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so far, I am really getting a kick out of this game

finally got a game going where I can be the Spartens and use there Troops

so started up the Rome/Persa campaign, on HARD with me as the Spartens

while looking around the map before clicking on start, I seen one side who's main goal was take Sparta, so that settled the early war plans of my boys

once they fell, I just settled into a building period, which I then seen that the Aclive, only had one city left, so helped put them out of there suffering (nice CITY too !)

been selling a lot of "nails", which has really been a boon to my Tradeing , as I need almost everything

hired 5 Troops of Merk's and that almost did me in, wow, them boys like Payday, so ended up sending them into the Messian backyard, and picked a fight with a very Large formation, they took out 6 troops, and hurt most of the rest, but was just too many of them

by that time, my Spatarns were ready, 6 troops of the good guys and 6 troops of wantobes along for the trip, made miecemeat out of the rest of the Messian troops (one Spartan troop gained 349 exp points in 2 battles, they were the speartip of the army, after 3 battles there less then 15 men left, but that war was over and R@R time had begun)

the Romans are walking over anybody in there path, but so far, they are still far north, my goals take me to the East, so will let them have there fun

HARD_Sarge

(sorry for the spelling, these are some fancy names for me to try and work out )

Okay, let's talk.

I got this game on Monday. I've missed a lot of sleep since then. I t took a little getting use to but things finally click adn fell into place. I would like to congratulate the person(s) who came up with the screens and interface. They are great. Easy to use, and they display the info you need in an easy to interpret format. (WiTP should be this way)

Now, I think I'm playing scn #17. GOing along pretty good. No one has attacked me in years. But I'm slowly colonizing some territories. Anyway, whenI start a scn, is there an option that I missed as far as chosing which county I want to be at the outset?

(if its like Spartan - which I just got then downloaded Troy!!), when you pick the scenario, the map comes up. you THEN click on a colored region on the map to choose to play that one. you can barely decipher when you click on it the region is "depressed" (not sad, but sunken [:D]). it defaults to Sparta on the Spartan scenarios.

Thank you. I'll give that a try.

Depending on what you want to do, you can click on a nation and pick to be that nation, or you can click on the upper right, on radom, and it will change the nations

so say you want to play in the area that is Sparta, you could end up being the Romans,or Dorian or Ionian,or something else

HARD_Sarge

Hey good tip! I've been working around the clock completing a major research paper.

And now it's time for some FUN!

I've played about 8 different campaign games and two smaller scenarios. I play on easy as I'm olde not not as good as you fellas.[;)]
The last game I had my first attack on a walled city. As I outnumger him 20-1 I let it autoresolve.Wrong. I reset it the battle and found the Greek fire does a number on my troops. After experimenting I found the best thing to do is charge,preferable with heavy cavalry but heavy infantry will do.A General certainly helps too. When you charge you can outrun the Greek fire until after you make contact.
I've gone thru 8 attacks on walled cities now. You can besiege the city for a year or two and break down it's defenses or if you greatly outnumber the defense you can go to manual and use the tactics I've described.
Another thing I've learned as it's VERY expensive to keep an army in the field.Keep em in the cities until you are completely ready to attack a certain city.
Also,in the Grand Campaign cames play Crete,[:)]
In the Grand Campaign with the Persian and Roman hordes,pay you ransom to them to make friends. In my last game there were two countries left. Me and the Persians. If I hadn't bribed the Persians I'd of been dead too.
I played the Byzantines once and the Persians were my enemies.I had a walled city with a large fort and a max number of elite toops.I defeated 6 of their huge armies ina row before I fell to the seventh.They had five other ready to go if that had failed. Fortunately I had a smaller city in an out of the way place ann they left it alone and I was able to fulfill my victory goals with it.
Yes,I'm have great fun with this game.[;)]

Haven't played much yet. Do armies in the field and particularly those performing long sieges suffer attrition? Thanks.

I haven't noticed any attrition to the attacking forces.I've never been attacked in any of my walled cities. I have noticed that after a long siege the Greek fire is missing when I attack the city tho.

Edit.Actually I was attacked once in a walled city but as I was hit by seven huge armies in a row there wasn't much I could do and there wasn't any siege.

No, attrition is not factored in with the armies.You can be in a city or the field and size of army remains static. You repair an army at the rate of 5% if in a city.

If you decide to siege instead of attack a city immdeiately, the defense value of the walled city decrease a little each month. Eventually you will see a cloud start to form over the city. Represents foul odor from rotting items.

