The Man of Many Ways

[Father.Torque]

Sing me, O Goddess…

If you don’t know what Total War is, it’s a venerable series in the map-painting strategy genre. Its claim to fame is that the turn-based map strategy layer is usually a little lighter and more basic than others of its ilk, but, whenever you get into a battle, the game zooms in and becomes a tactical RTS, with you commanding your blocks of units individually. In this way, you can turn probable defeats into victories with clever execution. I’ve always liked this mix way more than your typical Civ-like.

The series has like I dunno a dozen+ games in it now stretching over eras of history from ancient Rome to the Napoleonic wars. They’ve developed from little 2d sprite guys on a crude 3d map to full featured pretty 3d everything, and the mechanics have slowly evolved over time as well.

My favorite Total War has always been Medieval 2, though I think the most popular one is certainly Rome. Unfortunately Medieval 2 is showing its age and it’s hard to play now without a lot of the QOL developments they’ve made in later titles, it’s due a remake imo (it’s called “Medieval 2” because it itself is a remake of one of the very first TW games, and they’ve done more modern ones for Rome and Shogun as well). They’ve also experimented with more fantasy-based approaches, with units with magical powers and whatnot; there’s a Romance of the Three Kingdoms version, as well as a Warhammer one.

But they made one just for me. They made one… about the Trojan war.

This also means there are now Total War games covering eras from the 12th century BC to the early 19th century. So that’s pretty cool.

Troy Total War is a good example of the modern version of the game. You can actually pick from the beginning whether you get a more grounded historical approach, a really magicked-out wacky version that’s paid DLC, or a middle road where some of the more mythical elements are present with “realistic” interpretations (so like you can recruit a unit of “harpies” but they’re like barbarian women who throw javelins, or “centaurs” who are a really effective mounted archer unit, something that otherwise doesn’t exist in the game). This middle version, which they call like The Truth Behind The Myth or something, was the only one available on release.

I played this game a ton when it first came out a couple years ago, then fell off it as one is wont. But I’ve been reading kid versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey to my kids recently and I got the hankering. So I fell back in and played a campaign as Sarpedon, one of the Trojan mainstays. Kicked enough ass that I came out with some good stories, so I thought… let’s start a new game, and make a thread about it.

Here comes our boy:

Pay attention to that text in the upper right about Odysseus’ unique stuff. This is real important going forward as it practically limits Odysseus to coastal territories which makes your typical clumpy map-painting impossible (although that’s often not a great way to play anyway, as we’ll see). In general it’s a feature of the later TW games to try to differentiate factions more starkly than earlier titles through these one-off, campaign-altering mechanics.

You can see he’s listed as having a Hard starting position. You’re in a corner of the map behind a bunch of relatively powerful factions on the main Peloponnesus. Since you need coastal territory, and it’s not practical to take each bit of coast as you go along even if you were strong enough to take it militarily (more on that later), you’ve got to break out into all the central Aegean islands to really expand, but it’s tough to get there before all the other majors without leaving your soft underbelly exposed to your immediate neighbors. Odysseus has gotta be constantly making moves. Sitting around and consolidating doesn’t work well for him.

Our starting position (with guest seagull). No matter what faction you pick, you always get a start with some jobber faction occupying a chunk of your rightful home province. I recruit a few basic units and go kick those guys in the codpiece.

Their final holdout. Though it says there’s an army there with 4 units to my 12, all settlements have a free garrison that can be used whenever it is attacked, or whenever a friendly army is attacked within reinforcement range on the map. The number of units goes up as the main settlement building levels up, and you can fill one of your building slots with a building that grants extra garrison as well. So this is actually more of an even fight, units-wise.

Attacking a non-walled city. Not all their units are visible yet because they’re far away and behind stuff. You can see I’ve arrayed myself into two wings. Cities have narrow approaches that prevent you from making a full front line, so it’s usually to your advantage to split up on multiple approaches in the hopes of turning one into a flank if you can break the enemy and push through. Unfortunately for these dudes I have more ranged units than them, which kind of forces them to come out of their shells a bit and chase after me.

It doesn’t go well for them.

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is diplomacy, which while basic is really important in this game. The Greeks (Danaans/Achaeans) and Trojans (Pelasgians) have large inherent diplomacy bonuses between themselves and penalties between each other, which really pushes you into making nice with your fellow Greeks (in this case). Eventually, by probably turn 100 at the latest but usually more like 50 or 60, you’re gonna get dragged into an Aegean war with all the Greeks on one side and all the Trojans on the other. It pays to, by that point, have as many friends as possible, and for your friends to be as powerful as possible.

So while in the early game it’s tempting to antagonize one of the big boys if they’re picking on some minor faction whose land you want, that’s usually a bad idea long term. From turn 1 I’ve been making little trade deals with every Greek who I don’t have immediate designs on attacking, to build up long-term relationships that will help out later in the big show. Plus the trade deals themselves can be lucrative, especially as your partners get friendlier. As long as you’re trading them something they really want in exchange for something they really don’t (these are clearly marked with the red and green backgrounds behind the different resources there), you’re making an overall “profit”. Trades of this kind are nearly always worthwhile as long as the other party doesn’t have negative relations with you.

So with the home turf secured, it’s time to figure out where we’re expanding while Odysseus expands his army a bit.

This is the coast to the immediate north of my home islands, a little later after I’m done kicking the ass of the guys who were there first. Along the bottom there you can see all the settlements that are in a province. This is important: owning all a province’s settlements allows you to activate a nice passive bonus for the whole region. There’s also a permanent distinction between capital cities, which is Calydon above, and the other smaller towns. You can see that the towns have way fewer building slots; they also can overall only get to size level 3, whereas capitals can get to 5, unlocking the highest-tier buildings. Plus capitals are capable of building all kinds of things that the towns cannot, including the stuff with province-wide bonuses. What this means is, while having all the towns in a province is very nice, as long as you have the capital it’s ok to be missing some of the towns. But owning just some towns without owning the capital SUCKS. It’s very rarely worth it, although there is a special production building you can put in a town that basically kills growth in exchange for somewhat higher production, which is meant for use when you have just one town in a province with no access to the capital.

This is where Odysseus’ unique feature comes in. You see the little sailing ship icon in the bottom left of Palairos and Astacos? Those identify them as “coastal” cities; all coastal cities have that docks building by default. Odysseus gets bigger bonuses than anyone else when he levels those buildings up. But, if he owns any city that is not coastal, it has NO building slots at all, just the main building in the top left. That’s losing out on 3/4 of each town’s production capacity, and (potentially, at max level 5) 7/8 of a capital city’s. Basically, absolutely not worth it, with the possible exception of grabbing a sneaky inland town or two to finish off an otherwise coastal province. Owning an inland capital city is NEVER worth it for Odysseus.

That brings us back to the screenshot. The only town I actually care about keeping from this war is Lefcas, which belongs to a different province with a coastal capital city. Despite looking like it’s on the coast, the capital Calydon is not coastal - I guess because it’s set on cliffs high above the water so it doesn’t have a port. So Astacos and Palairos, which I took in the war, are useless to me.

What then to do? Well - sell em to the guy who DOES own the capital, because boy, does he want them bad. Cities are by far the most valuable resource to trade and people will fall all over themselves to buy them off you. The brown boar guys, the Aetolians, were roughly my military equals and had no interest in me except for little trade deals. In exchange for Astacos, I got military access (aka permission for my armies to be on their land without them whining about it), a defensive alliance, AND ten turns of some resources. And then they gave me a whole other chunk of resources for Palairos as well.

So now I’ve turned a potential rival into, basically, friends for life. Unless I do some real boneheaded shit the Aetolians will love me forever. They’re also instantly significantly more powerful than their neighbors and therefore a bulwark on my northern border against all the factions on the northern third of the map, which I don’t give a shit about because it’s the Balkans (ok not literally) and not coastal. Well worth a war.

The question is what to do next. The northern Peloponnesus has some juicy all-coastal regions, but they’re ruled by a clutch of Ionians who are all allied together and quickly driving further into the peninsula, which is a war I am not capable of winning. Meanwhile, to the extreme northeast, are these pricks:

That island city, Scheria, is the coastal capital of the province that town Lefca I took is in, so that would be my most juicy target, but that is a large stack sitting on top of a giant 15-unit garrison; the maximum size of a single army is 20 units, so I’d need two big damn armies just to siege that place down, which I can’t really afford, and it would take a long time to do, which I also can’t afford. Also, to my chagrin, we started the game with a non-aggression pact with these guys, and breaking it in order to attack would give me a diplomatic penalty with all other factions that I ALSO can’t afford. That’s a lot of not affording.

Meanwhile, that dove faction on the mainland coast I have noticed in the diplomacy screen has damn near no army (likely due to a war they are in with some further-inland faction). Although the region has two inland towns, one of which is owned by a different faction that it would be pointless to rile, it’s got a coastal capital. While it isn’t the juiciest target economically, these guys are Dorians and don’t have any cultural affinity with me. If I just leave them there they’re going to be a pain allllllll the way in my western ass while I’m trying to push east through the map. So I decide to solve this problem now, while I can.

Setting up to assault a walled city. You can see I’m split in two groups again. If I had tougher units, I’d probably do three, but these guys are too fragile; if you send them in just one or two at a time they’ll freak and break early. I’ve built a couple rams to smash the gates. I’ll use my slingers to screen the ram; once the gates are down, I’ll usually send a tough unit with ladders up the wall as well to attack any squishy units like missile attackers they may have posted up there, while the main melee forces shove through the open gate.

