{"id":2043,"date":"2009-12-11T18:34:33","date_gmt":"2009-12-11T18:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2009-12-11T18:34:33","modified_gmt":"2009-12-11T18:34:33","slug":"on-site-mini-review-for-the-glory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/12\/11\/on-site-mini-review-for-the-glory\/","title":{"rendered":"On Site Mini-Review: For the Glory"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been dithering on commenting about For the Glory<\/em>, the fan made pseudo-expansion to Europa Universalis 2<\/em>. It has new graphics, including a greater variety of sprites and map modes, and makes good use of the alert tabs that Paradox introduced in EU3. But when you pay your twenty dollars for it, you are essentially buying smoother integration of two popular mods – The Alternative Grand Campaign Event Exchange Project and the Age of Timur.<\/p>\n

The latter mod is in many ways the more modest. It adjusts the start date and gives you lots of new nations to choose from. You also get to play Timur – the great Central Asian conqueror who is near the end of his reign in EU3.<\/p>\n

The real meat is in the AGCEEP, which take a very different design philosophy from the current Paradox model. EU2 was always chained to history to some extent. Monarch and leader lists were fixed to an historical chronology and events would pop up to either keep you on the straight and narrow historical path or give you an alternative history.<\/p>\n

Imagine that those event pop-ups happened to you every three years and they asked you to make decisions that didn’t really make sense outside of the real historical context. For example, your English Henry V obliterates and vassalizes of France and is still sitting in Paris with a huge army. Then an event asks you if you want to give a bunch of these provinces to your Burgundian friends – say no and everything goes to hell.<\/p>\n

It would be stretching it to say that the AGCEEP forces you down an historical path. Events link across nations in some interesting ways and the alternative histories it draws are actually quite intricate. But this is an event driven game in ways that the new EU games are not. Events are not there to entertain the player or give variety or goals to aim for – the events exist to make you feel you are living a textbook, that you are the guiding spirit of a nation with a destiny you are either simpatico with or struggling against. The events, both historical and original, are creative and interesting and attractive in a very unique way.<\/p>\n

In many ways, AGCEEP is one of those “Let’s Add More” mods. To compare, the largest event file in the default EU2 game is the 210 kb random event file. AGCEEP has a 1.8 MB event file for the Holy Roman Empire and most of those events are there to cover almost every possible contingency for the abolition or restoration of the HRE.<\/p>\n

So much work has gone into the Timur setting and AGCEEP mods that I sort of regret not being able to return to EU2 with any great joy. I’ve moved past the event driven history that both embrace because EU3, at least since In Nomine, has found ways to make me feel more attached to the national histories I write even as it doesn’t ask me to choose to between a constitutional monarchy and a radical revolution in 1789 France or combat Hussite and Lollard heretics or applaud the rise of an historically awesome ruler like Akbar.<\/p>\n

If you were a fan of the historical events, the real question is whether it is worth the 20 dollars to have smoother mod integration with the main program. One of the problems with the EU games pre-EU3 was that there was a wide range of mods and each one pretty much needed a unique installation. The mod functionality here is the big asset, since you can get both the AGCEEP and Timur mods for free on the official forums.<\/p>\n

That’s a decision for each individual gamer. As much as I enjoyed looking at the greater variety in unit sprites and applaud some of the new religious stuff in For the Glory’s mod additions, I’ve moved past EU2 – still one of my favorite games ever, but superseded by its sequel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been dithering on commenting about For the Glory, the fan made pseudo-expansion to Europa Universalis 2. It has new graphics, including a greater variety of sprites and map modes, and makes good use of the alert tabs that Paradox introduced in EU3. But when you pay your twenty dollars for it, you are essentially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[27,6],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-wX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2044,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions\/2044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}