate your empire, build forces without stretching your resources, rid the seas of enemy fleets you can look to expand again. Defend on all but one front. I would suggest taking all Italy and then you only have to defend northern italy (the two highest settlements) and due to mountain passes, and with the use of watchtowers and spies, you get plenty of notice.

It seems that north italy would only be one of two fronts. I would, as someone else suggested, forget asia minor if you can't handle it as well. North greece (Thessaly and the city west of it) should be easy to defend with a few stacks too. Near your mainland where you produce good troops, it should nt be difficult to produce quality armies and replenish them easily. Naval invasions are quite rare so they arent a huge problem. But have an emergency stack around problem areas to be dispatched quickly.

When you have norther Italy defend that front. It's noce to defend and i did it well with the numidians in my last campaign. Personally, my next target would be carthage, its a great city, super rich, good farmlands and very advanced. Also, your gain will cripple carthage thus reducing another threat. With carthage (and tarsus - below carthage, and caralis - sardinia) You could either work your way along africa to take on egypt (although that route is not rich and egypt will be tough, you may wish to build up elsewhere first) or now concentrate on asia minor. Its rich and closer to your homeland. Trade will be very high as well, especially the coasts opposite greece.

Well thats what i would do anyway. I wouldnt mind giving that game a go. If you wanted, you could send me that save file and i will play and report back what i did...

[Erwin Rommel]

do what the byzentines do when threatened bribed there enemies!

[Aemilianus]

You all have been talking about trade blockades- I am inclined to agree that your navy is quite large, and probably excessive for the task. Rome is not built as a naval game- navies are quite useful, but I use them in a very supplementary role, mostly in one or two fleets whose purpose is either landing 20 divisions at a time at points along the coast, or dealing with enemy blockade forces. In the games I play, blockade forces are almost never excessively large, and 10 divisions of ships should be quite sufficient at your point in the game to command the Aegean.

My suggestion is to put that money into your land forces, which do the real damage. I've been at war with 5 factions before, and I do agree- go on the defensive on most fronts, garrison bridges, build watchtowers, etc. The way I see it, you have two options here- build and land about 60 divisions (that's 3 stacks) and simply attack, garrison with 5-6 divisions after exterminating, and roll up Anatolia. If you are defeated, simply retreat back to the nearest walled city and retrain. Greeks are the best defensive troops in the game, and I haven't lost a battle with them in almost a year. Your other option is to send those 60 divisions into Italy, and smash the Romans. That is also lucrative, as you will take out the greatest threat of the game by far. My suggestion, depending on whatever city the Scipii have, you should probably take it out unless it's totally useless, and I have yet to find a totally useless city.

Once you have done one of these two things, you will either A. Have an advance directly into the face of Egypt. Your troops are better, but bring a lot of archers and cavalry. Roll them up, and when you get closer to Alexandria, judiciously land a supporting army. Problem solved. If you take option B, Carthage is probably your best bet, and you can roll up Egypt from the west.

[KingKoKaine]

In these threads, people always REFUSE to state what difficulty they are playing on. Even when directly asked, they won't say anything about it.

To the OP, and not to be rude, but the thread is kind of useless without telling us what difficulty settings you're playing on since that would drastically alter long term plans.

Also to the OP: You've actually gotten "snippy" with about 3 people in this thread who responded to your jibberish as best they could (and quite well at that). You got nasty when someone said that the romans should be avoided. You said "I could CRUSH the romans!!!"...then go do it and stop sitting here asking us what you should do to avoid war in a game called total war.

DERRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!

[Cavalier]

You could try to either bribe one city of theirs, and move one stack there. wait one turn, let them attack you, you punch the attack away, you retrain your soldiers and then go after them.
Or, you could skip the defense and go offensive one just ONE target. Pick them out one by one.
Offense is the best Defense.

[joorik]

1. Lose the huge fleets and go for more landarmies. Keep one tough fleet around greece to beat any ships coming there tho. Right now you are prolly spending more on your fleet than the trade income is worth.
2. Put one army in Italy and push to the alps. Those two towns there are easy to defend with one army and with them you defend all of Italy.
3. Conquer the islands. AI doesn't seem to the a huge fan of capturing them so they are easy to hold while providing a nice trade income.
4. Forget conquering Gaul and thrace and all the other inland crap. Go for meditarranean towns for income. If you capture the towns you don't need to blocade their ports.
5. Don't annihilate factions unless you really need their last town. Having a weak one-town faction on your border between you and a strong faction means that the strong faction wont probably declare war on you.