Assaults always result in huge attrition, even if your force is dominant relative to the one inside the walls. I lose a couple weak units entirely and a few more are at a fraction of full strength. But it’s done. Losing units is part of the game; recruitment is fast and maintaining units is expensive anyway. Occasionally in the late game the computer will build death stacks of all elite units, but you’ll more often see a core of a handful of elite units surrounded by easily replaceable swarms. This is an intelligent way to build to keep an effective army while keeping costs down.

While I siege the southern capital and then move onto the inland town, the enemy hero is in the north trying to slap an army together. He thinks he can sneak by me and retake the capital while my back is turned.

It goes poorly for him.

There’s a couple reasons why. Those spears are decent units; they’re probably roughly the equal of my heavy swords (which I have five of, the pentagon icons) and definitely outclass my light swords, which are the guys with circle icons. Plus they outnumber me in melee altogether. In a standup fight I’m dead. But they have basically no missiles, where I have 7 units of cheap slingers.

When you deploy before a battle each side has a zone they can freely arrange their forces in, and there’s always a broad band of no man’s land between. There are, however, special vanguard units that are allowed to set up and deploy in the no man’s land. Odysseus, because he’s a crafty bastard, specializes in these kinds of units - all the light swords can do this, as well as those fancy javelin ambushers with the orange backgrounds, and Odysseus himself.

So I used my heavy swords to create a front line between the forested map edge and a big rock feature. I deployed all my light swords into the no man’s land, hidden in a forest in a giant L formation trap. I also noticed that homeboy had his hero unit deployed off separate from the rest of his force for some dumbass reason - probably to protect him, since I’d used my spy before the battle to assassinate the real hero and this was some jobber replacement. So I deployed Odysseus and his javelin boys basically right in front of him. Hit go, Odi and the Javelins assassinate the enemy hero before the army can really react; then all his fancy heavy spears walk right into my trap, charging facefirst into my line of heavy swords while all my flankers come out and completely envelop them. All while under withering sling volleys. Then of course Odi and the Ambushers push down and javelin them in the rear as well. It was honestly disgusting.

Mission complete.

With my back line secured, it’s time to decide how to expand east. The Ionian situation on the Peloponnesus has only gotten more dire, so I decide to abandon it entirely and start making friends with those guys instead.

Crete, meanwhile, as the biggest island around, is quite juicy territory for me, but my allies have already eaten most of it up (all the towns with blue icons are allied - this is Menelaus, from Sparta, and Diomedes, from Argos, doing work). Damn, I was too slow.

So that can only mean one thing: it’s time for an Aegean campaign.

[daphaknee]

OH HELL YEAH CUBAS EFFORTPOSTING

[SUPERSONNICK]

if history lessons would have been like this awesome read, i’d maybe have (tried to) majored in ancient greek history.

But alas, such is luck, i remember only a handful of things from three years Latin. There was some fistin’ in Issos at 333 bc,

Battle of Issus

where Alexander (the greatest ) had a feisty brawl w/ Darius’ — Alex may have won, but Darius’ legacy is cemented in history for his own extra-large horizontal shmup cabinets

… and now YOU, dear reader, might have a hunch why i didn’t really excell in Latin .

Anyway, looking forward to Part Deux of your campaign!

[Father.Torque]

One of the wild things to keep in mind is that the Mycenean Greek civilization that formed the historical basis for the Trojan War story existed nearly a thousand years before Alexander. It was as distant from them as like the Norman conquest of England is from us. It really was a mythical and nearly prehistoric time, for Alexander as well as us!

[eska]

oh man did you read the latest lazenby post? i imagine it’s stuff you covered at school but it goes on about the titans belonging to a pre-olympian pantheon and the myths of perseus etc acting as propaganda to subjugate the indigenous civilizations living in Greece before the Greeks etc. so wild to think about how every Before has another before behind it

[Father.Torque]

We didn’t cover it in school - no literature survives from these ancient civilizations, and we only read primary texts. Aside from Homer, St John’s starts with Plato and his fellow golden age Athenians.*

I mean I think this is a good beginning, and one has to begin somewhere - but thinking of this era as the beginning is multiply wrong. It’s always worth keeping in mind just how old humanity is, and how little we know about the cultures that nurtured us in our vast, dark infancy.

(It’s funny - we think of Athens as almost synonymous with “ancient Greece”, this imperial colossus, but in the era depicted by the game it’s this backwater whose leader is some rando whose name carries no special weight. All the big business is happening to the south on the Peloponnesus. Fortunes rise and fall…)

[Father.Torque]

The best laid plans…

Basically immediately after starting the game again, we are declared on by Elis, a 2-city minor on the western Peloponnesus, our neighbor directly across the water to the immediate east of Ithaca. This is an incredibly boneheaded move. We have defensive alliances with like half the Greek majors at this point, plus our northern bros the Aetolians, and Elis has no military alliances to bring to the table. But fine! Their province is coastal and I’d planned early on taking it before deciding on abandoning the Peloponnesus for the Aegean islands. If they wanna be stupid, that’s fine with me.

Pride goeth before the fall, pal.

Their final force, which is no joke. Something to notice here is that Odysseus’ army is starting to get out of date. Even garrisons of a mid-rank city like this have a more solid melee core than we do. Still, I have the weight of numbers and all those beautiful slingers on my side. Importantly, the AI calculates our chances as too even and won’t come out of the city to face me, which means I can wait a few turns to starve them out and grab the city without a substantial fight.

(The little broken helmet icon in the top left of that box at the bottom describes the number of turns under siege before units in the city begin to take attrition damage. Next to that, with the hourglass + flag, is the number of turns until surrender, but waiting that long is almost never necessary. A couple turns of attrition knocks the units down to ~50% strength, at which point they are total pushovers.)

I happen to notice in the event log that Mycenae was attacked by Corinth. That’s weird, I think; Mycenae is my defensive ally, but didn’t call me into that war. I scroll over and…

Lol. Agamemnon razed the goddamn place to the ground. When this happens, any faction can colonize the dead city by leading an army to it and spending some resources. (Keep this in mind, it’s important for later.)

This triggers a thought. Corinth was one third of the powerful Ionia-Cortinth-Athens alliance that was scaring me away from the Peloponnesus and driving me east into the sea. But obviously Corinth is now a non-issue. Seems likely that could only happen if the whole alliance was getting beat up and its military kept squelched. So I send my agents to scout around Ionian territory, since they hold the mostly-coastal province on the northern Peloponnesus that I covet. And indeed - just a couple small stacks of raiding type armies. Their capital doesn’t even have a big 15-unit garrison, just the regular 9-unit one.

War in the Aegean is on hold. It’s time to grab this tasty territory, closer to home, while we can.

We close out the Elis campaign and get ready to stage an attack on Ionia. But wait a minute here…

D’oh. Altis, capital of the Elisian province I’ve been sieging, isn’t actually coastal, even though it is on the coast. Another one of those cliff cities with no port. Well shit, seems like something I should’ve paid attention to. Instead of keeping this weak stuff, I hand it over to Nestor of Pylos, who is hanging onto that last city in the province. He is very happy to have it, to the tune of lots of gold and food per turn, which funds expanding the secondary army I’m moving in to attack Ionia.

Things have been happening in the back lines, too. I haven’t mentioned this yet but for a long time I’ve had a hero recruited and sitting around with a little army of 6 or 7 basic units. This is something I do a lot in this game. First, it acts as a home defense force, which can quickly slip into any city (supplementing the garrison) that comes under threat from an enemy who thinks they’ll be cute by cutting around my main army out in the field and trying to attack my rich home territories. But that hero and army also increases happiness, which helps with newly-conquered territories, which get a happiness penalty that drains away over time. So Odysseus is usually out front with the real army, and the cleanup crew comes in behind to establish depth in defense and also settle things out in newly-conquered territory.

Well, the Ionians are weak, but this province I want to take does have 4 cities, and my one 20-stack can’t be very responsive to any Ionian half-stacks running around causing trouble or beefing themselves up with quick recruitment. I need a second army to stitch them up and pin them down. So I’ve recruited more units into the backbencher’s army and moved him forward to back up Odysseus.

Remember the Phaiacians? The guys with that big stack in that island city to my extreme northwest? I finally sell them Lefca, the only other city in their province and my very first territorial acquisition after I secured my home province. In theory I could have sold it to them a lot earlier, but they had low relations with me due to their relative power and them very much disliking us killing their neighbors across the water and stealing all their land. So, since they weren’t an active threat due to our non-aggression pact, I just let them sit while I grew more powerful and the penalties for attacking their friends drained away. Once they got more neutral with me, selling them the city would give me a lot more buck for my bang. And boy, did they love it:

Bros for life.

Meanwhile - I’d been noticing a lone hero from Pylos wandering around in the deep sea to the southwest. This triggered my memory - in the extreme southwest of the map, there’s a quasi-hidden island with a single decrepit city on it you can colonize. And I’m like, fuck! I could have grabbed that two dozen turns ago if I remembered it was there. Free island city. Ah well. Like Crete, more opportunities lost…

But then I notice the Pylos hero turn back toward home! I dunno if he took too much attrition out there in the deep sea (oh yeah: armies take attrition when sailing too far away from coastlines), or maybe Pylos got in a war and the AI wanted to muster its forces or whatever. Either way, I got my chance. I instantly recruit a new hero, give him like two drag-ass units of guys with sticks and immediately send him rocketing down there, even giving him Odysseus’ ship upgrade to make him faster in the water (oh yeah: you can equip your heroes with items looted from battle that give them little bonuses), since Odi ain’t using it, being busy being landlocked besieging half the Peloponnesus.

