The systems don't really map well to Greek warfare or imperialism, but their overall effect "feels" right, even if the player has to keep reaching into the gears to keep them turning smoothly. It makes Troy an undeniably cumbersome game to play but, having spent more time with the game, I increasingly love how all the kludginess captures, in broad strokes, a unique setting and type of conflict. If you squint, you can kind of see the kind of imperialist machinery that raised a handful of Greek cities to hegemonic power, but it all occurs via a diplomacy model that's about balancing scales. The only way to extort money, then, is to kick the crap out of someone for a few turns and then force them to pay you for a peace treaty and, later, for a non-aggression pact. The diplomatic model makes AI factions so averse to ultimatums that a threat of war is effectively a declaration of war. Strong allies are almost comically generous with funds, so if you're willing to make the rounds every few turns, you can practically double your money just from donations. Agamemnon has the ability to extract resources from vassals at-will, but it doesn't scale well as the conflict escalates. On the other hand, these systems only sort-of exist in Troy. Any good game about Greek warfare is going to be about the ruinous cost of policing an empire with far-flung standing forces, and the need to extract extra resources from friends and neighbors to sustain that cost. To defeat the Athenians, the Spartans also started soliciting financial support.
But over time, the Athenians started treating this less like donations and more like tribute, which is part of what led them into a terminal conflict with the rest of Greece. To fully drive-off the Persians and establish the kind of standing forces that would secure the Aegean, the Athenian-led Delian League effectively passed the hat among small Greek islands and cities along the Ionian coast. The Spartan-led coalition to defend Greece from Persia ran out of momentum as Persian forces fell back away from the parts of Greece where Sparta and its allies were based. On the one hand, I kind of love that a fully-equipped war machine in Troy practically requires donations to sustain, because this was the essential dynamic of Hellenic imperialism. The chances are you'll also end up with ridiculous amounts of spare bronze, gold, and stone as the game goes on, and can trade to cover your army upkeep.
Either way, the factions who view you as a staunch ally will be open to gifting you large amounts of resources semi-regularly. The smallest ones are often the richest, perhaps because they're not fielding big armies, but my suspicion is they're getting resource bonuses to help cover the notoriously poor budgeting that's dogged Total War AI for most of its life. It's a weird dynamic in Troy, but AI factions end up with massive hoards of wealth. To get you to that point, you'll probably need the help of your allies to make donations to your cause. But that's only really viable in the endgame, when you're waging pitched battles in the densely populated, staunchly-defended heartland of your enemy. The first is battle and conquest, both of which yield massive spoils that can ensure that your war feeds itself. There are two ways to really support massive armies beyond what the game's natural economy can sustain. The penalty gets significantly steeper with each additional army, so that even having 3 or 4 different armies becomes a heavy burden on your economy: more than that and their cost is crushing.Įven then, however, it's hard to make ends meet in Troy. In Troy, every additional army raised-that is, every collection of units serving under a hero-general-increases upkeep costs across the board for your army. To keep the numbers of armies under control, and to check the "snowballing" dynamics where players' conquests fuel unstoppable war machines, Total War games have adopted different approaches. In Total War games, every unit has a cost for initial recruitment, and then an upkeep cost that's paid every turn. Troy makes sure you'll need those resources because it imposes penalties as you field more armies. However, the southern Aegean is ripe for an island-hopping campaign that can draw the two adversaries closer, while the northern Aegean has tons of neutral factions and potential resources. Likewise, the Trojans don't have anywhere near the numbers to attack Greece directly. The direct line between Greece and Troy is over a forbidding expanse of water, and while the Greeks can land a lot of troops there, they can't reinforce quickly enough to overpower the Trojans and their allies, who dominate the Ionian coast.
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