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King

Part Time Game Designer
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Dec 7, 2001
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This is going to be an interactive AAR, I am going to play and you guys get to choose the strategy that I will do my best to carry out.

So we are the Kingdom of Macedonia, so let’s first look at what we start with. Macedonia is a 4 province country, we have 4 different resources, wood, iron, horses and fish. Although fish is useful (it increases manpower) the other three are really important. Iron gives us heavy infantry, wood archers and triremes and horses cavalry and horse archers. This gives us excellent military building blocks for going conquering. The only down side is that the Elephant appears to be extinct from Greece or we could have all the units. Although we could try our luck at trying to trade for elephants to be honest elephant units are expensive to build and maintain. For a medium sized country like Macedonia Elephants are a luxury item.

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Being a aristocratic monarchy we get 3 idea slots and if we were to pick 2 military ones and civic one we would get a nice bonus on trade income. To some this may seem not that useful but personally trade income means more money, which we can turn into armies.

Next let us turn attention to our neighbours. To the South we have a collection of rich one province Greek states, these are highly tempting targets for liberation. To the West we have Eprius who at the moment is at war with Rome; more often than not Carthage joins in this war as well. This creates a problem for us; if we do not intervene in this war we stand a really good chance of ending up with Rome or Carthage as neighbours (this is bad). To the North are the Illyria and some Barbarian provinces. Illyria is our most powerful neighbour and have they have 3 provinces and have been known to jump on us if we give a sign of weakness.

So that underlines our military prospects, however we also have possibilities for diplomacy, we are larger that our Greek neighbours to the south so they may be persuaded to play us tribute. This can be pretty good. Tribute income obviously means more money; we don’t increase our costs for pig stabbing (the importance of pig stabbing will be explained later) and conquering non core provinces will give us a tech hit.

Another route for expansion is the barbarian North, we can send our troops up there to say hello to the locals, if the barbarians become weak enough we will be able to colonise there allowing Macedonia to grow. We are going to have to keep troops up in the north anyway because Greece is fairly wealthy making it a magnet for Barbarian hordes (they like to go and loot civilised, wealthy provinces rather than just wandering around aimlessly).

colonise.jpg


So while I set up the trade routes and pick a few ideas you can decide how we will restore Macedonia to its glory.

P.S. this thread will be locked and a seperate thread will be created for plans.
 
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Eprius must die

So the decision is taken, it is war. The Macedonian Army under the personal command of Ptolemy Keraunos marched into Eprius, although not the man with the greatest military ability Ptolemy knew that the future of his realm relied on the army having a strong bond of loyalty with its ruler. However the decision was not popular with the ordinary people and the realm suffered a serious drop in stability. Ptolemy would have to look into improving that in the future. However Macedonia spent its starting money on building up a solid block of heavy infantry. This would form the backbone of a future Macedonian Army.

However the Gods smiled upon Ptolemy and his military ability increase. His victories over Eprius also enhanced his popularity giving him yet more security on the throne.

tactics.jpg


However the Southern part of his Kingdom was in open revolt and unless the war could be brought to a swift conclusion this could prove serious problem. The good news was that with Carthage victorious in Scilly Eprius was now totally defeated, and their possessions in Greece could be incorporated into the Macedonian Kingdom.

annex.jpg


This freed Ptolemy to deal with the rebels in the South. The situation was dangerous with the capture of Athens however the situation was brought under control and the revolts were crushed. However this is a short term solution, in the longer term the people will have to believe that the Gods do favour Macedonia, to achieve that we must stab the pig. However pig stabbing does not come cheap and many pigs will have to be stabbed before the people the Gods will be appeased.

sacrafice.jpg


So it is mission accomplished, but Macedonia will require a period of recovery before it can consider military expansion again. I have raised our stability up a notch and have added archer units our new army. Cavalry and horse archers will follow to make it fully effective.

To the North the situation remains unchanged Illyria is there and will have increased the size of its army. I can see 7,000 men on the border but that doesn’t mean that more aren’t lurking were I can’t see them.

To the South things are much more interesting, the Greek states have allied together and have been raising armies. We don’t know yet if this defensive or offensive. The largest being the Achean league with 20,000 men, but this is not a huge problem on its own. To have raised that number of troops they must have mainly raised light infantry. A properly formed combined army lead by an average general will more than likely defeat that kind of force even if slightly outnumbered. The problem is that combined armed armies are a bit more expensive to maintain so our army can only be in one place at a time, while they can be in multiple places.

