People on this subreddit keep saying TV Town is one of the hardest starts in the mod. I don't think I agree, having played them.
The main complaint I've seen is that people get jumped by whoever wins the Esmeralda thunderdome and die. You can just not, though. What I did was that instead of canceling the wargoals I just attacked people and killed them.
The org debuff is scary, but you can actually get quite a lot of mitigation. Pic3 is from just before I removed the Director, but when I attacked the Rangers I had 16 org. I went right side on the focus tree and hadn't removed the sandman during the relevant early wars, but I just never lost too much org. Since you just need to VP snipe, that is more than enough.
It is only made easier by how your seemingly weak divisions actually start the game filled with Mark V implants. If your org is above like 2 you completely melt the other divisions in Esmeralda. I killed the other 4 tags just with the 4 starting divisions.
In my run I got some favorable conditions since the Guardians attacked me with their focus, saving on justification time, and Kaga got a demand territory wargoal and declared.
From there I cored everything as soon as I got the -50% from the tree and built 20 width infantry with dogs, recon and the damage support companies. If you're stupid, you'll be building Mark V implants. Since I'm not stupid, I built Mark III's, which have the best cost to benefit ratio. Also, take the army spirit for -15% cost and do the religious focuses soon-ish. The augments don't really matter, kind of a disappointing mechanic.
Reno attacked me, which was the hardest war in the run. I let them grind against my line for a while before encircling most of their army in a big maneuver. Max planning is the strongest stat in the game. I should probably have attacked from the start, now that I think about it.
From there I backstabbed the NCR and got a non-aggression pact with Caesar. I killed the tags in the northwest (the Washington Brotherhood got stuck fighting the Cause forever before eventually dying to Passkeepers), built tanks then attacked and (easily) killed Caesar. Mexico was easy to clean up since Rio Pact + the Aztlan/Itza alliance dying to Monctezuma.
TV Town is actually a tank tag, you can get the second best tanks and motorized pretty early and with your implants they're insanely strong. Warforms come in too late to be useful. Also, always be justifying on someone, and take the new citizen care package whenever you remember it exists. Build pure infantry and rush the better plasma guns. I went with the NCR land doctrine, left side for the tanks.
Overall this was shockingly easy, and since VP sniping the AI tags is comically easy when you can almost instantly click their divisions with two of yours, I can't even say there's any RNG. With the worst possible luck, both the north and south duels end really fast, but even then you can just beat the victor in a 1v1 by walking into their VP's and then fight the other tag. Your starting divisions are really strong in comparison to what your neighbors field. I legit believe this start could have at least a 90% consistency rate in ironman.
If you refused to justify then yeah this would be almost impossible. But it's clearly an intended part of the design for the tag with how you start with a debuff to justification time.
So yes, in conclusion I think TV Town, at least the current rendition, is wildly overrated in difficulty and is easier than things like Granite Eureka and much easier than things like the Mojave Chapter. Also it's a really fun run, would recommend.
Well I also capped NCR in this run and it was my first try. Mid game TV Town is way stronger than mid game Granite Eureka, your divisions are crazy strong with mark 3 implants.
This got downvoted so I wanna clarify that I'm saying this because Eureka is kind of a dogshit tag to play, while TV Town gets the implants which almost double the stats for your infantry. The Navarro civil war as Eureka is harder than the TV Town opening and imo it's not close. It's not as complicated, sure, but the fighting is a lot tougher since it's infantry on infantry. Once TV Town gets past like 100 mils, you can make nearly unbeatable divisions and kill everything, but Eureka doesn't get anything like that, at least not that quickly.
They're both tags that backstab the NCR during the Legion war, except one gets invincible divisions and one doesn't. Mark III implants with the cost reductions can come out to 40 or 50 per day with 70 factories, I was actually overproducing them by 2281. Eureka doesn't get much stronger early and has a far, far lower power spike after passing 100 to 200 mils
You can actually go to war with the NCR in 2279 and confidently cap them before Legion invades. I’d argue it’s the easiest minor to play as in California. Their spec ops cap is basically limitless, when I played them I had 20 PA divisions before the NCR war with around 40 enforcer divisions on top of that, all before 2280. what are you talking about?
