Recent games just have one key, a dual Steam/Slitherine key. Redeeming your Steam Key.
I got a Steam key through Slitherine no problems
My impression so far is very positive. The UI is very easy to use with lots of information presented at your fingertips. There are 2 expandable tool menus at the bottom left and right of the screen that present all the options you need and you can select, move, turn, attack and undo movement of units just using the left and right mouse buttons.
The tutorials are well done and present all the information you need to know to play the game and be successful. I think the graphics are great. It’s like playing a miniatures board game. The AI seems pretty good, even on the easy tutorial setting.
Overall, so far I’d say this is a keeper. I haven’t started a campaign yet so I don’t know how that part of the game goes yet. But there’s nothing I don’t like that I’ve seen so far. It’s very impressive. The only negative is that it costs $30. I can’t say it’s not worth that though if you love games like this.
The other thing I like is that it apparently has a map editor and you can create your own battles and campaigns.
Yesterday I played the first tutorial to get used to the game. It’s got a really nice tactical battle system that I like a lot. Here’s a little mini AAR of my first tutorial battle:
The tutorial gave me the ancient British forces from 54BC fighting the Roman forces of the time.
I start the battle in an advantageous position with my general and core foot on a hill, which provides some combat advantages. However the trees up there will disorder my forces unless they are light foot, which mine are not. So I’m going to need to move them forward. The chariots and light cavalry I want to move out to both sides of the map to prepare to flank the Romans if/when they move toward me. I need to move my slingers forward so they can mess up the Roman javelin chuckers before they can mess me up instead. The screenshot is turn one before any moves are made.
The first thing I do is move my two groups of slingers up in range. The ones on the right concentrate on the javelins on the far right because I want to hit them on their flank with my chariots. My slingers disorder that unit and I hit them with the chariot unit. Here on turn 2 you can see that they broke and that also caused the Roman cavalry next to them to break and run and are being pursued by my chariot unit. Notice that as they flee they pass my foot unit and present their backs for a flank attack which I take advantage of.
Later on turn 2 I have positioned my light cavalry and chariots to hit the flanks of Roman units at the top of the map. I’ve moved some of my heavy foot forward to engage the Roman foot from the side of the hill, which provides a slight advantage to my troops. I’ll need it because these are tough nuts to crack. The other two are engaging their cavalry to the north.
At this point on turn 3, the Roman cavalry I engaged has been hit from the flanks and is fleeing off the map, pursued by my units. To the north, his javelin unit is also fleeing off the map. His core legion units are standing firm against flank attacks. They are very tough.
But by turn 5, repeated flank attacks have taken their toll and the Romans are disordered and wavering. My chariot breaks the Roman foot unit to the south and it flees.
Turn 6 and the rout is on.
Victory is ours. A crushing victory with huge Roman losses and light British ones.
That does look cool. I liked Battle Academy, which I think this uses an evolution of that engine.
I was thinking about this game a bit when I was playing Battle Chasers (a completely different type of game). What I don’t like in Battle Chasers is that you can fail if you just haven’t leveled up enough. I think I prefer games like this where there is some tactical challenge and you have the tools to defeat it, you just need to figure out how.
In multiplayer I’m playing quite a few large battles where the unit-points are even, but the composition is set to “pot luck” so you don’t have any control over what you’re going to get.
One of the better games I’m in with this setup is Gauls-vs-Ancient British and the British player got an absolute ton of superb quality chariots. I got some decent armoured cavalry and then outside of that we both got a cluster of various quality warbands, (large numbers, but unwieldy).
He managed to put his warbands up on a hill and I manoeuvered mine so that there is swampland and rough ground between us, so those units are just in a standoff where whichever one attacks is going to be disordered.
Then there’s this massive wheeling and whirling mounted battle going on around them, with light javelin cavalry, armoured heavy cavalry and countless chariots all spinning and chasing, trying to win an advantage.
It’s seriously messy, but a lot of fun.
Me and a friend picked this up on the Steam sale. We have played the tutorials and have a basic understanding, now we are going to go head to head. Please recommend some starting battles that are even and the armies are straight forward. It would be nice to know that I am getting my ass kicked because I am a bad player not because the armies are uneven or they need tactics that only come through experience.
