"A not so punic war" Topic

Playing Rome 2 total war with rome total realism 3 mod, it's a great mod that makes the game much better.

But playing the 2nd punic war campaign.
I'm now in year 205 BC. And had my very first battle with Carthage (as Rome) I've been at at war with them the entire war (some 20 years and 220 turns)
They've never attack me. Not even with a navy. I've been fighting guals and Spanish.

In the meantime Carthage has pissed of the known world.
I think they literally are at war with every faction in this campaign except one of the Numidian factions.

And when this first battle actually happened it was I Rome who invaded Africa. And my army is now close Carthage it self.
And I have three veteran elite armies about to sail down the East Coast of Spain. One army will take novo carthago (the only Carthagenian province left in Iberia as the Spanish and celts have taken all other Carthagenian holdings on that peninsula.

The two other armies will sail on to Africa.

Not only that but the celt Iberians have actually invaded and freed sevral Numidian cities from Carthage in Africa.

This is a very strange campaign.
I feel more like ceasar conquering gual then actually fighting in the 2nd punic war.

It's a computer game. I assume the AI is not programmed to attempt to recreate history, is it?

The ai in this campaign is supposed to be more restricted and less open than the grand campaign ai.

Rome and Carthage are the only two factions that can't make peace.

Do you see Rome 2 as a vast improvement over Rome Total War? To be honest I didn't see much game play difference between Medieval 1 and 2 just some more game options.

Rome 2 is better in some respects (armor is better from the get go, so no hastati in lorica segmemta)
But rome 2 is unplayable with out mods (like all total war games made after medieval 2) you need a realism mod, The improves the battle dynamics, battle length, battle and campaign ai.

In vanilla Rome 2 you can meet full armies of just light infantry.

You need mods to tell the ai to make propper armies. Vanilla Rome also means battles last at most 10 minutes usually only 5. And the ai always just charge straight ahead.

With rome total realism 3. At least the ai does try and flank especially with cavalry.

I've now taken novo carthago and the second city in Africa. It's only carthago left.

Rome 2 is notoriously dodgy in a number of respects, especially when it comes to entity interaction and AI. The graphics and equipment accuracy are improved over Rome 1 but the gameplay itself is if anything, imo (and that of reviews I've seen) a step backwards, and certainly no improvement. And graphical improvement is a double-edged sword as it means the game runs badly on most computers.

I don't mind short battles in themselves; the problem with long battles is that, well, they're just too long. It's fine once in a while but if every battle's going to take upwards of forty minutes there's a limit to how many of them you can actually play.

I feel that a mod for Rome 1 to offer some graphical improvement and reskin some units would actually offer a superior game.

I think I might have found a reason for the inactive Carthage. I beat the campaign as Rome and started the same campaign as Carthage. This time Rome is inactive. I think it's because this mod makes it much harder to keep settlements you take over.
From the messages I get it looks like Rome have problems subjecting the celts in northern Italy. They keep wiping out the ligurans. But they come back. This is because the mod makes it a long term project subjecting other cultures, I spent many years occupying and beating down rebelliona. I had to build only buildings that covered the culture to Latin. And if the Roman ai can't do that they'll be stuck in northern Italy the entire campaign. I assume something like that happened to the Carthage ai last time.