Review Alea Jacta Est gets a Tacticular Cancer Review

Fantastic first review, Cenobyte!

Presuming the "most" in this sentence was not just a superfluous word, can you compare which scenarios are actually more open and which ones are not?

I want to play the scenarios in some order, but cannot figure out which. But since I do already know that AGEOD games require deep understanding of the situation and geographical knowledge that comes only from repeatedly playing scenarios, I will probably play in chronological order (the map gets larger).

In fact, the game interface hardly explains a damn thing. But I wouldn't hold it against them. It's one thing to develop games with such complex rules with 3,4 people, another to write down everything and keep it up to date too.

The problem is that there are simply too many small things. I have a printed manual for AACW, and played for many years, but I still constantly run into questions like "how does the strategic rating of a commander influence the speed of entrenching" or "does the 5% cohesion bonus apply to a brigade or the whole division" or "do I need offensive stance if I want to attack merchants in the shipping boxes", etc.

I once tried to explain the command point rules in a concise tutorial, therefore I know that it would be really hard to write down every single rule, if you still want to be productive in other areas. Instead I learned to play the games by intuition (which is much better than powergaming the rules) and figure out the missing parts by trial and error.

For AACW there is a wiki that explains many things (may apply to all games): http://www.ageod.net/aacwwiki/Main_Page

This is the exact same problem that I criticized in my review for Revolution under Siege.

Such things can all be lived with, but I found some of the interface changes from AACW not very felicitous. Why didn't they stick with what they had?

Thanks, Burning Bridges!

I think the Roman Civil War scenario (Caesar vs Pompeius) is the most open one. Both sides have advantages and a secure resource and recruitment base at the start of the game. This scenario also allows you to recruit new legions, so even if you completely loose an army, you should be able to rebuild your strength if you make a determined effort.

The Emperor civil war scenarios are also quite balanced, especially the Septimius Severus scenario (in the 4-Emperor's Year, the Otho faction has a significant disadvantage against the other two factions, which are roughly equal in strength).

The other scenarios are pretty much one-sided, and are very challenging even against the AI. In my first test game, I played as the Populares in the Marius vs Sulla scenario, and while I could hold out and successfully defend Italy against Sulla's onslaught, I lost in victory points at the end of the game.

Good review, "fair and balanced".

WIA already had monthly turns, so really it depends on the AGEOD games (ROP / RUS / AACW : 15 days ; WIA / AJE : 30 days ; NCP : 7 days).

I agree ; playing a non-Roman faction (mostly Pontus, if you don't have the Spartacus scenario) can be downright frustrating for people not unexperimented people : the supply logistics is extremely difficult, and you lose with 4 : 1 ratio due to limited frontage - frontage not being clearly explained in the manual - so you don't understand what you can do. Well played, they really can be a match to Sulla's legion, which the Populares cannot be.

I agree that the "provincial decisions" could be improved. Some are really useful and imply a real sacrifice, some are boring and "free" (Merchant : free 5 money per merchant with almost no constraint), some are not so usefull but cosmetic (building Roads - that's what Roman did !). I believe balancing this stuff will be on the dev'list once the remaining bugs are killed.

Looks like my Beginner's Corner was useful

That's a difficult balance for AGEOD games : either you do a lot of "historical events", but PBEM players need to have a pre-knowledge of the scenario to be on equal footing, and you don't, but then those events make SP even more interesting.
Note that the apparition of the Barbarians in some scenario is random to an extant, so you might prepare against - say - a Dacian raid for nothing.

There are quite a few issues (non crashing bugs, balance issues) outstanding, but I am confident they will be fixed in a short time. The team is really working on them. Most of these bugs you won't see if you don't start to bean-count (which I love to do).
As a beta, I am responsible for some of these bugs being not detected at release :/

It is going to be the object of a significant effort I believe ; the game changed a lot since the beta - and sometimes the manual was not kept up to date.