It works out beautifully. In the long term this will be pure profit. This place is so far away that it’s defended by the sea itself. It’s extra-good for Odysseus, as well; though capital cities usually aren’t themselves productive, instead providing defense and provincial boosts for the outlying towns which act as production centers, Odysseus gets some unique capital-city production buildings, meant I think to offset the fact that there’s large chunks of the map that are landlocked and not that productive for him. I haven’t used these buildings much yet, but ultimately I’m gonna load this place down with em. It’ll be a jewel.

We launch the Ionian campaign. Odysseus makes a lightning strike into the heart of the province, at Cleion, which is where most of the enemy army is massed, while the backbencher Melanippos starts working along the northern coast. His army is weak enough that even the standard 9-unit garrison puts up a decent fight, but we make it work. Immediately after taking that city, he’s counterattacked by a smallish force that I’d missed that had been lurking in the mountains. That’s an even dicier proposition, but we manage to expel them too. Pretty cool battles… I should take more screenshots of the battles themselves, but they’re realtime with pause and so I get all hyped and stressed and forget to pause and take the shots. I keep meaning to, you know, like take a series of shots showing how a significant battle plays out. One day.

Anyway, Odysseus is able to move north to back up our second-stringer, pushing forward to the next city. I put it under siege.

Again, even when a faction doesn’t really have significant armies running around the map, it doesn’t mean their lands can just be snatched for free. Those garrisons are no joke. In fact, the computer projects our chances as bad enough that if we clicked the auto-resolve button, it would damn near annihilate Odysseus’ army. Taking a couple turns to grind this place down by siege is not a bad idea.

Meanwhile, after a turn of rest, Melanippos leapfrogs Odysseus to siege the final city, Aegion. It’s the walled capital, but the garrison is actually smaller, so I figure he can handle it. I want all their cities locked down so they can’t freely recruit more units. Rather than wait around to get sieged out, the Ionians sally out.

Here’s the balance of power. While we look strong on paper, we have a very small melee core that’s already half-dead. We’ve made situations like this work before, but we are just too weak here. While we are able to kill a lot of enemy by running them all over the map like psychos and shooting them down with all our missile troops, it’s just not enough and they are able to run us off.

Still, that mighty struggle is actually the death knell of the Ionians. I did enough damage to their garrison that Odysseus can push through his city and move up to place this one under siege, and by then the Ionians have taken one too many wounds. The northern Peloponnesus is ours. And yes, this time the capital does actually count as coastal.

Remember the Aetolians, the boar guys to the north we gave those early cities too? Turns out that was a good investment. I haven’t even mentioned it yet but we’ve been declared on like three or four times by northern minors, not I think because of any designs on Ithaca per se but rather because they want the Aetolian lands and we are their defensive ally. On paper that’s a bad idea for them, since we outpower them significantly, but they determine (correctly!) that I’m too busy with my southern wars and won’t bother actually militarily supporting Aetolia in any meaningful way.

But - I don’t have to. I’ve made Aetolia strong enough early enough by gifting them that province that they can clean that shit up all on their own. I have my own personal northern watchdog so I never have to worry about that border. Aetolia beats them down and like five or eight turns later I’m like, huh, I wonder what’s going on up there with that “war” I’m allegedly in? And then I’m able to peace them out for a profit, having never seen hide nor hair of them.

In this latest escapade, Dolopia started with three cities. By the end of it, Aetolia took two of them for themselves and I got a lucrative peace deal. Literally all I had to do was defend one of my northwestern cities with its native garrison against a small raiding force (actually, ok, it was a pretty tough fight again due to unit quality, but - still - it cost me nothing). Ask any strategy gamer and they’ll tell you: this is sweet sweet beauty.

State of the union, turn 44: our empire is composed of three main regions: the home islands of Ithaca, the northwest territories, and the rich lands of Ionia, aka the northern Peloponnesus. (Well, and the wacky mysterious southwest island.) Ithaca itself has grown to a level 5 city, the maximum, which unlocks three different level 5 military buildings that grant access to our most elite units. Odysseus’ army desperately needs an upgrade and a refit. Ideally I would move him back home to do that before moving east across the isthmus of Cornith and finally, finally take on Akis, Nogaria, and Dionysius there, just hanging out all tasty in the Aegean (and not allied to each other nor anyone else, the fools).

BUT it’s gonna take me like 6-8 turns to actually get all those buildings built, and that’s a long time to wait. I might just crazily push ahead with Odysseus and use Melanippos to shuttle him the advanced units once they’re ready instead, but that’s a risky plan. If Odi gets caught out my paper tiger army could be shredded and it could be a long time before I’m able to form up and get out there again. To gauge their strength, I’ve got my spy moving out there now, who moves like lightning as I’ve upgraded his map movement speed multiple times (did I mention that heroes and agents level up and get little skill upgrades you can choose?). We’ll make our call on how to handle that next time.

[Father.Torque]

R&R

1 or 2 Greek majors bothers me nearly every turn trying to buy me into a military alliance. I’m so cool. But no thanks. There’s very little profit in being on the hook for whatever piddling aggressive expansion wars these guys are always starting, and I don’t want anyone horning on my own wars and nabbing territory out from under me.

Taking a look at the Aegean, it seems like the majors are all occupied with stuff in their own necks of the woods. Hoping the islands stay free for a bit, I shuttle Odysseus back to Ithaca and crack open those sweet high-level military buildings to modernize our troops.

The Ithacan New Model Army.

To explain what’s going on here a bit: the game, as you’ve seen, has five resources: food, wood, stone, bronze, and gold. These align very neatly into tiers: food is the “low rank” unit resource, while wood is the “low rank” building resource; bronze, mid rank units; stone, mid rank building; and gold, for elite third-tier stuff. They go up in a staggered pyramid of value.

Units, too, align into these three tiers, matching the resources. What this means is that fielding an army of all high tier units is extremely expensive. For me, bronze is very limited, and I can’t field a lot of troops that require it for upkeep. So I’ve chosen this comp: a melee core of tier 2 heavy swords, a ranged array of tier 2 slingers (who despite being tier 2 only cost food, no bronze, a huge and important boon), and a tight stealth ambush spec ops unit of 2 elite spear runners and 2 tier 2 javelin ambushers (ok, those were supposed to be tier 3 but I didn’t have the gold on hand to recruit ;_;), who as we remember get led by Odysseus himself, whose personal unit is of elite tier 3 javelin ambushers. This is relatively bronze-expensive but not SO bronze-expensive that I can’t field any other armies, which was the goal. Largely achieved, again, because of those food-only slingers. God I love those.

We’ve also recruited a new hero, Leucos, who I give a food-heavy army, tier 1 melee and ambushers with those nice tier 2 slingers, BUT with two tier 3 melee units to make a nice little high morale hardcore that will hopefully support the frontline of otherwise somewhat unimpressive guys.

Time to give the new armies a workout. My gamble paid off; still no one has made any appreciable moves on the Aegean. From the available targets, we select Noagria, for two reasons: one, their islands are relatively centrally located and will provide a good base for further Aegean operations (and a nice launchpad for assaulting the Trojans on the Anatolian coast, long term); second, they have the “lone wolf” diplomatic personality, which means it is highly unlikely that they will ever call in anyone to help them.

The Noagrian Campaign

The starting position. Pretty standard behavior from an AI minor: one big stack sitting on their big capital garrison, leaving their juicy little bits just hanging out defenseless. We take advantage of this, rolling them up and trapping them in their capital in just a couple turns.

Odysseus can’t siege it by himself until Leucos’ 2nd Army gets there to help; if I tried, they would just sally out with their army and the garrison, doubling up on me and putting me at a huge disadvantage, and even if I did manage to squeak out a win, they would just retreat back into their walls, leaving us both damaged, but with them able to heal much faster in friendly territory… unless I sieged them again, which would goad them into attacking again, and down and down.

Instead, I perform a standard tactic which I haven’t showed off before: raiding. Raiding gives a nice income in exchange for fucking up the province that you do it in and really pissing off whoever owns it. It’s a great thing to do in this exact situation, waiting for backup while a big annoying army sits around in a well-defended city with its thumb up its ass. Either you goad them into leaving the walls and the garrison behind and bringing you a fair fight, or they sit tight and you get free cash until backup arrives. It’s a win/win.

Leucos shows up. This is what the siege looks like. Yeah… these guys are isolated and we aren’t under any other pressure. We’ll be waiting this one out.

Now, while we maintain the siege, I’m going doing my little round-robin trades and notice something disturbing:

Achilles here is at war with the Trojans. I click through and see that the alliance cascade has tripped. Right around turn 60 like I said in the first post. The Trojan War has begun.

Now this right here is why I said no to all those full alliances with my Greek buddies. I have NOT been pulled into this war, not yet anyway. This is very ideal. While all the Greek and Trojan majors are busy bashing each other, I can spend my time expanding into all the remaining minors, really juicing myself up for when I finally wade in, tipping the scales in favor of the Greeks and achieving victory.

You know. That’s the plan. In theory.

The Coalition Wars

In Paradox games, which on the strategic layer are FAR more complex, realistic, and fully-featured than TW games, there’s a diplomatic mechanic called coalition. As you fight wars and gain power, neighboring and otherwise affected factions gain points toward an anti-you coalition. Piss them off enough and one by one they’ll tip over the line, each joining the coalition. When the coalition gets strong enough that they can match you militarily, it’ll trigger a coalition war, where they all attack you at once. This simulates the very real phenomenon of lots of little countries watching each other get gobbled up by big powers and saying to each other, yo, if we don’t band together, they’ll get us all eventually.

