14. The Fruits of Empire | The Grand Campaign | AoE2: DE

[@jurgnobs1308]

I mean "time left to build X" usually means you have to finish it by that time. it's not "time left to start constructing X" or what ever. the way I did it was that I started right away, noticed it's going fast, then delayed the actual finishing of it until the timer almost ran out

[@Ciclopotis]

It's pretty obvious. Seems like any kind of "unorthodox" win/lose condition doesn't sit well with Ornlu.

[@billytringuyen1]

i think he already know that lol

[@jurgnobs1308]

@billytringuyen1 k? he knew how I did it? interesting. I guess I feel stalked now.

[@DCdabest]

Yeah I was chuckling as the timer counted down the first time. Oh Ornlucles!

[@DCdabest]

I do want to say that the VA work in the grand campaign has been top[ notch. As amusing as it is to have Greek and Iranian characters voiced in the stereotypical British accents more at home in a 1950's historical drama than a more contemporary video setting; the way Themistocles VA delivers the line, "We would take it from them, Aristides" is genuinely chilling. The cold, flat threat in those words hits very hard indeed. Great stuff.

[@Polo88Kai]

Apparently the 'chance of rebellion' actually works. In my playthrough, which is also in low tribute demand, both greens and yellow turned against me, so I had no safe sea trade route. I had to spam Lembos and towers for defence, and micro my very few gold ships until defeated Green for a safe trade route.

[@mryes413]

The loose alliance of city states that had fought against Xerxes's invasion had been dominated by Sparta and the Peloponnesian league. With the withdrawal of these states, a congress was called on the holy island of Delos to institute a new alliance to continue the fight against the Persians. This alliance, now including many of the Aegean islands, was formally constituted as the 'First Athenian Alliance', commonly known as the Delian League.

[@mryes413]

Athenian politician Themistocles loses the confidence of the Athenian people, partly due to his arrogance and partly due to his alleged readiness to take bribes. As a result, he is ostracized and retires to Argos.

[@gebhard128]

ironiclly it was the democracy that pushed the delian league into an instrument of subordination of the allies. The boatsmen of the ships became a significant political power and depended on the tribute from the allied states. At the beginning of the peloponesian war the athenians were so hated they viewed the militaristic spartans with an economy based on slavery as the liberaters of greece

[@AnthonyAvon]

This one's fun for us casuals. You just go around the islands taking all the resources, building up a cheat code navy and then at the end build the wonder, and snipe the castles with the Leviathans.

[@tobiasm5579]

Die Leviathan hatte ich persönlich gerne als Alternative für alle die keine Kanonenboot bauen. Können Nur dann halt als Tribokschiff

[@Teinve]

lol what? am I missing something? I just tried this and it was so hard, I don't see how to build the wonder AND get the navy and resources. And I'd say I'm a hardcore campaign player wtf, not casual

[@AnthonyAvon]

@@Teinve I don't know if on hard you have to complete the Wonder or just start it before the timer. I play on standard so I just left the Wonder unfinished until I had enough fun. But yeah, if you can't delay the Wonder, I can see how this is a hard one.

[@johnnicholas1657]

That's the point. You can't delay the wonder​@@AnthonyAvon

[@AnthonyAvon]

@@johnnicholas1657 I see. It can be if you join us casuals on the standard difficulty. It's fun.

[@kinbine_]

it's a neat scenario in concept, but i think the chance of rebellion should go up and only lower when taking down a fort, also bloating the user with even more resources and buildings doesn't feel good when the map is like this

[@DCdabest]

I don't know why these scenarios insist on transferring the buildings of defeated enemies to the player instead of simply pacifying the AI player and turning them back into an Ally. I can only imagine it's to stop the player from cheesing the scenarios with trade mechanics but in the next scenario I did exactly that by not defeating the purple player so I could use their docks as trade ports forever lol.

