So let's play around with something different again. This time around we can attack freely - indeed we must, for we are forbidden from staying put. This run we'll be playing a barbarian horde, be they terrible swarms of axemen or packs of cavalry raiders descending from the hills in terrible might.
Rules of Play
- We may not hold more than one semi-permanent city (our 'capital') at a time. Any others must be sacked and abandoned by the next turn, permitting enough time to retrain units and train one last unit before abandonment.
- Caveat: The above rule is exempted if the settlement is besieged and our forces cannot escape, but once the opportunity arises they must leave immediately. We are obliged to break sieges as soon as is sane to do so.
- Corollary: The above rule implies that all non-capital settlements must be abandoned at the start of the game and allowed to return to neutrality via riot.
- The 'capital' must be reassigned frequently to prevent our forces remaining in one place for too long. How frequent (every 1, 2, 3 or 5 years) will be determined by viewer vote.
No other rules should be needed, as this forces us to remain on the hoof at all times, hopefully changing our strategy significantly. If this proves not to be the case we will add new rules as we go. Since the victory condition of acquiring lots of provinces will be barred to us, we will count it a victory if we annihilate all other non-Rebel factions - or possibly acquire 5,000,000 denarii. We'll see.
First, we should decide what faction to play. The real city-builders have been excluded, so only barbarians or certain Eastern nations have been included. After all, we're not here to build an empire, we're here to get rich laying waste to the world!
- Armenia: Spearmen infantry, horse archers and cataphracts.
- Britannia: Medium infantry, terrible navy, chariots instead of cavalry, ranged slingers.
- Dacia: Limited heavy infantry (inc. falxmen), limited cavalry, decent archers.
- Gaul: Medium infantry & druids, light cavalry, terrible navy, elite archers.
- Germania: Lots of specialist infantry, powerful cavalry, decent archer support, terrible navy.
- Numidia: Ranged focus, low troop diversity, cavalry focus.
- Parthia: Eastern infantry, excellent ranged & melee cavalry selection.
- Pontus: Decent mix of eastern infantry, chariots and cavalry, ranged and close, tend to field large but individually weak armies.
- Scythia: Almost no infantry, massive cavalry focus.
- Spain: Notoriously weak, balanced infantry/cavalry but low diversity.
- Thrace: Partially successor-based armies, balance of infantry and cavalry but low diversity.
Next, we should decide how long we can keep a capital city for before it has to move. This is much simpler.
- 5 Years (10 turns): Comfortable. Plenty of time to build up capitals, raise income from trade and farms to support our main units and build up good barracks to raise troops from. Excellent survival chances, but we might become a touch sedentary for our noble barbarian roots.
- 3 Years (6 turns): Pressured. We don't have a huge amount of time to build up new capitals, but we can get a decent barracks up in this time and churn out some of the better units to replace our losses - maybe even take a good income from trade or farms in the process.
- 2 Years (4 turns): Painful. This does force us to move quickly with our conquests, which places a lot of pressure on survival. A capital city might just last long enough to pump out a few home-recruited units before it gets sacked and replaced, but it will keep us very much on the move.
- 1 Year (2 turns): !!Fun!! Only twice as long as a standard 'sacking' city. Seriously puts pressure on our survival, makes it very difficult to get the better home-made units, but if nothing else it should be memorable. Trying to maintain any sort of siege will be very, very interesting.
Once we have these, we should be ready to begin. Naturally, I imagine we'll end up playing Spain on !!Fun!! capital movement difficulty.
Poll
7 (8.3%)
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Topic: Raiders: Total Horde - Another RTW Let's Play! (Read 3252 times)