Played around 4 different campaigns on VH campaign and N battle difficulty, so feel like I can put out a reasonable review. First want to say great job, the mod is really a step up from vanilla and it is clear a lot of passion went into making it. All my suggestions are intended to help improve the mod experience.


1. Unit rosters are far better than vanilla, especially for Romans where the vanilla forced upgrades were unhistorical and nonsensical for the Roman playstyle. Playing as a barbarian horde is immensely fun as well, as it provides a greater challenge than vanilla but is still reasonable.

2. The economic changes are good IMO. Makes it more difficult to steamroll the AI in a way that doesn't involve just giving the AI tons of armies.



1. The AI barbarian horde faction dies too easily and quickly because they can't handle the new, larger garrisons and won't replenish or settle at the right time and place. They sack a few towns, take major damage, and just sit around raiding until a Roman fullstack cleans them up. They don't know to encamp and replenish. They also refuse to settle until its too late, or choose the worst possible location. All the major historical migrators like the Suebians, Alans, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths etc. always die before turn 50 on all my campaigns, even when I am playing as a horde faction too. Maybe related to the below point.

2. The auto resolve seems unbalanced in favor of Roman units. Playing as Visigoths, I could easily win fights against WRE/ERE that were <50% in my favor in autoresolve by just rushing with melee troops. This hurts the barbarian AI a lot since they can only fight other AI through autoresolve. In my current ERE campaigns, the strongest faction after WRE and ERE is rebel Roman Britain, because all the other barbarian factions get smashed in autoresolve vs WRE. It may have to do with low tier barbarians having so little armor and how the autoresolve weights that. Perhaps also related to below:

3. The AI does not recruit higher tier units and seems to only use levy tier or tier 1 units. Following the above trend, this hurts the barbarian factions the most because barbarian tier 1 units are not that good, but tier 2 and 3 units are excellent. Meanwhile, the Roman tier 1 limitanei units have fantastic value, but tier 2 and 3 don't compare as well relative to the barbarian ones. Since the AI only uses levy or tier 1 units, AI Roman armies almost always beat AI barbarian ones. It also means that if you can survive the first 30-40 turns as any faction, you are in no real danger as your armies are always far better than enemy armies, except for the Huns.



The mod is definitely still enjoyable in its current state, but could benefit from changes that will allow horde factions to survive and extend the challenge later into the game. I'm not a modder, so I don't know how difficult making the above changes will be or if they are even possible, but something to consider at least.