[LoR AAR] Resurrecting the Legacy of Rome
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Wonderful! Am now reading.
However the Imperial Reconquest CB looks hilariously overpowered. My head spins at the thought that the Byzzies will get this fantasy CB for free all the way from Serbia to Britannia. :wacko:
I didn't get LoR yet (have no time to play). Will surely get it at some point though
However the Imperial Reconquest CB looks hilariously overpowered. My head spins at the thought that the Byzzies will get this fantasy CB for free all the way from Serbia to Britannia. :wacko:
I didn't get LoR yet (have no time to play). Will surely get it at some point though
Part 5 is complete... Thank you for your patience, and if you read it, let me know what you think!
I hear the Imperial Reconquest CB is only for the human player. The AI won't use it!
Wonderful! Am now reading.
However the Imperial Reconquest CB looks hilariously overpowered. My head spins at the thought that the Byzzies will get this fantasy CB for free all the way from Serbia to Britannia. :wacko:
I didn't get LoR yet (have no time to play). Will surely get it at some point though
I hear the Imperial Reconquest CB is only for the human player. The AI won't use it!
Why do you mention in the opening text that it is is the ninth Roman indiction (120-134 years since something or other, assuming a 15-year cycle). Greek indictions tended to be dated from AD 312 (presumably marking Constantine's capture of Rome), which would make this the 44th indiction.
My dating was indeed based on the Roman indiction, but I was not aware the ERE used a different numbering. Are you sure it was official?
Anyway, the Ecumenical Patriarchate uses indictions continuously since Byzantine times. I'll check some of their documents over the weekend to see if the indictions correspond to Roman numbering or not (but I think they do, which would mean Roman indiction all the way).
Anyway, the Ecumenical Patriarchate uses indictions continuously since Byzantine times. I'll check some of their documents over the weekend to see if the indictions correspond to Roman numbering or not (but I think they do, which would mean Roman indiction all the way).
Read it all now.
Congratulations on one hell of a successful reign. Succession will probably be rocky as heck, but I'm sure you would pull through eventually. I don't see how any vassal could hope to withstand your 10,000 man retinue even if Michael is an imbecile who needs.
Honestly though, while it's nice to see all those fun events, the AAR is not advertisement for a challenging or well balanced game... As the BYZ player you were able to ROFLstomp everything from Syria and Palestine to Sicily and the Crimea in the space of a mere 20 years game time, and with the 1070 start to boot where the Empire is supposed to be unstable, divided and faced by powerful enemies. Your Romanos Diogenes had a LAWLtastically easy reign - raising the levy laws, the taxes, the crown authority, the retinues... was there anything that required luck? You even outnumbered the Seljuks in the initial war after you raised the Varangians. Meanwhile the Muslims holy-warred their way through Tuscany, and the Normans just bended over when you came over. And western Christianity just lets you roll them up (evicting the Pope from Rome!!!) with the silly Roman Empire CB.
Playing as BYZ, it looks like it's more of a fantasy lala land game, than historical grand strategy. :sad:
Congratulations on one hell of a successful reign. Succession will probably be rocky as heck, but I'm sure you would pull through eventually. I don't see how any vassal could hope to withstand your 10,000 man retinue even if Michael is an imbecile who needs.
Honestly though, while it's nice to see all those fun events, the AAR is not advertisement for a challenging or well balanced game... As the BYZ player you were able to ROFLstomp everything from Syria and Palestine to Sicily and the Crimea in the space of a mere 20 years game time, and with the 1070 start to boot where the Empire is supposed to be unstable, divided and faced by powerful enemies. Your Romanos Diogenes had a LAWLtastically easy reign - raising the levy laws, the taxes, the crown authority, the retinues... was there anything that required luck? You even outnumbered the Seljuks in the initial war after you raised the Varangians. Meanwhile the Muslims holy-warred their way through Tuscany, and the Normans just bended over when you came over. And western Christianity just lets you roll them up (evicting the Pope from Rome!!!) with the silly Roman Empire CB.
Playing as BYZ, it looks like it's more of a fantasy lala land game, than historical grand strategy. :sad:
I was under the impression that Greek indictions marked the Orthodox religious year and didn't date from Christ's supposed birth, but it's your AAR in the end.
Meh. The game is ridiculously easy if you start out holding any kingdom or empire title. Defeating the AI is never a challenge. The point of the DLC is to make sure Byzantium feels different than the HRE and France, not to punish Byz-o-philes in their attempts to recreate the Roman Empire.
Of course you'd get a more interesting AAR with more difficulty for the player if you start from one of the dates where the Empire is really on the back foot, like post-Manzikert or post-Fourth Crusade. The author basically cheated with his starting date. Byantium 1066-1071 in the history files is at its largest for the entire game, and while in 1066 it is somewhat blunted by Doukas horrible stats, you can avoid that if you start in 1070. And the history files don't deprive you of Anatolia until 1071. So he chose the single, tiny sliver within the history files where Byzantium is at it's peak strength and decided to start a game from there. Hardly a recipe for an interesting or challenging play through.
Don't blame the game when it's the player who puts it on Very Easy and enables every single handicap, which is essentially what constantinople! has done here.
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The AI isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, I know that, but come on! I think this really is too easy. Yes Byzantium is huge in the 1066/70 start but the leadership isn't that good - the last time I played Byz (couple of months ago) having a 10-DIP emperor with a 5-DIP wife, a short reign penalty, an angry adult son in the chain of succession and the Seljuks coming for him wasn't a straight ticket to world domination.