TW doesn’t have this mechanic, strictly speaking. Multipolar wars don’t actually exist, really; every war is an independent instance between two factions, even if you got into it through an alliance or otherwise “as a group” through some kind of diplomacy. Instead, as you get stronger, you just get a generic diplomatic penalty with everyone, which is listed as “great power” on the diplomacy screen.

The thing is, if you’re otherwise unpopular with a faction, and you’re powerful enough, your great power penalty will be big enough to tank your relations low enough that they’ll declare war on you just out of pure hate, despite it being very militarily unfavorable.

Of course, once you’re in a war, you’re relatively “weaker” because your forces are tied up contending with whoever opposes you, which is also factored into the AI’s war calculation. And the more wars you get in, the weaker you look, pushing more factions into declaring on you, each getting pushed over the line in a cascade effect. The end result? De facto coalition war.

It starts with Dionysias here, who though they have gotten picked apart in the Aegean, still hold a substantial power base in Rhodes, the rich eastern island mirror to our own Ithaca in the west.

2, 3, 4, 5 minors follow, most of them, annoyingly, in central Greece, where they start to really beat on my buddies, the Aetolians. Then the worst of them follows up with a real roundhouse.

You can see Esperia is the 13th most powerful faction on the map, which is no joke consdering they hold just 3 cities. What’s worse is that they are right across the channel from my rich Ionian lands along the northern Peloponnesus. It’s the soft underbelly of my empire and they’re about to drag a sharp knife right across it. Though I sort of saw this coming and am building some emergency armies in Ithaca, they aren’t done fast enough to stop the blitzkrieg.

In just a couple turns, they burn one city to the ground and capture another. Luckily, their multiple, swarmy half-stacks are too cowardly to attack the walled capital. So far. I need a rapid response.

I leave Leucos to defend my new Noagrian possessions while Odysseus tries to speed back to Ionia.

Then the entire Dionysian army shows up.

One thing I have going for me here is that all the Greek majors have honored my defensive alliances. This coalition of minors is now at war with all the power players in Greece. It’s suicidal in the long term. But then again, what else were they supposed to do? They saw the writing on the wall. And since I’m their primary target, it could be a huge loss for ME until the friendly AI bumbles its way to squashing all these bugs. Besides, they’re in the middle of the Trojan War and have really big bad guys to be dealing with. While it’s nice when my allies nibble at the edges of my enemies, I can’t rely on them for heavy lifting.

And then. In the middle. Of all this.

This right here is a unique mechanic of Troy TW. At some point, when you get powerful enough, one of the opposing majors picks you as their rival. They particularly and specifically hate you, and they become your nemesis. It’s sort of a clever bit of design, as it forces you get involved, at least to some degree, in the Trojan War, and also ensures that a faction who is your equal actually opposes your continuous expansion through minor after minor. Superpower stuff. Designed to complicate exactly the plan I had.

Suffice it to say, however, that this is a really bad time. Hippolyta is incredibly strong this game. Strong enough for the game to choose her, rather than one of the traditional Trojan heavy hitters (Hector, Paris, Aeneas) to be my rival. Now… I don’t know why, exactly. I don’t have any intel on Anatolia at all and actually can’t even open diplomacy with Hippolyta because I haven’t even discovered her faction yet, lol. So I think I’m safe from them for the immediate future and this is a problem for future Odysseus. Still. Every time I hit the end turn button now and the turn scrolls through to Hippolyta, I literally wince and suck in breath. Please, don’t let me see the horde coming over the horizon, please…

I play defense in Noagria, moving Leucos from garrison to garrison and warding off the Dionysians with the prospect of unfavorable siege battles while my allies pick at their island holdings. The idea is to keep up this dance until I can secure the situation on the mainland.

There is another huge development that saves my bacon, one that I think is a sort of “bug” or more accurately a degenerate case. So, as each of these minors declare on me in order, they don’t seem to be factoring in the strength of my defensive alliances. So they’re like “get that Odysseus fucker we hate that guy” and then suddenly every hero of the Iliad turns to them with spear raised and they go “uh, ok, so, maybe that was a little hasty”. After surviving for a few turns against each of them, I’m often able to peace them out, sometimes even with a tidy little profit, without spilling a drop of blood, or even seeing their armies in the field. Sometimes these peace deals come a little TOO fast, which leaves my allies feeling a left in the lurch (since all wars are bipolar, me peacing out does NOT peace them out, and actually the strength of my faction no longer threatening the enemy faction means they are stronger, relatively, against my allies that remain, making it even harder for them to peace out, lol). This lowers my diplomatic reliability a bit. But hell, this is when you gotta pull that trigger. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

My advance force reaches Ionia. I have a bigger army coming right in behind them, but Esperia isn’t waiting around.

I have higher quality units, and they have no ranged at all, but that means they wayyy outnumber me in melee, and with a bunch of fast-charging two-hand spears to boot. In this fight, if I can find a cozy defensive position, let their shittier melee splash against my heavy swords, and get time to leverage my slings, I’ll be ok; on the other hand, I can’t build a large formation, which means I am extremely vulnerable to encirclement. If all those spears get around my swords’ flanks and into my slings, I’m totally fucked.

Well… suffice it to say I made the good thing happen. Actually there were a couple extremely tight wins here in a row as the Esperians sent a couple waves at me. You’ll just have to trust me about how cool it all was though, because um, I didn’t take any battle screenshots. Again. I just get too into it man!

With stalwart Antiphates weathering the storm 300 style, we buy enough time for good ol Melanippos to move in with the larger, cheaper army to retake my goddamn land. The Esperian raiders are scattered.

I’ll have to rebuild these places, once rich and developed, nearly from scratch. It hurts.

Esperia is going to feel that pain.

I wipe them off the map. Esperia is now of interest only to historians.

[SUPERSONNICK]

8 posts in, first 300 reference iirc, A++ plot development … the only thing missing is Gerard Buttler cameo as a hero unit and turning around an inevitable defeat

[Father.Torque]

Building the Wall

With my back line sorted, it’s time to get back to Aegean expansion, although I have to do it carefully: Hippolyta might be sending stacks toward me at any moment, so I have to be careful to always have an army drifting somewhere around the Noagrian midpoint so that it can respond quickly to any attacks.

I sniped Akis to the southwest there while they were weak, and now the Lelegians, with that blue fish icon who have this broad scattered arc of cities, have decided it’s a good idea to declare on me. That’s fine with me, since those two southeastern islands are a whole province themselves, plus they have Minoa there in the center, which I need for my next epic quest.

Cuba, what’s an epic quest?

Oh. Yeah. We haven’t talked about how you actually like… win, have we?

Every game has two possible victory conditions: a Homeric Victory, and a Total War Victory.

Total War Victory is like, your standard “blob the fuck out” world domination type victory. The Homeric Victory, on the other hand, is slightly more interesting: there’s a couple mechanical conditions that are customized to your character (e.g., Odysseus, the sneaky guy, has to get an agent [sneaky spy or diplomat guy] to a high level), and you must also complete an epic quest chain, which is unique to each character. Odysseus’ involves interacting with the different islands he visited in the Odyssey. For example, the first quest has you send a guy to the Phaiacians (remember them, the isolationist island guys to the extreme northwest from our very early game that we started out with a non-aggression pact with?), which is actually Odi’s last stop in the Odyssey before getting home, but then again he starts this game in Ithaca instead of ending there so it’s kind of like the Odyssey in reverse.

Note that both victories require stomping out Troy and all the Trojan majors so really they’re basically the same because if you’re powerful enough to do that you’re powerful enough to do anything and you won already.

Anyway, we need to own Minoa for our next link in the chain, and these dummy Lelegians have made it too easy.

Our expansion has triggered a concomitant expansion of our view range, and we now have a picture of a substantial portion of the Anatolian coast.

It’s extremely interesting. The Amazons are strong as hell, which we knew, but now I know why I didn’t get rivaled by one of the Trojan factions: Aeneas, of Dardania, that golden hart with the sea green background, has confederated both Paris and Hector and become the sole heir of Priam! You don’t see that often, usually Hector is dominant, but he was the first to declare on the Greek majors so I guess he got beat down enough for Aeneas to take him over.

Also of interest is the substantial Mycenean beachhead they’ve established on that peninsula there. This is GREAT news for me. Since the Greeks are at war with Hippolyta and Aeneas, those huge factions are going to focus a lot of their efforts on attacking the Mycenean cancer right in their bellies, which means they’ll have a lot fewer forces left over to drift south and attack my holdings. This map is a relief, honestly.

Just to the south there is Miletus, these blue & purple scorpion guys, who are the Amazons’ current expansion target. More good news for me. I start trying to make friends with these guys immediately. If they can act as a useful bulwark against the Amazons, that’s more time for me to continue my Mediterranean expansion.

Uh… guys. I uh, I don’t think Miletus is gonna be able to stop the Amazons. I was joking about the “horde” earlier, but that is… that is a terrifying army. And any of them could jump in the water at any time and be at my Noagrian or Minoan islands in a couple turns.

Back on the home front, I use the armies that wiped Esperia to roll up and take one more city from a one-city holdout faction that hates me. Not only will that knock them out of the game, but then I can gift the city to the Dolopians there with the griffon on the brown field. They’re already friends with the Aetolians, so that’s two big central Greek factions to act as my inland proxies to once again shore up that territory and keep me secure while I focus on the east.

