Field of Glory: Empires

Considering I'm into my 7th year playing this game and have also now 100%-ed the achievements, maybe it's about time to drop a positive review. FoG Empires is one of the best historical grand strategy games out there, and is generally a delight to play. The graphical presentation is nothing to write home about, but then again I would also say the game aesthetics have their own special charm that grows on you. There are many other interesting things that could be said about the game mechanics, level of abstraction and so on, but other reviewers here have already done a great job summarizing all of that.

Its not fun. While there is an interesting idea behind it, the implementation is very rough. You have to lead your nation in a way that leaves a mark on history. The game tries to simulate a declining/stagnating society, but doesnt do it very well. At least not in a fun way. Presentation values are rather simple. Its not an issue for a game like this, but I cant help of thinking about games from 20 years ago like Chariots of War and Spartan, that seemed to look somewhat nicer. The UI is pretty poor in that the information it provides, particularly in regard to numbers, can be quite confusing. The message/event UI is cumbersome. While starting a game I wanted to take a nation thats easier, and the two easiest nations described were Macedon and Egypt. It turned out to be complete nonsense as expanding as an obscure tribe somewhere far away is much easier than Macedon, and I will explain why. There are a lot of neutral areas on the map which you can conquer if you beat the garrison, which is not that hard. When you are surrounded by nations, you need to fight their armies and siege their fortified cities. As Macedon I was constantly raided and got debuffs, which I couldnt really d…

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…

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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