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Author |
File Description |
Richard Ames |
Posted on 08/06/05 @ 10:16 PM (updated 11/08/05)
File Details |
Number of Scenarios: |
1 |
Difficulty: |
Mod-Hard |
DRUSUS AND TIBERIUS
This is a single scenario campaign where you play as Tiberius, a young man who is later to become the second Roman Emperor. You have a small base camp near the river, and a supply camp to the south west. The enemy is in close proximity to you so you may face attacks early on from two different fronts. You must also watch over your brother Drusus and his camp, on the other side of the map. Your objective in the campaign is nothing less than to subdue the rebellious tribes, and turn them into Roman provinces, and you, Tiberius, must lead from the front.
Play time is roughly an hour. Feel free to share how you found the mission, and any improvements I can make.
[Updated 8/11/05 to make instructions more readable, and made slightly easier for moderate/hard difficulty (enemy stops training priests/STs after a short time)]
NOTES
* This was designed for AoE. If you play it in Rise of Rome I will cry
* Although this is a short mission, it can be quite difficult. Not recommended for rookie players.
*There is plenty of reading there for you. The readme, history, and instructions are all optional, but you will need to read the hints and study the bitmap carefully to understand the mission.
*<Self Promotion>Also check out my other historical campaign, “Characters of Ancient India”</Self Promotion>
OTHER CAMPAIGNS ON ROME:
¤ Senate and People of Rome by Andrea Rosa – Recently Andrea has remade his debut campaign. Most downloaders may not be aware of this, since the update was a replacement the original campaign.
¤ When in Rome by Rich Parker (Rise of Rome) – A great recent scenario by Rich, who we all thought had retired to a flash seaside apartment. This is a single scenario gem, and reminds us he is right up there with the greatest designers.
¤ Scipio and the Second Punic War by imhotep – This architect of scenario designing has put together a brilliant campaign which has his unique puzzle style elements blended into the campaign which nobody else has ever been able emulate.
¤ The Rise and Fall of The Roman Empire by Joey S – A rather long but still surprisingly good campaign, and great for those who thirst for hours upon hours of playability (unlike this campaign)
TRIBUTE
This campaign is dedicated to Borbola Balazs, or BB for short. He has been active on the forums for over two years, and is well respected in the area of AI and Per files. His Egypt AI/Per set is one of the best around. He also made the remarkable CTY file editor, which everyone thought impossible, hence he has been dubbed “BB the genius”. More recently he has worked on the Fall of the Newbs project, where he stars as the chariot riding Tiberius himself, and collaborated with Bismarck in the Shoreview Contest, on the Traders of Purple campaign, which did very well, and has some amazing AIs, such as CPU players changing diplomacy between each other. And that goes without mentioning the legendary Racing Campaign… |
Author | Comments & Reviews ( All | Comments Only | Reviews Only ) |
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Monochromatic 2 (id: Acelgoyobis) |
Posted on 08/08/05 @ 12:17 PM
Edit:Fudgy.
You forgot all the original RoR campaigns that ES has made.
[Edited on 08/08/05 @ 12:18 PM]
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LittleFreak |
Posted on 08/24/05 @ 10:19 AM
Phew. I finally have finished this incredibly tricky campaign. I must say I'm quite happy about having beaten it, I was close to giving up.
First, let me mention that this is not your normal build up and destroy or fixed force scenario. You have a base, but you can't possibly build up. You can get resources in the nearby river and so build up an army of infantry though. And that army you will urgently need, because the enemy will be knocking at your front door soon with swordsmen, priests, siege weapons and annoying chariot archers. Fending these off can be very tricky to impossible. And by all that, you need to look after your little brother at the other side of the map and tribute him some food so his camp doesn't fall. The victory conditions are often quite tricky, and different from those you'll face in other campaigns. You have to lure an enemy leader to an ally without drawing him out of a little desert area, you have to use your hero to destroy enemy buildings (unlike other missions where you can hide the hero somewhere save), and many other things like that.
You don't get a lot to start with, and you'll have to work with everything you get. A single destroyed house can mean defeat. Let me remind you, if you're a beginner you might better not try this camapign. I found it very hard and even frustrating at times (ever tried beating chariot archers with infantry?). I enjoy difficult missions, but this one has a big problem: you have hardly any freedom concerning unit choices and tactics. You are forced to use infantry, get food with fishing boats and trading stone for gold (this represents new soldiers arriving). There is only one path to victory, and if you do something wrong you'll most likely have lost. There are a few gaia towers or chariot archers to help you, but for the most part you're on your own.