In other news the Seleucid Empire defeated Egypt, the upside is that the Seleucid Empire exhausted its manpower resources to do it. Egypt on the other hand has been bankrupted by this war removing them as contenders in Mediterranean politics for a while at least.

broke.jpg


So that’s the situation at the start of this year, some semi-civilised country claims that their unimportant city is 478 years old.
 
So a period of consolidation is called for in Macedonia, unmolested Ptolemy would of focussed on raising stability and expanding his army a little. However from the north Barbarian raiders were sighted, clearly intent on wreaking havoc on Greece.

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So Ptolemy marched his army north to deal with them. The barbarians were mainly light infantry and so Ptolemy with numbers on his side and better troops was able to defeat them easily and drive them out of Macedonia. However this was not enough for King Ptolemy he was determined to make his northern frontier more secure so his capital was not attacked again, so he marched army into the barbaric north to destroy this horde utterly. He then sold the survivors into slavery. However it wasn’t the biggest horde so the pickings were pretty slim, but Ptolemy still got some cash.

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He then kept his army in Meldi to destroy Barbarian resistance there and open it up for Macedonian colonists. However Meldi will take some civilising before the Macedonian frontier can be pushed north, but a nice trade route has been established with one of the Greek states to the south, this will bring the benefits of civilisation to the province quicker

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Ptolemy, having proved his bravery, won himself an admirer. So Ptolemy wondered if he should appoint his new friend, who was obviously going to be much more loyal, to command the other army. This would have been good, as loyal commanders don’t rebel. However Zagreus is insane and not very good at anything, military efficiency means that Ptolemy will have to take a, hopefully small, risk here.

newfriend.jpg


However consolidation is now complete, Macedonia has a strongish army, good stability and opportunities. Our technology has advanced allowing us to build some building if we wish. On the down side the Seleucid Empire quickly crushed a small civil war earlier (see if you can spot the rebels in one of the earlier screenshots). So they have conquered the small states of Asia Minor, and are allied with Pontus, who hold Thrace. In the West things look a lot better with Rome and Carthage busy killing each other. In Greece or strengthened position appears to be paying off as we may have fresh diplomatic opportunities in the South.

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Well council is to attack Illyria, now fortunately for us they don’t like us very much. This means that the people won’t be too upset if we go to war with them. Only a –2 stability hit. My military strategy is both sound and a gamble; I don’t want this war to go on to long so I am going to use assaults to overrun the enemy quickly. The AI will be more tempted to stab you in the back if you are involved in a long and exhausting war. I’ll explain the gamble part of this at the end.

First let’s get ourselves some tribute. Our Diplomatic advisor has assured us that the Aetolian League will be prepared to pay us tribute. A number of factors influence our ability to actually get them to pay. Firstly the charisma value of the envoy I send, the more persuasive he is the more likely they are to pay, the other big factor is how much I ask for. If I am too greedy they will refuse, at the same time if you ask for too little you are missing out on money. My personal preference is to ask for less and be surer of success and this is what I did.

tribute.jpg


The other useful this is that a tributary state cannot declare war on people, so this starts to secure our southern frontier a little.

So with the opportunities in the south dealt with we launch the war. First the good news is that Illyria had no hidden troops, the country was just not simply wealthy enough to support a large army containing heavy infantry and cavalry. So city after a city is taken by storm by the victorious Macedonia forces. As a side not it was almost a 3-way war when barbarians rose up in one of the provinces that Illyria colonised and took one of the cities I stormed. This province has now been thoroughly pillaged by the Barbarians and its civilisation value has suffered as a result.

With the final province under siege, and the barbarians ejected from Illyria, a peace offer came, offering me 3 provinces and little money, and I took it.

peaceoffer.jpg


Now I know that some of you will be upset that I did not push for total victory, but I am out of manpower. Even worse, only so many babies are born a year and it will take a generation for the manpower pool to recover. This was the price I paid for my all out assault strategy. However I feel that the mission set has been accomplished, Illyria has been removed as a threat, at least for now.

So onto to family life, some of you have been asking to see how Ptolemy doing and do we have an heir. The good news is we do, Ptolemy has a daughter who is currently governing a province, and the bad news is that women do not lead armies so wars are destined to be a bit more interesting when Ptolemy dies. The reason we have her governing a province is that this gives her a chance to build up money and popularity (provinces are nice sources of income for characters). These could come in useful in later life.

family.jpg


We also have a rival, who is not loyal at all. As the tool tip says if he will refuse to be removed from his current job. He is in a government position doing research, being a rival of Ptolemy means that he will work up some mischief no doubt (hopefully he won’t try to assassinate us). If he was in command of an army then problems would begin. Being that disloyal he would start thinking about leading his army against us, and isn’t going to give us his command.

