Rome TW2 Emperor's Edition is on sale

[Josh]

For fifteen bucks until day after tomorrow, if anybody is interested.

[Josh]

Okay, I'm not entirely keen on the new UI, but Carthago Delenda Est. Sittin' there on Sicily thinking you're all kinds of hot shit. Where are your elephants now, bitches?

[Josh]

Okay, Athenians are kind of a pain in the ass. Just fucking die already.

[Josh]

Oh hey, I can revive legions that were, um, sort of misplaced due to certain military misadventures *cough*understrengthsiegeinMassala*cough*.

1st Italio marches again! Reborn in Carthage* and ready to kick some ass in Northern Africa.

*Carthage is and always has been a key commercial cog in the Republic. Hannibal who?

[frigidmagi]

So who is the darkest villain to menace the glorious Republic then?

[Josh]

Besides my own ineptitude?

The Spartans gave us a fair run for our money when I decided to absorb Greece. I had to piecemeal them out a bit at a time, take a few cities then call a time-out to let us get our shit back together.

But the big fight's going to brew up with the Avernii to my west, or the Parthians or Armenians to the east. I'm sitting uncomfortably between some sizable powers due to my Greek ambitions. I should've said fuck off to the joy of conquering Sparta/Athens and consolidated North Africa/Spain/Gaul before turning to the east, so things could ugly.

Also, my version of Manius Aquillius met his ignoble fate at the hands of the Masaesyli in North Africa. Marched a legion into the desert, got harried by spies and veterans before being clobbered. He won the first battle but took a beating, and got sabotaged so he couldn't retreat. Second battle bled the Masaesyli all out of proportion (they outnumbered me three to one but lost about twice as many men as I had left to field.)

I expect the general got a gold bath after that disaster. Then being as how they're a lousy one-province country I offered them client state status and they jumped at the chance. (They'd already offered to surrender and accept client status before my army even breached their border.) Now they keep trying to drag me into their war with the Lusitani, which I will join as soon as I shift some forces down. At least then I'll be in a position to pincer the Avernii if the balloon goes up, though it leaves me scraping on the defensive on the Armenian/Parthian frontier. At least my navy will be able to straight fuck their shit up if it rolls hot over there.

[Josh]

I have conquered a city in Spain named 'Arse'.

Did I mention that it was defended by Vercingetorix?

That means I kicked royal Arse.

Really, this one just wrote itself.

He actually pulled off a pretty clever stunt, swinging two armies in around behind my big bad legion from Rome, the one with the Praetorians and the heavy onagers, while his army hit from the front. I made a half-assed desert box with my legions flanked out to either side to refuse the flanks, my scorpions in a straight line across the middle and almost exactly perpendicular to the Gallic line of entry from either side, so in order to rush my weakish center they had to cross the line of fire and take a beating, or else they had to charge into my swordsmen.

...who were each backed by a unit of heavy onagers with another heavy onager detachment in the middle to play to whichever side was getting pressed harder.

It was a hard, bloody fight, outnumbered three to one, but we beat their asses and then went on to conquer us some Arse.

The Averni have made a stiff fight of things, but I was able to blitzkrieg half their empire out before they really consolidated their forces. Almost all of Gaul is mine, except for modern-day Switzerland, which is held by some minor principality that I'll get around to squashing later, and modern Normandy, which is held by the Gallic Federation, which interestingly enough invaded the UK and took over. So after I finish mopping up the Averni in Spain and the Lusitani in Spain and Northern Africa (fuckers are holed up in Morocco, but that's about to come to a tragic end for them) it's on to burn some boats in old blighty.

[Josh]

Oh shit my Arse is revolting.

I need to build a Cloaca posthaste!

[Josh]

Man, I Legio always catches the shit sandwiches.

Got caught in Side by two Armenian armies and a flank attack from the sea. I Legio holds the damn line, gotta give big props to the Pretorians who held the east entrance. They died to a man, but they bottled up like half the Armenian army and shattered every attack that came their way until they just flat ran out of bodies. They allowed me to rip the shit out of the marine invasion and then defeat the land armies in detail.

In the end it came down to bonsai* charges by my artillery crews along and a final lunge by my sole remaining infantry cohort against their last unit of spearmen, with my general running about hacking down their fucking slingers.

Seriously, fuck their slingers.

(Yes, my men carry their little trees with them everywhere. I Legio is my oldest outfit and they've developed some eccentricities while marching from one end of western Europe to the other.)

