[AndrewJFisher]

I just played the first two campaigns and was surprised that I was able to win both. When I played this as a kid it took ages to find a way to win some of the campaigns, but then I had to learn how to utilize the controls. I wouldn't say I used that much strategy this time, didn't change the formations much, but I did oversee most of the encounters/battles and did really well at most of them. Actually in "The Race for the Flags", right away I noticed that though the enemy is ahead of you, those on the left hand path are in poor health i.e. slower and weaker, so it seems obvious now to send your squads up that road, easily catching up the enemy and likely beating them. The default rule is that the forest is sparse so keep going straight up, through the forest, over the bridge, round the mountains etc. reaching the fort/flags first.

I noticed the manual rates the difficulty of each campaign, they generally get harder as you go down the list. It suddenly got a lot harder when I got down to The Rivalry, I failed it about six times before realizing that Caesar just sends all his men to your fort and doesn't bother leaving anyone at his own fort to "spawn" new soldiers, so there's no reason to leave your base with its fort and village. You'll have the advantage when the enemy squads arrive at your fort. I go with the default rules and general and the game's statement that Caesar's weakness is that he doesn't always protect his conquests proved true here. The campaigns did in fact get harder from there, I failed many times at Tale of Three Islands, Wu vs. Chu and War in the Mountains before winning each by forcing a surrender. But surprisingly I beat the final campaign Islands of Doom on the first try! I suppose if not for all the practice I got from failing the previous three, I'd have failed Islands of Doom a few times too, but I found that it was generally easier to capture the enemies' forts and actually many of the flags are not inside the forts so easier to capture. In the end I captured the last flag by storming the west-most enemy fort with four squads, sending the last one in to get the flag while the enemy squads were stuck in encounters.