Field of Glory Empires

Finally played this for a little while.

I’m surprised how well this game portrays Sparta, a secondary minor faction. You have the usual Agoge worship and Spartan Phalanx is great… But it’s extremely limited. And Spartan economy just doesn’t work. Also for some reason my kings died like flies.

My first game had a stretch where it seems like my rulers couldn’t last more than a few turns. That’s not how it normally goes there. You certainly can have a couple go in quick succession but some rulers will also stick around for a long time.

I had a game as the Belgae where my terrible starting leader held on until he was like 80, which is very old in this game. I kept wanting him to croak.

After a few quick flameouts I made it to turn on hundred with Dacia. I’m in third place in Legacy but the Factions ahead of me have roughly twice my school and are pulling away. I guess I could build up an army attack one of them but I worry that my decadence with Spike, as this game I have yet to make it even to Gloriousstage two, And I think it is due to the fact that I’ve expanded a lot and have the most regions, As well as the highest land force score. It took quite a while to play 100 turns but a game is 500 and I don’t really want to continue unless there’s some chance of eventually winning.
Has anyone played enough to have a sense of what the rhythm of a typical game with a minor power is like?

I have not gotten to the late game yet, but my sense of it is that AI factions face the same problems maintaining their glory that you do, and that turn 100 is much too early to worry about a couple factions ahead of you. You and they will face major hurdles. (From what I read about difficulty levels, this is the main thing that is tougher at higher difficulty levels – there, AI nations will face diminished internal threats.)

Of course, part of this is also a matter of personality. If I took a minor faction, created a secure empire, and finished with the third most legacy at the end of 500 turns, I would feel like I did pretty well by them. But even if you have to see a victory screen to be satisfied, I think there is a lot of water to pass under the bridge.

I’m hoping to take my current Nubia game as far as I can to see where I can end up in the rankings. I’m less than two hundred turns in and have conquered all of the parts of Egypt that matter. From here I can stabilize but also hopefully have some influence in the Mediterranean against the powers that are ahead of me.

I now have two decisions that are more like quests And can only be triggered if I move a fleets to one of two very far away areas. There’s no way I’m going to conquer my way from the Balkans up to Scotland, so I suspect there is some way of getting long-distance naval supply. Unfortunately I have no idea what is

If Rome gets to three times my score I’m not gonna make it for 500 turns. So I am looking to conquer some weak but culturally rich neighbors

I’ve been doing well as Rome but my decadence has really been spiking up over that past 10 turns or so. I’m trying to combat that by building more culture buildings in my regions and moving citizens there to work them. Are there any other strategies? Maybe stopping expansion for a bit and building infrastructure will help?

I jump on any building that decreases decadence.

There may be a better way but I got a fleet up north for the quest by simply making it large enough that the ships didn’t all die before they got there

Likewise!

Has anyone else been unable to get a province governor set to focus on a specific building type to keep all regions building reliably? It seems like sometimes when one building finishes another will start, but not always. The interesting thing is that if I change the building focus, sometimes the regions with nothing building will start building something from the new focus. It’s almost like it’s deciding there’s nothing in its focus worth building so it… doesn’t build anything.

Yeah you can safely ignore those decisions most of the time, but as long as you keep your ships moving, a fleet of 3 small ships should be able to sail to any sea zone.

It offered 150 legacy so I really wanted to do it worth losing a few ships. I’m surprised that three is enough though, I Will have to try some experiments

There are some excellent building chains that result in major decadence removal effects. Oration Tribunes may seem useless, but they lead to courthouses which are ace (to the point where I’d consider building them anytime they turn up) and finally Tribunals. Also, Preceptor House -> School -> Academy.

I restarted my game as Rome, so haven’t gotten much past turn 50, so haven’t noticed any real issues yet (biggest issues was the first 20 turns, where it was hard to balance production with culture). Will see what happens when I get to Empire. I did take it a bit more slowly this time - depending on your situation, I definitely think it make good sense to take a few pauses to buff culture and loyalty.

In my experience so far, the AI governors are pretty useless. Haven’t tried the builder yet as I don’t find that too onerous, but I’m far from happy with the pop allocator which would have been nice if it was actually useful as moving pops isn’t particularly fun or interesting decision-wise.

I like the complexity of the various systems in the game but it just takes too long. I’m at turn 125 now, I hope I manage to win long before 500 because that won’t happen until next weekend . If and when I do play again I am going to be more aggressive are using the shuffle option so that I can specialize the region

Thanks, this has worked great. I’m now a stable empire and #1 in CDR and #2 in Legacy.

I had a chance to start some proper game as Rome. Previously started as Sparta and failed in a great way.

Rome is easy mode of course. Unlike Sparta your legions aren’t terminators from space but they usually overwhelm everyone around you. Rome itself is the only place to get proper legions, I also liked that some Samnium village to the north, near Boii, has an archery range and thus is a great source of velites (skirmishers). Tactical combat shows you what everybody does in a great way, it’s also good at highlighting that your big stack isn’t that useful on its own, especially when you go fight in the mountains.

I’m yet to properly understand what to do with loyalty and economy but I like the economic system. UI leaves a lot to be desired, of course: for some reason many buildings don’t have thier effects listed in the left panel but in the right one where you usually see a historical description. It’s be also nice to be able to get a screen with unit stats (previous AGEOD games had this), not just tooltip. There are also some obvious mistakes like diplomacy screen doesn’t actually show your relationships value which is bizzare.

Overall I look at this game and see the right level of granularity and abstraction. I think Imperator Rome suffered from a desire to have everything as detailed as possible. Here Rome start is defined economically by specific buildings, populace and access to some natural resources as well as trade sources. In Imperator Rome most countries start with a dozen of provinces, and thus dozen of trade goods, and provinces mostly don’t have any special buildings. Here I can see that for hundreds of turns I’ll be very interested in what exactly is happening in Rome even though now I have 11 cities. In Imperator any decent country has hundreds of cities and it’s all a blur.