Challenges:
1. Building a city which contains 7,000 people.
2. Fighting frequent enemy attacks.
3. Wolf can be a problem initially, killing off immigrants.
Pros:
1. Plenty of farming spaces.
2. Plenty of iron mines and timber yards. Manufacturing weapons and furnitures would bring you abundance of fortunes. Remember to start importing items from traders before they will start buying from you.
3. Plenty of water all along the region.
Cons:
1. Unable to have clay pit, have to import. Pottery shortage is a common thing.
2. Maximum of 7 forts can be built.
Tips:
1. Build multiple residential areas (9x9) and spread them all over the map, starting from the right most region. This is because enemy would gain pathway only through the left most region.
2. Mobilize barrack to a newer residential area because older areas would have no unemployed people, which would slow down the recruitment and training process. If you want to, build more than one barrack to spend up the training process. However, this can only be done in the early stage, before the first barrack is filled with employee. And even with more than 1 barrack, only one of them will have weapons delivered to it and thus training for legion. Training for Javelin and Mounted-horse don't require weapons.
3. Build walls and towers smartly. If you have walls blocking the main path, enemy would try to squeeze into the city through the edge, usually near rocks and jungles let's called it hot-gates. Thus, this creates a loophole where you can actually build walls and towers parallel with these hot-gates, so that as they are busy breaking through the hot-gates, they are being tricked and army from your towers can start killing them. This works!
3. Use different armies for different enemies. Legion is most effective to deal with hand-to-hand, which include grounded armies and archers. Javelin is suitable with short distance attack, most effective with killing elephants. Mounted horse is the weakest army and is useful as backup and also to kill wolf which runs pretty fast. Legion is not effective with elephants.
Kill all elephant first (using Javelin); distract enemy armies with walls and towers, kill the elephants. This will force them to surrender.
4. Legion moves the slowest but they are the bravest. Do not keep Javelin and Mounted-horse out of the fort for too long; their spirit will start to decrease faster than any the Legion. This means that as enemy start to move nearer to the city, you have to start mobilize Legions first (you have to guess which location to mobilize them to because they move quite slow). As for Javelin and Mounted-horse, mobilize them only as enemy are close to walls and towers which would hold them for a while.
5. Build plenty of granaries close to each residential areas. You would probably need at least 7 residential areas (to accommodate 7,000 people) with 1 granary each.
6. You need to have some marble to build medium-sized temple. But don't over produce marble, stop the production if necessary so that you don't waste the warehouses' space.
7. When you are finally able to have around 6,500+ people, reaching 7,000 people may not come very quickly because shortage of pottery may drive people away. Thus the number of people may fluctuate in between 6,800 to 6,500. To win the scenario, just have to build another residential area; 7x7 will be enough.
8. Build appropriate gatehouse in between residential areas. This is a smart move to make sure that prefectures and engineers do not travel to far from the areas which they are supposed to cover.
9. Built plenty of oracles around to keep all gods happy (all the time). Oracle requires marbles but does not need to be manned. Thus, it is good for remote areas where human resource is scare. This can also provide a few doses of 'The Spirit of Mars' whenever necessary.
Refer to previous entry on Syracusae.