[@inductivegrunt94]

The fact you have a market and access to Trade Cogs kinda defeats the purpose of the tribute/rebellion mechanic as you can just get gold that way and only focus on the main enemy with your massive navy instead of trying to balance out potentially fighting everyone on the map.

[@tryagain6691]

The biggest miss on this scenario is allowing us to trade. You can just ignore the entire tribute/rebellion mechanic, build up your hyper navy and... just go across the map and win. I wasn't really a fan. That said, I'm might have just been getting tired of naval missions. This is the 4th one in the Athens section of the campaing, with 5 of the 7 total being naval missions and appart from Hot Gates (and the next one), they are very similar to each other, with almost no hybrid elements, everything being rangable on water and no challenge whatsoever with the special buffs. I mean they can't be avoided, it was a huge part of this period, but some variety would have been good.

[@chucknoum23]

Athenians have good infantry and super good archers and we had almost no time or occasions to use them in the campaign 😕

[@gengarpokemon7731]

Yeah the Navy is super OP and most maps win con is destroy a fort. I'd like a bit of a grind fest considering the look of this DLC map designs and models is really well done.

[@mryes413]

Throughout the 470s BC, the Delian League campaigned in Thrace and the Aegean to remove the remaining Persian garrisons from the region, primarily under the command of the Athenian politician Cimon.

[@nedreow3722]

The problem is that there is no incentive to demand high tribute, so the optimal strategy is obviously to have as few rebellions as possible and just use the massive starting forces to beat down the few who do rebel. Really the scenario needs some form of pressure to encourage the player to demand more tribute. Maybe forcing the player to send resources back to Athens to fund the construction of the Parthenon?

[@jonathanking8800]

Demanding more tribute changes the next scenario, right?

[@bladewolf3173]

I very much disagree with the idea that the having the wonder built by the end of the time is not intuitive. Every other timer in this campaign that was not a countdown for someone to arrive was complete the objective before the timer expires. Not all of those would fail the mission, but they would fail the objective. I am pretty sure this is true in every other campaign as well in AoE as well. There are a lot of campaign scenarios, but I am pretty sure that this is true. So making the assumption that you had to only start the wonder by the end of timer was honestly nonsensical. You played the rest of the scenario well and it was still enjoyable to watch, but I would say the objective was obvious.

[@OrnLu_AoE]

Yes, but you forget an important part of my confusion - Wonders normally take 3500 ingame seconds to build, so even if you put a bunch of villagers on it, it would be REALLY tough to gather the resources necessary and complete the Wonder within the 12 minute time limit or whatever. This particular Wonder seems to complete in like a third of the time, which you have no way of knowing prior

[@nunosilva6162]

​@@OrnLu_AoE i think this is a "too much skill" issue, you know the game well so you make that assumption, your criticism is fair. It just doesnt resonate with most people, (like me). I knew wonders took long too build, so i sent all my villagers to it and then was like "oh it's not that bad" and scaled back. Didnt really think about it being a modified wonder build time. The objective just wants the player to be urgent, that's all

[@mryes413]

Did you complete the wonder?

[@Fake_Dozer]

Very cheesey on standard difficulty, there's no time limit there and you can build up your navy as you like until you set tribute demands.

[@raigarmullerson4838]

Love the series. Cheers from Estonia

[@milekordic3745]

Back greek civil war

[@gengarpokemon7731]

as much as I enjoy nearly every aspect of this DLC I don't like the defeat a fort and you win style as most times it cuts down the scenario so quick.

[@DCdabest]

One thing that has been a shame about the DLC has been the fact that; despite giving us this new water triangle and the split between military and civilian docks; the game has thrown a lot of that out the window by giving us these super insane upgrades for most of the naval missions. As fun as they are; it would have been better to restrict them to a single scenario and then have the rest play out like proper naval scenarios in order to showcase the new design. It's hard to get a feel for whether I like the new naval system when the scenarios are designed around specifically skewing it so the player can have an invincible fleet.