Field of Glory: Empires

I really wanted to like it, but it's just so mind-numbingly tedious. The UI is honestly terrible. There's huge amounts of critical information completely hidden from you. It's minimalist in a completely dysfunctional way. It's not even the menus within menus experience like Distant Worlds or a Paradox game. There's just very little information on the game's systems available. You get a lot of top level superficial information but tons of stuff is always happening under the hood that requires rote knowledge to make sense of. I found the manual okay but typically I just had a browser open while trying to play to look stuff up. The game's most impactful mechanic, development of cities, doesn't seem to have a dependency tree anywhere so you just have to know what's good and what leads to what. Most of your time is spent picking buildings, which is neat, right up until you figure out which buildings are good and then it's just a matter of spamming reshuffle until you get one of the structures you actually want. There aren't actually any meaningful choices to make because structures finish so fast in well optimized regions that you can afford to waste as much time as you want shuf…

The concept of this game is great, sadly it just wasnt executed very well. The building and progression parts of this roman world are quite fun. Loved the way each playthrough is unique via the construction options, but sadly the game just falls apart with everything else. Combat is terrible, you have both arms plus a foot tied behind your back. You get one movement choice per year with one legion, so you have no control over retreats, flanks, sieges. Missing this tactical element means much of your game will be dominated by dice rolls, which brings me to the terrible decadence mechanic .... Decadance, its new and interesting for a bit, if your in the lower third for culture then you bascially have a 'coin flip' each turn to decide if your civ starts to collapse. Sure you can get lucky and basically swim around in the low sulture and get no decadance tokens at all, but on the other hand, its possible for you to roll tails 5 times in a row and suddenly your empire is collapsing, let me say again, the only factor controlling the collapase of all your hard work is a simple coin flip each turn, and nothing you can do to alter it. But i hear you say, why dont you just manage your cul…

Fantastic game. Big upgrade over games like the Total War series. Far more believable AI, much more historically accurate. Challenging but still fun.

beautifull game

Really fun grand strategy game. It plays differently from anything I've ever played before and has a really cool system for building up your provinces where the buildings you are offered are random every time. The combat works well and it's even better if you own Field of Glory 2 which lets you export the battles to that game and play them out kind of like Total War. It's got this really neat culture and decadence system that handles the problem of preventing blobbing better than any other game I've played. I have a few minor complaints; I wish the diplomacy system was more fleshed out, and having the option to do a peace treaty with someone after you fully occupy them instead of just instantly taking all of their provinces would be nice. Also the tooltips are pretty bad and if you want to play this you're probably going to have to at least skim the manual. If you're up to that though I highly recommend this game.

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