An excellent example of this tactic is Severous' German Defensive campaign. He had settlements revolting left and right, and was spreading plague as well.

Hi Sub Rosa.

Hehe. Nice.

The spy will cause 5% of unrest every 'eye' of spy skill. Up to 10 'eye' of spys can be used to create 50% unrest.

Cause two turns of riot and the city could rebel.

By the way. To the right of the riot icon..beyond the icon that shows plague is a yellow crescent icon. Thats not in the standard game. What does it mean?

Yes, what is is SubRosa? I played XGM for a while and didn't come across a symbol like that.

The crescent is a pair of laurel leaves, in XGM it denotes that the majority of the population is Western Civilized. The other options are Eastern (which has an eagle), and Barbarian (a hammer).

I thought it was every spy that added %5 to unrest, I did not realize it was %5 per skill point they possessed. That is good, because now that I see this is working I am planning on putting more spies in that city. Now I will not need as many as I thought.

I never really read your German Defensive campaign, since I really have not been planning on playing a German defensive campaign. I will have to go look at it to see what other gems you have in there Severous.

I actually got the idea from another tactic I read about here. That of sending a raiding force deep into enemy territory, sacking their cities, destroying the buildings, and then abandoning them to rebel the next turn.

I would do that to the border cities, but the problem is that in XGM if you play one of the major factions you do not get generic rebels. Instead you get a whole new faction that pops up. The first time that happened to me the rebels appeared with 3-4 full stacks of pretty decent units, plus generals. So I do my absolute best to avoid cities rebelling now. That mechanism keeps the overall number of factions down, because there is a rebel faction for many of the regular ones. In fact, in my current campaign the Carthaginian rebels have taken over all of North-West Africa, and have nearly wiped out the regular Carthaginian faction.

Since the option of sacking and abandoning would not work, I had to find some other options. Eventually I hit upon the idea of trying to get as close to the same thing without taking the city.

I have done the plague thing earlier in the game. When the Pella plague hit early on I made some spies there and sent them into Thrace, figuring that would keep them too busy to mess with me while I was expanding into Asia Minor. The trouble is the Thracians did it to me right back, and I found them sending infected spies into my own cities. I had to put spies and assassins in all my own border cities to keep the Thracian spies out. That touched off a long cloak and dagger war between me and Thrace that lasted for about 30 years, until they finally attacked me outright.

Edit: Severous, I cannot find your Defensive German Campaign topic. It was a topic was it not? I thought I remembered seeing it somewhere at some time. Could you (or someone else) point me in the right direction?

[This message has been edited by SubRosa (edited 04-28-2007 @ 06:55 PM).]

http://rtw.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=10,2435,0,20

[This message has been edited by dsmi1 (edited 04-29-2007 @ 00:11 AM).]

Thank you muchly dsmi1, I was not looking in the War Stories folder.

No worries mate. =]

Thanks for posting the thread, its a good read.

[This message has been edited by dsmi1 (edited 04-29-2007 @ 00:45 AM).]

SubRosa

The mod is behaving like Barbarian Invasion. When the Western Roman Empire looses a region to rebellion it becomes a different faction like you describe in XGM. Fortunately, not with a huge army. Hordes that appear come with a big army (as I am about to report in my current campaign thread). So XGM appears to mix both those BI concepts.

A few more assassins? Destroy the militry buildings as well and then let it rebel? Perhaps the new enemy that appears will be militarily weak because of few advanced troops?

Economic targets for assassins can be good. The Brutii in vanilla RTW were crippled by my assassins knocking out economic buildings. They had an army bigger than their income so never had money left for repairs. Wasnt just crippling to a city...it crippled the faction.

Do you have RTW 1.5 and is that the XGM or which mod making the minimap different

@Willworms: Yes, I have RTW 1.5 (and BI 1.6). I am using the XGM mod, which among other things has the Mundus Magnus map. I love this map. I can honestly say I do not want to go back to playing vanilla RTW anymore because this map is so much better. So I think after I am done with XGM (which should be soon, once I finish this Greek campaign I am on) I am going to play a Mundus Magnus game, probably with either the Scythians or the Britons.

@Severous: XGM uses either RTW or BI, whichever you decide to use. I went for BI since I have not really played it much (the one time previously I did I was ingloriously destroyed by the Huns). After having some time to play with the BI engine I have to say I like it better than regular RTW. The night battles are neat (at least neat looking, I am not really sure what benefit they are), and the AI seems a bit better. But XGM incorporates Darth Formations so maybe that is why.

One thing that is XGM specific is that more factions can build elephants. Greece, Macedon, The Ptolemeys, Pontus, and Armenia can now do so as long as they control an elephant region. Once I took Antioch, I started pumping out the war elephants. I love those things. Now that I have taken the 3 big Ptolemaic cities along the Nile, I am building armored elephants. Yum.

The rebel factions all start out with a few territories, so at the beginning of the game every faction is represented. Plus whenever one of your cities rebels it goes over to your rebel faction, regardless of what the original faction of the city was. I actually made a ceasefire with the Rebel Greeks at the beginning of my game, so that is possible. But eventually I wiped them out. The first time a city rebelled after that is when I had the huge pile of rebel armies pop up. The second time it was only a single full stack within the city that went, more like what normally happens in vanilla RTW. So it could be that rebel deluge only happens the first time. One thing is for certain it sure put a fear of rebellion in me! Which I think makes the game better.

Hmmm, I had not thought about how destroying the military buildings might make the rebels that spawn weaker. I will have to make sure to leave them alone. I have been mainly concentrating on the temples and health buildings. They rebuilt their Awesome Temple of Hera last turn, so I went and destroyed it again this turn. Public Order went from 70% to 20%. I have four spies in that city now too. But it has still not rebelled. So I guess I will have to turn up the screws even more.

I really like the spies, assassins, and diplomats in this game. They add a whole new dimension to your strategy.


Edit: Severous, I just started reading your Defensive German campaign. Goddess that is amazing. I cannot believe how much detail you put into that. I am only a few pages into it, as looking at all those pretty pictures takes a while. I think I am going to have to make going through the entire thing a project for work. After all, I have to do something worthwhile when I am on the clock...

[This message has been edited by SubRosa (edited 08-18-2007 @ 01:22 AM).]