What really stands out in this mission is creativity. The concept is original, and you'll have to adjust your normal playing style to the mission a lot. I noticed some slightly similiarities with a scenario of Andrea Rosas campaign Memories of the Gupta Dynasty though. But still, this is very creative.
Creativity also shows in map design. A lot of thought and work has been put into making the map good looking. A lot of advanced techniques have been used, and the hard work really shows.
The story was a bit confusing. The objectives are located in the hints section, the instructions are a letter from your mother. The history section has some good information, but after reading the hints I did not really get what I had to do. I had to read them again and play a while until I began to understand. That's also the fault of the complicated victory conditions, which are original, but hard to understand if you didn't play the game yet. The bitmap was very good though, and made understanding the scenario a bit easier.
Overall, this scenario has strengthes and weaknesses. I wouldn't reccommend this to beginners, they will probably despair. Those seeking for a challenge and originality should definitely give it a try.
*edit*
After the difficulty was tweaked and the story was made a little bit more understandable, I increased to balance score from 3.7 to 4 and the instructions to 4.2[Edited on 12/05/05 @ 10:20 AM]
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rakovsky |
Posted on 12/06/18 @ 10:00 PM
Playability: 3
The main problem is that it's meant for AOE1.0c, but the Scenario has four main glitches on AOE1.0&1.0C:
1. If you meet all the Objectives, in my experience the game does not end.
2. The game uses a trigger where a tower constantly shoots arrows and this makes saving impossible in versions 1.01A-1.0C, as the Designer mentions in his Readme.
3. In AOE1.0 and maybe 1.0c, if you load a Savegame, the Green Alexander Hero (Drusus) immediately trots out of his stone base, and the Scenario is set so that if he steps outside his base, you immediately are Defeated.
4. The map has a few paths that have eyecandy like trees, rocks, and stationary ally units that make Pathfinding very hard in AOE1.0. But this is generally not a problem in 1.0C, which it must have been made for.
All four glitches go away in ROR, and I was able to beat it on Moderate in ROR. But ROR has a different problem that he mentions in the Readme, which is that you have map sharing with all Players whom the Scenario has set as "Allies." And in history and in the Scenario story, the yellow player is not actually your team's real ally and is in fact fighting your brother, Drusus (Aqua Player). There seem to be a few differences in the way that the AI attacks in ROR. For instance he seems to stop his attacks on your Aqua ally after a while, whereas in AOE1.0 you have to keep helping Aqua with resources.
There is also another problem, which is that the missile trigger does not work on Easy or Easiest in either AOE or ROR, so you cannot get your eastern reinforcements in those versions. And in fact this means that you cannot beat the mission on those difficulty levels.
I put a walkthrough in another post on this Comments page. If you follow it, you can meet all the objectives on AOE1.0c, even without saving, although of course that makes it harder.
Balance: 2
I think that the game was too hard. I think that a good game balance is one where clicking hard will make a hard game and clicking moderate will make an average game. That way a player can choose the difficulty they want. Otherwise the balance is off.
What hurts the balance severely is that you are stuck playing on MODERATE or harder, are supposed to play using the AOE1 program (not ROR), and in AOE1 the savegames crash and there are Pathfinding difficulties in AOE1.0. The Game Designer warns here on this File page that it's not meant for weak gamers.
If you play it in ROR the game difficulty is acceptable if you follow my walkthrough and use saves, but the Designer says that it's not meant for ROR.
Creativity: 5
I liked the story instructions in the form of a letter and the idea of several missions, and the map graphics were great.
Map Design: 4
The roads are too narrow for comfortable transport. But otherwise, the graphics are awesome, with buildings and geographic objects that are rarely if ever seen in the official game (like snow and farm vegetables).
Story/Instructions: 5
I liked the story and how it was based on history. The instructions say "Difficulty will be lowered by saving". What does that mean? Just that saving checkpoints is a known, common-sense way to help win a game?
Additional Comments:
I expected that this was made for AOE 1.0C because the Granary put out Patch 1.0C in December 2004 and this Scenario was made in 08/06/05. However, in AOE 1.0C, this Scenario has a special trouble saving due to the constantly shooting tower by the SE edge. This glitch would not be present in AOE 1.0c, ask Fisk wrote to me on the Forum: "Yeah, it's actually a well known fact that the missile save bug was introduced with the 1.0a patch" and the 1.0c patch didn't fix that new bug. Richard wrote for this Scenario that saving lowers the difficulty, so this suggests that he intended players to do saving. So perhaps Richard designed this Scenario on AOE 1.0, which didn't have that bug.
