Letters from wAAR - An experimental Rome AAR with Epigoni mod

[Wave]

Greetings readers! It's again a time to try complete one AAR. Yet I've been quite unsuccessful in that due different things, mainly savegame losses and hardware failures.

What's the hook?

Minimal amount of text about the gameplay or even the other events of the game, every update consists of a few letters written by a character we're following who doesn't know everything about the status of the country. When the character dies we will simply change to another one.

Start date: 1st October 486
Difficulty: Normal
Mod: Epigoni
Game version: 2.35 Beta
Player skill level: Poor

Gameplay notes in magenta/purple
Writer notes in yellow

I will be posting small updates quite frequently instead of big updates after longer whiles.
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Written chapters:

PART 1:
From battlefield to battlefield ---
With Gaius Fabricius Luscinus

Chapter I Betcha didn't expect that! Posted 24th April 2012
Chapter II Punic War #1 - Part 1 Posted 27th April 2012
Chapter III Punic War #1 - Part 2 Posted 6th May 2012
Chapter IV End of an era Posted 14th May 2012

PART 2:
The diary of a madman ---
With Manius Pomponius Matho

Chapter I Intro Posted 15th May 2012
Chapter II Ill omens Posted 25th May 2012
Chapter III Towards the light Posted 3rd June 2012
Chapter IV Punic war #2 - Part 1 Posted 16th June 2012
Chapter V Punic war #2 - Part 2 Posted 20th June 2012
Chapter VI Punic war #2 - Part 3 Posted 27th June 2012
Chapter VII Punic war #2 - Part 4 Posted 8th September 2012
Chapter VIII When good plans go bad Posted 6th November 2012

PART 3:
War poetry ---
With Abdalo Baalid
Chapter I Backgrounds Posted 17th November 2012

[loki100]

nice idea, this should give a new and interesting perspective

[Wave]

From battlefield to battlefield
Chapter I
Betcha didn't expect that!

Portraits of some people of this AAR:






As the navy was a lot smaller than I was hoping I spent all my money in the beginning to build more





I allied Mamertimes despite them being at war with Carthage and risked getting involved into the war without time to prepare any better






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All kinds of feedback is appreciated!

EDIT: Damnit Loki I should have remembered that nobody posts in AARland without you noticing, congratulations for being bloody quick

EDIT2: It seems I underestimated the font size by quite a lot.. Next one will have bit smaller font and then more text can fit in too

[loki100]

ach, like to get my comments in early ... great stuff, wonderful treatment of the events

[Qorten]

It should get quite interesting quite soon with an early war against Carthage!

[Malurous]

A nice, stylish approach. I'm intrigued to see what follows. The possibilities, with all the different characters, seem endless.

[Wave]

@ Loki100: Thank you, I'll do my best to learn to write like some people here who can really hook any reader

@ Qorten: I hope so, in the beginning I had nothing but the one army of 16 units but I believe the war will go trough pretty painless as Carthage is almost underpowered in many of mods (if you compare to vanilla) and I think Epigoni doesn't make an exception here. Their manpower problems will hurt them and I'm going to take advantage out of it

@ Malurous: Thanks for support I'm planning to try make every character different during this AAR but it may get hard eventually. Kind of luckily Gaius will die rather soon and we can change the guy.

From battlefield to battlefield
Chapter II
Punic War #1 - Part 1

I noticed that I have made some typos and other kinds of grammar mistakes in my letters, I'll be more careful in the future. Hopefully the font size is a bit better now.



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Gaius was elected to consul, weirdly he was the last (third) in the list of candidates when I checked approximately half a year before election but probably a couple of battles after that gave him enough popularity to became the consul

The letter looks a lot lamer and more unofficial than I wanted it to but it'll do this time.
In the Epigoni mod the consuls reign only for one year (at least in military republic), which is in my opinion very annoying because the rulers are changing all the time, so basically I have only one year to do all funny stuff with my character.



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The 1st Legion captured Oea and Sabratha while the 2nd Legion took care of Leptis Magna (which is OPM tribe in Epigoni mod). Carthage was attacking frequently with 8-16 unit strong armies but they didn't cause any major problems, attrition instead did.

