Playing with and without missions

[AggaWackTan]

So taking a break from the big nations I’ve played a few campaigns as Massalia, Atropatene and Aksum. There’s no lure to follow missions as they’re not all too fleshed out for them. Massalia has a nice one ‘hold Greek ports, capture the pillars of Hercules’ mission tree. It’s more of a campaign goal outline than a ‘do this, do that’ mission.

I have to say that playing without missions with smaller tags and just thinking up of your own strategy and building cities wherever you want has actually made me love this game so much. The main tags in the game suffer from being overpowered but playing as a small nation and transforming barren deserts and wastelands into civilised cities without referring to a mission tree is where this game comes to life.

I think future mission trees need to be more event related and the game left to the player. The main event I’m thinking of is ‘The Antigonids Cause Wavers’. This is a huge event in the game, where the antigonid ai knows it has a goal of conquering Corinth or else it falls, and it’s tied into the decision tab. The antigonids have loads of missions but this event has such a massive effect on the campaign.

For future dlc (Rome in mind) I’d like if the pan Italian league and all these trees were not scrapped but tied into decisions/ events more. As referring back and forth to the mission tree is really distracting from what’s fun. I think I realised just how distracting it is when playing as small nations where I’m having a great time not thinking about missions at all. For example the Roman ‘antigonid cause wavers’ could be ‘Tarentine pleas answered by Pyrrhus’ where if Rome conquers southern Greece then an event occurs where they either release all Italian Greek cities in return for money/ maybe innovation points and a 20 year truce or they get a go to war event with all magna Graecia released and Pyrrhus arriving with an army. The whole Pyrrhus being sent to the Antiginid court is really nice but I think Pyrrhus going to Italy is more important. This is just one example, but this campaign shifting events, one off are far more fun I think than the missions.

But I’d still like a way to get the bonuses from the missions without having to open the mission tab and think ‘build one more forum, delete my marketplace and build a tax office’. Or ‘conquer Samnium, then conquer Apulia’. It’d be better if the mission tree was plain and simple ‘hold all Italia or have Alliances/ subjects hold all regions’. And then maybe an event related to it for the flavour

 

[Dayvit78]

Hope they add more generic country missions (dynamically created missions). And relax the requirements on some of them - for example, the "make sure all building slots are full in these 3 cities" is more relevant than "make sure there's 1 library, 2 marketplaces, 1 granary" which force you to delete buildings in already built up cities.
Of course, if the mission is specific "we want to make this a granary province" then it's fine - I like the challenge and the benefits. But just make those types optional.

 

[Bouchart]

I imagine a lot of the generic missions will be rewritten at some point. They're all over the place in terms of quality, especially the conquest ones.

The "three cities with no free building slots" mission I don't like. Often I queue up some buildings for the cities and forget about it. Then one of the cities grows and frees up another building slot.