Strategy guide for aggressive raiding roman players. I’ve dominated my area and reached high on the rankings on several servers playing like this.
The Roman tribe is a very interesting one, and for some reason everyone advice new players to go for romans. I really wonder why, I can’t see why it would be the easiest one
to play. Usually most new players who chose roman as their tribe just become farms right away. I’m not saying roman is a bad tribe, it’s just played far too passively by many players in my opinion.
Get the rewards
In all my guides I say that you should start following the
rewards program first.
If you don’t have that on your
server, you just build whatever you need to get the homeland bonus, then lvl 3 main building, granary, warehouse, marketplace, rally point and barracks. No need to build up all the fields then, and even if you have the reward bonus on the server, quit after quest number 21 and don’t build all the fields to level two, it’s a waste of resources. You can do that later when you really need
the extra gold you get for it, and if you don’t need the gold just wait with it till you have your second village.
Let’s look at the roman basic foot soldier for a bit, the imperian. 40 offense, 35 infantry defense and 50 cavalry defense. The cavalry defense is pretty useless at the start of the server, 35 infantry defense is pretty good though. Having 40 offense it’s definitely a stronger troop when it comes to pure fighting than the famous teuton clubs. It’s much worse in raiding though, only being able to carry 2/3 of the resources and walking slower. It also costs 440 resources compared to a club swinger costing only 250. Cause of all this you can’t compete with a teuton from the start.
So what do you do? I suggest laying low and avoiding strong teutons from the start. They will
attack you, but just be active enough so that they never
catch your troops or get any resources from you. They will be busy farming and probably not notice you as you’ll be building troops and your population won’t grow very much at all from the start. Your legionnaires are too expensive to lose in fights with teutons at this point, so here is your first goal as a roman.
2 legionnaires
From the time you have 2 legionnaires you start farming 24/7 with them, but be careful, you don’t wanna loose even a single one of them. If you’re playing on quest reward server make sure you attack players with 15 or more population with 3 or more troops the first time to avoid losses. As soon as you get the battle report you’ll attack again assuming you got max.
Keep building more legionnaires 24/7 and keep them out raiding all the time, never have them at home when you’re not online. Even if they defend fairly well you don’t want to loose them, this is not the time to kill other peoples armies, you’ll wait with that till later. You also don’t want any large teuton in the neighborhood noticing you and attack you more frequently cause of that. Stay under the radar and pretend you’re just an inactive farm.
I usually don’t build anything but troops in this period, but it’s ok to build up some more crop fields if it makes you feel safer. As a roman you also need a cranny as teutons will be raiding you, and you don’t want to loose all your crops when your crop production is
negative, as you’ll then loose some of your precious troops. You will be negative in crop production if you play my style, but it’s no problem as long as your active.
100 legionnaires
Yes, I know it sounds like a lot, but I believe it is necessary. Legionnaires farm much slower than clubs and to support the building of infrastructure for your EIs(equites imperatoris) you’ll need a large farming income. If your area is an exceptionally good one, and you get close to max in each of your raids I guess you can do with 60-70 or so, but then you have to be very active. You don’t want to spend too much time building up the academy and stables, as you’ll then be too far behind in troops.
What about imperians you might say? Most romans seem to go for imperians first after all. I believe this is a big mistake. What do you need these imperians for now? They are better raiders than the legionnaires that’s true, and it costs less resources to build buildings and research them, but compared to EIs they are crap at this point. Who will you be facing in your battles now? Teautons with clubs, and the EIs are way way better than imperians fighting clubs. They can counter atttack clubs easily, they can kill them almost without losses and they can’t be countered by club armies themselves as they are twice as fast as clubs. They are also better raiders than imperians in general even if there are no teutons at all close to you.
When you’ve got those EIs you can start having fun, now you’re gonna start hitting those teutons around you over and over, counter any
attacks they make with their clubs, just look at the combat guide on how to do that well, and kill all of their troops. It feels really good to retaliate on someone who’s been attacking you before, doesn’t it? They may start building spears and hinder you, but this will take them a long time, and spears are defensive units that they can’t really raid efficiently with. While you’re farming and attacking teutons with your EIs you’ll keep farming the other villages in the area with your legionnaires.
20 equites imperatoris
As soon as you have 15-20 EIs you should go build a hero mansion and get a hero EI. You’ll boost his offense points and he’ll hopefully be levelling fast killing all those clubs. If you happen to run out of teutons to kill off in your 21×21 just use your EIs to farm the other villages in the area. If you don’t have scouts already now you better research them now, usually I reasearch scouts as soon as I’ve got the prerequisites for it, at the 100 legionnaires point that is.
Just keep raiding and farming building EIs non stop, any extra resources will be put into crop fields as you’ll have a massive negative crop production by now. The other fields are not that important but let them follow 2-3 levesls behind. When your crop fields reach level 5 or so, start putting extra resources into party and second village infrastructure, take a look at other guides if you don’t know how.
100 equites imperatoris
I am usually at around 100 EIs at the time I found my second city, and I’ll probably have enough culture points without holding a party on speed, on a normal server maybe one party is needed.
The same ideas of where to put your second village goes for any tribe really. If you’re using gold and/or are playing on a normal server a 15 cropper is the way to go. A cropper will produce more total resources than any other city cause of the bonus buildings, and it will also be a better base for big armies, so if you use gold you should always chose a 15 cropper. If you’re playing on a normal server you should also always chose a 15 cropper as it’s too hard supporting a big army from a 6444 city with normal resource production. Troops eat as much on a normal server, but you production is only one third of speed. When you get your second city on a normal server you stop producting troops in your first city and build it in your second city, the 15 cropper, instead. That’s why you shouldn’t research anything in your first city apart from scouts, since you’ll have to do it all over again in your second one anyways.
A 6444 can easily support a pretty big army on speed, so it’s more up to you there. If you play on speed and don’t use gold, you can chose a 6444 if you wish, but at least city number 4 or 5 has to be a 15 cropper.
Village number 2
Now when you’ve got your second village it’s time to upgrade more of those resource fields. You should also take the time to research imperians. No reason to stop raiding with your legionnaires, but imperians are much better raiders and you should start building those in your barracks now. How you balance the production of imperians versus EIs depends a lot on what your neighbourhood looks like. If there are a lot of teutons with clubs and axes left to be killed go for more EIs, if there are more romans, gauls and teutons with spear defenses go for more imperians.
Onwards now you just keep up raiding and dominating your neighbourhood, build up a bigger army and upgrade your resource fields. On a speed server you have to be partying all the time, while on a normal server it’s better to go for culture buildings like the embassy. Don’t rush researching EC (equites caesaris), they are not that good raiders, they are expensive and they are to be used for your main offense army later in the game. I’ll just end this guide here as it is a starting guide, I’ll write more about endgame on this page later.
