Field of Glory Empires MP Game New Thread.

Started by devoncop, June 04, 2019, 01:10:26 PM

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Gusington

'Herding the Qats' - the next big release from The Fleshpot Bitches!


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Sir Slash

I hear they're not easy to herd. 'Herd' it myself.  :2funny:  From a Qat though so maybe it's qat accurate.  :2funny:
"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

devoncop

Quote from: Sir Slash on August 21, 2019, 09:22:32 AM
I hear they're not easy to herd. 'Herd' it myself.  :2funny:  From a Qat though so maybe it's qat accurate.  :2funny:

Take from me....they are easier than herding Judeans. :pullhair: :pullhair: :pullhair:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=534&t=92000

Link to Field of Glory Empires MP forum with Slitherine Games

Gusington

FYI I am traveling for work tomorrow through Saturday night. I am hoping the AI will go nuts again and put Bactria out of its misery :/


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

devoncop

Quote from: Gusington on August 21, 2019, 01:09:02 PM
FYI I am traveling for work tomorrow through Saturday night. I am hoping the AI will go nuts again and put Bactria out of its misery :/

To be fair the Bactrian national pastime is "misery" .....I speak from experience from another MP game where they constantly revolt, top their leaders (good,bad or indifferent....they don't mind) and enjoy sending the regime into a decadence death spiral whenever possible.....😂
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=534&t=92000

Link to Field of Glory Empires MP forum with Slitherine Games

Gusington



слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

JasonPratt

I'll do what I can to help stabilize your region when I get an opportunity, Gus!  :bd:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

JasonPratt

Kindred watch and tense,
Like a pair of wolves,
Mangy, ripped and torn.
Now which one will leap?



There's a decent chance right now the Qats will win if they load up and go after my newly recovered port territory, before I can settle peace in the area and start building up defenses. And it'll be a while before I have enough punch to both try to protect against a Qatabian counterattack, and to try to hit their capital with a very reasonable chance of winning. Each turn will tip things further in my direction, so if they're going to go they should go now; but waiting out the long game also gives them some hope of a disastrously distracting problem cropping up on my side, of course.

I'm also curious how long they can afford to be this strong. They're blockading my port right now (and Egypt's recently acquired port, too), but that has to stop at some point, right? When it does, my trade income with my allies should be significant.

Meanwhile, if I can get another decent expeditionary force together (and how long will that take), should I not try to expand out diagonally away in a direction I won't need to garrison much? I've still got some room down here -- though so do they. It's all a bunch of oases and nothing else, however, which will take hard work forever to become useful.
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

devoncop

Quote from: JasonPratt on August 22, 2019, 08:31:43 AM
Kindred watch and tense,
Like a pair of wolves,
Mangy, ripped and torn.
Now which one will leap?



There's a decent chance right now the Qats will win if they load up and go after my newly recovered port territory, before I can settle peace in the area and start building up defenses. And it'll be a while before I have enough punch to both try to protect against a Qatabian counterattack, and to try to hit their capital with a very reasonable chance of winning. Each turn will tip things further in my direction, so if they're going to go they should go now; but waiting out the long game also gives them some hope of a disastrously distracting problem cropping up on my side, of course.

I'm also curious how long they can afford to be this strong. They're blockading my port right now (and Egypt's recently acquired port, too), but that has to stop at some point, right? When it does, my trade income with my allies should be significant.

Meanwhile, if I can get another decent expeditionary force together (and how long will that take), should I not try to expand out diagonally away in a direction I won't need to garrison much? I've still got some room down here -- though so do they. It's all a bunch of oases and nothing else, however, which will take hard work forever to become useful.

I am hoping that fleet will shift this turn as it is out of supply blockading those two ports and return further east as I am taking a risk and transporting my unescorted troops north to Nabatea on the Red Sea as I have no fleet building capacity there......pray for me :-)...that should also unblock your port.