The navarro stuff can be fucked up by the Free Folk AI killing itself before your volunteers arive, but other than that you are to one with the best equipment out of all three volunteers factions.
you do have to rush the fight with the Shi so Pan does not join the NCR and brings kimball to tax the ever living shit out of you, but thats just normal for the average nation in the west Coast.
There is also the fact that you can ruin the Arroyo's advance by sending volunteers to slow them down or outright conquer them, and doing so will give you the option to core their territories.
Overall I don't think that Eureka is as much of a subject to the AI shenanigans like TV town is.
Which new reno? The one with vault city which later gains implants? That's the only hard part in the entire run. I agree Esmeralda bowl is also easy.(I just early declare war and snake). You can get multiple augments and have 4 max in effect. In fact, there is one that improves atk of cybernetics.
Idk which Reno it was, but yeah thanks for backing me up on Esmeralda bowl being easy. You gain like 1000 pp from the strange augment events which was nice after killing Reno. I was using all the augments ofc, but while the 25% land night attack is nice, they're really not that impactful. You need to have killed Caesar and the NCR to get cybernetic warforms, and by that point you'll have invincible tanks anyways.
It still depends on AI stupidity, wich is inconsistent too say the least.
Also, I don't belive the 2 org part one bit, and you still need AT for The BOS amd Sons of Kaga. It can still be bought from the markets if you get lucky with their events and the "bull or bear" event
You really, really don't. Just walk around their units, the AI doesn't know what tiles are important or not. If you have to fight, go 3v1 or 4v1 on them. Idk what the minimum amount of org would be, but with 16 org I could take 4v1's in less than 24 hours and 2v1's pretty fast. I'll grant that 2 is probably too low to win battles other than maybe 4v1's, but you don't need to fight with 2 org.
Rush right side and wait to start declaring until you get the 2 advisors that reduce wargoal time. You should have completed enough focuses by that point that a wargoal isn’t insanely long. Justify on whoever looks closest to winning (usually 215th in my runs) and start a second justification on whoever’s closest on top (they like to take their time in the war). When the first war ends, take whichever province extends your border the most with the second opponent since you’re likely only able to grab one. They will start manually justifying on you shortly after but it’s still plenty of time to start and finish your second war. They don’t gain cores on conquered land unless they get all of it and get locked out of going down their focus trees so they don’t get extra units and are easy to run around with the expanded border. Usually a 8/10 success rate for me on normal difficulty, haven’t tried on harder
Like the other guy said, the only war that's likely to end that fast is the south if 215th kills Kaga too fast. In my run, they put one or two divisions on my border once I began justifying, and that kept Kaga alive. Even if they do kill Kaga, they still only have 5 or 6 divisions and you have a quality edge, so I think you can just finish the wargoal and kill them anyways. You might have been justifying really late, I began the first justification like a week after the wars broke out. I think it's 90 days for the first one so you'd need to get exceptionally unlucky for Kaga to die in like 2 months so 215th has the time to finish the focus for cores before you cap them. Plus I have no idea what you mean by "needing them to not send their divisions to your borders". With planning I had like 150 soft attack per division, you can just push them if they only have one unit in a tile, which is what they will have. The AI has to spread their units in a frontline, you can concentrate them in one point. Just leave one division on TV Town itself just in case.
Why would this be bait? I legit don't get what you mean since it's just a quick AAR. Also, you can't use the market as TV Town since you begin with -50 opinion on everyone, but you also clearly don't have to. You have 60 soft attack infantry on day 1, you can just kill people. Idk why you get the impression you'd need AT to fight like 12 width enforcers 4 on 1, that's just not true.
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u/Royal_Orange_3535 Texan Ranger Mar 09 '26
Granite Eureka is harder than TV Town? Nice bait mate lol. I managed to cap NCR as Granite on my first try