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Thread: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

  1. #1

    Default Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    We all love roleplaying but sometimes we need to employ trickery just short of outright cheating. Share your powergaming tricks in this thread. For extra fun, try to explain these exploits in roleplaying terms. I'll start:

    • Worried about having your generals and armies rebel? Have them embark a ship, which effectively puts them into stasis. They cannot rebel. Roleplaying explanation: the ships contain cryogenic chambers.
    • Does your army appear to be barely within range to besiege a city, but upon dragging your cursor to the settlement you see the tip of the green arrow turn red? Have you cavalry besiege the settlement, then order your infantry to join up. Roleplaying explanation: the cavalry arrive to cause the settlement's inhabitants to panic and order a lockdown, effectively beginning the siege early.
    • Put up watchtowers around your settlement in the early game to attract and distract roving stacks. Roleplaying explanation: you spend 200 mnai to establish scouting parties which also kite enemy stacks as a side gig. They don't get paid for that.
    • Is your Faction Leader about to kick the bucket, and the Faction Heir is a 18 year old whose only knowledge of military tactics and statecraft what he learned in a lvl 2 school? Assemble an army of disposable levies and mercenaries and leave them between your empire's core and frontiers. Once your FL dies, this army will rebel shortly, and your FH can destroy it with a smaller but more elite stack. Boom, he's an established leader. Roleplaying explanation: sensing weakness in the Faction Heir, huge swaths of angry peasants and ambitious mercenaries gather to overthrow the empire, ironically becoming the first stepping stone for the Faction Heir to achieve supremacy.
    • If you don't want your FMs to become corrupt, station a diplomat near an allied faction and periodically gift them vast sums of cash. Not only does this keep your mnai under 50000, but it also wins the goodwill of a neighbor. Roleplaying explanation: you're funding a proxy war.
    • The Successor mechanic is rather inconsistent. I suspect that the only way for your designated Faction Heir-Heir to become Faction Heir is if all of the Faction Leader's children die off. Send the pretenders onto a ship and drop them off onto an island. Have them lose a battle and they're gone. Landlocked? Chances are your bodyguard is an unshakeable melee unit so suiciding them without having them flee should be easy. If not, create a stack of cheap troops led by your pretenders and have them attack a small rebel stack. Position the majority of your army close to the meager enemy units while your FMs die off, not fleeing due to the proximity of allies. Roleplaying explanation: your Faction Heir-Heir is too far removed from the Faction Leader's immediately family, so he orchestrates a purge, which consists of freezing the pretenders to death inside the ships' cryogenic chambers.
    • The Hellenic Colonist mechanic is supposed to make colony points a rare and valued commodity to be wisely invested. Circumvent this by blitzing as many settlements with Hellenic Metropolis as possible in the early/mid game. It's made all the easier by the fact that EVERY starting Metropolis is a coastal settlement and highly developed, meaning that it can easily support a full stack of slingers and levy spearmen (albeit at a modest net negative in income). Roleplaying explanation: you become an imperial maritime power and begin kidnapping Hellenes and dispersing them among foreign settlements.
    • Balaeric Slingers are currently far too numerous as noted in several recent threads. They are also cheap and extremely deadly, making them a substantial component in most settlements' garrisons. Roleplaying explanation: Carthage has instituted a "Balaeric Homestead Act" where Balaeric men, women, and children of all ages are to be relocated and given land in Mediterranean settlements. In return, they are to instruct the natives in the arts of slinging and of course serve as slingers themselves.
    • Some faction's reforms require you to heavily modify your campaign strategy around them, often leading the player to take actions with no roleplaying explanation. Let's use the currently difficult-to-be-obtained (but soon-to-be-improved) Carthaginian Barcid reforms as an example. Your FL must be pro-Barcid and Rab Mahnet, you must have fought at least 6 large Roman armies, and own Carthage, "New" Carthage, and Gadir. Since in many players' playthroughs the only Barcid FM with Charismatic is Hanno who is Rab Mahnet at the beginning of the campaign, they'll have to jump through hoops to fulfill the requirements before he dies. Roleplaying explanation: Hanno is ambitious, almost to a sociopathic level. He dreams of a Carthaginian empire that spans beyond the arid wastelands of Africa. Unfortunately, he cannot achieve this by continuing his political career on a normal trajectory. Years of politicking has "only" yielded him generalship of Carthage's main army, and time is ticking - the man is 38. He must resort to drastic measures. Adonibaal has stifled Hanno's plans of overseas expansion for years, and even supported Shafat as the Other Leading Man, with a cadre of anti-Barcids high up in Carthaginian politics in the line of succession should things "go wrong." Hanno will ensure that things go wrong. He identified the politicians in this line of succession, and hired black-ops Balaerics to kidnap and sail them to Crete, where the warlike natives will surely take care of them. He then wove a web of lies to pin the blame on Ashtzaph, the native overlord of Gadir and who is rather unpopular with the Carthaginian council. He too was exiled, this time legally by the council, and a more direct Carthaginian government to be installed in Gadir. With the foundations set for his plan, and with himself firmly set in stone as the future Leading Man, Hanno waited for Adonibaal to die. He respected him far too much to arrange for his "accident." He also used his newfound power to order ships to pirate Massalia's and Emporion's shipping lanes nonstop in order to keep Carthage in a constant state of way and thus retaining his title of General of the Army. In 10 years Adonibaal dies of rampant syphilis, leaving Hanno with supreme power. He immediately looked for avenues of overseas expansion. His first was the settlement of Mastia. He conquered it and renamed it New Carthage, building mines there as quickly as possible, reinvigorating the Carthaginian economy. However, the rest of Iberia is too difficult to control. With no other options, Hanno looked towards Rome. Once a ally (though born out of mutual contempt for that upstart Pyrrhus), they've become a rival. Hanno knew that subduing the Roman Republic would be just a difficult task, but their lands are richer and his subordinates assure him that the Roman people share the same ideals and customs ("Yeah we're both basically Western Mediterranean Polities we'll be fine" they said) and thus are easy to pacify. Assembling an army of Libyans, Ligurians, Numidians, Iberians, Hellenes, and an elite core of citizens, he sailed from Alali to the Po valley where the bulk of Roman military operations are being conducted. He clobbered one army after the other, but with the destruction of one legion came the appearance of two more. After 6 epic battles Hanno gave up, his armies depleted and the council shocked by Roman resiliency. Fortunately his campaigning impressed the Romans so he was able to arrange favorably peace terms with the Romans. Trade renewed, and Hanno decided to focus his attentions elsewhere. Over the course of his illustrious career Hanno defeated the hated city of Syracuse, exterminated the Numidians in one of the most drawn-out and brutal wars of all time, and secured a profitable chunk of the Iberian peninsula. He was never satisfied. As he entered his seventies, he did all he could to avoid the icy grip of death. He studied reality-warping and created entirely new timelines just to survive through diseases and assassinations. Still, by 237 BC he knew that his time was up, but he could rest assured knowing that Carthage has been on a steady trajectory towards becoming an empire. His last piece of legislature, dubbed the Barcid Reforms, reorganized the governments of Carthage's subject nation, established a training program to arm Libyans in the roman fashion, and finally relocated the Carthaginian's symbolic capital to New Carthage to represent Carthage's new imperial identity. With that accomplished Hanno could die in peace.