This Scenario apparently can save on AOE 1.0, but not on AOE 1.0 or even RockNROR-modded AOE 1.0c. On the RockNROR-modded AOE 1.0c:
1. I loaded a savegame from not long after I started up, and got: "Out of Memory, Please Free some memory, then retry." ie. the Savegame was broken.
2. I played a bit, finding different Gaia units, set out for the east dock and saved. Then when I tried to load it, I got: Age of Empires has stopped working. A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. The savegame was broken.
3. This happened a third time, after I made a savegame when I was about to discover the troops in the SW red base.
In contrast, on regular AOE 1.0, my first save worked from right before I went to the east Gaia dock. But then later on problems started coming up in AOE 1.0 with crashes and with saved games not working.[Edited on 08/28/20 @ 01:18 PM]
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rakovsky |
Posted on 08/26/20 @ 02:59 PM
THE OBJECTIVES ARE:
1. The Tiberius unit must destroy the 2 Orange (Raeti) Barracks and 2 Orange (Raeti) Archeries.
2. Capture and hold the Gaia dock in the east.
3. About 13 minutes into the game (you can check your time with F11 in RockNROR), you get three horsemen on the East side. Green Hero Alexander must kill Yellow Hero Hector. You should help Alexander, but you can't draw him outside of his stone area.
4. The two heavy cavalry in the supply camp to the west must go and directly fight the chieftain in the hills to the far south.
5. Tiberius and 4 legions must go to the Government Center and Tiberius must stand by the Yellow flag there.
These are loss conditions that you must avoid:
1. Tiberius can't be killed.
2. Drusus' Aqua archeries can't be destroyed, so you should tribute him food, which he is short on.
3. Green Alexander (Drusus) Hero must not leave his stone desert area. The instructions say that if you lure the Hector hero into combat and fire arrows at Hector to help, you will likely draw him away and then Alexander will follow. THIS IS CONFUSING because the Instructions also say that you should help Alexander in the fight.
4. At least one of your horse "Assassins" on the eastern side must survive until Alexander fights Hector. The idea is probably that the horsemen are needed to facilitate the fight.
5. Don't lose your dock and don't lose both your barracks and archery. You should protect your houses.
6. The Yellow Government Center must survive.
Special Rules and Hints:
1. Trade your stone, not wood, because you need wood, not stone.
2. You don't have villagers.
Additional Notes:
There is a glitch on Savegames: What happens is that the Red "Supplies Camp" is repeatedly winning when I load the savegames. Probably this is because there is an artifact at the Supply camp and Red picks it up when I go there or when the savegame loads. Like first you discover the area, then the artifact switches to your control, then you leave, then Red gets the artifact.
The Readme says: "Some other features of the campaign include two timed appearance tricks – a standard catapult one with a naval application". Apparently this refers to the catapult hitting the transport. I don't see any real help in having the catapult hit the transport because you could just have your units discover the Gaia transport unit when they move south. The idea probably was to make the transport show up at your main dock at the beginning, but the Designer could have just given you the transport to start with by putting it by your dock there. My concern is that triggers and VCs could be a factor in making the mission buggy.
The Readme says: "Don't play this in RoR, trust me. The map design will look weird, you will be able to see allies' LOS which will ruin the visual aspects more, and... just don't play it in RoR."
The Pathfinding generally works okay for AOE 1.0C. But if this map gets revised with AOE 1.0 in mind, the eye candy objects need to be cleared from the paths that the units are supposed to take, due to the awful pathfinding of AOE 1.0. Things like rocks and cliff edges being close enough to the water that the chariot archers are stuck, the blockages/traffic jam as the red supply base, the trees below the elephant archers in the northwest, maybe a few trees north of the gaia dock, although those also help deter enemy AI units.
The Readme says: "Saving may also prove crash happy, since there are a lot of projectiles floating around, and they mess up save files." This was a known bug in 1.0a and later, but the savegames fail even in 1.0. The fact that he mentions the missile bug suggests that it was made in AOE 1.0C, despite the Scenario not loading in my 1.0c Scenario Editor.
