Episode 270: Gaul Stones

[Rob Zacny]

Episode 270: Gaul Stones

 

Today's episode on Hegemony Rome: The Rise of Caesar is all about learning. We learn that Troy's eloquence is as fleeting as the wind. We learn about Rowan's dark side. We also learn that Rob, ah, really likes logistics.

 

Listen Here.

[hexgrid]

I would be all over a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" version of this.

[Gormongous]

I feel you on the Mithridatic Wars, Troy. Not because I would ever want to play that boring game of Pontic whack-a-mole, but because I know people think of the Pyrrhic Wars the same way. The only game ever to give Pyrrhus his due was the Rome: Total Realism mod for the first Rome: Total War, and even there his expeditionary force was subject to repeated nerfs.

 

Hearing you guys talk about this game brings back all the good feelings of playing Hegemony: Gold. My three abandoned campaigns will live in my heart forever. It bums me out to hear that the AI is not that aggressive in this new one, because in the old one, the AI never tried to expand, but it was very good at burning your farms every spring and fall. Peltasts were so light and fast that the only way to stop them was to burn their farms preemptively, but there was a limit to how many raids you could orchestrate like that, so the "truce" diplomacy option became very valuable after your empire reached a certain size. Attempting to stop the raids for good on a given frontier when I didn't have the money to buy the tribes off was also the cause for one of my best experiences playing any strategy game, where I sent my biggest and best army, fresh from the conquest of Aetolia, northwest into Illyria and Pannonia to incorporate those regions and secure the western half of the peninsula. I knew for a fact that there was no single army big enough to oppose mine, so I thought I had it in the bag, but it ends up there was a reason for the scarcity of enemy forces. I didn't know it, but I was sending my men into a nightmare of starvation and rout. The entire army, which I think was ten phalanges and about double the support troops, melted away after capturing a half dozen economically worthless cities, never having fought a single battle. It was humiliating and basically ended that game, but man, was it authentic!

 

Also, I think the reason no one realized this came out was because it came out on Early Access, which I know a lot of people (including me) ignore, before quietly switching to a formal release. I really don't see the reason for it, if it's as solid as everyone on the podcast says.

[Adam Beckett]

...so then, it must be me.

 

I failed to build a 'supply line', in the very first moments of the game. As Troy, said, do not deviate from the tutorial ... or the tutorial script ends. Even when I follow the tutorial by the letter, the game mechanics are at full throttle. Sending my non-Caesar army to the west, they were attacked by Helvetic raiders. Surprise, I guess. The tutorial tells me to create a 'supply line', but does not tell me 'how'*, after minutes ago telling me to click this and hold that, explicitely. Before I achieved the very first missions, my armies starved to death.

 

If this tutorial is excellent, then I am far too dumb to play this game. If Troy meant the written tutorial, instead the interactive one, then that might be another thing. I don't mind learning a game. This podcasts makes me invest more time to this than I usually would.

The camera controls are not a problem for anyone, but me, neither?

 

*edit: The supply line tutorial was on the Lugdunum (West) side of the map. It triggered only after it was mentioned before, while Caesar went to the East, back to Eporedia. This is a minor thingy. Now, I feel even more stupid for having mentioned it. Also, the tutorial seems to by 'dynamic' - certain events trigger certain tutorial elements. Paying attentiion seems to be the key. Mea culpa!.

[Gormongous]

Hearing you guys talk about this game brings back all the good feelings of playing Hegemony: Gold. My three abandoned campaigns will live in my heart forever. It bums me out to hear that the AI is not that aggressive in this new one, because in the old one, the AI never tried to expand, but it was very good at burning your farms every spring and fall. Peltasts were so light and fast that the only way to stop them was to burn their farms preemptively, but there was a limit to how many raids you could orchestrate like that, so the "truce" diplomacy option became very valuable after your empire reached a certain size.

 

Okay, I've put a couple nights into this game, in sandbox mode as the Dumnones, and I have to agree with the podcast's assessment of the AI. Nine times out of ten, it is shockingly passive, especially when it has to respond to raids past its front lines. I had united Cornwall, Exeter, and Dorset, which put me up against the Atrebates in the southeast and the Catuvellauni in the northeast, both of similar strength. I did some light skirmishing, but had trouble with stone walls, because I didn't know about siege towers yet, so instead I built four units of cavalry and ran them through every single resource point of both factions, capturing slaves and then burning everything else. Not only did the huge influx of free labor rocket my economy to the top, but the AI took almost a year to capture all the resource points back, which meant the vast majority of their towns and troops starved that winter. Both factions entered a death spiral, and I was able to siege five towns the next year with minimal interference. The only pushback was the repeated sally of two half-strength units against an irrelevant fort on the south shore. At this point, three years into the sandbox, the entire island is mine and I have triple the strength of any faction on the other side of the channel. Hegemony Gold this ain't, at least in terms of spot difficultly.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love being able to conduct razzias late in autumn to cripple my enemy, but I wish that Longbow had managed to keep the AI as sharp as it was in its previous games without compromising the other improvements.