Field of Glory Empires will give I:R run for money!

[jimwinsor]

Preach! Spread the word and leave a Steam review, more converts are always welcome!

[Mulllen]

I don't doubt IR will be more fun in the future after a couple of more updates and dlc as it's pretty much the same as it's forgotten ancestor atm but hope it doesn't turn into sakai. And yes FoG Empires is more than welcome it can only make paradox improve their own game more

[Bullseye500]

I have not played IR, I have been bust revisiting Empires!

[MarkShot]

I own Empires and other PDS games, but not I:R.

(I am going to leave out comments on PDS business practices as I will never get to my point if I do.)

I have watched paid and unpaid reviews v2.0. I:R lacks focus, a soul, (for Pocus) a raison d'etre, ... it just looks bland. It is made up of watered down parts of other titles and looks very formulaic.

Empires broke new ground in a number of areas. This was also refreshing, since Roman antiquity has been well covered by games.

I was saddened to see that Empires is as Microsoft would say "end of life". However, once patched, it will be a game of antiquity to stand the test of time.

Yes, it is something to be proud of.

[honvedseg]

I recently picked up both FoG:E and I:R on sale at GOG, and am currently dabbling with both. FoG:E is clearly the easier game to learn, relatively intuitive, and more "fun" in my opinion. I'm starting to think that I:R is going to end up as the more "realistic" and deeper "simulation" over time, since the last patch really upped the game to something fairly respectable from its bland and empty start, while FoG:E, while looking good, is now finalized. Paradox's DLC spam is another story (EUIV set a really bad example), and I probably won't sink a dime into their DLCs on principle alone. The added complexity in I:R is far less intuitive, however, so it probably won't appeal as well to players unacquainted with Grand Strategy games in general, and Paradox games in particular.

FoG:E introduced a couple of fresh ideas, so it's not an "apples to apples" comparison between the two games anyway. I'm already seeing different reasons to play both as the mood strikes.

[Swuul]

I have dabbed with both games quite a bit, and I love them both. Basically same era (at least in the ballpark sense), both are essentially map-painters, but quite different focus. FOGE focus is in the decadence system, I:R focus is in the political struggles (both internal and external).

The added complexity in I:R is far less intuitive, however, so it probably won't appeal as well to players unacquainted with Grand Strategy games in general, and Paradox games in particular.

This I disagree quite a bit with. I:R is by far more easier game to grasp, while FOGE is clearly targeted at the "grognard" market. Real time is what the average player prefers, WEGO turnbased is for hard-core strategygamers. The I:R system of focusing on personalities and families is something people have the past couple decades got used to in games like Sims, and it is easy to get a hang on the game very fast (especially after the latest published patch), and you are ready to conquer the world as Rome immediatly. In FOGE you need deep understanding of the system (basically, you have to dig through the files in the installation folders, as many things are not explained anywhere) to get a grasp of the delicate decadence system, the hidden (but important!) trading system and the excellent combat system (it truly is excellent, and I have not yet bumped to many who actually seem to understand the combat system basically at all); without proper understanding of those three things, any nation can implode basically at any time, and that will frustrate many players to no end (not understanding why everything went down the drain).

I love both games. But there is zero doubt which one is (while the Steam charts doesn't provide full data (as both games can be played outside Steam too), the numbers there are very clear) and will be more popular. I:R is an easy game for the masses to play and you can learn by doing, while FOGE is clearly targeted at the hard-core strategy-gamers and thus has a harsh learning curve.

[honvedseg]

I love both games. But there is zero doubt which one is (while the Steam charts doesn't provide full data (as both games can be played outside Steam too), the numbers there are very clear) and will be more popular. I:R is an easy game for the masses to play and you can learn by doing, while FOGE is clearly targeted at the hard-core strategy-gamers and thus has a harsh learning curve.

I'm familiar with several of both Paradox's and Slitherine's earlier games, and had no problem simply firing up and playing a dozen or so turns of FoG:E, without looking at either the tutorial or manual. At that point, Decadence started to become a problem, so I then had to go back and read a chapter of the manual to figure out how the Decadence system worked. After only about a dozen hours, I think I've got about 90% of the game mechanics figured out well enough on my own (including some of the "metagame" aspects), and am currently starting a more difficult run, because I was steamrolling the AI on both the Culture/Decadence and Legacy charts, as well as expanding at a fairly decent pace. Without the random events and choices, it would probably get rather boring and repetitive quickly, once you understand the mechanics. As it stands now, FoG:E has a touch of that "just one more turn....just one MORE turn..." vibe where you look up and realize it's 3am, because it's just unpredictable enough to keep you from getting complacent. I:R, at least since the 2.0 patch, is taking me a lot more time and effort to figure out the interactions, despite the fundamentals being easy enough. I can see where the stronger focus on internal diplomacy and rival politics could get tedious, especially for the "masses" who are looking for a relatively basic "map painter".

As said, they're both good in different ways. The difference in player numbers is partially accounted for by the relative popularity of the developers: Slitherine/Ageod is a relatively less known developer, and a lot of players won't buy a moderately high priced game from some company they aren't familiar with. Having played Legion, Chariots of War, Spartan, and a couple of other titles from them, I wasn't deterred.

[Swuul]

After only about a dozen hours, I think I've got about 90% of the game mechanics figured out well enough on my own (including some of the "metagame" aspects), and am currently starting a more difficult run, because I was steamrolling the AI on both the Culture/Decadence and Legacy charts, as well as expanding at a fairly decent pace.