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Walkthrough Strategy
OPENING/PREPARATION FOR BATTLE:
(1) Send Tiberius a bit south to find soldiers, and then have Tiberius take the path to the Gaia dock on the east lake (located SW of the yellow Hector Hero), which has minimal resistance at the start.
- If he keeps getting converted on his way back from the dock, then have him find the elephants north of your home base before going to the dock, or have him wait at the east dock until your legions have killed off a wave or two of priests and soldiers.
- Give Food to Drusus' aqua base in tribute often. I hope that if you tribute them as much as possible so that you never have much more than 100 food in your own inventory that your tribute will be enough from the 3 fishing ships.
- Build 2 fishing ships at that east Gaia dock.
- After getting the Gaia dock, bring Tiberius back and go to the far northwest side of the river to get the 2 elephants.
(2) Set your 2 Merchant boats to Stone and send them to the red dock and don't build more merchants.
(3) Build a Trireme to clear the river of enemies and send it a bit east of the red dock. On the way it will find two chariot archers, and then kill Brown enemies east of the red supply base.
- After the Trireme, build 1 fishing ship at your main dock. Too many more could clog your river.
- Bring those two chariot archers by the middle of the river to your base.
- Send the Trireme to the red dock to find the cavalry group by the supply camp. When you get your cavalry, use them to take the artifacts, or else apparently you lose if you load your savegames.
- Then use one cavalry to discover your 2 houses on the west side of the the red supply camp. Bring your trireme home for base defense.
(4) PROTECT Your HOUSES by your main base.
- Keep your chariots and Tiberius and elephants in the back so that they don't get converted.
- Build legions and especially centurions (they move quickly due to Aristocracy technology), but not axemen.
- Keep a trireme on hand, building another if yours gets killed.
(5) There are healing priests on the upper left side of the river at the end of a path.
(6) The west end of the road that runs a bit south of the west corner has free chariots. They can fight other chariot archers well, but they take up house space and die quickly otherwise, so you can protect them until you need them, like keeping them in the back of your forces.
YOUR ATTACK:
(7) Send about 7-10 legionnaires and centurions south to take out the towers and siege workshop at the southern Orange base. Then take out the two southern Orange Archeries there with Tiberius next to both. He doesn't need to be next to the Siege Workshop.
(8) After your trireme clears the way down the river, and comes back, send your transport to the red supply base to bring your cavalry reinforcements across the river at a space near the tower and ruin on the east bank of the middle of the river.
- Send the cavalry from the red supply base and the two heavy cavalry that you transported along the road that goes south and east from your tower and ruin on the east side of the river.
- Protect your heavy cavalry while they go south. Send other units ahead of them, like your legions from your attack on the southern Orange base.
- First, use your chariot archers to draw away the chief's bodyguard brown swordsmen. (You can find a lot of those archers on your path that splits off and goes to the west corner as you are heading to the enemy chief). Use the two heavy cavalry to attack the raider chief cavalryman in the lower section of the map by the blue flag.
- Then, you need to use your two brother heavy cavalry to attack the chief at once, and apparently while they are fighting him you need to be shooting him with the archers or massing him with units because he is pretty strong.
- Do not use your two heavy cavalry to clear the way south because they can easily get killed by the chariots and other soldiers before they get to the enemy chieftain.
(9) Send about 7 legions and centurions north to take out the Orange towers and temple and then use Tiberius to take out the two barracks there.
- After you take out the northern base, Put Tiberius on the flags to the east/right of the Government Center. The four legions don't have to be right on the flags and can actually be about a tile or two soldier lengths in any direction from that Government Center.
(10) When it comes to Alexander's duel with Drusus, I found my horse archers trapped in by their entrance due to Aqua's archers being massed next to them. This could happen if you had tributed a lot of food to help Aqua to the point where there are no Yellow soldiers fighting them. In order to free up the area next to your horse archers, you can tribute some food and gold and stone to the Yellow Player so that he will fight the Aqua soldiers in that location enough to free up space so that your horse archers can pass through and go to the north.
- What you need to do with your horse archers is have them fight Hector and then Hector will follow stop occasionally to shoot him as he is following your archers and then have them run into the stone box behind Drusus/Alexander. Try to take off significant health from him before he gets into Drusus' box. If they are in the stone box when he kills your archers, you won't lose. Nor will you lose if your archers somehow survive and Drusus kills him.
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GLITCHES:
- Narrow paths and eye candy on paths hurt your pathfinding in AOE 1.0 to get the north elephants and eastern Gaia dock and get through the traffic jam at the houses at the western red base. It would be best to clear a path. Pathfinding is awful in 1.0, but generally OK in 1.0c.