The expansions have added lots of fun stuff, but balance has totally gone out of the window. SoI added stupid muslim invasions, now LoR adds stupid lala land fantasy CBs for Byzantium that have them steamroll everything in sight. I am happy they are developing the game further, but at this point I think I would pay money for an expansion that does not actually add a single features but instead is just a balance package. Have one of their three-man teams sit down for 3-4 months and just BALANCE the game, so that the historical starts give a more reasonable spread of results in hands-off games, that there's challenge in keeping even a large a realm together when your ruler is only a mediocre guy, and that the over-the-top mechanisms like invasions get toned down a little. I would pay money for this.
It dies for a week after you get ~45k views. Normally that's not a problem, but it is if you make an official beta AAR. I made an AAR for AHD and it totally killed my Photobucket for months >.<
Aww, I think its very ambient.Diogenes is a very interesting choice for your dynasty. I always wanted to play as Romanos but I don't like their clown vomit CoA
I made a free account with imageshack and uploaded all the AAR's pics in their storage. Do you know if what you say also happens with imageshack? I'd hate it if they delete the pics and leave the AAR again without them
They don't get deleted on PB, they just get a 'high traffic warning' for a few weeks. From what I hear, Imageshack is better for high traffick images.I made a free account with imageshack and uploaded all the AAR's pics in their storage. Do you know if what you say also happens with imageshack? I'd hate it if they delete the pics and leave the AAR again without them
Not sure if using their website to hosts promotional content for a commercial products violates their TOS or not...
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I guess you need to read his ending, again. Remember that this AAR is only about one ruler, when ruler changes are one of the most treacherous moments in the game, especially for sprawling empires.
Its only natural for military achievements to be easier when playing a large realm. The player who knows his way around the game and plays for conquest is destined to own a large chunk of the map before his game is over.
From the time I became a beta (before the game's vanilla release) to today, I've played the game to the end choosing (sequentially) a different Byzantine Emperor each time, starting from Konstantinos X Dukas and my current game session is with Alexios IV Angelos. There are 11 Emperors between these two so that means I've played 12 full games and I'm in the middle of the 13th. (BTW, an interesting kind of a challenge is Nicephoros III Botaniates in 1077-1081. He starts 78-years-old without a heir and you have to marry him quickly to a lustful girl and continue with the newborn under a long regency). All the games ended with my realm controlling all africa and the middle east, Spain, Italy and sometimes Hungary and parts of France or Russia, depending on what intermarriages I did to inherit Kingdoms. Wasn't all these games fantasy?
The fabricate-claim system guaranteed that the realm's expansion could never reach the former borders of Rome because the time it'd take to get that immense expanse province-by-province is enormous (in all my games I've never reached Brittain or even northern France). And this is the purpose of the Imperial Reconquest CB: To give the player the chance to actually bring the Roman Empire in its old pre-400 AD borders, just for the fun of it, at the same time giving the player Byzantine/Roman related events to make his game more rich and varied.
And now that I think of it, check out how many years Justinian needed to conquer both Italy and Africa. If you said to the pre-Justinian Emperors what Justinian accomplished in so little time, they'd too reply that you are talking lala fantasy.
I choose Romanus Diogenes and 1070 because I deemed it ideal to demonstrate the new AAR's characteristics and possibilities for restoring the Roman Empire in the limited time I had available to play the game for the sole reason of writing this AAR. The strategy I follow I've learned from experience, having fought the initial Seljuk war many times in the past. I could go towards the Seljuks without passing the Maximum Feudal Levies law and without waiting for attrition to take its toll in the initial Seljuk army and suffer defeat after defeat until Anatolia was lost. Would you prefer such an AAR? Perhaps you would, but that was not the scenario I wanted to tackle, nor it was suited to the purpose of this ARR and the reason I was requested to write it.
In the past I have written another AAR, twice as long as this one, playing on an almost complete beta of the vanilla game, starting in 1066 with Konstantinos Doukas that you say above is more difficult. Without retinues and without Imperial reconquest CB. And I started the game by fighting simultaneously the Seljuks on the east and conquering Sicily in the west. This AAR is in the beta forum, but if you are interested I can ask for it to be moved here.
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I was under the impression that Greek indictions marked the Orthodox religious year and didn't date from Christ's supposed birth, but it's your AAR in the end.
Indictions had nothing to do with religion. They were a civilian system that was introduced and used for tax purposes. The indiction exists separately and is the same number regardless if you use the Byzantine Era or AD date system.
I confirmed that Constantine the Great changed the Roman Indiction to a 15-year cycle, but it remained a Roman Indiction and was not renamed to 'Greek Indiction'.
Here's some dates from some official acts of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (I've chosen acts with dates before Sept.1st):
Year 7126 (1618) ind.I
Year 7136 (1628) ind.XI
Year 1646 ind.XIV (meanwhile the Patriarchate abandoned the Byzantine Era and adopted Anno Domini).
Year 1684 ind.VII
Year 1840 ind.XIII
Year 1907 ind.V
Year 2007 ind.XV
All above corresponded with Indiction IX used in my AAR for the 15/9/1070 date. You have to take into account that the Indiction and Byzantine Era year change every September 1st (not January 1st), so it was Indiction VIII until 31/8/1070 and Indiction IX started 1/9/1070.
