Strategy for Alexander T&P campaign

[bignickel]

Fighting up north was relatively easy; but the campaign to settle the south has me frustrated.

You show up with a token force, you advance with great speed east to the first kingdom you see... and they surrender and join you. Swell.

Then what?

I've tried building up my ally by creating secondary and tertiary cities for him. But basically, I can't build up my own own 'red' forces, and in about 20 minutes, my red forces are usually dead. Which means I've got to proceed with my allies blue forces (and I'm not even sure Alexander's 'powers' even work with them).

I head south to try and take Thebes, and it's worse than Stalingrad. It's just a meat grinder. I keep creating guys, sending em down to the city I was able to take, he keeps sending guys up, and they keep annihialating each other. I try to build a few towers, but the citizens inevitably get killed trying to get them up. Or the towers get burned. After 45 minutes of this grinder last night, I turned the game off.

Very frustrating; I could barely keep the city as my own, much less build a big enough force to attack Thebes. Every so often I would have a great deal of men and seige engines, and would attack Thebes with it; they'd attack and attack, and archers would should up from the south, and I'd try to deal with them,.. and then my force would eventually just die.

How do you this scenario?

[tetley]

Archers? Are you getting a little too happy with the Heavy Infantry, maybe? Those first several scenarios are meatgrinders regardless. You just have to rally-point and forward build a lot. And don't forget to empty out the Universities when you max research--you need the pop. I really think there's something to diplomacy you can do to make it easier, but I haven't figured it out yet.

[bignickel]

I was able to beat it last night. I had to just get a better feel for the flow of the game (and the obvious differances between it and Starcraft)

I was able to take one city with my red units, took another city nearby, then pounded Thebes with both armies at once, and then razed it.

Wonder if I should have taken the Spartans on...

[tetley]

This is probably a bit late, but I don't think you should go south. Turn 1, sure, go north. But turn 2, send your north army directly to Rome instead. That battle's tough, but so is the one to the south. But what's nice about this is, the next two turns you can just go "Overrun->Next Turn->Overrun->Next Turn". Had you gone south, you would have to fight those next two battles, and they're both meatgrinders. You reduce the number of tough battles from 3 to 1. And make some money in the process. It's awesome.

From there on out the campaign's basically the same: go after Egypt, then Persia. Except now you've got some cash that you can buy Egypt's cards with (before you attack him).

[dennis_caver]

The Key to Egypt is the two army technique. You send the larger army out in the Desert to come in behind Thebes(Luxor). At the same time send Raiding parties
into the Egyptian city farest from Thebes. And at the same time you have to keep them at bay in the Nile with ships and Bombards.

I found the Turks and Persians? the toughest

Cave on,

Dennis