Slitherine

So after trying out the game with Macedonia at balanced difficulty and Sparta at Experienced, I got quite confident and decided to play with Syracuse at Insane.

I managed to get the whole Sicily province from Carthage after the initial war and I was hoping for the Romans to delay their seemingly inevitable attack on me so that I could expand my powerbase in Greece. The Romans had other plans so now I am facing waves of Roman army stacks.

Disloyalty is rampant and I am a decadent city state for a long time, but these are things I can live with and more or less expected at higher difficulty setting. My manpower keeps getting depleted (I bought some once a decision was a available otherwise I would be losing units by now), I have no navy and a small mercenary force as allowed by my financial situation.

I have only been able to survive because of playing out battles in FoG:2. The tide is turning though due to Rome's "endless" stacks, not to mention that I got fed up with being outclassed in all medium and heavy infantry units both in quantity and quality (and both in FoG:E and FoG:2). The fact that my main general (and most subgenerals in FoG:2) consistently die after each battle (4-5 times in a row) even on the rare occasion of auto-resolving easy battles does not help.

My main concern is available units. Does Syracuse get any better units or the starting roster is pretty much it? I do not think I have the stamina of playing more battles in FoG:2 under such odds (and I do not seem to have a chance when it comes to FoG:E battles - maybe I am missing out something?)

If anyone else have played with them, maybe you can share some additional advice.

I don’t think Syracuse should be able to survive a sustained Roman assault and am glad to see you’re not finding it easy !

Just looking at AI games (ie where Syracuse, Rome and Carthage are all AI and the player is located far away), I'd say that Syracuse survives only about 25% of games, which I think gives you some feel for how hard it is. There was a reported test in the beta where the player managed to fend off the initial onslaught by Carthage by clinging to Syracuse itself.

but I think this is one of the hardest starts in the game - in that if one of the others really go for you I'm not too sure what can be done.

Thank you for the replies, despite just telling me to suck it

I came across a let's play video by Das Tactic using Syracuse (in lower difficulty setting most probably) and I saw him facing similar challenges with his army, so I guess it is what it is.

My main gripe though remains the lack of any effective unit types by Syracuse. I do not see any reason gameplay or historical wise that all their available units should be sub-par compared to contemporary Carthaginian and Roman units (and Hellenistic and "barbarian" warbands for that matter).

Oh well, I will just move on to an Epirus campaign to accomplish Pyrrhus dreams