I haven’t really checked in with the Greek majors in a while, and uh… oh my. Sparta has eaten

Arcadia (central Peloponnesian minor)
AND Pylos (Nestor)
AND Argos (Diomedes)
AND Salamis (Ajax)

and have taken over the entire Peloponnesus except for my Ionian province. They’ve been confederating as quickly as possible and have absolutely ballooned into the #1 world power without me even noticing. Guess it’s good they’re my best buds for life! Agamemnon’s Mycenae is still holding on there in the center (I wonder if the game is programmed so Menelaus can never confederate Agamemnon since he’s his brother? that would be cool) and Achilles still has a very strong kingdom to the north (Achilles is a moody dick and it’s unlikely his diplomacy would ever be high enough with anyone to confederate).

I’m Odysseus, gotta keep making moves. With the scary Amazons in my side view, I, perhaps foolishly, start a war with Dionysius. I want Naxos, that central island city, and I want Rhodes, an extremely rich territory that includes one of the rare bronze production centers, which will help me even out my armies with higher-quality units. This screenshot shows me establishing a beachhead on Rhodes.

But the Dionysians aren’t idiots, and have heavily fortified Naxos. So I’ve got to have one army hanging out in the center, both to ensure this army in Naxos won’t leave to reinforce Rhodes, but also to defend against any potential Amazon attacks from the mainland. That central army can’t really besiege Naxos alone, though, as they’d be outnumbered nearly 2:1.

With the pressure I’m putting on Rhodes, the bait works! The army leaves the safety of Naxos’ walls and comes out to play. Their melee core is stronger than mine, and their slingers outnumber mine, though they are lower-quality. Still, a straight up fight would not go my way. But I’ve got the ol’ Ithacan special forces, and they make all the difference.

Our opening deployments. This is pretty much SOP for me at this point. Slinger line deployed as forward as possible; I’ll move my melee line through to front them as soon as the battle starts. Meanwhile, a huge wing composed of my forward-deploying ambush units. I have more of them in this army than any other, so while the main line is weaker, the jaws snap harder.

Our lines when they begin to engage. My scattered light clubs are not going to be able to stand up long against those dense, disciplined spear formations.

The jaws close. You can see my center line has really not held, and a couple club units as well as my general himself are on the run. But it doesn’t matter. My melee wing closed on the rear of their formation, and my ambush javelins have torn apart their slingers, removing their ability to counter my slingers, who absolutely pour fire into the enemy spears that are left trying to mop up my remaining melee.

I’ve referred to this plenty, but to be explicit: units in Total War don’t just have typical values like speed, armor, attack, damage, etc, but they also all have a morale value that is chiefly affected by damage taken, but can also be directly influenced by other factors - seeing nearby friendly units break lowers morale, as does being flanked, as does one’s general fleeing or being dead. This can trigger a deadly morale cascade where an army breaks and runs while it still has plenty of strength, losing them the battle. A unit will first become “broken”, meaning they flee uncontrollably for a while but can recover and return to the battle; if their morale sinks even lower they will “shatter”, which means they’re done, they will run until they hit the edge of the map and leave the battle. In some circumstances it’s worth chasing down a broken unit to ensure that it shatters and does not return to hit you unexpectedly in the flank or rear; in some circumstances it isn’t. You win when every enemy unit is shattered.

BUT the battle doesn’t end automatically when this occurs. You can click a button to end it at any time, but you are permitted to chase down the fleeing and defenseless units and slaughter them as long as you can catch up. Just like in historical battles, this is the phase where the casualties really pile up. And while it can be a little boring, anytime you’re fighting an army on the field this is worth doing. The more units you exterminate now the fewer there will be who can regroup and recuperate.

(It’s pointless to do this to city garrisons, on the other hand, because once you take the city it installs your own garrison anyway. UNLESS you are fighting on the field just outside a city and its garrison has joined as reinforcements: then, of course, the more you kill now the less you have to face when you turn around and attack the city.)

It’s a slaughter. The slim remains of Naxos’ defending army flee behind its walls.

We follow up with an immediate siege to prevent any replenishment or resupply. The nearly extinct army + the garrison are no longer strong enough to risk an assault on me, so now I can comfortably siege them out without risking my own costly assault.

That is, of course, until the Amazons attack in force. Maybe it was hubris to start this Dionysian war while staring down the barrel of Hippolyta’s horde…

[Father.Torque]

Holding the Line

The Ithacan empire stretches in a long northwest-to-southeast arc all the way down through the Cyclades and into Rhodes. That’s an incredibly long line to hold. Though we are able to shuttle back and forth picking off most would-be raiders, some inevitably break through.

Sometimes they’re Hippolyta herself at the head of the Amazons’ most modern and impressive army. I took this shot, though, because this time my bacon (or more specifically, Pylea’s bacon) was saved by jilted Meleaus himself. Sparta owns all of Crete now in the extreme south of the map, and they are pumping out troops down there and regularly flowing them north towards Dardania and the Trojan war. Sometimes that means they can take out my enemies on the way. That’s what happened here, much to my relief.

It’s not just the Amazons I’m fending off, either.

These minors on the extreme east of the map, northeast of Rhodes, join in the general beatdown. These guys are perfectly placed to be juicy expansion targets for Sarpedon’s Lycia there, one of the Trojan majors, but his AI has been content to sit on his butt this whole time. Luckily that includes not declaring on me, something, it turns out, that he will never do.

These guys attacking means my Rhodian assets are under threat now, stretching my forces even thinner. I still really want Naxos in the center of the Aegean, but I just can’t deal with them right now. After taking the Rhodian capital the Dionysians are ready to make peace, so I grit my teeth and meet them at the negotiating table even though by my estimation that war is only half done.

Rhodes, incomplete.

Usually the AI only builds big 19 or 20 death stacks when they are prepping to assault a really hard target or, paradoxically, when they’re a one or two-city minor and have no room to spread out. (This is also the game’s “natural” way of preserving small factions past their natural lifespans - even late game, a 20 stack sitting on a 15 garrison walled city is a very unattractive target.) Mid- to large-size empires usually build a whole bunch of like 10-15 stacks instead, and use them to assault your provincial towns with their standard 8-unit garrisons, sacking them for income and to destroy your economy. Since my armies can’t be everywhere, I’m finding I have to try to fight off these raiding parties with these small garrisons more often than I’d like.

I’m finding a surprising amount of success with this. Here’s a fairly standard result for this sort of battle. I attribute this to two things: first, what I think is a tech advantage. TTW has a sort of basic “tech tree” that’s one of the only ways to get faction-wide bonuses, but it’s slow to fill out and the bonuses are not huge. Still, they add up. I can’t be sure, though, because as far as I know there’s no way to check where the AI is at on their tree. Maybe they don’t even have one.

Second, there’s those tasty Odyssean forward-deploying ambush units. Instead of plugging a couple of chokepoints and just letting our units crash into each other, which is a recipe for eventually getting overwhelmed by superior numbers, I always am able to put just a couple units in some hiding place outside the city. I let the enemy funnel into the chokepoint, and then bam, slam 'em from behind. This does nasty things to their morale.

Works like a charm.

While keeping up this dance, I scroll around the map and find a light at the end of the tunnel.

Achilles is housing Aeneas in the north, including in the former lands of Hector and Paris. The Trojan confederation is falling apart, and the Amazons really are the last bulwark standing on Anatolia. Of course… they’re a big assed bulwark. But still, we are really beginning to hem them in. If I can exhaust them by shooting down all their probes in the south, they will eventually get ground down and be unable to make armies at the same rate, which will let me claw my way north and into their lands.

The Cyclades Line, turn 106.

Doing a standard trading round, I notice that Sparta is really blobbing the fuck out.

They’re up to 44 cities now. They’ve confederated a couple more factions recently, not the least of which is my old friends the Aetolians. Which is fine with me, I don’t mind who’s watching the west, as long as it’s someone reliable.

An extremely tantalizing situation that cropped up during my defense, where these two Amazon armies (led once again by Hippolyta herself) ended up pincered between two of my armies. I was hoping for a big nasty battle, but I couldn’t quite get there that turn, and they saw my stacks and got spooked off, only to be hunted down and picked off ignominiously a few turns later.

These goofs attack me in the west as well. They ain’t shit, but it’s a taste of things to come. My stable situation out there will in not too long become a bit less stable. Luckily good ol backbencher Melanippos spends his days sitting around in comfort way in the back lines for just such an occasion. No matter how much they try, I’ll never truly face a significant threat in the west. Especially because I have no desire to expand there, I can just play defense and let them exhaust themselves against all the newly Spartan lands.

Eventually I’m able to one by one harass the eastern minors enough to get peace deals, and the incoming Amazon armies slow to a trickle. With my eastern flank secured, I finally have an opportunity to counterattack and push into southern Anatolia.

Operation Avalanche

I’m in a weird situation here where, because Hippolyta is my rival, I can’t actually access diplomacy with her. No peace is possible. I have to DESTROY her faction utterly. This would normally be easy - I’d just take everything for myself. But more than half her holdings are inland crap Odysseus has no use for. There’s no allies around to sell her cities off to, but I can’t let her hold any cities, so that means one thing: razing them to the ground. A scorched-earth campaign. Unfortunately this means some of these hostile minors that I’ve recently peaced with can move in behind me and colonize those destroyed cities, which makes them more powerful in the long term. But, again, that is a problem for future Odysseus. I don’t really have any other choice.

A series of impressive sieges as I advance onto Amazon (and allied) lands. They are putting up a stiff resistance, for now. But I have the initiative.

