On the Road to Greatness
The most astonishing thing about what I am about to write is not that this is about Magna Graecia, but that it is about Magna Graecia in vanilla. Thats right, no mods, neither mine nor one of the other ones ,partly because not all contain Magna Graecia (and I felt like playing as them), mine doesn't for one, and partly because I wanted to have a real challenge (the mods I have that include them have it slightly easier in my opinion to survive the first war).
Well onto the introduction of our country. Magna Graecia consists of two provinces (Tarentum and Ager Bruttius) in souther Italy. Both have a rather good population, and the resources aren't bad, grain will help in the long run and wood allows us to train archers and construct a navy from the start. Shame about the lack of iron though. However despite these great advantages the situation is rather grim. First of all our main province, Tarentum, doesn't have Greek culture (which we would want, seeing as Magna Graecia is despite the latin name a greek country) so no manpower from there which is especially bad as it would have provided twice the manpower of our other province.
Bummer. Well we can live with that provided there are no more nasty surprises. Oh, are we at war with Rome? That might be a problem seeing as the have lots of manpower, access to iron so have heavy infantry and their wood means they will also have archers. Their starting army that is standing on the border numbers 26,000 men. We have a measly 6,000. So outnumbered and outmatched, this will be nasty, unless of course we can find the right ally. And lucky us! We have Pyrrhus. Who will get some extra troops soon, but not really that much, and he have this strange obsession with Massilia anyway so he will be of very little help.
Well this doesn't look too good, but I am certain it will all go well. First I should probably set up the ideas. Pick Professional Soldiers for military, neither available military idea is of much use and it might be better to pick something else and forfeit the government type bonus, but I don't do that kind of thing unless there is an idea I really, really want and there is not any such ones at the moment. The other two ideas, Organized Recruitment and Civic Duty are on the other hand decent choices, we want to quickly raise more men, and the harder our fortifications are to breach the better.
And as the war is being planned (the plan is simple, train troops in Ager Bruttius while our army tries to manouver around the Romans and hopefully keep them in place until Pyrrhus finish being a fool and decides to actually trying to fight the real enemy) we receive a diplomatic envoy from the Aetolians. They want an alliance. Why not I say, but unfortunately they don't seem keen to join the war (and thereby hopefully getting those cascading alliances we all heard of going) so we try to improve relations, and then promptly forget about the Aetolians and the fact we are supposed to try to get them to help until after the war is over, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Our manouvering sadly fails to keep Rome from reaching Tarentum. Our army avoided battle, but as the Romans sees no threat they promptly assault and take the city. Not a great start, and Pyrrhus is at Massilia as expected. Worthless ally, could we not asked someone more competent and powerful of assistance? Someone not obsessed with Massilia? Later it seems disaster has struck as our army is caught in Lucania and forced to fight fiercely for its life. And astonishingly we actually are victorious!