No, Armies in the field don't suffer any attrition but they are a bear to maintain for any length of time. I learned the hard way to have a healthy surplus of silver and food before starting a 'campaign' - wood is necessary also if you travel by ocean.

From some comments it seems the Campaign with Rome/Persia offers a good challenge. I played my first game with the 1500BC Campaign on 'Very Hard' and to be honest after the expansion to aquire resources when the AI opponents offered a little challenge, there was very little point in continuing. The AI seems to never(or take forever) to move up the technology tree to get the better troops. After getting Elite Heavy Infantry/Supply Depots, the AI could do nothing in reponse. In Asia Minor there was a huge AI empire(30+ cities) so I took my field army over and captured one of their cities(defended by light infantry only). Funny thing the AI doesn't respond at all and I see relations had barely worsened! So I set out to capture another and see what the AI does, in short very little. It had about 10 'Huge' Armies made up of mostly Light Infantry but also some Heavy Infantry(suprise!) but didn't once try to engage my Army. In fact I once marched past one of their Armies standing in the open in order to attack a city and the AI never responded.

Despite the disappointment with the AI opponent I really like the dynamics of this game. The limited resources(all vital) make for some interesting choices as does the limited space in each city. Diplomacy appears very in depth but I haven't really explored it in detail yet. Some observations though, the Exploit Statis-Rebels order seems way too powerful for 1000 silver. Every time I ordered it for one of my 5-Star Diplomats the enemy empire soon broke up. Amazing, and I wondered why the AI Diplomats didn't try doing that to me? I stopped using it because it just didn't seem fair.

I read on the Slitherine forums some Mods to be used to make Spartan more of a challenge. I would like to use them for GoT - is it possible? How? The idea of modding seems great until I looked into the files and wow overwhelming to say the least. Is there a collection of Mods anywhere and instructions on how to install them?

This game has good depth and potential, just needs some more work to the AI to give a better challenge throughout the 'whole' game, not just the start where I am guessing it has a horde of resources to give it a jump start.

I did a little checking and I found this site. You might want to start here for MODS.
http://www.aimoo.com/forum/categories.c ... yID=317546

Yea, the Spartan mods will work with Gates of Troy, just put them in the same dir structure as it says for Spartan.

ORIGINAL: Iain McNeil

Yea, the Spartan mods will work with Gates of Troy, just put them in the same dir structure as it says for Spartan.

Hi Iain,

Ok I downloaded the Berserker Mod last night and followed the instructions by creating a 'Mod' folder in the GoT directory. I get the option and select it and started a game, however after playing for some time I never noticed anything different or is there? Looking more closely at the Berserker Mod I see in it only has maps for the Spartan game, which I don't have, and none specifically for GoT. Can I copy what's in the 'Grand Campaign' folder(the sides.txt) into a map made for GoT, ie the GCRomePersia map? If not what do I need to do to make it 'work'? Sorry if I am being a little slow here and thanks for your help.



Ron

Ah... yea thats true. No it wouldn't work for Troy. We'll have to create one for Gates of Troy. It's not a big job so Ill try to get it done early next week.

Ok, the Sparan "Berserker Mod" has been updated to include the Gates of Troy scenarios.

http://www.slitherine.co.uk/spartan/downloads.htm#Mods

Thanks Iain for the quick work!

Hi Iain
well lets see if I am getting this right

download and unzip into GoT folder, take the Mod folder out of Berzerkmod folder, and place into the GoT folder

then click start

a box will open above the menu for starting a new or old game, click on the mod you want, the screen may blink, and then click on start new game ? (for me it does, music stops and screen blinks, then the music starts up again and still on the same menu)

(do all 3 of the Spartan mods work or only the Berzeker ?)


HARD_Sarge

It depends how you unzip the file. Inside the zip is a mod dir which needs to be copied to the root dir of Gates of Troy on your PC. If you use windows compressor you can copy the dir straight from the zip file. If you use winzip this isn't possible so extract the whole zip to a temporary dir & then copy the mod dir across. In teh end you will have GatesofTroy\Mod\Berserker Mod\ directory structure. You will know if its working if when you run the game you see a list of mods in the bottom left. To activate a mod select it and you'll see the screen flicker as it updates everything.

The other Spartan mods dont work atm, but they are less interesting than berserker so I don't know if its worth converting them?

Hi Iain
thanks, I got it to work after looking it over, the setting the mod, then starting the game is what was throwing me (would be nice if there was some kind of hint that the mod was now in effect though, number showing in the corner or what not)

HARD_Sarge

and if you didn't figure it out, I am really likeing this game