The administrative burden of a rising empire

[cherryblossom]

Ave Honourable members of SPQR.

This is the first mod I ever installed and I keep comming back to it, so I guess it must be doing something right . Having said that, I often stop around 100 turns into the game because I become too overwhelmed by the amount of time I spend every turn adjusting taxes, picking battles, bringing reinforcements and retraining legions. on top of this I have a killsheet to update and about 10 battles to fight between every turn. This means that I can often spend an entire evening progressing maybe only 3-4 turns (1 year game time as you all know)

This is not a criticism as such, and I realize that running an empire would not have been easy. So I would just like to hear what you do to keep an overview of your realm and how long time you usually spend on a turn when you're well into the game.

Any tips, Strategies and pointers would be most welcome

[tanglebones]

At my stage in the game i try to keep fronts to a minimum, keeping battles to a specific area with a concentrated blob of legions and not having them scattered over a large area of the map or borders. Keeps supply routes to a minimum and feels just generally easier to keep track of who's where and doing what. That's generally my waring tactic.

A good tip for shortening battle marathons considerably is to put incharge of a legion a general that has the Night Fighter trait, this way when you often encounter the spearhead of a mass of enemy stacks you can simply dip in, attack one, defeat them and pull back all in the same turn. Hit and run i guess. Not only this but in most cases you can choose your targets with ease, whittling them down as you see fit.

In the screenshot there are 4 local stacks, if i defea... correction, when i defeat this army having singled them out using the "Attempt a night attack" option, they will retreat from the battlefield, and on the campaign map i will be free to retreat to a safer spot before i end the turn, or attack another single marcedon if i wish.



Hmm, i'm not short of a danarii or two at 10BC, pretty much all my settlements, cities etc have their taxes set to normal or low, there's hardly any maintaining to be done, unlike at the frontlines when cities fall to Rome and require some authority. At the moment i'm dealing death in Egypt and Macedon - i've not been claiming many cities in those areas though, the game is a kind of quite progression for me at the moment. If anything i'm gradually massing a force large enough to steamroll what is left of Macedon, i've done most of the hard-slog work that needed to be done.

[Ejergard]

Tanglebones, im surprised you don't have the reforms yet. Why not?

[tanglebones]

Oh i've had the reforms for a while Ejergard - basically i assigned what was left of my northern contingent of pre-marius armies to fodder duty. At the moment they're spearheading my marius legions in that region.

Some pre-marius i disassembled, but i had quite a few leet units that i just couldn't bring myself to do so. There are some things i would do differently if i started a new game, something i aim to do next time, follow a more strict routine.