Hannibal Issues

[Bismark776]

I played Birth of America and Birth of America 2 and had a lot of fun with both of those games. I recently purchased Hannibal and I have been having tremendous difficulty with it. I've been playing the 219 start date and I can't seem to get Hannibal into northern Italy without running out of supplies. I tried landing a bunch of supply carts in the genoa area by ship and having them meet up with my army but my army just eats up those supplies too before I have time to take any cities and build supply depots. Any suggestions on this? I tried the tutorial but it didn't seem to give me any info on logistics and supply.

Another issue I've had is that if you don't "open the northern roads" as soon as it becomes available it seems to disappear and never come back.

[Franciscus]

Hi

Sorry for a late answer.

- The northern road is difficult, for sure (it was considered almost impossible by the romans historically ) . Some advices: After you capture Saguntum, spend the 219-218 winter resting and refitting your army. Build a few extra units if you want, and more supply wagons. Begin your journey when the weather is good, with full supply. Do not make long stretches (ie, do not plot a course straight for Cularo).Travel in good weather. Use the supply Massalia gives. As soon as you capture Cularo consider to build a depot there and rest. As soon as Taurasia is yours, maybe build there a depot too will help.

- The Northern roads option should not disappear unless Rome declares war after capturing Pharos (this will open the northern road too and make the option useless). If that is not the case, please post a save, with at least a backup, of your game when this option disappeares.

Regards

[Bismark776]

No problem about reply time, Paradox forums were just like this back when I first got into their games. ageod makes great games, the community will build!

I think hopping from city to city, instead of the one long march order, is making the big difference, I tried that in my most recent attempt. I agree though, it *should* be difficult. I told my roommate I was having trouble learning the game and he said, "well that sucks". I responded that it sucks now, but having a game with a sophisticated logistics and supply system will be fantastic once I get the hang of it.

The northern roads option definitely disappears whenever I don't select it immediately and without the Romans capturing Pharos. I've had several games I restarted because the option was gone and northern spain was still listed as being locked for the scenario. I'll reproduce it and upload a save later today (presumably you want that in the technical support subforum).

I do appreciate this game and I can tell its fantastic just as the Birth of America series is. I just need to work my way through learning all the mechanics.

[Franciscus]

Are you using the 1.01 beta Patch ? If not, I strongly sugest you do it

Regards

[Bismark776]

It looks like the beta patch corrected the northern road issue, thank you.

[arsan]

Hi!
Some other ideas to make the travel faster and less costly for Hannibal force:
-Send a cavalry force in advance of the main army on offensive posture/evade combat to take military control of the regions you are going to move through. And to scout for enemy forces. Let them rest as needed to recover cohesion and get some supplies on Massilia and the other neutral cities
-Send Hannibal and the main infantry stack behind the cavalry on passive posture so they lose less cohesion and can move faster and need less rest.
- Cross the alps via Cularo. The coastal regions lacks road and it takes much more time. It seems a shorter route but it's not.

Regards!

[ajarnlance]

Hi!
Some other ideas to make the travel faster and less costly for Hannibal force:
-Send a cavalry force in advance of the main army on offensive posture/evade combat to take military control of the regions you are going to move through. And to scout for enemy forces. Let them rest as needed to recover cohesion and get some supplies on Massilia and the other neutral cities
-Send Hannibal and the main infantry stack behind the cavalry on passive posture so they lose less cohesion and can move faster and need less rest.
- Cross the alps via Cularo. The coastal regions lacks road and it takes much more time. It seems a shorter route but it's not.

Regards!

This is very useful info on how to use cavalry effectively to take military control. Do you have any info on screening for cavalry? For example, if my cavalry are in province A which is between my army in province B and the enemy in province C will they screen? Or is it better to include the cavalry in my army stack? Will this increase the hide value of the stack? How much cavalry is needed to increase the hide value? Is it a percentage of the total stack strength? Thanks!

[Shri]

Hannibal has several issues to be rectified-

1. Leaders cannot be promoted, as Carthage, i have only 3 Barcid Multinational Leaders and a varied army- Mago Barca needs to be promoted, how do i do that?
2. SEIGE is a very very big and complex issue, i (Hannibal) with a 50,000 Strong Army (8000 Cavalry) am at the gates of Rome for 3 full years on all out attack and yet not a single breach, worse- i got frustrated and played the SEIGE Card, i got 1 breach, next turn combat occurred and the AI (Level 3, one level below all out- with full aggressive setting) lost 10k for my 3k losses and i won, yet the Breach was gone!!! - HORRIBLE.
3. I have TONS of EP. TONS of VP (Both Useless) but very little Income (i badly need this income).
4. How do i build TRADE Ships? Any IDEAS?
5. Northern Route is really horrible in terms of Supply, better is to build NAVY and Land in Sicily or Tarentum or Capua or something else- You are actually forcing the player to play - a-historical. There should be some advantage to play historical!.