Thanks
This is a very good game with a lot of flexibility for expansions. Looking forward to this.
Any of the DLC must haves? I bought the base game a little while ago but haven’t played it yet. DLC is on sale on Steam.
That I think is down to a matter of what draws you in: each of the DLCs brings in a quite different period, with different battlefield tactics.
I am enjoying all of them, but probably the ones I would recommend to someone needing to choose are Immortal Fire and Rise of Persia.
Thanks. I don’t know anything about the actual historical periods, so I am interested in them purely from a game play perspective. I’m in the middle of reading a world history book, so maybe I’ll eventually learn a little bit about them :-)
I only have Legions Triumphant and enjoyed that a lot - for me a good part of the fun is seeing how the armies change over time (i.e. shifting away from the traditional Roman Legion to have more mixed arms + specialist units).
I’ll join the choir: I grabbed the base game for an indecent price (those anniversary coupons!) and my first contact was really great.
I enjoyed Pike and Shots before, in part because I love some of the periods it covered, and in part because I like that design where something as simple as engaging an unit is the biggest decision. I also have next to zero knowledge of ancient warfare. In any case, I find that the game plays more smoothly than P&S. It may also be due to the updated engine, as a lot of visual clues are actually visible in this game, and make gauging information much more intuitive for someone like me who only occasionally actually look at the numbers.
I do agree with that @LeftEmpty. It was very hard for me to read Pike and Shot… Also the design had some major issues imo when it came to depict the era. FOG2 achieves a better balance between plausibility of simulation and gameplay.
It can be a very tense game too, you literally eat your nails while you watch melee between two evenly matched forces. That makes it a quite suspenseful wargame, where no two games play the same.
Just don’t try to win Pydna as Perseus. That scenario is jinxed!
I’ve picked up the other expansions since my original post a few months back and now I can say that I personally prefer the expansions prefer the expansions that go backwards in history (Immortal Fire and Rise of Persia) from the base game.
This is primarily because the later era armies tend to be very calvary heavy and I generally prefer FOG battles with a stronger infantry bent.
I finally got around to giving this a try with the first tutorial mission. It makes a pretty good first impression, but I think I may need to read the manual to get the nuts and bolts. It was easy enough to win the first tutorial, but there was a bunch that I didn’t really understand as far as what was going on.
Maybe that stuff is explained in the other tutorial scenarios and the first scenario was meant to be played without really knowing much. In any case it was fun. I think I may hold off on delving deeper for now as it seems like it will take some effort to really get into and not something I can just casually play. I’ve got too many games in progress right now, but I was curious to see how this is.
I had no problem winning the three tutorial scenarios, but I was already familiar with Pike & Shot. The game requires a lot of learning, which won’t be really provided by the game itself, and which will be served quite drily and all at once in the manual. As you wrote it, this game requires dedication!
Turning on the battle reports as a new player is a must, I think, although it isn’t glamorous and quite repetitive (as any pedagogy is doomed to be, I guess).
One year on, I am still learning stuff about what works or not. Like charging with heavy Successors cavalry at Thracians with Rhompaia not being a good idea.
I highly recommend multiplayer too.
Since this one as I understand it can be used to resolve battles in Field of Glory: Empires which I was considering purchasing when it comes out, I wanted to see what opinions were about this as a standalone SP experience?
It’s 50% off in the steam sale and it occurred to me now might not be a bad time to pick this one up, figure it out a bit, so that I could make use of it with FOG:E.
Not seeing much activity in this thread making me wonder if everyone bounced off this one?!
I mean I can’t imagine there’s much to say on it - it’s very much a wargamer’s war game, just with a nicer graphics engine. A digital adaptation of a physical miniatures rule-set that they’ve been slowly porting new units and army lists over as DLC.
It’s pretty solid but probably not exciting unless you’re already very keen on ancients/medieval wargaming in the first place.
But yes, you can export battle data from FOG:E into FOG2 and play out the tactical battle in granular details as opposed to letting the standard auto=resolve do its thing. You then feed the results back in to Empires and carry on from there.