{"id":3007,"date":"2011-03-09T20:21:53","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T01:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=3007"},"modified":"2011-03-09T20:22:50","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T01:22:50","slug":"give-me-back-my-legions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/03\/09\/give-me-back-my-legions\/","title":{"rendered":"Give Me Back My Legions"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was probably when I replayed the Battle of Teutoberger Wald from the Roman side for the 20th time that I realized just how deeply Field of Glory<\/em> has sunk into my gaming routine. It’s a not daily fix like Dungeon Crawl<\/em> is or Civ 4<\/em> was for many years. But it is a game I keep coming back to and that Slitherine and HexWar steadily improve and deepen. It’s one of the few wargames that I can say I happily play online against humans (because the battles are so short) and it’s a game whose expansions and variety promise years and years of enjoyment.<\/p>\n

FoG is now on its fifth expansion, Legions Triumphant<\/em><\/a>, which takes the fun into the Imperial Age. The new expansion has a disappointing paucity of historical battles, but that’s always been a bit of a problem for the series. It is designed as a tabletop game where you create your armies in the Digital Army Generator (now there are hundreds of nations and allies to choose from) and then set them to work against each other in online play.<\/p>\n

A lot of the changes in the game since launch have been small ones. You can now give skirmish units specific behavioral orders on if and when they should evade melee combat. You can block evasion with proper placement now. Rules about facing and units ignoring orders have been clarified, and the there are tiny little tweaks and bug fixes in each of the many patches. (Now up to version 1.50). Would be nice if they fixed some of the spelling errors in the army lists and battles, but you can’t have everything. The game gets more polished and easier to understand in every update.<\/p>\n

I’ve written before about my love of the old Encyclopedia of War: Ancient Battles<\/em><\/a>, and increasingly Field of Glory<\/em> is becoming that. I think a random battle generator would be nice, but the flexibility of the DAG with the hundreds of maps to choose from plus the amazingly intuitive scenario editor have Field of Glory<\/em> fighting with War in the East<\/em> as the best wargame of the last five years.<\/p>\n

I keep coming back to Field of Glory<\/em> for more than the setting, though that is an attraction. The AI is not great, which is almost a draw in a game like this. Most single player battles will take no more than 30 minutes to resolve, many are much shorter. The fun is in trying to craft the perfect battle plan. In Teutoberger Wald, can your Romans survive at all? Can you as Hannibal destroy an entire army at Trasimene or Cannae? When I take the side of Lucullus in Tigranocerta, I have Yakety Sax playing in my head as the Armenians run for the hills in a spiral of fragmenting and routing units.<\/p>\n

\"Bibracte\"<\/center> <\/p>\n

I’ve yet to create that beautiful double envelopment that utterly destroys the enemy. But there have been some moments of beauty, like in my Bibracte battle tonight that played out much like the historical one. The Germans pushed my Romans hard at the beginning and their charges shattered some of my front and one of my wings completely. But once the troops are engaged, there isn’t a lot that can beat Roman swordsmanship and once the barbarians were forced back to the river, that was it.<\/p>\n

Three more expansions have been announced (an Ottoman themed one, one for the Byzantine Empire and one for Vikings) but so far not the pre-classical Near East one I’d love to see. Maybe next year.<\/p>\n

I will probably do a game diary once I talk Bill Abner into finally buying this and playing me. I think he’s chicken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was probably when I replayed the Battle of Teutoberger Wald from the Roman side for the 20th time that I realized just how deeply Field of Glory has sunk into my gaming routine. It’s a not daily fix like Dungeon Crawl is or Civ 4 was for many years. But it is a game […]<\/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":[12,3,18,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Mv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007"}],"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=3007"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3012,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions\/3012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}