[Ebbingford]

Northern route is OK, use the neutral towns for supply on the way, and then once you get to Italy build depots.

[Bismark776]

I've had success with the Northern route since using the suggestions here. My current game only has a few years left and I'm a few hundred victory points ahead so it looks like I'm going to win. There are definitely still some areas I'm having difficulty with though.

1. Sieges are tough but my fatal flaw early on was port sieges as I didn't realize the port resupplied by sea (this is logical though). I was sieging a city in north-eastern italy for years before I realized I had to send my fleet around and then it fell within another year. I did basically lose my entire fleet to storms and attrition though. Its really very challenging that the carthaginians basically can't cause breaches without the special siege card which seems to limited in quantity for the whole campaign, and they also can't effectively siege ports without breaches. The numidians took a port city near Carthage and my Army was able to bottle them up inside it. They have a an army strength of a little over 900. I was able to naval blockade them for a while until their strength dropped to about 100 but then the Roman fleet showed up and wrecked my fleet and the army inside completely recovered. I had to commit a pretty large army to just sitting outside and I had to constantly move supply wagons back and forth to keep my army supplied outside the walls.

2. Hannibal keeps winning pyrrhic victories. I'll have about the same size and strength army as the romans, sometimes even a stronger army but I'll take 15-20,000 casualties to the romans ~10,000 or less. Basically I'm in a place where I'm using something like Fabian tactics, as Hannibal, against the Romans. I have Hannibal sitting next to the roman army and shadowing its movements so they can't retake any territory. This seems more than a little ridiculous but perhaps its just that I don't understand battles. One thing I've noticed is that the romans seem to be getting a big entrenchment bonus. To try to combat that I tried putting my army in the same province as theirs but keeping my army in defensive mode. This way I thought we'd only fight a battle if the enemy attacked me. The romans are still getting that entrenchment bonus and defensive bonus so it seems Hannibal is attacking while in defensive mode? Even outside of this problem, I can't ever seem to get truly decisive battles, the kind of decisive battles that marked Hannibal's early campaigns and forced the romans to simply stop fighting him in the field.

[Franciscus]

Hi

The forthcoming official HAN patch, besides bug-fixes, tries to improve the balance. In my testing, an army led by Hannibal will now almost always utterly defeat an equivalente Roman field army, with appaling roman losses. This is IMHO well balanced by the almost inexhaustible supply of roman man-power.
As to the sieges, they are meant to be difficult and long. The siege of Saguntum took historically many months, for instance. But one of the patch changes is to reduce the fort level of Arretium to 1. Although not a walk in the park, this small change also seems IMHO to improve the gameplay - there is now a (more) easy way to break out of Cisalpina...

Not long now...

Regards

[vaalen]

Hi

The forthcoming official HAN patch, besides bug-fixes, tries to improve the balance. In my testing, an army led by Hannibal will now almost always utterly defeat an equivalente Roman field army, with appaling roman losses. This is IMHO well balanced by the almost inexhaustible supply of roman man-power.
As to the sieges, they are meant to be difficult and long. The siege of Saguntum took historically many months, for instance. But one of the patch changes is to reduce the fort level of Arretium to 1. Although not a walk in the park, this small change also seems IMHO to improve the gameplay - there is now a (more) easy way to break out of Cisalpina...

Not long now...

Regards

This seems like exactly the kind of fix the game needs. Well done!

[Bismark776]

Hi

The forthcoming official HAN patch, besides bug-fixes, tries to improve the balance. In my testing, an army led by Hannibal will now almost always utterly defeat an equivalente Roman field army, with appaling roman losses. This is IMHO well balanced by the almost inexhaustible supply of roman man-power.
As to the sieges, they are meant to be difficult and long. The siege of Saguntum took historically many months, for instance. But one of the patch changes is to reduce the fort level of Arretium to 1. Although not a walk in the park, this small change also seems IMHO to improve the gameplay - there is now a (more) easy way to break out of Cisalpina...

Not long now...

Regards

This is great news and great work, thanks guys! I ended up winning that game eventually by capturing the city of Rome while the Roman main army (over 100,000 soldiers and about 14,000 cavalry) was trapped in Southern Italy with Hannibal blocking the way north. I can't wait to play with your upcoming patch though, it sounds like a more dynamic game with more dramatic differences between the two sides.

[PJJ]

Yes, that sounds really good! Hannibal should be able to beat the Romans decisively in pitched battle, especially when facing the not-so-great Roman generals of the early phase of the 2nd Punic War, and then march to the south like he did in real life.