In other news Rome appears to be winning against Carthage, but the war drags on.
 
The Period of consolidation

So the decision has been taken and Macedonia will have a period of consolidation. However things start out badly, the frontier remains restless and our new population is finding it hard to adapt. Add in some unplanned expenses (events) and the Macedonian treasury is empty. Fortunately for us the Gods come to our aid.

divineintervention.jpg


Our new population is not Macedonian, in fact they aren’t even Greek, and they have strange beliefs. However the good news is that we can get them to embrace our beliefs.

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The other task I was set was colonisation abroad. At the moment we have reached our limit on what to colonise, our border provinces neither have the population or the civilisation value to continue colonisation. My efforts to boost the population not only failed, but failed spectacularly (more on this later), however, there is much I can do about the civilisation value. The most important problem is the barbarians like to loot provinces back to the Stone Age, so I need to make sure this doesn’t happen. Thus the defences of the border provinces are a priority.

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I also have to bring you some sad news. Our great king Ptolemy Kearaunus passed away. Hailed as conqueror he did much to expand the glory of Macedonia. We are now ruled by Queen Thessaloniki Ptolemy. The bad news is that Thessaloniki Ptolemy seems to have decided not to marry, there is not a lot I can do about this, so it leaves me wondering who will get the throne when she dies.

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Thessaloniki Ptolemy's first test came when the news that the barbarians of Daci rose up. This horde is much bigger than the last one and will pose more problems.

daci.jpg


You will all be pleased to find out that this latest barbarian incursion did not prove too dangerous in the end. If a second horde of similar size has picked now to visit Greece I could have been in serious trouble. As it was I could focus all my attention in dealing with this single horde. Oh and to please the Navy lobby I doubled the size of the Macedonian fleet to give us a naval platform. There were several pitched battles in northern Macedonian frontier, with my main army in action I was able to bring strength in numbers to bear, but in the wilder uncivilised parts it was much harder to keep these troops fed (meaning a further drain on our manpower). However finally we were able to weaken the horde so much that they were willing to surrender themselves into slavery, of course if I wasn’t able to overcome them I could of tried to see if they wanted to found a client kingdom in some of my former lands.

surrender.jpg


With that problem successfully negotiated back to consolidation. We received good news when some of our less enlightened members of our country decided to embrace our ways. We could of course tried to prevent this, and appealing to basic chauvinism is a good way to make a ruler more popular, but Thessaloniki Ptolemy doesn’t need to resort to such grandstanding, at the moment.

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So onto business, as mentioned earlier I was searching for way to boost the population of my frontier provinces. So what better way that using, the opium of the masses, religion. We decide to try and persuade the people that Aphrodite wants them to go for it for the nation. Sadly the people weren’t convinced and my population started to drop. This happened a couple of times and I am now beginning to loose faith myself.

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In other news, Sparta has agreed to pay tribute for Macedonian protection, giving us two of the three Greek states having seen the light, I have made them my allies too. The Achean League is proving reluctant but I am sure they will see sense sooner rather than later. The war between Rome and Carthage ended in a bloody stalemate, which suited me fine. In the east things are getting a bit scary, the Seleucid nobility is showing uncommon loyalty and refusing to embark on major civil wars. Pontus is tributary state of the Empire and Egypt has taken another beating. However what really worries me is the military strength that this alliance has.

ohno.jpg
 
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So the destruction of Illyria is what has been asked for, so that is what you will get. So Macedonia embarks on the second Illyrian War. To be honest this war is no contest, as we took half their territory in the last war. They simply do not have the required tax base to raise a reasonable sized army. So it does not take long for my armies to simply overrun their provinces.

2ndwar.jpg


We now have Illyria reduced to a single province and we can contemplate the war to annihilate them. First we wait to get our stability up, while saving up for a really big pig (the country is so great now so an average pig just doesn’t impress anyone anymore) I try to convince the Achaen League to send me gifts and in return I will consider them under my protection. They don’t seem to want to see the light. Still a couple of really impressive pigs later and the truce having expired those that called for the destruction of Illyria get their fondest wish, as the people of Macedonian start dancing to the beat of war.

