The Appian Way

Distant Battles

On some occasions during the course of the Caesar 3 career, the emperor will require you to send your troops to help a Roman city threatened by enemy interlopers. As explained on my page covering the favour rating, it is of paramount importance that you send enough troops to win the battle. Not only does this give you an enormous favour rating boost, but you will also be permitted to decorate your city with a triumphal arch. Nice!

Winning Distant Battles

The enemy in a distant battle have a preset strength, set by the scenario designer. The strength of the enemy can be up to 120. In order to win the distant battle, you need to dispatch an army of greater strength that arrives at the threatened distant city before the invading enemy army. Dispatching an army in time is rarely a problem: you are always given two years to comply with a troop request. If, therefore, you have a strong enough army before the request arrives, dispatching them immediately will ensure they get there in time.

This leaves simply the problem of sending a large enough army to defeat the foe. This is made more difficult because you do not know the precise strength of the enemy army. However, the troop request will tell you the its approximate strength:

Knowing the maximum strength of the enemy, all we have to do now is calculate the strength of the army we are sending in response. For the purposes of fighting distant battles, your soldiers have the following strengths:

• Academy-trained legionaries have a strength of 3
• Untrained legionaries have a strength of 2
• Academy-trained auxiliaries (whether javelin or mounted) also have a strength of 2
• Untrained auxiliaries have a strength of 1

Example: An army consisting of a full fort (16 soldiers) of academy-trained legionaries, and 12 untrained javelins has strength 60.

If you send just enough troops to win the battle, few of your soldiers will return. If, on the other hand, you send an overwhelmingly superior force, most of your soldiers will likely return. However, a minor bug in the game means it is possible to send too many troops to meet a request. If the strength of the army you send exceeds 255, then the game does not count the first 255 strength points (i.e. an army of strength 288, corresponding to six forts of academy-trained legionaries, is interpreted as an army of strength 33!), so it can pay to leave at least one fort at home!

This website was created by Mark Snow a.k.a. Caesar Alan. Most of the information presented here was gleaned from a number of other websites. Where possible I have credited my sources. You are free to use any of the information here, provided you acknowledge your source!