[Franciscus]

HAN 1.01 patch "RC" posted here:

http://www.ageod-forum.com/showthread.php?38040-HAN-RC-1-01-patch&goto=newpost

All the changes discussed above included

Enjoy !

[Bismark776]

Awesome! I won't get to start a new game for maybe a few days but hopefully Saturday or Sunday I will. I'll give some feedback when I have it. Thank you for all the info getting me started on this game!

[Bismark776]

So over the weekend, rather than play a game as the Romans, I replayed as Hannibal using the official patch. Now obviously some of the changes to my experience were a result of my understanding the game a lot better but regardless here are my observations:

I had a pretty easy time of it (I'm not playing on an especially hard difficulty and it is against the AI, I get that). Crossing the alps was no problem since I knew how to traverse the land between Saguntum and the Alps and stay in supply/with cohesion. Getting into northern Italy I was able to siege and assault the cities there and trap Roman armies. I then broke south and just offered a wall, taking each city one at a time and beating down large Roman armies with Hannibal and sieging cities with Megalus and his Gauls. Eventually I built up my fleet enough that, with Syracuse on my size, I achieved enough Naval parity to effectively siege Sicilian cities with Hasdrubal's Spanish forces (I left a small army behind to deal with tribes). Eventually Rome fell to a siege by Megalus while Hannibal blocked the route to him.

I never, in the entire playthrough, felt like victory was in doubt. Here are some weaknesses I think could be addressed:

-I get that you want it to be a viable alternative strategy for Carthage to build a navy to challenge Rome. It is expensive to do that already but it isn't difficult. I also feel like the AI is not effective at identifying situations where my fleet is concentrated in one place (typically for blockades) for a long time and taking advantage of those situations by concentrating its own fleet for a big naval victory. If it did that instead of doing whatever it does with its fleet right now (its not doing anything it seems since I've never seen the Romans invade spain or africa with any significant force) then it would probably be much more effective at keeping my Navy out of the war.

-The AI romans need to force me to fight without Hannibal as a leader. The easiest way to do that is to engage me wherever Hannibal isn't. The best thing for them to do would be to attack spain since losing spain would also significantly reduce the number of units I can build, and if I'm struggling to beat Rome in Spain then the tribal defections would go from minor nuisance to a real threat. If I have to focus all my funds on building units to keep Spain in my control then I won't be able to reinforce Hannibal as well or send additional armies to operate in Italy/Sicily which would really make things a lot harder.

-Hannibal wins basically all of his battles now which is great. He typically wins them with advantageous casualty results as well, sometimes by significant margins (ie. loses 5000, kills 10-15,000). I'm still not getting the kind of decisive battles where Hannibal wipes out entire roman armies in a single day but I guess the advantageous results, spread out across a campaign, achieves a similar effect in aggregate. At the same time, though, it is just so easy to replenish his losses. Just click up a few replacements in the production screen, put Hannibal in a controlled city on defensive mode, and wait a month or two and he'll be right back up to full strength. This means that I don't even really worry about my casualties. I imagine its not realistic since the engine is already built but I'd love to see a system where a unit can't replenish losses unless it can trace a path through controlled provinces to a province that can build that unit (port to port might be allowed for simplicity).

[Franciscus]

Hi

Thanks for the feedback

Some notes:
- my personal sugestion playing against the AI (specially Roman AI) is to Play at Tribune oreven consul Level and with activation bonus too. In the end though, the AI will almost always lose against a good and experienced player, specially if her weaknesses are expoited fully and the player does not want to Play conservatively/historicaly.
- There are scripts directing Roman AI to go to Spain with Scipio (father and son). They are not absolute directives though, and may eventually need some improvements.
- there are no two equal games and the AI will surely Play different in your next game. Specifically, you may have been specially lucky in your sieges, because in my tests Hannibal had a hard time succesfully besieging large roman cities

Regards

[numahr]

I have tried to address some of the issues you mention by modifying some values left open to changes by the devs in open files. See the mod thread. Specifically:
- battles are more decisive
- replacement is harder

You may want to have a look. Based on testings, the scenario files need to be changed to reflect this (the thread also has edited scenario files thanks to another player, rominet). The AI may not know fully how to play with the updated rules. But it may help you get a better feeling of the 2nd Punic War, and feedback is welcome :-)

[Bismark776]

Thanks for the feedback again Franciscus. If I sounded critical, I apologize, I ought to have opened with, this game is incredibly well designed and fun. I love "Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage" the board game, and this is a great computer game of the same topic. I just wanted to give feedback, you can't improve in a vacuum right!

numahr, I'll check that mod out at some point. I think I'm definitely going to play a complete Rome game first though. I want to get a full feel for the game in its vanilla state before I start playing around with things. I will give feedback when I have it!