Vol wrote:They're one of my yearly rotation of games. Flipping through Med 2, Shogun 2, and Attila, I really don't care for the graphical clutter and campaign features they added over time. There's a beauty in a simple, focused idea that gets lost when you iterate and lose the greater scope. That and the loss of the stack splitting/captain system, which is bullshit. I do need to finish my legendary WRE run some day, even though every end turn was a few hours of fighting rebels, heh.
Pretty sure my most played games ever are TF2, WoW, TW, TOR, ME, OW, CS 1.6, and gosh that's a worrying list.
Yeah, some of my most epic play-throughs come from Attila, Med 2 and Rome 2. I still got write-ups for a part of one:
"At the moment, I am knee-deep in an Eastern Roman Empire campaign in Attila. I managed to keep the entire realm together by concentrating on kicking out the wandering barbarians in the west, while paying off the Sassanids in the east. Worked like a charm. At this point (year 410, IIRC), the Western Roman Empire already has collapsed, as it is wont to do and I am just now conquering Italia with 8 stacks of elite troops, who are always advancing in groups of two (one mixed infantry and cavalry, the other one mostly melee cavalry), since the AI has this nasty habit of ambushing lonely stacks with two or three stacks of their own.
I got ten more regiments standing on the border of the Sassanid empire and the plan is to finish conquering the entirety of Italy, leave four stacks to clean up rebellions and keep all those neighbouring barbarians honest, then force march the other four stacks, including my Emperor (my best general by far), to meet up with the ten stacks on the Sassanid border. The factions I am still at war with will be paid off out of my ample treasury (1.000.000 gold pieces strong and growing).
I've stopped giving the Sassanids their presents a few turns ago and while I may give them a few turns worth of them more to finish the conquest of Italy, I am just waiting for them to declare war on me. It won't be too long now, their new emperor hates rival empires and it was a chore to keep good relations with him while I was building up my strength.
I might also spend a good chunk of time trying to optimize my provinces a bit more, since some of them look a bit inefficient in terms of prosperity and happyness. Luckily keeping everything clean is super easy with the ERE.
Also, more than half of the governors have been adopted into the ruling family and I successfully sent assassins to the most powerful guys from the other families. I just declared the only male descendant of the Emperor (a bastard who luckily came out pretty well, with no bad personality traits) as his heir. The Emperor himself is in the prime of his life, 36 years old and a nine star general. Sadly, he has negative traits out the wazoo in terms of governing, so that it really is better to keep him a general. As long as I use him to kick in doors and conquer cities, his influence will continue to grow.
I think the most morally shitty thing I did in this game was to send an assassin to the wife of the emperor (who had really bad traits) and while I only wounded her, I successfully divorced her next turn. That must have been a pretty ugly scene. ^^"
"The Sassanids then declared war on me unexpectedly early, which was anticipated but not optimal. Turns out that having ten stacks on the border was not enough to fully assault all of the middle east, so I am a bit on the backfoot, having conquered only something like five cities, while single stacks of the allied states of the Sassanids are sacking my cities on the border. Meanwhile, the Sassanids are ramming something like four stacks per turn of cheap troops into my elite armies, which are easy wins on autoresolve (I don't really have the time to fight out every engagement), but still cost me troops.
Especially vexing is trying to conquer the Arabic peninsula, since the area is huge, made out of desert and the cities are far from each other. It's almost impossible to catch the single stacks which are raiding my back area. I'll have to move at least two to four more stacks down there to wipe them out.
After about everybody in the east declared war on me, I managed to keep the Afrigids out of it by paying them the stupidly high amount of 85.000 gold... but it had to be done, since their provinces wrap around the northeast of my realm. So far, the peace with them is holding and I keep giving them small gifts every now and then.
Meanwhile, the Marcomans and their allies, the Langobards, declared war on me in the west. I only have four stacks left there, but it's not all bad... the Marcomans owned two cities I really wanted, to get full provinces. I'm moving my stacks to conquer them, wipe out any rebellions and then destroy the Marcoman and Langobard armies, which will make getting peace with them easier.
I got four stacks, including my emperor, force marching towards the eastern front from the west and two more stacks I built around my main recruiting area. I hope this will give me the upper hand and if I get more time to really fight out all the engagements, my numbers will get much better. The main problem is catching all those single stacks running around my hinterlands. I am moving my spies to the east to misdirect those armies so that I can catch them easier, not to mention assassinate and manipulate the enemy agents.
My treasury has taken a big hit, I am down to 450.000 gold, from the 1.000.000 before the war began. Rebuilding the cities has been costly, as was upgrading my existing realm to the latest round of technology upgrades, not to mention that corruption has skyrocketed with the size increase of the ERE. I'll have to keep an eye out for that, to avoid running out of money during the war. We all know what happens to nations which run into that problem. ^^
All in all, could be going much worse. I think I can pull this off quite well and after I have conquered the Sassanids and the entire east, I think I'll just keep to what I got and sit out until 450 for the culture victory. Let the barbarians have the west. I wouldn't want to wipe out the proto-Germans, y'know."
"And I am content to just win the minor victory with the ERE, too. At this point, I wiped out the Sassanids in the east and all their satrapies (leaving behind three of them as subjugated states to serve as border states to people I don't want to take on... like the Huns), have substantial holdings in the west (I did reload the whole deal about conquering Italia... it was a bad idea which pretty inevitably led down to financial ruin) and am now left with a stable state with happy populations and docile governors, statesmen and generals. I have trade agreements with half the world and the other half is mired in conflicts elsewhere. I have the cultural victory conditions all sewn up already, with the exception of one building I was about to start on when year 425 came around.
Pretty much, I was left with nowhere to go but to click through one hundred rounds of nothing and deal with minor annoyances. I think the only thing which could have impacted me was the Huns, but they were busy plundering north of me and I was paying them off with little trinkets to keep their attention elsewhere. "
