Rob Zacny

Episode 409: Field of Glory II

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Three Moves Ahead 409:

Three Moves Ahead 409


Field of Glory II
It's an ancients kind of week as Rob, Rowan, and Troy "I'm so good with the elephants my mates call me 'Elephant Man'" Goodfellow talk about Field of Glory II by Byzantine Games. FoG II started as tabletop system that was ported to the PC in the original Field of Glory and its Asian counterpart, Sengoku Jidai. The sequel improves the formula in almost every way and presents an extremely capable engine for designing and playing out tactical battles. The campaign falters a bit, but the crew is pleased overall.

Field of Glory II

 

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Yay - episode on my favorite period of history.

 

Stuff I really like about FoG2:

  • The pacing of the battles in the game; as Rob says, knowing when to commit and when not to, can make all the difference.
  • The handling of light troops, especially light infantry. The way they function here "feels" right, when set up against ancient accounts.
  • The Legion vs Phalanx dynamics are good. Can't agree with Rob about the rough ground criticism - in that respect the game reflects pretty well what the sources tell us.

Things I didn't like:

  • Campaigns. Agree that they are boring.
  • Elephants are appropriately strong unit which can come apart very quickly if things goes against them, but there is not any rampage. This means that one of the key elements of accounts of elephants in battle does not exist in the game.
  • Fails the Cannae-test. To be fair, most games do, but this one does so spectacularly. The historical holding action with Numidian cavalry is impossible. Cavalry is too immobile for it to even be a consideration to attack the opposite flanks cavalry. The historical gradual withdrawal of the Punic center during the battle is practically impossible and a terrible idea. I'm not sure you could even recreate the course of the battle if you tried.
  • Polybius famously said that it was better to have cavalry superiority and half the infantry. FoG2 essentially disagrees, making it far too easy for infantry to tie down and counter cavalry. Taking Cannae as an example - it doesn't help to have 8 cavalry against your opponents 3, when he can throw 12-15 infantry units in to counter you.
  • I also feel the game undervalues quality quite a bit. History is replete with battles where smaller numbers of elite troops defeat larger numbers. I doubt Caesar could beat Pompey in this game.

Overall, though I still like it. It's a good wargame, even if it doesn't quite catch all the nuances of the period.

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I'd like to thank Consul Kaiser for bringing a connoisseur humor to the podcast.

 

Also Rob & Troy description of all those autogenerated battles reminded me of a possible perfect game mode of daily challenge. The one where you turn on the game every day, get your new tactical puzzle and see how dumb you are compared to real cool dudes. I think that's what Dyelist had done but I didn't like that game in general that much. Also there was something like that in Desktop Dungeons but it wasn't a good fit for that game.

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2 hours ago, ilitarist said:

Also Rob & Troy description of all those autogenerated battles reminded me of a possible perfect game mode of daily challenge. The one where you turn on the game every day, get your new tactical puzzle and see how dumb you are compared to real cool dudes. I think that's what Dyelist had done but I didn't like that game in general that much.

 

That's actually a really good idea, though it would probably require some form of determinism, since performance would otherwise be luck-based.

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15 hours ago, micabytes said:

Yay - episode on my favorite period of history.

 

Stuff I really like about FoG2:

  • The pacing of the battles in the game; as Rob says, knowing when to commit and when not to, can make all the difference.
  • The handling of light troops, especially light infantry. The way they function here "feels" right, when set up against ancient accounts.
  • The Legion vs Phalanx dynamics are good. Can't agree with Rob about the rough ground criticism - in that respect the game reflects pretty well what the sources tell us.

