LET'S PLAY UPDATES (JANUARY 2024)

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Rome: Total War (Julii)(M/M) - Parts 08 to 11
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Well I decided to transfer the two episodes I was planning for Aeloren Tactics over to this game since the next fight in that game is so unbalanced it's utterly ridiculous. At any rate the two additional episodes were used to capture two additional cities. Albeit only one of them was pertinent to my main goal of this short campaign of eliminating Gaul. The other target is a mining village that can be used to secure additional funds to help pay for my growing army. After all, it's not like waging war on the barbarians in the north is cheap. Though I'll admit the most recent city I took from Gaul is kind of worthless in one respect. The Gaelic leadership basically turned all of the residents into crappy spearmen so it'll be a while before I can use this new forward village to create useful units. Oh well, at least it should be easy to hold onto.
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Rome: Total War (Saxons)(M/M) - Parts 11 to 21
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It may have taken 11 episodes and me converting the planned episodes for the Roxolani, Lombard, Brutii, and Alexander campaigns in order to do it, but the Saxons run is now complete. On the whole I think this campaign was pretty easy with me being able to basically run roughshod over the Western Roman Empire as I pushed into parts of Germany, France, England, and Italy. And I moved at such a fast pace the Vandal hordes had only just started to arrive near my border when I finished the campaign.

Though a few of the episodes did remind me of just how iffy the AI can be at times in this old game. The best example of this came in the episode where I capture the starting city for the Alemanni where the King and one of his sons kept riding back and forth under portions of their city's wall where I had placed archers. As a result I just had to sit back and wait for the king and his son to be turned into pin cushions in order to make taking that city pretty easy.

We also scored a few heroic victories, but most of those battles were so one sided I question why they were considered heroic, but I guess it's not my place to tell the game how to judge a battle. I was also surprised the starting faction leader lasted so long. On the plus side he did manage to last long enough for an up and coming son to take his retinue. Though that son never really got to benefit from that trade since I finished the campaign before he could arrive in England to help deal with the threat of the Romano-British popping up when I taken Rome's last city on the island. Though I'll admit the campaign ending when it did was probably for the best since I was starting to get bored with it since I was closing in on becoming an unstoppable snowball that was careening down a mountain.