On 5/11/2016 7:14 PM, Holdit wrote:
I'm looking at getting into ancients a little deeper than RTW2 (no
laughing at the back).
The offerings I'm aware of are:
- Great Battles series - these seem to be highly thought of but won't
run on my system
- HPS Ancient Wars series - looks OK but pricey
- Matrix Fields of Glory - not outrageously priced and seems to expand
into Medieval warfare also.
- Matrix Tin Soldiers - very limited number of scenarios.
Which is the best of the bunch or are there better offerings I'm not
aware of?
Holdit
Last summer, I decided to play a whole bunch of games on the Pyrrhic
War. I had an HPS scenario on one of the battles, a Field of Glory
scenario, the Alea Jacta Est Birth of Rome module and Europa
Universalis’ Rome, with an appropriate start time.
I’m playing single player only, and I tend to rank “immersion” higher
than innovative and/or challenging game play. This probably skews my preferences, particularly relative to the fan base of these games. Given
that, here’s are my thoughts in all of their gory detail. My short
answer is that I think we have to wait for some new developer to get it
right. Go RobP.
Like the OP, I had again broken out the Rome Total War, and felt the disappointment. I began digging through the old games, sure that
somewhere, someone must have done better. HPS battles started off my “comparative gaming” exercise and, while it pains me to do so, may get
ranked as the best available ancients tactics option. The modelling of
the battle seems pretty good. There are lots of scenarios, plus a
scenario editor. Not to mention, the scenarios take a brutally long time
to play so that gives you a whole lot of hours within a particular HPS
module.
On the downside, the scenarios take a brutally long time to play. Also,
the AI, while not obviously incompetent, probably will not beat you in
any of the scenarios (mostly designed for balanced play-by-email).
The gameplay starts out OK as you close your army towards the enemy and
need only make minor adjustments to your lines. Mostly you move forward
using group moves, meaning (for example) you give a single movement
order to all of one legion’s principes (10 counters) together. This
works until the armies make contact, at which point the group move is
useless and you have to give orders counter-by-counter. This isn’t too
bad when you’re working on a tactically interesting section of the
battle field. (Can you break his right wing before he punches a hole in
your center?) But you pretty much have to visit every counter, every
turn, whether you want to or not.
My last HPS complaint is that, while the army detail is simulated to the
lowest level of detail compared to most other games (for legions, one
counter represents a maniple), it is still the same mechanics as any
other hex-and-counter game. That is, the difference between a roman
legion and allied heavy infantry is in the stats of the units. There is
no simulation of the manipular system and its unique advantages. Indeed,
there is no enforcement (or advantage, as far as I can tell) for keeping
your units in the historical formations and combat roles. This is up to
you as the player to do for your own satisfaction, often expending a lot
of on-screen clicks to do so.
You’d think, then, that Field of Glory would be a breath of fresh air.
Counter representative sizes are bigger (although, I’ll note, they are
set by the scenario designer, so it really could be anything) so micromanagement is less. The AI can give a challenge, particularly in
scenarios designed for single play - although this too is primarily a play-by-email game. This is the same rule set as Pike and Shot, and I
LOVE it there, but for some reason FoG doesn’t do it for me.
Similar to my criticism of HPS, there is no game enforcement or
advantage to historically-correct formations. In fact, optimal gameplay
seems to involve using the larger scale (and thus, greater
movement-per-turn) to scurry around to an unexpected attack position. I
also find the unit stats to give some results that don’t match my gut.
Finally, as Eddy has said in the past, linear combat and hexes just
don’t match. I’ll point out that Pike and Shot used the same rules but a
grid system.
The advantages of Field of Glory are many. A huge number of scenarios
and an active community, especially for multiplayer. The scenario editor
is simple enough that you can actually throw together your own, plus
there are army builders to create balanced, hypothetical match-ups. Most importantly, the battles are fairly quick. Even if a particular scenario
model falls flat, you’ve wasted only an evening on it, not a month of
your life.
I haven’t played Tin Soldiers since around the time of its release. I
was actually a beta tester for it, and so most of my play time came just
before release and I’ve not played it much since. As the OP said, the
number of scenarios are quite limited and there’s no provision for
sandbox play and no hope that additional content will someday arrive.
Like Field of Glory, this is really more of a “table top” simulator than
a battle simulator. HPS Ancients also, to a lesser extent. But in Tin
Soldiers it is the most obvious that you are pushing stands of
miniatures. Not what I’m generally in the mood for, and I suspect a big
part of the reason the series didn’t last.
When I was testing Tin Soldiers, I broke out my old copy of Great
Battles, as the gold-standard of its time for ancient battles.
Unfortunately, the memory of it is a little better than the modern
replay. It hadn’t actually solved many of the problems of some of its
newer competitors, we just weren’t aware back then of what we were
missing. Plus, the program - even with the best of patches (I haven’t
tried the GOG specifically) - wasn’t entirely stable. It was not
uncommon for me to get well into a battle and then find that all my
reloads lead to back to the same crash-to-desktop. While I haven’t tried
them back-to-back, I expect that FoG is suitable upgrade to Great
Battles. One glaring exception - I always thought that the double-width
phalanx units was a brilliant mechanic, but other games don’t use it.
The combined experience of all of these makes me wonder if the right
battle simulation isn’t the “General simulator.” Rather than simulate
the board game or tabletop and push all the units around, shouldn’t you
sit in the saddle of the consul and give only the appropriate orders? As
the few games on other eras that do this demonstrate, this requires a
level of AI (especially friendly AI) that doesn’t exist for ancients.
Enter Birth of Rome, which simulates the operational level and deals
with the tactical battles in considerable detail, but outside the
control of the player. You can set up the size, quality and makeup of
your armies and, through the commander assignments, control its tactics.
But once the armies are marching towards each other, there isn’t much micromanagement for a general to do - so why not just have the computer
resolve everything. This game answers that question: it’s kind of the
worst of all worlds.
Roman Republic games have two interesting aspects. One is the spectacle
of massive formations of soldiers colliding and the fascinating rock-paper-scissors that actually played out as the army organization of
the different cultures helped to dictate the fates of their nations. For
the battles in question, the phalanx vs legion is the obvious, but most
ancient battles are characterized by an array of unique units. At the
other end is the political aspects of the Roman Republic. Control of the Senate, control of resources, the ability to install consuls, generals
or governors. This creates an opportunity to design good games around
even a nearly-invincible Rome against the world.
Birth of Rome lands right between these two interesting wings in the
dull middle. At the strategic level, all the decision are made by the
scenario designer. At the tactical level, all the decisions are made by
the computer. Leaving what? A historical account might describe how the
Romans, upon hearing of Pyrrhus’ arrival in Italy, mustered 80,000 men
and divided them into four armies. Do any of us wish we could
micromanage the makeup and lower-level command of the Roman response? I
didn’t think so.
EU Rome is a game that I ignored when it came out. It seemed like easy
way to capitalize on Rome: Total War’s popularity with their existing
engine. Last year, I finally picked it up when I saw it for a buck or
two. In retrospect, it was an intermediate version of the Crusader Kings
system and does manage to immerse the player in that interesting
strategic top end of the Roman era. In particular, whereas the RTW
family system has little connection with historical politics, EUR does
start to capture the feel of it. Once you stray outside the historical
bounds of a scenario setup, EUR moves toward the classic 4X gameplay
with build queues and constructing the right buildings, a mechanic
without much connection to historical reality. But it is slower to
silliness than most of its competitors and therefore, in my own Pyrrhic exercise of last summer, actually was the most satisfying attempt to
play the Roman Republic.
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