Originally Posted by
AnonMilwaukean
Just finished the campaign on Hard as the Roman Expedition (and staying loyal rather than declaring independence), so I'll add the following to what I already wrote above:
1) The Moors and Langobards just pop out of nowhere when they appear. I also found it rather hilarious that when the Langobards appear, the text is literally The Langobards Are Coming! I mean, that's hilarious to me... what, are the Langobards the Redcoats, and is the text being spoken by Paul Revere? But on a serious note, it's a little silly that full stacks appear out of thin air without almost any warning. The first time you play the Gems quest and decide to enter Berber territory, you have no way of knowing that the Moors will appear all along the south rather than in one or two spots on the edge of the Sahara. Found this to be annoying, and I commented on it above.
2) The Roman Empire is not particularly good at doing anything useful offense-wise. Not a big deal since that would sort of defeat the purpose, but they are incredibly woeful much of the time.
3) Fortunately, the Roman Empire is pretty sensible about immediately changing buildings in settlements you reclaim so as to increase happiness and provide a garrison. Was pleasantly surprised to check the garrison info and city info several times during the campaign to find that right away buildings were being changed up by the AI. Very little in the way of rebellions in reclaimed territory during the game, which helps keep things fun (as opposed to playing whack-a-mole with rebels every few turns).
4) The map is significantly bigger than the HatG map from R2 (which is the closest equivalent for maps). Further, the terrain is way more detailed, with numerous rivers, forests, and mountains. It takes a long time to cross North Africa, and going up Italy also takes a good amount of time. It makes for a lot more campaign strategy regarding movement and positioning of armies.
5) Too many free armies as reinforcements. I feel like the number of free armies you get throughout the campaign would be fine if it was just an occasional extra army via quest rewards. I mean, I'm used to playing as the Huns (who are one of my favorite sides), so maybe it's just me, but even before the first free army I had already turtled up a bit in the Carthage area and saved growth to pop out an extra horde. Even without having done that, I still feel like the last 1-2 armies I got I did nothing with except delete the units, build income-producing buildings, and then filling with slingers just to meet the victory conditions (140 units and 10,000 income are kinda lame objectives given that by the time you have all of Italy it's pretty much game-set-match anyways).
6) Breath of fresh air to not have the Huns to contend with every end-game.
7) Unit balance was great, and enemy armies had reasonable compositions (like an Ostrogoth army actually having 11 Germanic Warband, 2 Onagers, 4 Cavalry, and 4 Missile units to go with their general? That's outstanding compared to some of what I saw from non-Hunnic sides in the GC).
Overall, I really, really like this campaign, and was not entirely expecting to given that I'd hoped for a wider, GC-scale Justinian campaign. Terrain-wise, I feel like this is the most detailed map I've played on in the entire series, with numerous rivers, enough mountain passes, deserts, forests, coasts, etc. Moreover, the different playable factions actually all seem like they'd be interesting to play as. Rather than a bunch of 1-settlement factions all in Germania (where the Huns eventually will come through), each faction has a good chunk of land in a very different climate from most of the rest (desert vs mountains vs plains/forests). That said, I have no idea how playing as the Vandals would go... they ended up getting attacked by myself (the expedition), the Sardinians, and even the Roman Empire (Carthage itself was under siege by the Roman Empire, a rarity of an event to see from the Roman Empire in my campaign just now).
I did have a few nit-picky things, most of which I listed above, but by-and-large it's probably one of the best campaigns from either R2 or Attila, and it is a contended for Shogun 2's campaigns, even.
The only big thing I could really point out is that I obviously played the faction the campaign was most meant for... I doubt the other factions have the level of detail and lore that the Expedition does. Regardless, now I'm interested to try the other sides (notably the Ostrogoths).