I have to stand in attention with my hat off in respect! I had to play for dozens of hours and dig through the files for an equal number of hours to get an approx understanding of how things work in the game. And that with well over a decade of history with AGEOD games. With FOGE, Pocus and the AGEOD team has created quite the piece of marvel with deep-woven intricacies, that I'd be surprised if even he himself remembers all of the stuff in the game

[MarkShot]

The steam rolling is deceptive, since the system does not evolve towards an equilibrium.

However, it is possible to remain glorious most the entire game by hand managing the empire in the late game and shuffling priorities. I did that for 500 years, but it got increasingly harder to fight the friction pulling of the gaming system.

I find in most TW and PDS games the anti-snowballing mechanics are weak. Because they simply shift the tipping point against the player, but there is still a tipping point. Here the system naturally evolves towards your collapse, but you can make 500 years of glory if you are careful.

[Pocus]

If the game manages somehow to fare better than its competitors, on snow-balling and map painting, that's already good, I'm humble here!

And indeed, I sometime have to check what is in the code to remember a game rules

[honvedseg]

Granted, I'm still in the early phases of my second campaign (about 80 turns in), playing as the Etruscans. I had to become a client-state of Rome to avoid being crushed early on, but have risen into the top 10 in both Culture/Decadence and Legacy, with Rome leading in Legacy but far behind me in Culture/Decadence.

As I pointed out in another thread, Slitherine made a change in how buildings work from its early games, so now the buildings themselves produce output without assigning workers. In the earlier games, the buildings improved the productivity of the workers substantially, but you still needed farmers, brick-makers, merchants, and artists assigned to those buildings to produce food, construction materials, money, and culture. Now, you simply build enough structures to handle the necessities, and just move all your population units to produce Culture. Silly, in my opinion. While diplomacy and various other game mechanics have improved, this was a huge step backwards, in my opinion.

[Pocus]

You seem to believe there is a kind of continuation between these games, with Slitherine being a monolithic block
The early Slitherine games were coded and produced by the founders of Slitherine. Some 10-15 years later or so, AGEOD is doing a game on ancient times. AGEOD is part of Slitherine. That's it, not the same design, history, persons.

That's a conscious choice to have population produces something. This is the 'moving part' of production, allowing you to switch production from resource A to resource B, while buildings can't be changed (just destroyed and then rebuilt). This allow your nation to have a partial, yet rapid, flexibility in production, to focus on something or avert a disaster.

[honvedseg]

That's a conscious choice to have population produces something. This is the 'moving part' of production, allowing you to switch production from resource A to resource B, while buildings can't be changed (just destroyed and then rebuilt). This allow your nation to have a partial, yet rapid, flexibility in production, to focus on something or avert a disaster.

It was a conscious choice in the earlier games as well. The population in the earlier games could be freely moved from production of one resource to another, but the EFFICIENCY of those pops at a particular task was determined by the buildings they were placed in, although the maximum that could be placed was limited by the size of the buildings. Ideally, it would have been better if you could have put a worker into a trade without an open worker slot, in which case they would have only produced at the base rate, but unfortunately that wasn't done back then, and you couldn't assign a pop to a task without an open worker slot in the existing buildings. The present system has its good points and some bad ones from a gameplay perspective, but is far less realistic, where you can move ALL of your workers out of a particular field and still generate those resources.

As for the whole concept of "constructing population units" by growing food, it would have been a lot more realistic to have a default population growth rate, modified by a surplus (or lack) of food and other factors, rather than being able to force-grow your population at rabbit or cockroach rates simply by over-producing food. One of the limiting factors in early civilizations was that well over 95% of the population had to grow food (mostly living hand-to-mouth) just to afford the meager surplus needed for a few specialist trades, a handful of nobles, and relatively tiny standing armies. Once improved agricultural techniques and tools were introduced, that percentage dropped to around 90%, more than doubling the surplus and allowing further specialization and larger armies. Now, with automated equipment and hybrid seed, only a few percent of the population is needed to supply enough food for the rest. In FoG:E, once you build even one food-producing building, you can often dedicate 75% (or even 100%) of your labor pool to other things.

While the teams working on the old versus the new games have undoubtedly changed, many of the concepts were carried over from those old games. This is not quite a direct descendant, but a spiritual successor at the very least, possibly more like a niece or nephew game.

[Swuul]

I am pretty sure that Pocus aka Mr AGEOD knows AGEOD stuff and its possible influences from other games to his designs better than some random forumite

Back then AGEOD was independent, then part of Paradox (called Paradox France) , then going indy again, and these days part of Slitherine. I still remember when Pocus was a regular gamer posting on the Paradox forums, which was way before AGEOD got affiliated with Paradox

[Pocus]

Honestly, it has been considered to make contingent population productivity to appropriate buildings, but it was an additional logic in the game. Meaning more time put into the AI just for that, plus a slightly more complex game, and it was deemed complex enough. I admit though that mass moving all population from peasants to philosophers in Empires is not very ... realistic (and too easy to do). You'll be happy to know that in the next game there will be more limitations on that.

As for the old formula food -> population, it also has the merit of simplicity, too much perhaps? But as you hint at in your last example, in the modern world 5% of people in food does not translate to an explosion of growth rate, because there are many societal factors to that. Admittedly technical progress meant pop-splosion (a bit like cat-splosion in DF/RW ) and this is what you get also in Empires. Again, that's a very simple approach, admittedly. But then, with a higher cost in food, the more pop you have, this should be logarithmic.

Good memory Swuul! Indeed, AGEOD was founded in 2004 but was with Paradox something like 2-3 years around 2010-2012. So I have been an avid player of Paradox games during my life. But real-time is rather exhausting to me in the end, so I now prefer a more sedate pace, with turn based games.