The easiest and Hardest Battles

[marcusthegreat]

Hello I'm getting this game hopefully for christmas and I was wondering what battles are the easiest and Hardest so when I get to them I can think to myself 'This battle will be a piece of cake or I need to Focus on this one' Personal Opinions would be nice aswell

[duncan]

Hardest: Roman -- Cynoschephalos or Dog's Head or whatever, against the macedonians. You'll get a couple more tricky as hell, but not as difficult.

Easiest: The first scenarios are usually easy, but you are short of money...you'll never know when you'll meet those elephants!!!!

[sum1won]

Actually, some of the early ones are really tricky, as you arent far enough to have a variety of troops.

[honvedseg]

I'd have to agree, the most difficult are the Dog's Head (Cynocephalae), which was just brutal, and the footraces in the beginning of the 1st Servile War, where you only have about a minute to break the opposing army. Men in Black was a little more expensive in terms of casualties than I would have liked, but not that difficult otherwise, as were most of the battles against the Gauls.

On the other side of the coin, I came back from Bibracte with 362 kills and only 6 casualties. I could have lowered the losses a little more, but I wanted to "blood" a couple of newly recruited units before unceremoniously butchering the offending general. Most of the "survive until..." scenarios, I was trying to break the entire ambushing army before time ran out, rather than just sit passively, and succeeded in almost every instance.

The "Kill the enemy general" battles were almost too easy, once you saw the initial moves that the enemy made. In the early one against Coriolanus, I had to restrain a couple of units from rushing in and taking him out on their own, to give me enough time to send units against the right opponents, in order to maximize the experience points gained. I finally ended up sending my Legate in to personally administer the will of Rome, once Coriolanus was left standing without an army. Later, at Aquae Sextiae, I sent one cav unit wide around the flank to go after "skirmies", after pulling all the opposing forces into melee, and accidentally caught the general sitting out in the open behind the lines. It was kind of disappointing, since the scenario ended with my "meatgrinder" units just getting warmed up, and 45 seconds left to "kill".

[honvedseg]

Looking at my notes from the second run through the Roman Campaign on the HARD setting, the whole 1st Samnite War was pretty much a pushover. In the third battle, "Conclude the War", you need to take less than 70 casualties. I didn't take 70 casualties (61 total) in the entire set of 4 battles, "Conscript Revolt", "Campanian Allies", "Conclude the War", and "Annexation of Etruria", while inflicting well over 1000.

As for single battles, the 2nd Samnite War opened with the relief of Neapolis, which had no special victory conditions, and facing a large number of inferior troops, gathered in this one location to provide your newest units with training. I took a casualty (yes, 1) in the battle, while cutting off the escape of several units with my cavalry to inflict additional "Trample" kills on the fleeing Samnites, slaughtering 275 of the insolent highlanders who dared to defile Roman soil.

In "Crossing the Alps" during the 3rd Servile War, and at "Zela" during Caesar's Civil War, I took a massive 101 casualties in each battle. The time counter at Zela was also down to a narrow 0:05 remaining when I overran the last Javelinmen cowering in the rocks. These horrific numbers were only exceeded by those at Cynocephalae, with 103 brave Roman citizens and allies lost to the brutal Macedonian phalanx and heavy Companion cavalry.

[venividivici]

Any battle which has to be won in generally less than two minutes will be a tough one. I didn't find Cynoscephalae all that difficult for some reason, but I did have lots of high stat heavy infantry by the time I got to that battle the first time round.