Field of Glory Empires

Oh God… an empire that goes to ruin if it’s not in at least six wars.

How you doin’?

It got delayed? That makes this even harder to put off buying.

I like the trade good system. Basically all your food, resources and culture are all generated from the buildings your cities haves. The buildings need certain trade goods to work, which you need to own in your empire, or have enough trade range to buy them automatically. So the game incentivizes you to expand in specific directions based on what trade goods you want access to.

Oops, I was working off of memory and I think the Cicero update is still scheduled for September…I just had sometime in Autumn in my mind.

I just quickly did the suggested intro scenario and quickly got demolished. I’m going to take a look at the tutorials. :)

Mp doesn’t include foge 2 battles :(

That is a letdown.

I’m in too, I thinkI’m losing my first game but I plan to try again.

at the start I seem to have 1 army with 3 leaders. Each leader gives benefits to a “stack.” what is a stack, is it an army? is it usually best to make one army per leader?s

I do remember seeing in the video that it can be helpful to have more than one leader in an army in case one dies in battle.

Anyone getting things like this Steam review mentions?

"Diplomacy is kind of strange. I jumped into the deep end and started playing as Carthage and I will get a message from, say, Numidia asking for further cooperation. I agree to it. Next turn it says we are now cooperating on deep and many levels. I ask them to be allies since I have a 51% of success. Next turn they declare war on me. Hmmm. "

Yes, I was surprised when a neighbor asked to cooperate and although I accepted they declared was a few turns later.
Does a given nation get the same set of objectives revealed at the same times on each play through? If so I’d rather they announce the sequence at the start?

Sort of. I am finding the AI factions to be extremely hostile. I think that by turn 10 or 12 I had Aquitania, Aedui, Massalia, Emporia, and Gallii all declare war on me. And that is still playing on the lowest difficulty level.

Not sure what to make of this.

If this is the way the game is written, so as to produce difficulty where realistic AI would fail to produce difficulty, I am going to be unhappy. The one bit of evidence of this is that Aquitania and Aedui declared war on me both on turn 5, and the Aquitania referred to the Aedui declaration in theirs. Since there is no game mechanic that would allow the human player to do that (allies with high diplomatic relations will declare war on anyone that their ally declares on, but it would not be possible for the human to obtain an alliance or high diplomatic relations by turn 5). So I would rather think that within the game mechanics, Aedui declared first, and this just colored the wording of the Aquitainia declaration which happened to come the same turn.

On the other hand, if this is just AI factions acting in their self interest, regardless of which opponent is the human, I love it. I started with the largest army, so would be seen as the primary threat. So especially the weak factions like Emporia are just waiting for a chance to benefit from a larger neighbor fighting a war against multiple factions.

None of these, however, had sought cooperation. I do remember reading in the rules, though, that cooperation treaties do not prevent a declaration of war unless diplomatic relations are fairly high. Which struck me as odd.

Hey, Producer of Empires here. :)

The AI countries are as aggressive and opportunistic against each other as against the player, you can notice that as the game goes on.

I guess an argument can be made that sometimes they are a tad bit more aggressive than they should be, we might end up tweaking that a bit, but there is definitely no anti-player mechanic at play.

The reference of one country’s declaration of war in a message from an other was a flavour message, I believe.

The objectives are semi-random. Each country has a list of possible ones and depending on their route of advance so far, they get assigned new ones from that.

I bought this (and FOG II in the bundle) on Steam. I always have loved ancients, though I’m also at this point in my gaming life deeply skeptical of the need for any new games. But the itch is still there occasionally.

Only tried Rome for a few turns. I, um, didn’t do well. Even after watching the tutorial videos I am still somewhat baffled by some of the economics, and need to really figure out how to build up my military-industrial complex before I go forth and fight. I built two more legions and went after the Sonones or whatever they are…and got my butt handed to me. Next turn, the Etruscans came calling. Oy vey.

Still, it seems very nicely done and very colorful, and I look forward to figuring it out more. I also played a couple of tutorial fights in FOG II. That game is much more intuitive, as it’s somewhat more straight forward (move up, stick the other guy with a pointy object). Unfortunately, I wish I had bought this much earlier so I could have gotten the DLC on sale. Might have to wait for another sale, because I think I have to have some Persians.

good to know, thanks! and thanks for dropping by.

@Tamas Welcome!

Thank you for the clear response and thank you for the breakthough in this type of game. The cliche of “blobs become invincible so the total goal is to paint the map” had me really discouraged. I love how this game handles it.

Hopefully you will not mind if I toss questions and minor suggestions your way:

a) I see that 10.5.7 discusses fatigue levels. Now, I can see where this comes into play during a battle, when a skirmisher or head-to-head reduces an opponent to tired or exhausted. But the rulebook text refers to movement and fighting affecting this. So if my units are moving from one region to the other and then fighting during that turn, are they supposed to get a reduced level? Is there a place to see this? A way to predict this? If this mechanic comes into play beyond the skirmisher thing, I am confused as to how.

b) I am frequently confused about region names. On the ownership overlay, they are not visible unless I tooltip each region separately – easy when you have only a small number of provinces, frustrating when more are involved. On the provinces overlay, they are visible at a certain zoom level, but this is frustrating because the color zones are based on provinces not ownership – valuable information, but disorienting for many of the purposes where I am looking for a particular province. Is there a screen somewhere that combines a clear view of ownership and region names? Because if so, I am overlooking it. And if not, this would be sooo useful.

c) I have now wrapped my mind around the mechanic that determines the winner of a battle, and leads to the pursuit phase. (10.7.6) Not head-to-head victories, not unit deaths, but rather when one side inflicted 3+ total points of health and effectiveness loss, as compared to the enemy. (I am only foggy on whether the skirmisher phase counts, but I think not.) If I could suggest that it would make the battle much more compelling (and understandable) to view, if there were a running counter in the corner of the screen, keeping score.

Given the issues with Ageod’s last attempt at grand strategy, I have to ask -
How is the turn processing time?

One of the things I find interesting in this game is the impact of your faction naming territorial objectives. Supposedly this comes from your current leader, but in terms of gameplay, it feels more like you are the leader and these objectives come from other powerful groups within your nation.

The obvious impact is that conquering these objectives gives you progress tokens, always an important currency. Also, holding these objectives adds less decadence than holding other regions.

But in important ways, these objectives prevent the game from drifting into the normal strategy title where you make rational decisions based upon what is the wisest course of action.

Sometimes the objectives turn out to be objectionable to a neighbor, and even if you do not take action to achieve such an objective, the neighbor is aware of this current in your internal affairs, and it poisons any attempts to make nice with them. (Or the other way around, their internal politics push them to be hostile to you, because you own one of their objectives.)

But beyond that, I might rationally desire to take only regions to fill out a province, or only regions to add valuable resources. Or I might think it prudent not to head too close to a much stronger faction. But objectives can be in exactly the wrong direction, and not necessarily adjacent… But it can be a tough climb without those progress tokens.

Obviously an abstraction, but I like the take on how internal political necessities can be at cross purposes with the your overly rational views as grey eminence.

I have had no issues. Turns are not instantaneous, but the progress bars fill steadily over a few seconds, and you are then ready to proceed with the next turn.

Yes, this is much more like the politics of real life ;-)