What I'm saying is don't blockade, lay siege. With romans in TE I tried this and it worked out well. You'll prolly suffer some blockades in the beginning but later on you will have clear trade routs on a large area that provides quite a large income. Then you can go and conquer the inland towns if you feel like it. Main problem is that the towns you conquer will be quite hard to hold at first since your armies will be moving on the coast as fast as possible. I suggest exterminating populace in all to provide some quick cash for your conquests and if you are certain you cant hold a city then demolish its buildings too (not sure if you can demolish ports, but if possible it would mean that the city cant produce enemy fleets). After some time the enemies that have lost their naval trade will be far weaker than before and you will be much stronger so you can hold an army for on the coast after some distance to relieve towns that enemies are sieging. This came out as quite long, but I tend to get carried away

PS! You can fight everyone. I've done it in most my campaigns, only thing I use diplomats for is bribing some minor enemy troops so that I wouldn't have to chase them around on the map. Have been playing on vh/vh or vh/h mainly as romans lately.

[Zuwxiv]

I have a similar problem to those above.

Playing as Epiros (TE mod, it is northern Greece/southern Italy) I have smashed through all of the Romans. They have one city left, which I could easily crush. Every turn I offer a ceasefire, but they have an intense hatred for me. Somehow they managed not only to train but to hide a full stack from my spies and diplomats, and attacked my city. I promptly destroyed it, eliminating the last possible chance of a Roman comeback. I want them to stay around (this all happened within 15 turns of the game) but they want victory or death.

Meanwhile across the sea a bit I'm facing Macedon and Greece. Greece is my ally, Macedon was allied with Rome. I decided to help the Greeks out and attacked the Macedonians successfully, capturing a city. Unfortunately, this city happened to mean that the Greeks had their entire land border covered by me, and although I was their ally and Macedon has some rich colonies ready to be taken, Greece backstabs me.

So in Italy I have Rome as an enemy, and Gaul is neutral, but allied with Rome and thus hostile. Across I have Greece and Macedon as an enemy.

Before my attack on Macedon (an enemy of my ally) my allies included: Germany, Thrace, Dacia, Carthage, Greece, and the Seleucids. That's a powerful alliance that could completely kick ass if we all worked together, but I'm stuck against a strong Greek resistance and Macedon has somehow summoned a full stack. I am making money and my economy is strong, thanks to trading agreements with Carthage, but I'm taking heavy losses. I can cripple an equal enemy force without losing more than maybe 40% of my troops, most of the time much less. (This is on a harder difficulty) and I don't get the diplomacy.

If I were to focus all of my attention at any one of my enemies, or if any of my allies were to help with a quarter of their troops, my enemies would be utterly crushed. Instead, they keep pushing on at me. I can see Macedon's resistance; they are fairly strong. But Rome? Greece? They don't stand a chance. Their only hope is that one of their allies will tie me up or that they will get a miracle.

So in Modern day Greece I have Macedon and the Greeks as enemies, although Greece and Macedon are enemies as well. A triangle of destruction, what about that.

[jaklei]

wow... i cant understand that you could get into an crappy sitouation while playing RTW in campaign mode... i am impressed! Can someone here post your worst campaigns here? Becouse i love turning around empires when they are close to defeat, i have never lost an campaign on VH/VH difficulty on all the mods ive played (RTR, DARTH, VLAD,TROY,Etc...etc...)

i will start an topic about posting saved games of an campaign that went terribly wrong, and btw when i first played the game as Scipii i crushed everyone on Hard/hard in N africa Spain gaul moving into britain, but then the brutiii superceeded me with greece up to the russian border and germania and some cities in asia minor and an HUGE army that was larger than the single superveteran stack that i used to conquer the chartaginians/ibera/gauls/germania in that order, thats my 2 cents.. but hey, ive had a few bad campaigns aswell.