Then the problems start, with my main army now off to war, a small horde appears on the frontier.

problem.jpg


Fortunately it is small and my other army (as events would later reveal my favourite army), should be able to handle this. So the war continues, a quick assault later and Illryia is no more. Due to popular demand I’ll show you how experienced my army is.

army.jpg


As you can see my tactic of favouring assaults doesn’t do my veterans any good, but it does get the wars over quickly. For those of you who have a keen eye for detail will see a second barbarian horde in Macedonia territory, I am going to tell you a bit more about what happened later.

On with the story, one of things the loyal council felt was a good idea was to try and exploit civil wars, never one to disappoint I now welcome advice from the council on how Macedonia can exploit this civil war.

civilwar.jpg


You see when that second horde came along I immediate threw my main army against them, without looking at the loyalty of the General or the loyalty of the troops, I lost control of the situation and the result is this:

bigproblem.jpg


So it is all looking a but grim, we have lost 80% of our army, and a fair chunk of territory, the only good things going for us is that we hold the wealthiest provinces and the main resource provinces. Although I am not certain that is enough, the army I built (and has now rebelled) was a well-balanced force that took a long time to raise, things are most definitely grim.
P.S. for those of you who wanted me to show you a nice page of ledger letting you know how big the enemy armies are, there isn’t one. We decided that this didn’t fit the feel of the game and instead your military advisory will warn you about your neighbours if they are big and powerful.
 
Know your Enemy!

rebel.jpg


Yes it is those evil Antigonids up to no good.

Ok let’s recap the situation, we have a civil war which has split Macedonia in two. It has also split the people of Macedonia in two (both sides gets half the nation’s manpower). They ended up with the biggest army while I ended up with the richest provinces. Thus at all costs I must keep them out of the southern part of the realm and I need time to raise a new field army to challenge theirs. So my plan is to recruit some light infantry siege armies to take their provinces back. Light infantry are cheap and quick to recruit, but to be honest not that good in combat (except against other light infantry). That doesn’t stop me using them as siege troops. I also must avoid fighting that big army at all costs until I know I can win. History will remember this as Ptolemy tactics.

lightinfantry.jpg


Now one of things I toyed with was to invoke an omen, my odds were 60% but to be honest I felt that it could not fail. However, it seems that the Gods were on my side, or luck was at any rate. The rebels called down an omen to boost moral and failed. I am going to fight the civil war with a huge bonus in even fights, if I can get one. So our plan goes into action, but then we hit a knife that cuts both ways, deserters.

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I can, if I want to, pick up free troops from time to time, but so too does the enemy. So even as I overrun his provinces, leaving that army seiging one of mine deserters capture one of the former Illyrian provinces from me. Still just when it looked like the situation was under control this happened.

defection.jpg


Yes indeed, the provinces I had just taken decide to defect back to the rebels. The army you see in the corner is my old main field army. Attrition has hit that army pretty hard, but I still don’t have a large enough army to take them on. Now you are wondering if things could get any worse and the answer is, of course, yes. Two rather large barbarian hordes pick now for a holiday in Greece. Yes there are 17,000 marching into the rebel held province and another 15,000 in one of my provinces.

worse.jpg


However the tide is going to turn my tactics have allowed me to raise a new army and I can finally take on the main rebel army. Now I need a commander. At the moment the top virtue I look for in a commander is loyalty. I don’t want a commander who will choose to switch sides with the army I have just loving built. So I pass over commanders who have 8 and 9 martial ability for this man.

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He certainly is loyal. So the first stop for the new army is to prevent my capital falling to the rebels. Then we hunt down the army ruthlessly pursuing it until it simply falls apart. Ironically their omen works against me here, because of their moral penalty their troops don’t stand in combat long and I need to purse them longer than otherwise. Then it is off to liberate their northern stronghold from the, eh, barbarians as it turned out.

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For your interest the 9,000 man army in the bottom of the overview is actually a rebel army that defected to me. A few provinces in the south defected to rebels in the meantime, but with the main army destroyed it is just a question of mopping up.

itsover.jpg


Yes I won, it was touch and go for while, especially when the barbarians came out to play, but what saved me in the end was holding the wealthy provinces, that allowed me to raise the army that would win the war. The good news, is that most of my wealthy provinces (with the exception of Macedonia) were spared the ravages of the war. So my main sources of revenue and manpower are intact. However the north has taken a real hit. Many of the provinces were looted several times through several sieges, others were thoroughly looted by the barbarians. It will take a while for some of these provinces to recover.
 