[frigidmagi]

How are Armenian armies?

[Josh]

Not bad, actually. They picked a bad fight there because they're so cav-heavy, so hitting a town where I can choke the mobility wasn't their best choice. Even so, it was a damn close thing. I honestly didn't expect the arty charge to do anything other than tie down their flank long enough for my remaining cohort to punch through and beat the shit out of their spearmen, but their general had bailed so their forces were pretty ready to pack in by that point.

In the open field they're a royal pain in the ass, especially what with the mounted archers and shit and Rome being stuck with javelin-tossing for a response.

But that's why we have the tetsudo, I suppose.

Armenia graciously accepted to be my client state, so now it's on to go after the last big power in the region. Parthia here I come!

(Don't plague me pls.)

[Josh]

I won't say Parthians are shit, but if you go in ready for hordes of missile cav and fort up while hammering them with the artillery, they are manageable.

Fight them on their terms and it's one of those die tired kind of situations, though.

[Josh]

There, fixed the obnoxious typo in the subject line.

Okay, Armenia was a stone bitch. They waited until I was tied up fighting the Selucids and the Cimmerians and then shanked me in my Middle Eastern holdings. The only thing that stopped them from pretty much straight jacking the entirety of Turkey out from under me was one legion bottlenecking them twice. The first battle was a stalemate, but I lost about a third of my infantry and all my cav. The second battle, after I'd reloaded with some scratch vigiles was more decisively in my favor. I stationed most of my crap on a ridge, with my vigiles strung out along the flank to protect my arty from that damned cavalry.

Well, they crammed the cav straight into my frontal legions, allowing me to swing my spearmen and my javelin-chuckers out in a near-perfect pincer. Ate up most of my spearmen because they in turn took a beating from a reinforcing army, but I shattered their main force and essentially broke the Armenian forces in Turkey.

Still, they made me claw for every inch of ancient Israel/Iraq.

Speaking of the Selucids, I had the coolest series of battles with them, some real morituri te salutamas stuff. I have this old legacy legion from the early days, mustered in Carthage and primarily built around a force of gladiators. Of course especially in the late game gladiators are pretty much meat for any kind of missile troops, but I've continually rebuilt the Legio Africanus with more willing shock troops.

They've been a pretty workmanlike legion, traveling from Africa up to do the dirty in Gaul, then in auld blighty, before traveling back down to Africa for a nice break and rebuild before the balloon went up with the Selucids. Then they marched off to liberate Libya, and it was in some dink village that the name eludes me where they really earned their pay.

So the village itself is minimally defended, but there are two reinforcing armies. My original scheme of attack was simply to let my artillery whittle everything down, I had a pretty heavy ballista component to back this army. But at the opening, it's a clear lane to the town center and my artillery goes to work. So the Selucids fucking bail.

And I'm all... whoa, it's wide open there.

So I send a horde of gladiators down to secure the town center, while holding back my artillery and a security screen in case of trap. Nope, it's really that open. So I start transiting my arty into the town when the reinforcements arrive.

So now I have an army hitting the center, and another big chunk hitting my security line, with my arty strung out in a line moving toward the city center.

No problem whatsoever. I simply halt the ballista in place, then have them turn and fire on the guys attacking the security screen. My line is thin as shit, but I go ahead and string my javelin leves out to flank the attackers on the screen, so now they're taking it from the ballista in the face and the javelins on their rears.

In the meantime, in town the gladiators get to their bloody work. Wave after wave of Selucids pour in, with missile troops backing, and my gladiators just carve through them like a hot knife.

So the Selucids freak out and bail, with most of their force intact.

But they come back the next turn, and my troops are now concentrated in-city. But this time, they also brought up fresh reinforcements, including elephants.

Not a lot of fancy tactics to that one. I lost two-thirds of my remaining gladiators in that battle, but they utterly broke the Selucid army and drove them from the town. Pluto reaped his harvest that day.

Then I had another big fight in another town where the rebuilt Africanus faced a combined land/naval assault, and again I took about two-thirds losses on my gladiators (with my new gladiatrice spearwomen, too. They kicked some ass holding the beach against the marines. It was funny to watch the Selucid ships land in front of my skorpions, only to have the gladiatrices charge the beach and pretty much instantly rout them.)

With the Selucids and Armenians mostly finished off, Africanus is heading back to Carthage to tool up again. They should be ready for the big final push that will see the obliteration of Parthia.

I'm still kind of mixed on this one, but I love the legion traditions system.