Time and Space in FOG and AJE

[marek1978]

I Love FOG empires – I think it is beautiful game and I love the very idea of how trade and managing state is solved. I think it is in many ways better than Pride of Nations.

Yet playing as Carthege in Field of Glory made me to play againg AJE ( Second Punic War Scenario) and I have to tell you that AJE was great, great game and it fells so much more reall to actualy move real armies in realistic time span rather than to see army moving for 3 year just to cross modern day Tunisia.
It made me think – why is this game trying to catch 600 years of history? Why yearly turns.
If the game is about getting dominant position around mediteranen then in realli life it happened between 305 and 149 BC – with key struggle taking place beeween 280 and 190.
At 202 BC Carthage was basically put of the table, in 197 Macedon was done and in 190 Seleucid was done as well. Next 50 years were road downhill and III punic and III macedon wars were merely just coup de grace.
So why not to have games that would have AJE moth;y turns and AJE regions density for some more accurate historical fighting ( with FOG battles as well )

Just an idea for the future

love the game, will buy persian expansion and promote it whene ever is possible

[Bullseye500]

Whatever AJE is...*shrugs*.

[MarkShot]

Alea Acta Est = AJE

It is or more or less the same engine upon which the second generation AGEOD (pre-Slitherine) were based on; hand coded by Pocus in the DELPHI IDE.

The engine and its expansions cover about 25 Roman conflicts. Minimally, there are two factions 2 play and sometimes 3. Turns are one month. Scenarios run from 25-300 turns. You should think of the scenarios as operational warfare across the Roman world.

The supply is very close to what is used here (except that you may transport supplies).

The combat system at its core is similar, but I would say far more sophisticated then what is in Empires (but less unit types). Combat results are extremely detailed, but unlike this game they are not nearly as graphically well presented and intuitive.

Victory or defeat focuses on achieving all objectives (means holding regions) or having more points at the end; there is also sudden death mode where which is based on crossing a national morale threshold. National morale increases with battle field victories and capture of objectives; and falls correspondingly. The games engine offers more options for configuring difficulty than this one. I think between 25 scenarios; 2 or 3 sides; and that the games have random elements; and you may use different strategies; so, you have a few years of replay value at least.

I have played a number of scenarios and they were a lot of fun.

The other 2 games that use a similar engine but more complex supply and chain of command are the two ACW games. Although similar, I would not say that the second game was not simply an improved version of the first. There are many who feel that AGEOD ACW titles were the best full theater games represent that conflict (turns are 2 weeks) and there are scenarios which cover the entire conflict. It's on my list to get to these eventually.

They run fine under WIN10 64 bit. Despite that they are older games, the engine turn processing times are not as snappy as this game.

DISCLOSURE: I am not impartial. I am a former member of the original AGEOD.

[MarkShot]

They are still available for Slitherine and well worth buying during a Winter Sale or your anniversary coupon.

[marek1978]

They are still available for Slitherine and well worth buying during a Winter Sale or your anniversary coupon.

Best games ever

[Bullseye500]

Thanks. I have been eye-ballling that civil wargame.

[MarkShot]

Thanks. I have been eye-ballling that civil wargame.

To be fair, there were many games produced off this engine beginning with BOA Birth of America in 2006 which has a later version WIA Wars in America.

The second game the ACW was redone later as CW2. But it has been debated which is superior for various reasons. The first had the same lovely hand drawn maps of BOA. However, the second natively supports larger fonts which required manual edits of configuration files in other titles.

You could say the first two titles were AGEv1 and the rest AGEv2. Why? Well, Pocus did something rather unique in the industry. AGEv2 was modular so that patches and features added to future titles were back portable to previously released titles. That is not to say that they identical. Roman supply and command is the simplest, and the combat model greatly discounts ranged combat compared to the battlefields of the last 300 hundred years.

The reason I mentioned AJE and the ACW games are that these are of personal interest. All these games were fairly well received by fans of the AGE engine. (Personally, I feel command, stack handling, and naval transport were better handled with AGE. But Empires is built upon a generic Slitherine engine. It was not built from the ground up as was AGEv1 and AGEv2.)

NOTE: They all have decent manuals, and all were patched to completion. However, support for questions not directly covered in manuals may be hard to come by these days.

PS: I never PBEM, but they all support PBEM.