After Action Report: Disaster in Free Mode
Opening Moves – Community Planning
I had played through some the new campaign and gotten a pretty good feel for the game but I am never satisfied with the campaign modes of many of these games. I did my best to graduate to Free Mode or its equivalent as quickly as possible. Too quickly in some cases and Glory of the Roman Empire is one of these cases.
Going through the options, I chose to tackle the Eternal City itself and not change any of the default settings. In this scenario, you lack some of the major resources like gold, marble, and stone. It forces you to rely heavily on the agricultural and animal husbandry arms of your economy to trade for those items that you will need. You absolutely will need stone early on and I concentrated on trading olives for two of these commodities, focusing on stone more so then gold. It seemed to pay dividends, as the slave population is fairly high and well dispersed in the early game. Building was thus pretty efficient once I had my clay pits up and running.
You really have to pay careful attention to how your economy interlocks especially early on. It is easy to become stumped in your building program for lack of a resource. I decided to build mostly houses, altars, and prefectures early on, with a smattering of farms and fish houses. I wanted to get a jump getting better houses and thus more citizens. It also gets you to some of the population rewards quicker. Quicker population rewards mean getting more and quicker monuments as well.
Of course this did not stop a riot of one from breaking out near the ole wood shacks. This guy must have really been angry because he rioted for quite a long time, even after I had a prefecture in place to keep the population placated. No one joined him though so I considered the problem solved. The only issue the population seemed to have was getting enough cloth. Needed more togas I assume. Since this was a minor issue, I kind of brushed off the first few warnings while I laid out neighborhoods, planned taverns, and made sure I had enough altars to improve all of my houses.
Finally I decided that if the population really wanted cloth I would just give it to them. I dropped two flax farms into place and a tailor right between them. Figured that should take care of the community’s need without disrupting my little plan at all. Then, my prefecture caught on fire…
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Mid Game – Why do I always have to be Nero?
Yes, the damn prefecture caught on fire! Quite spectacular to watch the big buildings burn. Of course since the Prefects well work there I did not think I had anything to worry about. Then the Skull appeared and I clicked it, to find out who was sick. You guessed it: the Prefect! Since I had no Herbalist Shop, I watched this poor guy die while his place of employment burned down. It was a pretty tragic five minutes of game time. Then the pig farm caught fire. I realized I did not have enough wells. It seemed that all at once, I needed my slaves to build a few different necessities in a few different locations.
You can run out of slaves very easily doing this. Then they have to go and get the needed supplies so if you build away from warehouses and shops, it takes longer to get a project under way. So I had to switch one of my trading houses to trading for gold instead of stone (I had switched to all stone earlier). This allowed me to buy more slaves of course, which would lighten their individual load and allow me to build more warehouses.
I think this is where I really lost the game. This created a cascade of issues that would lead to the bitter end. It never seemed like the slaves could build things fast enough to keep up with my needs. I attempted to maintain some order in this chaos by prioritizing my needs but the fires and plagues kept coming. I managed to increase the number of wells and add a few herbalist shops, but these needed people to work in them, which required more houses. Citizen demands were increasing as Imperial approval kept decreasing. Every time I managed to get one crisis under control, another would pop up and all the while I was working my slaves to the bone to keep them ahead of building demands.
All the while some locations, places I had not built very much on, were still catching fire or had slaves which were relatively dormant because of lack of building projects. Just as I was about to do some slave relocation… yes the prefecture burned down again.