Meanwhile - Sparta, who of course is my defensive ally and joins all my wars, never peaces out any of these little AIs because he’s vastly more powerful than them, so he’s perpetually at war with everyone I leave behind. And he sneaks in and snatches Naxos from me, that city right in the dead center of the Aegean I wanted so badly from Dionysias ages ago! This pisses me off, because I need to hold that territory for the next step in Odysseus’ epic quest chain. But, importantly, he razed the city first and colonized it anew, which means there’s nothing there and it’s not “worth” much. Luckily I caught it the second he did it, and so:

I’m able to trade him a fairly well-developed, but non-capital, city for it, plus a decent amount of loot besides. This is some slick dealing on my part, because if I hadn’t struck now, I never would have got ahold of this province, and never would be able to advance the quest. Well, not without making war on Sparta, my hugest and oldest ally, which would be ridiculous suicide.

Goofing around with minors in the west, I stumble upon Mount Olympus itself, home of the gods.

I think there’s some kind of fun unique bonus if you have the city that’s right next to it, but it’s of no use to me and not important to this campaign. I just think it looks cool.

The Amazons try to break the siege of Miletus, leading to probably the last big engagement of the Hippolytan war. This is the tipping point; they have plenty of fight left in them after this, and it doesn’t go fast, but it’s one long downhill. After this, I will have taken enough of their economy that they can’t muster fast enough to stop me any more.

The initial deployment is a mess. The way the game handles multiple stacks in battle is: whichever particular stack attacks, it and its particular target are the two armies that begin on the field. Any other stacks in reinforcement range enter the battle from a map edge once it begins. These entry points are marked during deployment, so you can plan ahead for where your enemies and allies will be coming from.

Except this time… well, I didn’t look too hard at em, and mixed the points up. I thought Odysseus there on the top would be the enemy reinforcements, and the Amazons to the right would have been my guys. This fuckup changes the tactical situation considerably. I have to crush the first army very quickly, before the Amazon reinforcement can reach the map center, or my central army stands the risk of being enveloped and destroyed.

Which is what’s about to happen here. Odysseus’ army is wheeling down from the top as fast as it can, but not quite fast enough to defend my central forces. Luckily his quick ambusher units were able to get in the fray fast enough to help flank the central Amazons and push most of them out. And just in time, too: you can see all my juicy vulnerable slingers just hanging out there in my rear, waiting for that huge line of swords to crash into them.

Though the central Amazons still aren’t finished, and it’s a big mess, I’m able to contain them enough for Odysseus to come down and mop them up, and in the meanwhile get my heavy spears down JUST in time to face the reinforcing Amazon swords, saving my slingers’ asses. It’s a close thing, but it clinches the victory.

Nothing to do now but clean up.

An action shot of my MVP slings shooting fleeing Amazon swordswomen in the back. You can see the trail of bodies they’ve left behind…

Huh! Miletus has this cool unique building with a faction-wide buff effect. I’ve never seen this before. It’s almost certainly a reference to some piece of ancient history or literature but I’m not familiar with it. Grateful for the buff anyway.

The Anatolian front, turn 125. My holdings form a nearly straight east-west line from Achilles’ lands in Phthia across the Aegean in Greece. I’ve almost joined with Agamemnon’s Mycenean beachhead that he established dozens of turns ago. This front is much smaller and it’s much easier to concentrate my forces here. The Amazons are wilting under the joint assault.

The Mycenean Purchase

I’ve had a couple confederation offers before, from Argos and Aetolia, but in both cases I took a look at their lands and decided they were of more use to the factions who were already there than land-shy Odysseus (which set them up to get eaten by Sparta instead). When I noticed that Agamemnon, King of Kings, was ready to submit to the rule of Odysseus, his most brilliant commander - and when I brilliantly noticed that nearly all of his lands were brilliantly coastal - well. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Our new holdings on the Greek mainland. Mycenae itself is hopelessly landlocked, so I’ll try to sell it to Sparta as soon as I get a decent opportunity (confederation gives an 8-turn happiness, influence and diplomacy penalty while the world gets over the news of you eating your neighbor, so it’s not the best idea to do any significant deals before that expires). Tiryns and Epitayros are very nice additions to our empire, however. We’ve also got Salamis, Ajax’s hometown before he got eaten by Menelaus, and while it is also a decent town it’s not a capital. More potential selling material.

The Mycenean “beachhead” in Anatolia, which ironically enough was the majority of its power base at the end. This is PERFECT territory for me, prime real estate, and includes an entire intact coastal province. It’s even contiguous (or well, about to be) with the northward push I’ve been making on Amazon land. This is a coup.

Just need to knock out that little one-city holdout on the western island there. Don’t worry, it’s coming.

Achilles, meanwhile, has taken the entire northern Anatolian coast. Dardania is reduced to some scattered island holdings. Troy is surrounded by the fleet-footed slayer of men. Everything’s coming up Achaea.

But, as rapping sensation DJ Khaled will tell you, success always brings out the haters…

[Father.Torque]

The Great Northern Fart

This would have terrified me a couple dozen turns ago, but now I’m completely Napoleon-brained. It probably started when Agamemnon’s army (when I confederated Mycenae I got the king of kings to become my gopher) attacked a walled island city and even no a flat-out assault with no siege time at all the autoresolve didn’t calculate the death of even one of his units.

It’s pretty cool to see allied AI armies stack up like this, it’s smart of them to do. I was getting ready to dive headfirst into that mutually-reinforcing group of four to the south there - that’s 44 units total I was getting ready to attack headlong with a single 20-stack - but when they saw me coming they literally turned tail and ran back north, lol.

Eventually I’m able to cheaply peace them out, one by one. Leaving them at war with my best buds Menelaus and the Spartans, as well as Achilles. This is important, because there’s an island in the north Aegean I have to take for Odysseus’ epic quest, and Achilles has held it for the longest, but he gets sneak attacked by one of these Thracians and I’m able to counter and grab it for myself. Another close call there.

Here’s that island now, “threatened” by one of the northern Greek Thracians. Not an important battle in the grand scheme of things, but notable because this guy’s army is… composed of 100% light javelin skirmishers? The battle was pretty hilarious - missile units can all be placed in a “skirmish mode” which is on by default, which makes the unit automatically run away whenever a hostile unit gets close enough. Can be useful to avoid having to do extreme micro. But anyway if your whole army is made up of units in skirmish mode, then I uh… I will just chase you off the map edge. End of battle. Very weird. Never seen the AI build like this, guess it was just kind of a freak accident caused by very limited unit selection wherever this guy was recruiting.

Hippolyta’s Last Stand

Meanwhile, on the Anatolian coast, the Amazons are putting up a better fight with a half dozen cities than damn near half of Greece and all the Balkans put together. These ladies are truly heroic. As this looks to be probably the last substantial siege battle before they are mostly rolled up, I take some screens to mark the occasion.

Standard city-sacking deployment at this point. Heavy melee and missiles on two neighboring choke point approaches, so that they can mutually cover & reinforce if necessary. Ambush forces (quick 2-handed spear chargers on the left, Odysseus and his javelin guerillas on the right) deployed forward and hidden, so that they can flow into undefended streets and wring around to flank from the rear.

Unfortunately in this battle it’s hardly necessary. The AI falls into this recursive loop trap where my missile forces outrange theirs, and they’re not willing to leave their defensive chokepoint positions to challenge me, so they just stand around for like 10 minutes while my slings pick apart their front lines for free. AI in the older TW games was easy to bait into shit like this all the time; Troy is much better, but it still happens once in a while.

Some important political developments–

Dardania confederates Sarpedon’s Lycia, artifically extending their lifespan. Not quite sure how this happened, as Achilles has wiped Dardania from its main holdings in Anatolia, leaving Aeneas with only some scattered island and coastal territory. Pretty sure that, even though Sarpedon has been sitting around doing hardly anything all game (which I made fun of him for earlier), his faction is at this point stronger than Aeneas’. Given that Aeneas confederated Hector and Paris, I guess he just got some wild diplomacy bonuses this game. Could also be that the AI for the Trojan majors is programmed to close ranks and consolidate as much as possible under threat to make for a more satisfying Trojan War. Who knows.

Menelaus is not about to be outdone by some weenie like Aeneas.

It’s Achilles’ Last Stand! (It’s a song by senior citizens. Ask your parents) I have to hand it to Sparta. This is a real diplomatic coup, Achilles is notoriously hard to impress. Note that he held out way longer than all the other Greek majors. But, this means that Sparta and I are the only two left standing. All the rest have been absorbed - mostly by him, heh.

Once again, have got to give it to the Amazons. Just when I think they don’t have any more in the tank, they manage to surprise me. With one of their last remaining capitals under siege, they force a fight with a measly 5-stack, the best they could put together before the city inevitably fell. Again, this is good tactics, even if strategically their situation is hopeless.

Because the garrison is sallying out to reinforce the little 5-stack, this is technically a field battle, though the city walls feature on the map. The garrison doesn’t start on the field, it has to come from the map edge like all reinforcements. If the reinforcement point is distant enough from the starting enemy army, I will often try to cut off one or the other and smash it with my full force before the reinforcements can come to bear, but this is one of those times where the reinforcement point is behind the enemy’s deployment zone. I’m the defender, so nothing to do but sit and wait for them to assemble and attack.

Amazonian reinforcements marching in a dense column onto the field. Damn, wish I could be putting some missile fire on THAT formation…

They slowly widen out into a line to front my formation. The terrain doesn’t offer any really good defensive positions, so I’ve put my ambushers way off to the right to screen my flank (you can’t see them on the field, but if you look close you can see the little group of green dots on the minimap to the south) and organized the rest of my forces into a large L formation, with my slow heavy spears as the front line and my somewhat quicker heavy swords as a potential trap-closing flanking force. The Amazons have enough units though that they should be able to engage me directly all the way down, which means we’ll have to break through the old-fashioned way to actually get an envelopment going.

