Strategy guide for aggressive raiding roman players. I’ve dominated my area and reached high on the rankings on several servers playing like this.
The Roman tribe is a very interesting one, and for some reason
everyone advice new players to go for romans. I really wonder why, I
can’t see why it would be the easiest one to play. Usually most new
players who chose roman as their tribe just become
farms right away. I’m not saying roman is a bad tribe, it’s just played far too passively by many players in my opinion.
Get the rewards
In all my guides I say that you should start following the
rewards program first.
If you don’t have that on
your server,
you just build whatever you need to get the homeland bonus, then lvl 3
main building, granary, warehouse, marketplace, rally point and
barracks. No need to build up all the fields then, and even if you have
the reward bonus on the server, quit after quest number 21 and don’t
build all the fields to level two, it’s a waste of resources. You can do
that later when you really need the extra gold you get for it, and if
you don’t need the gold just wait with it till you have your second
village.
Let’s look at the roman basic foot soldier for a bit, the imperian.
40 offense, 35 infantry defense and 50 cavalry defense. The cavalry
defense is pretty useless at the start of the server, 35 infantry
defense is pretty good though. Having 40 offense it’s definitely a
stronger troop when it comes to pure fighting than the famous teuton
clubs. It’s much worse in raiding though, only being able to carry 2/3
of the resources and walking slower. It also costs 440 resources
compared to a club swinger costing only 250. Cause of all this you can’t
compete with a teuton from the start.
So what do you do? I suggest laying low and avoiding strong teutons
from the start. They will attack you, but just be active enough so that
they never catch your troops or get any resources from you. They will be
busy farming and probably not notice you as you’ll be building troops
and your population won’t grow very much at all from the start. Your
legionnaires are too expensive to lose in fights with teutons at this
point, so here is your first goal as a roman.
2 legionnaires
From the time you have 2 legionnaires you start farming 24/7 with them,
but be careful, you don’t wanna loose even a single one of them. If
you’re playing on quest reward server make sure you attack players with
15 or more population with 3 or more troops the first time to avoid
losses. As soon as you get the battle report you’ll attack again
assuming you got max.
Keep building more legionnaires 24/7 and keep them out raiding all
the time, never have them at home when you’re not online. Even if they
defend fairly well you don’t want to loose them, this is not the time to
kill other peoples armies, you’ll wait with that till later. You also
don’t want any large teuton in the neighborhood noticing you and attack
you more frequently cause of that. Stay under the radar and pretend
you’re just an inactive farm.
I usually don’t build anything but troops in this period, but it’s ok
to build up some more crop fields if it makes you feel safer. As a
roman you also need a cranny as teutons will be raiding you, and you
don’t want to loose all your crops when your crop production is
negative, as you’ll then loose some of your precious troops. You will be
negative in crop production if you play
my style, but it’s no problem as long as your active.
100 legionnaires
Yes, I know it sounds like a lot, but I believe it is necessary.
Legionnaires farm much slower than clubs and to support the building of
infrastructure for your EIs(equites imperatoris) you’ll need a large
farming income. If your area is an exceptionally good one, and you get
close to max in each of your
raids
I guess you can do with 60-70 or so, but then you have to be very
active. You don’t want to spend too much time building up the academy
and stables, as you’ll then be too far behind in troops.
What about imperians you might say? Most romans seem to go for imperians first after all.
I believe this
is a big mistake. What do you need these imperians for now? They are
better raiders than the legionnaires that’s true, and it costs less
resources to build buildings and research them, but compared to EIs they
are crap at this point. Who will you be facing in your battles now?
Teautons with clubs, and the EIs are way way better than imperians
fighting clubs. They can counter atttack clubs easily, they can kill
them almost without losses and they can’t be countered by club armies
themselves as they are twice as fast as clubs. They are also better
raiders than imperians in general even if there are no teutons at all
close to you.
When you’ve got those EIs you can start having fun, now you’re gonna
start hitting those teutons around you over and over, counter any
attacks they make with their clubs, just look at the
combat guide
on how to do that well, and kill all of their troops. It feels really
good to retaliate on someone who’s been attacking you before, doesn’t
it? They may start building spears and hinder you, but this will take
them a long time, and spears are defensive units that they can’t really
raid efficiently with. While you’re farming and attacking teutons with
your EIs you’ll keep farming the other villages in the area with your
legionnaires.
20 equites imperatoris
As soon as you have 15-20 EIs you should go build a hero mansion and get
a hero EI. You’ll boost his offense points and he’ll hopefully be
levelling fast killing all those clubs. If you happen to run out of
teutons to kill off in your 21×21 just use your EIs to farm the other
villages in the area. If you don’t have scouts already now you better
research them now, usually I reasearch scouts as soon as I’ve got the
prerequisites for it, at the 100 legionnaires point that is.
Just keep raiding and farming building EIs non stop, any extra
resources will be put into crop fields as you’ll have a massive negative
crop production by now. The other fields are not that important but let
them follow 2-3 levesls behind. When your crop fields reach level 5 or
so, start putting extra resources into party and second village
infrastructure, take a look at other guides if you don’t know how.
100 equites imperatoris
I am usually at around 100 EIs at the time I found my second city, and
I’ll probably have enough culture points without holding a party on
speed, on a normal server maybe one party is needed.
The same ideas of where to put your second village goes for any tribe
really. If you’re using gold and/or are playing on a normal
server a
15 cropper is the way to go. A cropper will produce more total
resources than any other city cause of the bonus buildings, and it will
also be a better base for big armies, so if you use gold you should
always chose a 15 cropper. If you’re playing on a normal server you
should also always chose a 15 cropper as it’s too hard supporting a big
army from a 6444 city with normal resource production. Troops eat as
much on a normal server, but you production is only one third of speed.
When you get your second city on a normal server
you stop
producting troops in your first city and build it in your second city,
the 15 cropper, instead. That’s why you shouldn’t research anything in
your first city apart from scouts, since you’ll have to do it all over
again in your second one anyways.
A 6444 can easily support a pretty big army on speed, so it’s more up
to you there. If you play on speed and don’t use gold, you can chose a
6444 if you wish, but at least city number 4 or 5 has to be a 15
cropper.
Village number 2
Now when you’ve got your second village it’s time to upgrade more of
those resource fields. You should also take the time to research
imperians. No reason to stop raiding with your legionnaires, but
imperians are much better raiders and you should start building those in
your barracks now. How you balance the production of imperians versus
EIs depends a lot on what your neighbourhood looks like. If there are a
lot of teutons with clubs and axes left to be killed go for more EIs, if
there are more romans, gauls and teutons with spear defenses go for
more imperians.
Onwards now you just keep up raiding and dominating your
neighbourhood, build up a bigger army and upgrade your resource fields.
On a speed server you have to be partying all the time, while on a
normal server it’s better to go for culture buildings like the embassy.
Don’t rush researching EC (equites caesaris), they are not that good
raiders, they are expensive and they are to be used for your main
offense army later in the game. I’ll just end this guide here as it is a
starting guide, I’ll write more about endgame on this page later.