A few days ago I was playing a big 8-player FFA game on a map where I normally always win, but for the first time in eons I didn't choose Palmyra as my civ. Instead, I tried it as Romans. And it turned out that while I would have steamrollered all of them with Palmyrians, as Romans I couldn't do jack. I don't know the English name of the map that I was playing, but it's one of the multiplayer maps that come with the game where there's a tiny pool of water in the middle with a ruin and some gold, plus plenty of gold on the remaining map and barriers made from wood, with two players in each clearing and every clearing also has a ruin.

So I did my standard all-out rush on the red player which was going easier than it did when I was Palmyra because of the cheaper villagers, and I defeated him before the 10 minute mark. Then I camped at my base and built sentry towers and axemen to defend, but I knew that I couldn't let any of the remaining opponents become too strong or I might be in trouble later. Therefore I considered rushing one of them with slingers. Of course they were also battling each other because they were all hostile to each other so I was observing which ones would remain standing. It turned out that the brown enemy (who was Hittite) kicked the yellow one's ass and the gray one (Sumerian) made short work of the teal one. But the orange and green enemies were still fighting and no one of them was losing yet. The orange one was Romans and I simply KNEW that he would pump out legions and priests once he finished the green one so I decided to rush and take out the orange enemy, hopefully saving the green one who was Greeks. It would have been foolish to attack the brown or gray enemy with slingers anyway because both of them would just shoot them with stone throwers.

So I marched my slingers all the way across the map and saw orange broadswords and green archers/slingers. Of course I now tried to target mainly the orange units, and I said "yeah, the green player's my homie, I'll help him to defeat that roman snob", showing the orange enemy who's boss and he was soon defeated. But then the green one noticed my slingers and tried to defeat them. I now attacked the green enemy and shot quite a few of his units. Then I noticed that the brown enemy's score had skyrocketed. I had to stop him because I didn't want to be fighting a ton and a half of Hittite catapults. So I just let my slingers fight for themselves and attacked the brown one with my giant army of 4 (yes, four) Phalanxes. Of course they weren't enough to overwhelm him outright but my next squad of phalanxes was on the way and that stoopid brown enemy tried to counter them with camels. Lol. But somehow, although I was ripping his camels and stone throwers a new one in a few Phalanx swings each, I completely forgot to target his TC and went off to battle the gray enemy, leaving the brown one's economy mainly intact.

The gray enemy was annoying because he had many stone throwers but I used centurions and legions to attack him and managed to slay many of his soldiers. However, he also managed to defeat a few of his attack squads. Then, while I was still busy trying to create a new army, the attack bell sounds and I see a green dot on the map near my base. The green enemy was attacking me with catapults! ****! Now every one of the three enemies had either stone throwers or better siege units! The reason why I had feared this is because the Romans don't have any useful cavalry units and so it's quite hard to stop the cats, and worse, sentry towers and improved bowmen were quite useless too. So I had to use infantry (and lost many in the process) to stop the cats.

Now I really had to do something to prevent the enemies from blowing my base to heck with their cats! So I flooded the gray enemy with legions and finished him off before he could get too many stone throwers. Then I attacked the brown one but I again forgot to target his TC and wondered why he was attacking me with stone throwers again not five minutes after my attack. Also, I had noticed that the green enemy was a total pain in the ass now due to his phalanxes, priests, guard towers and HORDES of siege units all guarding his base, and every so often, he would attack me with a combined attack force, inflicting heavy casualties.

I was really mad at the brown enemy now because he simply didn't leave me alone. He only attacked me and never the green enemy. So I used bowmen, helos, scythes and whatever else I had available and finally took out the brown one's TC. He was still alive somehow, hiding his last remaining villagers, but he finally ceased to be aggressive. My priests converted the remains of his town and my army found and killed most of his villagers.

So it was down to me and the green enemy now. I tried to attack him with improved bowmen. Of course his cats shot like mad and his phalanxes charged my bowmen but at least I got some kills. Then I attacked him with my own phalanxes and legions but they didn't stand a chance due to his squad of siege units shooting like mad. Attacking him with helos also proved difficult because his cats made short work of them and if a few phalanxes managed to close to melee range before my helos could shoot them, the attack was condemned to failure already.

Many times I tried to get through with helos, and I even shot a few of his siege workshops but he had a TON of them producing siege units nonstop and every few seconds a new catapult showed up, downing my helos in threes and fours per shot. I simply had to find another way to get past his defense. If only I hadn't chosen Romans as my civ... with Palmyran Heavy Cavalry and Heavy Horse Archers I would have won that battle already! But now, all I had was infantry, helos and improved bowmen. Yes, I still used improved bowmen. Yes, I even managed to shoot a few of his attack squads with naught but improved bowmen. And yes, some of my attack squads managed to shoot his defensive catapults with improved bowmen. Yet this still wasn't enough to stop him, as he had a shitload of wood and gold so he could still create at least a three-figure number of new cats.

And then finally I invented a plan. I had noticed that the enemy had only two artifacts in his village and all the remaining ones were back at my base, heavily guarded by centurions and other units. If I could somehow get those two artifacts out of his base and wall them in and defend them for long enough, I wouldn't have to wade through another 200 of his cats. I now tried to get to his TC where he had stationed his artifacts and tried my best to sneak in.

Trying to get in by shooting the towers with helos failed thanks to his cats firing nonstop. That was strike one. Trying to run past everything with centurions and only battling enemy units directly in my way failed too, he just shot them down too quickly. That was strike two. If I wouldn't get the artifacts soon, he might pull off a massive attack on my base and kill me - my defense still consisted only of improved bowmen because everything else had too little LOS, moved too slowly or both, and let me tell you, it wasn't easy to kill those squads of 20 cats plus 10 helos with improved bowmen!

So I tried the only fast Roman unit that wouldn't get killed in one or two hits: Cavalry. Plain standard Cavalry, with all armor and attack upgrades, but of course I knew that they were still only normal, no heavy cavalry, and that they couldn't even dream of killing those enemy phalanxes. I made several squads of 25 cavalry and ran past everything in his base. But when I had the artifacts, the problem was that I still had to get them back all the way to the other end of the map where my base was, and his phalanxes and cats had already defeated half of my army and he was constantly taking the artifact back and driving it away in the wrong direction. I then finally killed the unit that he had used to steal the artifacts and ordered the artifacts to get the Hell out of there. Then it was down to my cavalry to escort the artifacts back to my base, and he tried to take them back several times. But every time I would just take one cavalry off to battle his unit and have the other ones continue guarding the artifact. This bought me enough time to keep enough cavalry alive who escorted the artifacts to my base where at least 100 units were ready to guard them with their life.

And so it ended. He resorted to massive catapult spammage in the end but couldn't penetrate my defenses in time to stop the countdown. However, it had taken 4:30 hours for me to win that battle, and I tell you, as Palmyra I would have defeated those enemies twice over in the same amount of time. Maybe I've just grown too used to the Palmyran tech tree and therefore it's so hard for me to play another civ.