Near the end of the battle, after most of the tactical action has played out. Important points to notice: their back line of missiles has been mostly destroyed by my own superior slingers as well as the flanking javelin guerillas. With the ranged units taken care of, the ambushers are now arrayed in a nice line directly to the enemy melee’s rear (the middle-right of the screenshot) and are pouring armor-piercing javelins into their backs. When we are able to get to this point it usually means things are over. But it wasn’t an easy fight: all my melee units took heavy losses. My general actually took such a savage beating he broke and is currently running off the field even while his army secures a tough victory (you can just see him on the left there pumping his little legs).

Still, this devastates the garrison, which means the city is free to take on my next turn, regardless of my army’s damaged state.

King Priam of Troy himself is sending me an exploratory trade mission to try to smooth over relations. Lol. He can see the writing on his big fancy walls.

Turn 147. After a truly world-historical struggle, the Amazons are down to their very final holdout. They are now a one-city minor. Time to end this charade.

Of course we can’t just let them have a general, so we assassinate them first. Standard strategy when I have my spy available, but in this context it just sort of feels like cruelty.

Oof. How far the mighty fall.

It’s finally over. Rest in peace big rizzle. (Also pictured: the feckless Thracians, who I literally can’t declare war on without a huge diplomatic penalty because we signed a peace agreement so recently, being cheeky enough to roll 2 big stacks up to my island and start raiding. The absolute putzes. They slinked off shamefully next turn and never bothered me again)

Right on time, Odysseus pops over from his long-sought victory over Hippolyta to nab his penultimate epic quest objective and secure the legendary bow of Philoctetes. Only one step left. Only one target left. As decreed by Zeus on high Olympus, the Trojan War has only one end: the sack of Troy.

[Father.Torque]

The Rout of the Greeks

Troy is by far the hardest target in the game, and is artificially built as a “last boss”, something otherwise not seen in your average 4X game. (What if you play the Trojans, you ask? There’s nothing analogous on the Greek side. You just play normally until you win. Boring.)

Troy is its own one-city faction and has permanent inflated boosts to its resources. It has a 20-unit garrison and maintains a full 20-stack army on top of it - 100% tier 3 elite units, even at the beginning of the game, which would be impossible to maintain with a single city - it’s hardly possible for me to maintain such a thing with my whole empire. Of course, if this army left the city walls, it could singlehandedly trounce anything anyone else could put up for the first 100 turns of the game, so Priam’s AI is set to be utterly passive. His death stack just sits in Troy, never venturing out, awaiting its ultimate fate.

Or so I thought.

Given these circumstances, attacking Troy isn’t like attacking anywhere else. It requires careful planning and overwhelming force. Priam is also permanently allied with his family that composes the Trojan majors - Hector, Paris, and Aeneas. Luckily Aeneas’ Dardania is the sole survivor of that bloodline, and is now mostly confined to Sarpedon’s former Lycian holdings in the south and a few scattered cities in the north Aegean. Still, I don’t want my empire’s flanks hit by roving Dardanian armies while I’m trying to throw the bulk of my empire at the walls of Troy. Turns pass while I move an older army to post up in my southern holdings, to protect them against attack from Lycia.

My 3 best armies converge on Troy.

My army posted up opposite Dardania’s Lycian holdings. At first this seems sort of like wasted effort, as Sparta has been spending these past few turns rolling south, absolutely devastating Aeneas. You can see he’s got 3 armies right there. But as soon as I declare on Troy, he moves all his forces north, abandoning the south to my single defensive army. It’s a good move on his part (not that he asked me), but would’ve been potentially disastrous if I hadn’t set my army up there first.

I move my forces in to besiege Troy - and get this popup. This is new to me! Because, dark secret, I’ve never actually beaten the game as a Greek before. I just sort of got far enough where I knew I would snowball and stopped. So I have no idea if anyone who besieges Troy gets this popup, or only Odysseus (since he IS the one who famously came up with the Trojan Horse idea), or only Odysseus if you have completed all the other steps of his epic questline. Either way, of course I elect to build the horse.

Unfortunately, at this point it doesn’t matter because…

Even though I tried not to underestimate Troy, I still totally did. Look at that relative power bar. Priam isn’t going to sit around letting me besiege Troy; he’s going to sally out and shoo away my gnats from his home. I decide to let discretion be the better part of valor and hit the retreat button. However, due to weirdness in the way armies move, one of my stacks retreats via the south and is still stuck close to the city.

Priam’s death stack leaves the walls and attacks me in the field! I honestly had no idea they could even do this. This army is utterly fucked - but! - this might be an opportunity. If I can kill as much of this army as possible, even just a handful of units, and keep it outside the city and away from its powerful garrison, I may be able to swoop in with my other stacks and eliminate this army - classic divide and conquer.

So, Leucos’ doomed forces set their jaws and meet their fate.

Our initial deployment. In the center there is a ridge that is not traversable, splitting this map in two. I arrange the bulk of my forces along the left of this ridge, and my ambushers on the right. Hopefully the Trojan army will concentrate on my left and allow my ambushers to run around the rear. But they also have chariots, which are this game’s (and era’s) closest approximation of heavy cavalry. If they screen their flank with them I’m gonna have trouble moving in, though I have a lot of ambushers, and they might be able to pick the chariots apart without all getting ran over, if I micro well enough.

Unfortunately the Trojans split their army evenly in half, meaning my ambushers have to fight a retreating skirmish action through the forest to delay their right wing while their left wing eats my face. On a unit to unit basis I’m hopelessly outmatched. I’m not able to get the surround I wanted, but I am still able to pick apart a few of their units before the guillotine falls.

The results. You can see I was able to destroy 3 or 4 units and severely damage a couple others. This really isn’t bad, considering how imbalanced the whole battle was. Unfortunately, though this screen makes it appear like the army isn’t a total loss, it already retreated once before it got attacked, which the game handles by essentially saying the army has nowhere to go. The entire stack is annihilated and Leucos is wounded, sent back to base.

Just as unfortunately, the Trojan army just heads back into the city to recuperate, disrupting my divide and conquer strategy. Things aren’t going Odysseus’ way.

I immediately recruit a new hero (a really well-leveled one that was in Mycenae’s stable) and begin recruiting our most elite and expensive army yet, but it will take a good 7 or 8 turns until that’s online, especially because of the gold cost of tier 3 units. There’s still a Trojan death stack, now awakened, stalking the Anatolian coast and my other stacks in the field.

Instead of just waiting around to die, I’ve moved my remaining armies, the ones originally intended to besiege Troy, and sent them west, launching a devastating blitzkrieg on Dardania’s holdings in the northern Aegean. I have them all in a couple turns, finally truly confining them to the distant south.

Troy’s stack, meanwhile, after spending a couple turns recovering, pops out and marches a scosh east, razing the Spartan-held city of Thymbra, which it turns out is the only other city in Troy’s province. Again, behavior I had no idea Priam’s AI was capable of. What I’m really scared of is them subsequently colonizing the razed city, growing their power base right in the middle of Spartan lands.

Apparently the Spartans are scared of the same thing, because heedless of the danger, they immediately move the armies they have in the area to attack Priam’s army outside the walls. Unfortunately they do so while the army is still in reinforcement range of Troy, meaning its perfectly healthy and rested 20-unit elite garrison will join as well. Further unfortunately, they do so while Agamemnon’s army is in their reinforcement range, apparently depending on his help - but without any other of my armies in the area.

Now, this battle does represent a huge opportunity. We can destroy the weakened army and hopefully smash the garrison badly enough that, as long as we stay healthy enough, we can immediately move to besiege Troy, preventing the garrison from replenishing. This could potentially tip the balance of power in the siege in our favor, preventing them from sallying out against us like they did initially and allowing us to comfortably maintain the siege for as long as we need.

On the other hand, if we screw up and our armies get scattered, the Trojan army can retreat back to the walls and heal back to full, leaving us back at square one.

…is what I want to say, for dramatic purposes. However, as you can see, since the Spartan armies are the primary attackers and Agamemnon’s army is the second reinforcement, I could just hit the autobattle button. We would win with Agamemnon’s army being basically untouched (and the Spartan armies getting real fucked up, but who cares about them).

But, I mean. That’s boring! This is certainly the biggest and baddest battle I will have ever fought in this game, and there’s no way I’m leaving that to the computer. Besides, we’re much better at mopping up defeated units than the autoresolve ever calculates, so if we control the battle ourselves, we can theoretically cause a lot more damage to the garrison, making our followup siege that much better.

The Battle of Troy

Initial deployment, which doesn’t include me, as second reinforcement, at all. Friendly reinforcements, including me, will emerge from the southern border; the full-power Trojan garrison will emerge from the east. Sandwiching the initial Spartan army in a complete pincer.

This is about the worst start you could possibly imagine. I can’t overstate how superior the Trojan unit quality is and how much of a difference it makes in how these tactical battles play out. In a straight up line vs line fight, one of these elite Trojan stacks could easily take on the kind of armies the Spartans field 3 or 4 to 1. Enveloping one between them is a recipe for a nearly instant kill. While I certainly don’t care about Spartan lives and treat both of these allied armies as sacrificial offerings to throw upon the spears of Troy while my own forces maneuver for flanks and do the real damage, they have to last for like a little while at least. Worst case scenario here is that the first Spartan army folds before our reinforcements even get on the field, and then the two Trojan armies meet up, form a solid line and attack us frontally. Our only advantage here is numerical superiority, and if we can’t leverage that into easy flanks, we could actually lose this (damn my hubris once again for not pressing that autoresolve button…)

The first wave of reinforcements hits the field. It’s as I said above. God, I hope the Spartans aren’t stupid about this.

