Hey guys,

Been playing this pretty consistently since I got it a few days ago. I'll admit that I didn't quite read everything I should have, and went and made alliances with Thessaly, Epirus, and the Paeonians. I got tired of the Paeonians storming in and mucking with H. Lyncestis's fields and mines. Thessaly and Epirus I just did because I could. I did not realize at the time that revoking the truce would impose a permanent hostility penalty. Is that just to that faction, or does it apply to all factions? And is there any cumulative effects from revoking multiple truces? Any way to get them to break it so I don't get the hostility hit? How much of a hit is it? (I did do some initial testing, but wasn't too sure if it was random or not)

Also, Forts. I just secured my north and western borders, and started working my way southwards along the coast. Getting to Athens, I started to notice that sometimes you'd see a fort and two mines. Perfect, right? So I hooked up both the mines to the fort (Like this: Mine->Fort<-Mine), and actually started making money. Is it supposed to work this way? I guess I couldn't station troops there as no food would come in without workers hauling it, but I'm not really expecting to do that most places anyways.

Oh, one more newb-ish question. I did a quest around Thrace (Maybe), and was rewarded with a general appearing in a city. But at the time, Thessaly owned the city he was to appear in because of the aforementioned truce. Later when I got around to wanting to kill Thessaly, I couldn't remember which general it was, or what quest I'd done. Will/Did he pop up in another city? Or maybe that particular city? Sadly, I've got so many brigades running around that aside from my core siege brigades, I just send them off wherever I seem to be getting attacked most to beef those guys up more.

Finally, one question that came up due to all my newly found freed up links to due my Forts: Say you've got four cities linked in a circle. Does the game know when trying to send food from 1->3 that the link from 1<->2 is congested and try to route food from 1->4->3? (Assuming the ring was 1<->2<->3<->4<->1) I'm curious as it'd be much cheaper (free) to create two 25/wk links than to upgrade one 25wk to a 50/wk. With a few of my freed up links, I've been cross-linking my cities to create more of a 'mesh network' than a 'star topology' (If you're into networking, you'll know what I mean).

Sorry for the long post, thanks in advance everyone :D

No offense meant here, but your administration sounds very messy. You will have a logistical nightmare down the road I think.

As for the 'mesh' system. Food flows down any links that have a demand. As for your 1/2/3/4/1 example, food would only move from 1 to 4 if there was a need. So if 1 was maxed out food would move to 2 and 4. If there was a demand in 3 and food was going from 4 to 3 but there wasn't enough food in 4 then excess would be taken from 1. This is very hard to visualise but basically it moves from point to point. Food does not 'plan' out a route. This used to lead to massive surpluses of 20,000+ food in places like Pella and food shortages out in the further regions. Now with the food caps in each city it distributes much better.

Truces and breaking them can be confusing. There is no problem with breaking a few truces. The effects are permanent as far as I know but fairly minor. Try to avoid making and breaking many alliances though. Keep it as low as possible.

Making the computer player break it is troublesome. I don't know how to do it reliably. I think it will gauge your strength to theirs and if the balance goes too much to their favour compared to when the truce was made then they will think they can take you on. it will give a countdown timer and they will offer new demands. You can just ignore them for the length of the timer and it will be broken without any negatives on your part.

Since the player tends to become stronger rather than weaker over time I have not been able to use this to much effect. But if of course you know it will be broken soon you have a nice long timer to get your troops into position to crush them the moment it is broken; very nice of them all things considered.

Forts are of little use once they are well within your empire so using them as mine sinks is very good. Border forts can help you hold an area if you don't want to make a truce with someone but even so I find them to be of limited military use as the enemy will just bypass them most of the time.

Finally, your general spawning in a foreign city, never had that happen. Sucks, but they should respawn when you finally take the city yourself.

Could be messy. I just link cities to the closest other city to encourage larger links. Sometimes this makes links which probably aren't the most direct, but I think I was hoping the increased capacity would make up for some inefficiencies.

Thanks for the explanation on the food routing. I think that clears up a lot of stuff I was seeing.