A Puny AAR
Greetings all, and welcome to this AAR. Country to be played is Carthage, starting in the year 490 AUC (or 264 BC) at the beginning of the first Punic war. I will be playing my own mod, has been a while since last. As for why 490 rather then as early as possible, well Carthage in 474 will be easier as conflict with Rome is not only avoidable, you have a decent amount of time to prepare for it so if it does come it should not be too difficult to avoid defeat. Anyway, how does things look as we start? Well here is Carthage.
Not bad, Syracuse and Utica are allies and in addition Theveste and Massyli are reasonably friendly. No real enemies apart from Rome actually. And we have a bit more territory to the west, but let us ignore it for the time being. Suffice to say that the iron in Hispania will be needed, but that is for later (if I had started at 474 the easiest way to get iron would be to trade with Rome, they tend to agree to it as relations are reasonably good at that start).
We are at war with Rome. They good news is that we are slightly richer. The bad news are that they have a somewhat stronger army with heavy infantry that is not only slightly larger, their manpower reserves are much greater then ours as well. We do have Syracuse on our side, lucky us (the Romans have Massilia as an ally, one which they quickly asks to join them, but who cares about Massilia). Obviously maintaining naval superiority will be very important if we are to achieve victory.
Well onto our plans. First ship our army in Africa to Sicily and try to prevent the Romans from taking Syracuse. We should also train troops and build ships. Our first battle with Rome is a naval one near the African coast. We win (had a great admiral) and sink many Roman ships, but they manage to flee back to Rome with their few remaining ships. Unfortunately they do manage to get another army to Sicily, but we are victorious in the battle that follows.
There are additional fighting, we lose some battles (though never with heavy losses) and win some, and in the end manages to destroy one of the Roman armies (they lost many men in fruitless attempts at assaulting Syracuse). The other Roman army remains though, and we have no manpower left. Luckily the Roman army is appearantly in a bad shape as the Romans leave Sicily a few months later, unfortunately our allies from Syracuse are the first to reach Messana so they control the siege.
The next year the Roman navy shows up again, outside to eastern coast of Sicily they are defeated in an indesicive battle, we pursue them a bit but turn back to prevent a vast Roman army from crossing the straits to Sicily. It would seem they tried to lure my fleet away so they could return, clever. It didn't work but still. The Syracusans are scared enough to leave Messana so I send in a small army to start a new siege, one where I am in command.
As the siege continues I look around and notice that Roman expansion to the north caused some unexpected troubles. Some Ligurians managed to take over northern Etruria and cut off the newly established Roman colony in Liguria from the rest of Rome. Interesting development.
As expected I eventually capture Messana but obviously that is not enough to get the Romans to accept peace. So here is how it looks, Rome have a larger army with lots of manpower (as noted my manpower is already exhausted). I am building ships (as do the Romans, and seemingly at a similar rate) and basically try to figure out a way to gain victory. And the populists are gaining support. Could be difficult.