Once more into a period of consolidation, so you asked what war did to the North of Macedonia. Well general looting and pillage doesn’t do much for the population of the province. If you throw in Barbarians as well then provinces get damaged very badly. Overall the effect was felt heaviest in Dalmatae, besieged several times by armies by both sides and the barbarians also felt a need to loot the province. This province isn’t my most valuable and is going to take a while to recover.

Dalmatae.jpg


So now some bad news, our great Queen is dead. Ok this isn’t all bad news her stats and traits meant that another civil war was a risk we were going to run, and we now have a new dynasty in charge.

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He was the character with the most popular character in Macedonia so he got the job. So with a new dynasty in charge time to do some consolidating. To please the naval lobby the Macedonian fleet was further expanded. This gives us a small fleet to defend our coast, or should we decide to go for a major naval campaign we have a base to build from. With the rather nasty experience of the civil war I have decided to add a second large field army. My hope here is that should a civil war happen again I would have a better chance of having a decent army to fight it. Although if both armies decide to defect I will be really screwed.

In mean time it is building a few buildings and fighting the barbarians on the frontier. One of the empty provinces between Pontus and myself rises up so I build a colony and defeat the barbarians there. This isn’t new but the barbarians retreat into another province and the locals decide that pillaging Greece sounds like a really good idea and join the horde.

joiningin.jpg


I also colonise this one as it border Pontus. I suppose you are wondering why I colonised them and Pontus didn’t. Well it isn’t that straight forward, but if both can colonise the best-placed country gets it. One important factor is the skill of the governor. Some of you might be wondering where all the manpower is going; well low civilisation value provinces aren’t good for supporting armies.

Still you should always look for the positives. The King may have killed off a large percentage of the Macedonian youth through starvation due to sustained campaigning in poor provinces, but at least his troops love him.

loyaltroops.jpg


So onto a quick update on technology

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As you can see things are going pretty nicely. At tech level 5 I will unlock new ideas, but I think my current set are what I need at the moment. Just to recap my current set gives me bonuses to both Heavy Infantry and Cavalry and defending against sieges.

So where are we now?

situation.jpg


I am willing to pronounce ourselves recovered from the civil war and can now think about what we want to do. To the north we have provinces we can now colonise, I colonised the ones next to Pontus to prevent them taking them. To the South I still can’t get tribute from the last independent Greek State. To the east Armenia has been swallowed by the Bosporan Kingdom and Pontus, both are getting big and are allied. However being a tributary of the Seleucid Empire means that Pontus is limited in its diplomatic options. Makes them really nice neighbours. The Seleucid Empire has stubbornly decided to remain stable (I am getting a tad worried). However what bothers me the most is the advance of Rome. They are getting close to my border and aren’t paying tribute.
 
So we try and execute our plans. First, how do we make friends with Carthage? Sending gifts will of course improve relations, but it costs 60 gold for a big country like Carthage so we want value for money. So we must pick the right envoy. We move Orsestes from his current job as governor of a former Illyrian province (were he was using his Charisma to convince the locals to adopt our ways) and send him to Carthage with money. Orestes didn’t like losing his job in the province were he could squeeze money from the locals to help with his high spending habits (in fact no one like losing their current job to be honest), but that he was pretty loyal anyway so it wasn’t a serious problem.

Envoy.jpg


Now the question was posed, what colonisation actually give us? Well when provinces are first colonised to be honest they are pretty poor and not very valuable. Although all tax income is good they actually hurt my research rate by not contributing much to begin with. Especially because most barbarian provinces have low civilisation values.

newprovince.jpg


However it isn’t all bad news, because as you can see this province has a good population growth because it is a grain province. Also being part of my empire will allow the civilisation value to grow quicker. On the down side the Balkan peninsular is a bit like a funnel, the further we push out the longer the frontier becomes. So it is not a true 0 sum game here.

Being a bit smarter about whom we pick for diplomatic jobs has paid off in other ways.

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Yes a more charismatic envoy persuaded the last Greek state to see reason. Meaning that Greece is now firmly in our pocket securing that flank.

Now for the tricky job of keeping the army loyal, picking the best commander is not always a good idea.

problemcommander.jpg


As you can see here we are passing over a highly competent commander for someone who is quite frankly an idiot. However we are doing this for a very good reason. The high charisma means that not only is he more likely to get special bonuses in combat, but also more likely to get the troops to love him. I finally had to remove him because the cost of getting rid of his loyal troops was proving too much. Troops expect to get paid off when they are sent home, loyal troops cost more because they don’t want to leave their commander.