[Malurous]

Still intriguing. I wonder if Gaius actually has time to visit Rome before his time as Consul is up.

For what it's worth, I had to do some zooming in with this text size. Maybe try something between this one and the one you used for the first chapter?

[loki100]

one does suspect that Gaius is going to see out his term in the deserts of North Africa ... well its all part of the glory of serving the Republic

as to font, just to join in, if you use a natural written style of font, I'd say go a size larger. They are often just that bit less clear to read. Its the same as the difference between an Arial style font and a Times New Roman, in effect the first is easier as every letter takes up the same space, the latter looks more natural as every letter takes up the space it needs. So a written style font is particularly random in terms of spacing etc. Apols, prob far too much information just I did a lot of work on disability rights and oddly font and page layout are quite an important issue in that field.

[Wave]

Thanks for the feedback!

I will most likely keep using the hand-written looking font because it looks better in my opinion as it is supposed to be hand written diary. I'll do a couple of test letters and post them here so everyone can say which font size looks best.

It is hard to say are they difficult to read as I've written them all and know what's supposed to be in there, thus even if I couldn't read everything perfectly I can't notice it so well. However I gotta admit that the letter "a" with that font definitely sucks, it looks more like "d" and then writing something like "adapt" looks more like "dddpt"

[Qorten]

Your war is going great, although you apparently had luck on your side in the first battle on African soil! To chime in with the others, a bit larger font would be nice. Or a font that looks like it's handwritten, but less so then what you're using now.

[Wave]

Here is a test letter with different font sizes:



Also do you think that the letters could be different sized, bigger or smaller? This one is 614x614px

[loki100]

Hi, I'd go with 55, for me at least that is easy to read and keeps the style you are trying to achieve

[Qorten]

55 is best.

[Malurous]

I agree, definitely 55.

[Wave]

From battlefield to battlefield
Chapter III
Punic War #1 - Part 2

To be honest I had one hell of a hurry to get the peace offer sent before I was walked over by the Carthaginian - Utican army. I don't know why but first they all gathered into Carthage, then moved back to Utica and even to Hippo Regius and then started moving to attack. Just thinking about the attrition, fool AI...



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I had to flip a coin to decide between taking piece of Sicily (giving them to Mamertimes) and other islands or starting "in your face" campaign immediately and going into North Africa. This way will allow Carthage to attack Mamertimes again and start another war when I can take care of Sicily.. Luckily they accepted my peace offer immediately.



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Because I never remember to stop every year and hand out the titles that people want (so basically my character pool is filled untitled populists) I had to do it all after the war and handed out tons of titles. The guys named below had an ambition to become the Tribune of Soldiers.



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I started colonising campaign to get rid of the barbarian problems and to really hammer my name into the North Africa



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Here is the current world map: Seleucids look scary but they are currently banged by Egypt (named Ptolemaic Kingdom in the mod) and other small states, at some point they almost collapsed due Armenia. I wish good luck to all non-greeks in Asia Minor.

[Qorten]

A very good start! The next war against Carthage should be like taking a walk in the park.

[Malurous]

Quite impressive gains, calling that a foothold might be an understatement.

[loki100]

like the new format, and that was an impressive outcome, I agree with the comments above, Carthage is yours for the taking (esp as they will be suffering from low manpower in any case)

[Wave]

Thanks for the comments! It seems that I have to stay sharp when posting as I have (only) 3 moderators replying here

What comes to the war, it did hurt my manpower pool quite a bit as well as Carthaginians', I didn't notice it immediately but after shipping armies back to Italy and roaming around the barbarian states (attrition, attrition and more attrition + an idiot using 20 unit stack for a while to wake up barbies...) to colonize my manpower hit zero but it's rising again and armies are full.

Same barbarians that attacked me ended up walking over Nassamones (the green TPM in the south of me) and installing their chief there.

Next update should follow shortly as I don't think that Gaius stays alive for a long time anymore (just turned 60) or anything interesting happens very soon.