  2. #2

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    Quote Originally Posted by Shoebopp View Post
    We all love roleplaying but sometimes we need to employ trickery just short of outright cheating. Share your powergaming tricks in this thread. For extra fun, try to explain these exploits in roleplaying terms. I'll start:


    • Does your army appear to be barely within range to besiege a city, but upon dragging your cursor to the settlement you see the tip of the green arrow turn red? Have you cavalry besiege the settlement, then order your infantry to join up. Roleplaying explanation: the cavalry arrive to cause the settlement's inhabitants to panic and order a lockdown, effectively beginning the siege early.
    In my opinion, this isn't gamey if the cavalry force is led by a junior FM and is sufficient to besiege the city on its own, i.e. it has at least a 2 to 1 advantage over the defenders.

  3. #3

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    I just explain all weird things by my FL, FH and FMs being drunk most of their time. They all have adequate traits, anyway.
    Furthermore, I believe that Rome must be destroyed.


  4. #4
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    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    This might be common knowledge, but there's a workaround for naval units not being able to move their full distance when they're transporting land units. You need at least two fleets in the stack, click on their unit cards (selecting all in the fleet) then move, instead of clicking the unit on the campaign map to move. When it gets to the end of the move, the rest of its movement range becomes green and you can go again. Just don't click anything else in the meantime or it doesn't work.

  5. #5

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    Destroy the public order reducing buildings when you capture a city so that you can keep a better grip on it! Like markets or docks, for example. Or even destroy everything that is possible then abandon it if you wish. It is totally not gamey, just scorching the land as punishment for resistance!
    If you see an enemy army right next to one of their cities, don't hesitate to walk up to the city and attack the army rather than besiege it. This will result in the city garrison also joining in the fight, allowing you to crush them without even a siege. It's not your fault if they're so dumb as to leave the protection of their walls, is it?

  6. #6

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    Buy every major Carthaginian city by less than 10k each.

  7. #7

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    Quote Originally Posted by RodriguesSting View Post
    Buy every major Carthaginian city by less than 10k each.
    How... how did you accomplish that as Numidia? Where did you acquire that much money? The IMF didn't even exist back then

  8. #8

    Default Re: Thread for game-y tips and tricks

    Your three actual provinces are fairly rich. And you can raid, and got A LOT of generals. Although I think I did that before I learned how to raid optimally. So yeah, just passive income. You got 150 odd turns until you can reform anyway.

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