I have expanded the army and navy as far as I can. The cost of (especially) the army means that my monthly positive balance is less than 1 gold. Any serious warfare of Macedonian territory and I will start to go negative. This is also hurting our drive to improve relations with Carthage, they naturally dislike me. Obviously it their fault for being a bit barbaric, if they were civilised Greeks it might be different. So we need to work on the relationship, but money is tight which is making things harder.

In the world at large everyone seems to be playing the waiting game. The Seleucids are polishing off Egypt, one war at a time. Carthage is expanding into Spain to build up their power, while Rome is doing the same in Gaul. With none of the 3 big powers feeling powerful enough to try and take on one of the others, each is expanding and waiting for an opportunity. Should Macedonia try and strike first, who knows?

581.jpg
 
So we now have 15 years when not much happens for Macedonia. Apologies to those that requested a screenshot about what the Romans were doing, I’ll try for next time, but interesting things started to happen out in the East. Macedonia didn’t do much we expanded our frontier out, established trade with these provinces and built some buildings that increased our revenue. The net effect is we are now making more that 2 gold a month again which is good. Now I haven’t been keeping you updated on the Monarch front because to be honest I had a number of short lived Monarchs who never got round to leaving heirs (they were all pretty old when the ascended the throne). However the current Omrid Monarch has decided to marry and now has 2 daughters, there is a potential cloud there on the horizon.

Regarding Crete and Rhodes. These countries don’t seem to fancy paying tribute to me and they have armies bigger than my fleet. These means that any invasion force (providing they can get passed the defending fleet would be outnumbered). Any attack there would require a much bigger fleet.

So now onto what is interesting in the world. The first good news was the first possible sign of a weakening of the Seleucid juggernaut. They have lost the eastern satraps to the Parthians, go Parthia.

parthia.jpg


Also in the news was a Carthaginian civil war. The Seleucids, who are never one to resist an opportunity to kick a man when they are down have decided to declare war on Carthage and Pontus has joined this war. Rome has negative stability at the moment and seems to have declined the opportunity to join in at this moment in time.

carthage.jpg


So we have choices. We could join in the fun and see what we can loot from Carthage. We also have the opportunity to try and see what we do about Pontus and the Seleucids, or we can keep building up Macedonian and hope that both sides exhaust themselves. For a war against the Seleucids we will probably wait a couple of months so that their armies are firmly committed against Carthage, that way their armies will be out of position and hopefully we can get an early blow in.
 
So its war

We move our troops up to the frontier and declare war on the Seleucid Empire. So here is the situation in the south before the war starts

southstart.jpg


As you can see things are looking a bit grim for Carthage. Now our plan falls apart the minute the war starts, they don’t call Pontus in. However this isn’t as bad as it first sounds, I need to ship my army by ships and the Seleucids will need to do the same. It took 6 waves, but we throw over 70,000 Macedonian troops into Asia Minor, leaving just 18,000 (mainly light infantry) to police the frontier and defend the Macedonia. It is a huge gamble, but initially gets us some success.

northstart.jpg


We catch only small forces defending that we quickly overrun and begin to take provinces from the Seleucids. The armies start to push further in, when we get our first piece of bad news. Our great king decides to die, leaving a 2 year old on the Macedonian throne.

boyking.jpg


However we can claim some success in our war, as Carthage is able to not only defeat the rebels, but starts to drive into Seleucid held Egypt. We on the other hand are starting to run into problems. Enough Seleucid forces have now arrived in Asia Minor to turn the war into siege and counter siege and although I have more regiments, I am now out of manpower so my armies are steadily weakening. Meanwhile the Seleucids are starting to land small forces into Macedonia. Ordinarily these harassing attacks would be not a problem, but with nearly all my troops committed to the grinding war in Asia Minor they are becoming an issue.

southmiddle.jpg


As you can tell, a war against one of the big boys is becoming too much. I have been trying to convince them to give me one province, anything to justify the costs, but they refuse. The Seleucids know that even though they are in bad shape, I am not in good shape either, and they are bigger. Eventually revolts at home, harassing attacks along the Macedonian coast and the stalemate in Asia Minor leave me no alternative

whitepeace.jpg


I know, not quite the victory we were hopping for, but to be honest it felt like the tide was turning. The Seleucids made the decision to try and remove the weaker country in the war (Macedonia) to then turn on the stronger Carthage. However the war was not a total waste. Our goal of preventing the Seleucids becoming more powerful at Carthage’s expense was achieved, as my withdrawal from the war made a status quo peace seem like good idea

endsouth.jpg


However the war has left Macedonia with a toxic legacy, a boy king who isn’t very good and a commander that the army loves

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