Things I didn't like:

  • Campaigns. Agree that they are boring.
  • Elephants are appropriately strong unit which can come apart very quickly if things goes against them, but there is not any rampage. This means that one of the key elements of accounts of elephants in battle does not exist in the game.
  • Fails the Cannae-test. To be fair, most games do, but this one does so spectacularly. The historical holding action with Numidian cavalry is impossible. Cavalry is too immobile for it to even be a consideration to attack the opposite flanks cavalry. The historical gradual withdrawal of the Punic center during the battle is practically impossible and a terrible idea. I'm not sure you could even recreate the course of the battle if you tried.
  • Polybius famously said that it was better to have cavalry superiority and half the infantry. FoG2 essentially disagrees, making it far too easy for infantry to tie down and counter cavalry. Taking Cannae as an example - it doesn't help to have 8 cavalry against your opponents 3, when he can throw 12-15 infantry units in to counter you.
  • I also feel the game undervalues quality quite a bit. History is replete with battles where smaller numbers of elite troops defeat larger numbers. I doubt Caesar could beat Pompey in this game.

Overall, though I still like it. It's a good wargame, even if it doesn't quite catch all the nuances of the period.

 

I think if you play the cavalry correctly, they're more maneuverable than you might think, but you have to either keep them away or go past the enemy to keep their mobility.  It's really hard to catch them with infantry without getting exposed if you spread them out enough and use the maneuverability mechanics by going right past them and force them to face somewhere.   Even the javelin cavalry can do a ton of damage by charging infantry in the flank.

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1 minute ago, panzeh said:

 

I think if you play the cavalry correctly, they're more maneuverable than you might think, but you have to either keep them away or go past the enemy to keep their mobility.  It's really hard to catch them with infantry without getting exposed if you spread them out enough and use the maneuverability mechanics by going right past them and force them to face somewhere.   Even the javelin cavalry can do a ton of damage by charging infantry in the flank.

 

If the opponent spreads out their cavalry, I think the simple counter is to not play that game. The AI makes that mistake a lot - sees one of your units doing something mildly threatening and runs after them with 1-2 units of its own, and it is always - always - a mistake. At Cannae, the Romans have so many troops that if the Carthaginian cavalry try to do a proper end-run around the Romans, the battle will be over before the Carthaginians are done.

 

But generally, I feel cavalry mobility is OK. But Cannae is a special battle that almost every ancient game struggles to simulate - which is why I call it the Cannae-test. Can you simulate Cannae and 1) allow the Carthaginians to do what the sources tell us they did, and 2) have the Roman battle plan make sense?  To carry out the maneuvers described by Polybius/Livy, your Carthaginians basically need mobility that would be hugely overpowered in every other battle, and thus they often don't. Strategos/Lost Battles handles this by giving the top generals a double move ability; GBoH handled it with its "momentum" rules (which allowed the Carthaginians to basically scoot around a fairly static Roman army due to the leadership gap). Don't think I've seen a game that manages 1) without this kind of "extra" mobility advantage. And almost no games (Lost Battles being the only exception I know of) can manage 2).

 

Sure - heavy cavalry that charge engaged infantry in the flank are awesome. But if I have double the number of infantry you have (as, e.g. at Cannae), I'd say that I'm doing something seriously wrong if you get to make any significant number of flank charges, beyond what you'll get as a result of the chaos of combat.  One definitely shouldn't do what the AI did when I played that battle - throw the majority of its infantry against my cavalry. It successfully defeated my cavalry - but by the time it had done so, I'd rolled up its front line of infantry using only my infantry and could break their morale.

 

Hmm. If I were designing within this system, I think that one possible tweak I'd consider/test in the game would be to make non-Lance cavalry much more likely to break off/fall back if charged by infantry (especially when charged in the flank). One of the problems with the handling of ancient cavalry right now is that they are far, far too likely to stick it out in a melee with infantry. Which is almost, always a bad idea  - even if the odds are even (which is presumably why the AI makes this choice). Don't think I've ever read any of any battle where that happened either (cavalry could sometimes have long battles against other cavalry, though often as a result of one or both sides dismounting). IMO, getting tied down in an equal combat is only a good idea for cavalry if you have other units that can exploit the situation.