The tactical situation as my army finally completes its entry onto the field, before I’ve been able to act significantly. The central Spartan army (led by Nestor, I think from the icon? That old fart) has held out remarkably well, I think partially due to the slow speed of most of the extremely heavily armored Trojan units, as well as some terrain features that are limiting maneuverability (hard to see in this screen, but there are a couple diagonal SW-NE ridges that are blocking certain paths). The reinforcing Spartan army has tacked right, forcing the Trojan garrison to face it instead of throwing its full force into Nestor’s juicy rear (Nestor thicc). Good tactics. Still, Nestor’s army is quite damaged and won’t last forever. I have to move up quickly and put my army to use.

My engagement position. There’s a ridge just to the left of my army, so that flank, and my squishy slingers, are protected. At this point, the front line of the Trojan left wing has been significantly exhausted, while the right wing from the garrison is still very strong, slugging it out with Sparta’s heavy spear line. There’s two big threats still. First, Troy has a seemingly endless line of elite archers stretched across their entire rear, who will devastate our allied armies if allowed to just stand there shooting unmolested. Second, the Trojan melee on the right wing will absolutely crush through the Spartan phalanx sooner or later, and if not dealt with some other way, will probably be strong enough to turn and take us out too, or least close enough that I don’t want to roll those dice.

So here’s the plan: my slings concentrate on their left wing archers. My melee forces support Nestor in the left and center, hoping to wrap up the remainders of the Trojans there, which would give them a run on the left wing archers and the rear of the Trojan right. Meanwhile, my javelin ambushers and high-speed low-drag two-hand spear chargers move to the right, behind the Spartan line and all the way to the extreme right flank, then loop around and collapse in on the Trojan right, splitting their attention between the archers in the back line and doing flank damage to the Trojan melee. That’s quite an unsupported maneuver with mostly squishy units and will probably result in a lot of them getting shot to pieces by Trojan arrows while they maneuver, but I have got to do something to disrupt that Trojan right wing or the bulk of my army will end up crushed.

It basically works! Wish I’d taken more screens while it was all happening, but I was concentrating on a lot of shit, man. This one had to go well.

My ambush forces didn’t get pounded as badly as I thought, while my melee slugged it out absolutely heroically with the extremely tough Trojan units. One of my heavy swords is down to 5 guys - and one of my heavy spears has a single guy remaining, without breaking and running! That guy is getting an Achaean Medal of Honor for conspicuous cojones above and beyond the call of duty. This is down, I think, to the fact that Agamemnon is both very high level and also one of the unique heroes, and gives his army some really stupendous morale bonuses. Only him or Odysseus could have pulled this off without a lot more dead, I think; jobber heroes’ bonuses are not as impressive, and I think a lot of this army would have broken and ran.

This has got to be absolutely the coolest battle I’ve ever fought in Troy Total War. Just huge, tons of high-quality units, really interesting positioning due to the reinforcement mechanics, and highly contextual due to its placement near the end of this long campaign. This battle was a result of tons of choices made by both me and the AI factions for many hours; if we’d made different choices, it might not have happened at all, or been significantly different. You could set this up in the free battle mode, but it wouldn’t mean anything. This is meaningful to me. And, not to be to sappy about it, justified both my investment in this game and this LP I’ve put together. I really, really loved it.

Greeks Bearing Gifts

After hunting down the fleeing Trojan forces, this is our payoff: the Trojans reduced to a mere handful of men, just a few dozen against my implacable hordes. Troy itself is now ripe for the picking.

The strategic mess outside the walls of Troy. Agamemnon moves IMMEDIATELY to capitalize on the damaged garrison. Luckily the scattered Spartan armies still feel themselves too weak to do it themselves, because due to turn order they could have besieged Troy before me, which means they would have been in the driver’s seat when it came to the attack itself, and also taken the city for themselves after we prevailed, both of which are pretty unacceptable outcomes imo. You can juuuuust barely see half of an Odysseus head on the extreme left of the screen, behind Imbrasos. Luckily he has massive sea movement range at this point and is able to come in to reinforce Agamemnon.

And good thing too, because look how much that garrison has been able to replenish in a single turn! After the battle they were down to 52 total guys! Troy OP.

Also note that little dialog box in the bottom. You cannot autoresolve the siege of Troy, which is kind of cool. You’re gonna be forced to play out that final battle on that fancy unique map whether you like it or not. But I like it!

So, we could theoretically assault now and probably win, though I don’t doubt I would lose a lot of units in the process - although who cares at this point, since after I take Troy it will be game victory, and I don’t really need to think any more about the long term. But I need to try out this Trojan Horse option. I have no idea what it’ll look like or how it’ll work, and I have no idea if I’ll ever get another opportunity to do it again if it turns out it really is limited to when you play as Odysseus.

One turn’s worth of sieging will see the Horse built after you select the option.

Then you get this unique interface in the siege dialogue. Apparently, I have to select six units from my army to go in the horse. They will begin the assault already in the middle of the city, with the rest of my army outside the walls, and the gates open. The defenders, meanwhile, will start the battle exhausted, which doesn’t seem as cool as the rest of the stuff but actually is more significant than it seems, as we will see.

I put a lot of thought into this. As poetic as it would be to put my lovely javelin ambushers in there for like, the Ultimate Forward Deployed Flank after a whole game of them pulling that shit and being my empire’s most vital tactic, the fact is that if I am gonna be squeezing the enemy between two halves of my force, I need a strong melee line on both sides to keep them penned in. I end up selecting Agamemnon himself, for the morale boost; three heavy melee troops; and two of my fast spear chargers, to take advantage of flanks and hopefully shatter enemy units in one fell swoop.

You bet your ass.

I do want to take this opportunity to note how specifically cool this climax is. Completely by “accident,” meaning without in any way planning to and just exercising all my best strategic options for the past however many hours and 180-odd turns, what I have here is Agamemnon, over-king of the Greeks, besieging Troy, supported by Odysseus, who has suggested and deployed the Trojan Horse to land the deathblow on Priam’s city. Just by playing the game, without any eye to the original story, I have managed to replicate nearly exactly the actual narrative of the Trojan War. This is incredibly cool. Like, again, it has justified all the time I’ve put into this game and this thread. One of the most satisfying concatenations of circumstances I’ve ever had the pleasure to experience.

Let’s check out this unique cutscene.

The bulk of my army outside the walls. This is a night battle, of course, which I don’t really register until right now - mechanically, night battles mean no reinforcements. So even though Odysseus’ stack is hanging out with us, he will not be involved in this battle. Agamemnon’s 20 will have to see us through.

The defenders at the gates.

My handpicked force, having just disgorged from the treacherous offering.

The actual initial deployment. This is obviously a fantastic tactical position, but those are all still tier 3 elite units. They are capable of standing up to a real grind, and I’m still scared of not being able to smash them fast enough before they simply cut through enough of my own guys to trigger a rout.

Mid-battle. My heavy spears advance through the gates, which have been left undefended by the Trojan forces as they turn to deal with Agamemnon in the rear. Luckily, my spear chargers have been able to loop around some of the city blocks and hit THEM in the rear, causing significant damage. The scattered Trojan units in the front are exhibiting lots of damage from my slings, who have been standing just outside the walls and raining fire up and over (you can see it coming in right in the center there).

It’s all over. The elite Trojans put up less of a fight than I expect before breaking. I think I underestimated the combined effect of them starting at half strength, due to their earlier loss in the field battle, and their exhaustion relative to my fresh troops. They break like troops of a much lower level. Troy is ours.

All hail Odysseus, the Man of Many Ways. And who had to use all the ways at his disposal to make this ultimate victory possible. The will of Zeus has been fulfilled, and the doom of the Trojans uttered. A thousand years of Greek dominion begins…

Like most blobber 4X games, this one has a little replay system at the end. This shows Hippolyta’s Amazons at their height, that massive orange blob. They really were a scary enemy, even scarier than I knew. But, in retrospect, when you add up me, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles - also more of an even match than I realized.

The end state. Add Ithaca’s light green to Sparta’s maroon and you can see how totally dominant we became. As Zeus foretold, Troy’s destruction really was inevitable. The way it played out was cool as hell, but even if we had lost any of those final battles, we would have been able to rebuild and wear them down to their eventual defeat. That beautiful new army that replaced Leucos’ that was annihilated? Was ready just as we landed the killing blow.

Agamemnon and Odysseus, side by side, surveying their new lands. The end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses.

[iguferon]

congrats on your victory!

[SUPERSONNICK]

let it be known that while it took me a while to catch up with each post… chapter in this thread, have been looking forward to dive into this re-enaction of ancient history which actually took place in ancient Japan Greece.

(Tho missing some giant enemy crabs and Medusas roaming the world tho, but that’s maybe for another time, another game )

And it has been great to read that you got as much enjoyment out of it like us readers do!
Alas, has been great entertainment, and a great writeup, kudos to Rhodos (j/k, Odysseus the man).

[Father.Torque]

@SUPERSONNICK

(Tho missing some giant enemy crabs and Medusas roaming the world tho, but that’s maybe for another time, another game )

Same game! You just pick the DLC “mythology” option at the beginning and there’s monsters and magic powers and all kinds of stuff!

I have been thinking of starting another game with all that stuff enabled…

[Mikey]

I’d read that too

[VastleCania]

this…was a good thread…

[Father.Torque]

Hey thanks. You should play the game

[VastleCania]

no