How to Win at Fall of Rome

[joncnunn]

One more important note, taking the 8th city that collapses an empire credits the player doing so with a lot of VPs.
Namely, you get credit for conquering all their remaining cities + credit for destroying all of their remaning units.

This does have the ironic effect that on Sid level, there is no need to collapse both Romes to win. Collapsing one of the Romes + any barb empire will do.

But this also means that you can't really allow an AI to collapse either Rome on that level.

[joncnunn]

Playing this one as the Sassidens now.

Barbarism is too expensive too research [even with all contacts], but can be stolen extremely cheaply very early on.

The Sassidens can actually build all the barb units in addition to their own. And they can buy the rest of the barb techs for very reasonable prices as well, say a contact or the WM. You start with two Heavy Calvary [named Immortal I and Immoral II] in addition to horsemen.

But Romes pricing of their techs are so expensive that you need to research Map Making and Fortification between 1/3rd and 1/2th yourself.

I still do not recommend libaries as the Sass; there just isn't enough techs to justify them. Instead build the obvious cities with migrants and then focus on military units.

Rank of Wonders as the Sassidens

Scourage of God : #1. (Requires the steal barbarism tactic )Spawns a War Lord and acts like HE. The unforunate thing under my proposed tech path is you can't time a prebuild correctly for it.

St Peter's : #2. Acts as ToA. Because of all the luxaries near you, in most cases you can actually wait for St Peters, unlike the other tribes which pretty much need Temples soon just for happiness.

The one that doubles churches happiness : #3. Okay, I guess.

Justine's Leadership: #4. Acts as Sun Tzu + HE. Costs 600 shields. Baracks are half price for you and as a result you'd have to build an awful lot of cities for this wonder to pay for itself.

I also note that too get a challenge as the Sassidens, one should probably not steal barbarism. Or alternatively, mod the game and remove the Sassidens from the list of civs that can build all of those barb units.

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Both Romes (Rome Eternal): 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 difficulty levels easier than base in the hands of a compenant human.

Pardon? Have you actually played this? I'd call it more than 2 levels aboave any Barbarian Civ (WRome gets easier in the midgame, admittedly).
Sassanids suffer from their bad initial units, but are still among the easiest.

Am I correct you didn't really play that conquest from several sides ?

[joncnunn]

I read the Rome Eternal threads over at Civ Fanatics that were on DemiGod level. Everyone said "too easy" as is and had some pretty stong proposed modifications to make it harder. (Both groups saying things like don't allow Rome to build Settlers and have the human rome unable to build workers, among other things.)

What they did was attack the barb tribes immedately while the barb tribes still had weak units.

Originally posted by Doc Tsiolkovski

Pardon? Have you actually played this? I'd call it more than 2 levels aboave any Barbarian Civ (WRome gets easier in the midgame, admittedly).
Sassanids suffer from their bad initial units, but are still among the easiest.

Am I correct you didn't really play that conquest from several sides ?

[Doc Tsiolkovski]

Well, I was part of the WRome team.
And nobody in the threads said it would be even somewhat as easy as the normal version - it just was "easy" enough to be beatable by such a collection of veterans (especially in the ERome team) on DG (while Ed Beach initially wasn't sure it can be won at all; during their internal testing nobody could win on Monarch)...but it still was easier to beat Sid with Celts.

The whole discussion about tweaks was to make it as hard as promised - not because it would be in any way easier than the unmodded FoR.