The Shining Source

Where could i... acquire the game? Tomahawk, if you are happy with your...  provider, then maybe you should direct me to them as a way of thanking them for their fine service.

PM'd you .

Good work everyone - nobody will ever guess what this is about.

To get back on topic, I must say I like the game quite a bit... it just sucks that you have to have defeated a race first before you can play with it... I don't want to be a smelly Roman, and the only thing I've conquered yet is the Greeks.

It reminded me a lot of Civilization, without the tech and with some "family" features.

Oh, and without the huge kickass realistic battles

btw, you can cheat and search on the internet for a way to unlock all factions.
Its done by just cutting and pasting a few lines in a textfile, and certainly not difficult.

The last game I was addicted was Farcry - by far the best shooter (I even prefer it to halflife 2).
Great graphics and a highly variably gameplay, multiple ways to solve a situation cool vehicles make it my number one.
It's even the first shooter that doesn't need a quick save option - the automatic saving is nearly perfect.
The sad thing is that it took me only one and a half week to finish it.

Next to that I finished Prince of Persia: Sands of Time - from my point the best Tomb Raider like game since Tomb Raider 1 - cool graphics, insane moves and good riddles make it one of my favorites. I'm going to get the "Warrior Within", the second part, soon.

Back to Rome - I played its prequals and at the moment it's too much work for me - strategy games force you to play rather long to see any real success. Nevertheless it seems to be a hell of a game from what I heard and saw.

After about 2 days of playing, I have some more comments...


1) I'm out of family members! You need family members for riot management, but you never have enough to cover ALL of your cities. I started using a diplomat to bribe other family members into joining me (and deporting them to safer parts of my empire, because they're sensitive to being bribed back) but I still don't have enough... any hints on how to manage without them?

2) Time-consuming! Managing 25-30 cities isn't exactly much fun to do... is the "Auto-management" feature any good? The advisor keeps telling me to build Catapult Ranges and I hardly use Siege weapons, so that's useless... if I let it auto-manage, will it lower taxes and organize plays so the people remain happy or do I still need to check all the time?

3) Riot riot riot! How do I keep everyone from rioting? My empire is spread from Carthage in the west to some empire far in the east, and there's yellow faces all over the place. I noticed a lot of it comes from the distance to my capitol, but if I shift it I'm just moving the problem from one place to another... suggestions?

4) Stupid specs . Quite often, my leaders end up being useless because they have more penalty points than bonus points... is there a way to make sure they get the good things and avoid the bad things, or is it all random? (I noticed fighting a lot helps your Command rate, but Influence and Management are more difficult to increase).

5) Silly Senate! The Senate is angry at me for some reason (my popularity is way low, even though I rarely ever miss an assignment. By the time I finally get it back to the middle, it drops back to one point and I don't know why. Does that just happen when my empire's too large, that they feel threatened or something?

Thanks in advance .

Well for the traits and family member stuff, it is possible to switch retinue characters sometimes. You won't be able to get rid of that Drunken Uncle of course, but a couple of others can be switched. That may help .

Also, if you have such a huge empire, perhaps it's time to play the game on a higher difficulty level?

1) breed them, keep them safe, bribe new ones, and dont let them be bribed or killed, thats all that helps. And face it, you cnat have a govenor in each city.

2) its a bitch, micromanagment, but i dont trust them AI's either, so i just manage by doing a complete check every 2 or 3 turns, wich takes +/- 5 min at most for 30 provs. Thats still less then a battle.

3) build every hapiness building available and keep large garrisons (20 units really isnt a strange garrison size im afraid).
Another method i adopted later on in the game was just exterminating every city i conquered. The less people there are to revolt.

4) shit happens with stats. Its actually linked to what you do with the family member and what buildings you build in his city. Temples have the most obvious effects, war temples leading to leaders hitting family members and stuff

5) Like you give a damn about those bureaucrats in Rome. As soon as you have enough support from the people, you can overthrow them anyway.

Okay... the garrison tip may help, I was always pretty cheap on my armies, hoping to save a few bucks that way (but then I had 1.4 million gold and decided that wasn't quite the most effective way either).

Another thing that kinda surprised me is how many men go in a unit... one game, one Hastati unit contains 20 soldiers, and another game that same unit of Hastati had 80 soldiers! For battles it's nicer to have more soldiers of course, but it's quite a drain on my population. I did start "migrating" by making units of 120 Peasants every turn in larger towns and moving them to smaller underdeveloped towns, and disbanding em there.

And the family traits are a tad weird... it's like the larger my family gets, the more negative traits they all develop. O well, maybe I should have them all fight more battles.

unit size depends on game settings.

And we all use the peasant deportation tactic one time or another

Must be somewhat random settings then, I don't remember deliberately setting it so that it'd be so many troops per unit .

Do you always fight out all your battles manually?

yup, since that saves losses

pm me the dodgy method

The Romans should be overpowerful at the start if the game follows history

I want to play this game, but i haven't got round to getting a 6800gt yet :sob: and nforce 4's aren't out over here yet :doublesob: Laptops pWnZ j00!

The Romans ARE indeed way overpowered... especially after the Marcus Gaius revolution, the troops are very strong.