 

But that's just my 2 cents. Ancient warfare is something that better scholars than me have spent tons of pages discussing.

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I've yet to actually play this, although I dabbled in Sengoku Jidai last year for some research. That was ok, but I think this might be the game that I get into properly. Great cast guys! I especially love Rob's tales of woe - the delivery is always superb.

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Great episode, great game.  The battles are just a lot of fun and have a great deal.  Rowan's point about the sticky melee is a good one, as it makes the battles feel 'real'.    

 

Troy has the elephants figured out - charge the heavy infantry.  Try to keep them in melee at all times.  I have yet to successfully route an elephant.  

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Outflank the elephant. Once it's disrupted, it will crumble... fast. Also, javelin infantry are extremely effective against them.

 

While I critique a bit above, my overall opinion is positive - it's an improvement on an already solid system.

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Nice episode. Always a pleasure to here Troy talking about games and subjects he loves. How robust and easy to use is the multiplayer?

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I was keen to prove you all wrong by enjoying a nice campaign as Pontus, and in a way I think I did as I have no problem with the linked battles with a bit of flavour text in between.

 

However what I wasn't banking on was it so brutally difficult, even though I'm only on the third difficulty! And yes I did lose far too many troops in the first battle but the Scythians are such frustrating opponents that I not going back to it and I'm too stubborn to give up.

 

Suffice to say Elite Roman Legionnaires are absolute murder machines and beating a Roman army when you have fewer, poorer quality troops is a bit of a mission.

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Yea I'd say so, I'm still playing it regularly. The community content and expansions have been keeping things fresh. 
 

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I'm extremely late to the party, but I've only recently tried this game after buying it a long time ago.

 

And I think it's a first wargame I really dig. Previously I've tried to play other entry-level wargames, like Panzercorps or Unity of Command, even Commander Great War. And those looked like boring yet challenging math problems. Units have very basic stats - attack, defense, range, movement. There are special attacks against armor or maybe air. Every unit behaves exactly the same even if they're supposed to play different roles. Every unit is a killer. And it's your job to make your killers meet their victims till it's enemy turn and now it's important for your victims to meet as few murderers as possible. You concentrate fire, you use ineffective killers to soften enemies. But even though those games are different it feels like their rulesets were written for some abstract chess-like battlefields, they could be applied to fantasy or Warhammer 40K settings - and Panzercorps, naturally, got WH40K clone. It felt like a grand sudoku puzzle or something. From all of those wargames I only ever liked fantasy ones because they felt like I make decisions not based solely on remembering attack tables. Elven Legacy is Panzer General clone, but it has casters, scouts who can develop skills for poison attacks or hit & run, elves that shoot farther away when they're in the hills, knights who always attack instantly when there's an enemy nearby and so on and so on. Those still felt like puzzles because in all of them you fight not against an army but against a timer.

 

Field of Glory 2 feels like a representation of an ancient battle on the other hand. Here heavy infantry or light cavalry doesn't just mean "slow but lots of HP" or "quick and weak", it doesn't even mean bonuses vs special units. It really means specific roles. When I imagine commander thinking about battlefield I can't connect it to the usual wargame picture of "let our weak unit attack them and then strong finish them off if there is less of 80% of them left", but this approach of "our heavy infantry should hold till our chariots regroup and attack their opponent from behind, let's make sure their flanks are defended by skirmishers who will run away but still draw enemy away" looks like a real deal. Skirmishers are not just weak infantry you use the same way as you'd use weakened heavy infantry, they skirmish. Light cavalry isn't just fast infantry, it's incapable of doing non-cavalry thing and just runs away when you attack it. And those battles are not about clearing the map on a timer, those battles are won when you think it's won. Half of the enemy army runs away, therefore, it's done.

 

I am now very skeptical of the term "entry-level wargame". Cause those wargames were ineffective to draw me in even when they talked about events and times that really draw me in.

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