- The arrow trigger tower on the eastern edge makes Easy and Easiest modes impossible and usually crashes save games in version 1.0c, if not 1.0 as well. It makes sense therefore in an update to get rid of the trigger. The only reason for the trigger would be if the heavy horse archers there were being attacked if they sat there. But the Yellow player who fights in that section is allied with you, so that should not be a problem.
- Pretty soon after loading the saves, a message comes up saying "You have been defeated". It turns out that the technical reason that it does this is because Red's Allied Victory box is unchecked and it has one single victory condition: Bring Alexander to the area in front of his stone box. In other words, Red alone wins if Red's Cavalry Hero Alexander moves outside Red's box. The reason that the Designer made it like this was because he wanted Alexander to stay in his box until your horse archers bring the enemy Hector to Alexander's box. Normally this would not be a problem, because Drusus/Alexander's Player is set to Passive, so that he just waits where he started. However when you load a Savegame, Red's stationary units in his supplybase on the far left, as well as Alexander, start moving. In Alexander's case, he trots out of his box.
- Even when I met all the VCs according to the Instructions, the game did not end, and I don't know why. I carefully checked the VCs in the Editor and they look fine, and they also match the tasks that I completed.
SPECIFIC CRASHES:
- On AOE 1.0 (using the .Exe file "Empires(2)", dated 1997), the game ends in defeat soon after I load savegames, and says that the winner is the Red Supply base. It turns out that the technical reason that it does this is because Red's Allied Victory box is unchecked and it has one single victory condition: Bring Alexander to the area in front of his stone box. In other words, Red alone wins if Red's Cavalry Hero Alexander moves outside Red's box. The reason that the Designer made it like this was because he wanted Alexander to stay in his box until your horse archers bring the enemy Hector to Alexander's box. Normally this would not be a problem, because Drusus/Alexander's Player is set to Passive, so that he just waits where he started. However when you load a Savegame, Red's stationary units in his supplybase on the far left, as well as Alexander, start moving. In Alexander's case, he trots out of his box.
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NOTE ON THE ROLE OF THE EASTERN TOWER/ HORSE ARCHER REINFORCEMENT TRIGGER:
I took out the red elephants in my Editor and tested it and this makes your reinforcements appear immediately on MODERATE, but they don't appear at all on the Easier settings. So in effect you would have to start with the blind priest closer to the tower and either no elephants or else the elephants would have to be closer, in order to get it to work on Easy. Really though if you are going to do that, you might as well take away the red elephants so that the Scenario will work on 1.0c The downside of getting rid of the trigger is that your riders will come on the east at the start and so they might get attacked while you are simultaneously fighting on the west of the map. Hopefully though this would not be a big problem if you are playing on Easy or Easiest.[Edited on 08/28/20 @ 01:20 PM]
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rakovsky |
Posted on 08/28/20 @ 11:20 AM
I beat the Drusus Campaign today in Rise of Rome using Savegames. The main downsides to playing in ROR were that your designated "Allies" (including the Yellow Player who is actually your team's opponent according to the Game story and history) shares map information with you, the Orange AI sends more chariot attacks but less catapults and the Yellow Player attacks your Aqua Ally Drusus much less. As a result, there is a bigger "traffic jam" of allied Aqua units by your Blue reinforcements on the East edge that can block in those reinforcements, so you should move those reinforcements into the middle of the path or accomplish their separate mission soon after you get them.
The Designer says on the File Download page and in his Readme that it's meant for AOE, not for ROR, because of the map sharing issue that I mentioned and other reasons that he didn't name. Still, it's the only version that I found that I could get a Victory Screen on after meeting the Objectives.
I talked with Richard about how a fixed Version would look and I'm submitting my fixed version as Drusus and Tiberius, Version 2.
YOU CAN FIND THE FIXED VERSION HERE:
http://aoe.heavengames.com/dl-php/showfile.php?fileid=2797[Edited on 11/11/20 @ 01:58 PM]
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HGDL v0.8.2 |
Rating |
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4.1 | Breakdown |
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Playability | 3.6 | Balance | 3.0 | Creativity | 4.9 | Map Design | 4.5 | Story/Instructions | 4.6 |
Statistics |
Downloads: | 3,602 |
Favorites: [] | 0 |
Size: | 267.91 KB |
Added: | 08/06/05 |
Updated: | 11/08/05 |
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