6th best game of 2019: Field of Glory: Empires

The manual is pretty great in its own right, but I got onto the game by watching Das Tactic’s Arvernii series, which explains all the basics:

I’m not usually a video person, but this is pretty good and the chap is quite personable. (I’m a 4X noob so I hadn’t heard of him prior).

Late to the party as usual and I am having a very good time learning the ropes with the Dacia faction. One thing that I could not find in the manual is when selecting a faction there are a certain number of stars for difficulty more stars means more difficult but what does interest mean and are more stars less or more challenging?

If I recall correctly, the other star rating had to do with how much content was specific to that faction. How many distinct gameplay mechanics and systems it has.

-Tom

Ah hah, thank you. My Dacian’s seem interested in rampaging across the map, racking up legacy AND bookoo decadence.

@orald Hey, hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Playing as Dacia ranked up there as one of my favorite gaming experiences. I then tried a couple other nations, and it was pretty good, but never again that magic.

Oh yes, I enjoyed my time with it very much. Though I only played as Dacia. At some point I will give it another go and maybe try my ancestral Scots.

You probably didn’t play with the expansion and it adds quite a lot. Regional decisions is the most important thing, you get them from a deck of possible decisions each turn and you can use it to colonize empty provinces, federate barbarians, boost siege, raise emergency militia or buy mercenaries etc.

I quite liked the game but it goes into a trap of many such empire-buiding games. Even with a short game option, you are supposed to be twice as cool as any other country, and if you’re not playing as a cool country with huge legacy bonuses (like Rome or Egypt) the game drags on way way beyond the point when you know you’ve won. Worse Total War games are like that. Both games I’ve won I’ve finished by targeting legacy-producing provinces of other major powers, like capturing the Pyramids - I could win just by skipping turns cause my legacy production was good, but I’d also had to do a lot of busywork with province management. The building system is great, but once you have 50 cities it’s all a blur, you know.

This is exactly my thoughts and why I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished a campaign since I always like playing as an underdog.

I bought this one on the last sale and finally have gotten around to it. I’m a sucker for Rome so of course that’s who I’m playing as first.

The campaign does feel like it’s going to be quite long. Each turn takes more and more time deciding what to build out in the ever increasing number of provinces, seemingly to the point on may occasions I lose the thread on what I’m doing strategically over all.

Speaking of losing the thread, I consistently get wrecked in mountains, even using medium units like Italian Foot, and this has the added bonus of on more than one occasion getting my generals dead. To avoid this I’ve taken to exporting these battles to FOG2, I mention this because the amount of time it takes me to finish just one battle like this has me return to FOGE completely lost on what I was up to before! This could also just be yet another example of me getting old and staring in my own annuity advertisement. ;)

Ok, so what’s the point of this bit of rambling, I mean other than I’m shocked at the fact I’ve spent 35 hours and only played a mere 180 turns out of a 500 turn campaign, well that I’ve been immensely entertained by it. Not sure why but there’s something mesmerizing about this game for me.

And best of all I’m not winning, Macedonia is taking over the known world and kicking my ass in legacy points (and pulling away) so much that I’ve no choice but to head east and take them down a peg (or that’s the plan that will come to naught at first contact).

Man can’t wait for Field of Glory: Kingdoms.

Edit to add a picture of current state of the world:

The recent buzz about FoG:Kingdoms made me reinstall this and get the expansion. I have forgotten how the economy works, keep on running out of money.

Nice! Better find some flat ground to take them on ;)

I’m betting you’ve figured this out, but if not focusing some development on yellow buildings should get the money flowing.

Yeah that’s an aspect of this game I don’t agree with. I mean I get the idea of mountains being a tough place to fight but then that’s the case for both defenders and attackers. The way they handle it with extreme frontage restrictions makes for comical outcomes where an army 10 or 20 times the size of the defender routinely loses. And I’m talking like every single time. There’s not much reflection in reality to this outcome and if you go to the trouble you can prove even w/in their game system it’s silly by exporting it to FOG2 and getting a very different outcome.

/ end rant ;)

Yes, doing that. The problem I was having is that I would go from a positive balance to -200 0 or less negative one next turn when predicted income change was positive. I still haven’t figured out those swings, but I switched to nation with a larger initial balance and am keeping it over 400, the unexpected changes dont seem to get that big.

It may also be obvious but you can always move most of your people into moneymaking. Citizens are more effective in it. Just leave all slaves in food and industry and send the citizens into moneymaking stuff.

I need some help with the diplomacy interface and in particular the “relinquish objective” action. When I select it, I add money and manpower to make the acceptance probability be 100%. But instead of getting control of the objective I just see the message that the recipient and I “signed a trade agreement.” What am I doing wrong?

The objective you or another nation relinquish is just a target that’s been set you can go after or not, you get legacy for taking that province.

But as an example if you are in diplomacy asking another nation to release an objective because say you own it and you’d like to get on better terms with them and one way to do that is to get them to release an objective you own because as long as they have it as an objective they’re going to be mildly pissed about it. That sort of diplomacy isn’t going to show you anything when it’s agreed to other than that they agreed to it.

It’s not like they are letting go of a territory in doing this, they are instead simply saying they’ll no longer go after it.

I think it’s realistic in the sense that it’s very hard to control mountainous terrain. But it’s more a matter of symmetrical vs assymetrical warfare, the latter of which is almost never represented in ancient war games (I can think of only one that did this, actually, and that was a boardgame on the Roman campaigns in Spain).

Yeah, I mean like I said, I get what they were going for, but the idea that a mere 4 units can control and dominate an entire province just makes me laugh.

In the real world such asymmetrical engagements wouldn’t happen under my command because I’d simply do the same thing I do to a walled city (even in this very game) and lay siege to the limited paths of supply leading to your so called mountain strong hold and starve you out.

Ah, thanks, I completely misunderstood that, because the game highlighted an objective of mine that I did not own… Looking at the diplomacy options again, I realize that the request I wanted is “relinquish territory.”

Yeah, I was confused by that at first as well. Generally I’ve found if you can get the money supply thing working you can throw money at diplomacy and get what you want, whether that’s cooperation leading to trade or alliances/client states.

In my current campaign Macedonia and I have finally come to blows because one of my allies went after them. What I’ve immediately discovered is something I already knew, leaving an enemy alone too long and allowing them to blob up into a huge mass means when you finally come to blows they casually show up out of the fog of war w/ an army 4X your largest army, and then things go badly…

Edit: circling back with an edit to ask a question I was wondering about: who are you playing as?