I would seriously consider seeing if you can build a mercenary centre if it comes up as the Saba is usually well off for gold and then just raise a mercenary army and crush them and then disband it if you need the cash. I would also look at developing the one of the ports and hitting the Aethiopian and Nubian territories in time.....Lots of Gold,Frankinsense etc over there if you look and they develop their lands so you arent taking over Arabian wastelands :-)


http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=534&t=92000

Link to Field of Glory Empires MP forum with Slitherine Games

JasonPratt

#489
The only reason I wasn't considering going after Ethiopia eventually, was because I figured you'd want Nubia and Ethiopia yourself. (Being on your side of the Red Sea and connected via the Nile headwaters.)
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

devoncop

Quote from: JasonPratt on August 22, 2019, 12:11:40 PM
The only reason I wasn't considering going after Ethiopia eventually, was because I figured you'd want Nubia and Ethiopia yourself. (Being on your side of the Red Sea and connected via the Nile headwaters.)

Definitely not.

In fact you would be doing me a favour as my main focus is up north and they tend to be disruptive at the worst possible time. Also if you needed help with them it would be much easier for me to get some to you...!

You could even try peace with the Qats and build up without disruption and head West....
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=534&t=92000

Link to Field of Glory Empires MP forum with Slitherine Games

Sir Slash

How do the factions measure-up war-wise in this game? I mean does one faction have unbeatable units or a superior general to all others? Are there military giants in this game or is everybody just pygmies?
"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

JasonPratt

#492
The military giants are definitely the Successor States, as you might expect: Egypt, the Selucids, the Antigonids, and whatever the heck is going on with Hellas (Macedonia, Sparta, Athens, etc., who have splintered off each other by now again). However, none of them are super-well developed despite their size at the start of the game, because Alexander just steamrolled his way along without pausing to develop his areas.

Then you have Rome, who at this point has just finished consolidating the Latin League and is coming back from having been rolled over by a barbarian horde. They have a lot of punching the do in the boot, but they also have a lot of latent ability already built in with their developed infrastructure compared to older more cultured factions around them (like Epirius). It's pretty normal for them to surge all over Italy. I think in our game everyone is down on the boot except for the Samnites? -- and they're surrounded? (And like historically, are kind of just waiting to exploit problems.) Syracuse has invaded the toe or the heel or something, so the islands have some punch. Carthage is spread out in trading ports all over north Africa but they don't have a unified nation yet (since originally they were just more Syro-Phoenician trading stations like the Canaanites.) They can get very punchy, as you might expect, but have a lot of actual contiguous nations between their own areas, albeit undeveloped ones.

Anyway. The big Successors tend to set up ally networks to forestall each other, using smaller factions as buffer states while they pick up spare territories around themselves and develop up their internal abilities (or redevelop in some cases using Hellenic efficiency to bootstrap back up ancient areas devastated by Alex and his generals). So they don't just superstack and go on Godzilla rampages. In fact they can't: the game heavily penalizes any attempts at trying to go far with large stacks, or even medium ones, or even small ones in some cases, unless you have already built up logistic support in your territories for them to springboard from.

I can give a pertinent example from my single-player games where I'm fiddling with how to survive and thrive as the Rhaeti, basically Alpine Celts. I've got a great defensive capital area with almost no development, and two great hinterland areas with literally no development at all, and I start with a reasonably punchy army for a minor. And even though I have a cultural and national ability to field up to 10 units without having to pay for them, they IMMEDIATELY start dying off IN MY OWN TERRITORIES because I have no way to feed them. Trying to invade any other nearby territories is worse. I'm probably supposed to be sending them out in random raids to try to survive, but I do pretty well dividing them up into a few units capable of living in the mountain capital and everyone else who shouldn't be in mountains going downhill to the north. This sort-of eases their drain on food to a manageable level, and provides some defense against random incoming raids, while I try to bootstrap my starting three territories into something useful. But my capital takes generations to get enough worker groups to try to do anything, partly because I simply can't stop all incoming raids there from the 'real' "Celtica" faction and the Boiis next door, and they blip off a worker group sometimes, and/or hampering my construction or food-growing for two to five years at other times. (I badly wish the game allowed us to move worker groups between areas.) The other two areas start with less but bootstrap up a LOT faster, even with occasionally successful raids against me.

My multi-player game as Saba (in this thread) is a somewhat different example. Saba starts with only one territory, but it has the remnants of a previously well-developed archaic superpower to rely on, so my decent little starting stack can survive there no problem. However, the moment I move out to other territories... well, depending on the weather conditions that year, I had better check the supply layer first because they'll likely starve to ashes if I move them in the wrong direction.

The superpowers have the exact same problems, except arguably worse, trying to move stacks around outside of logistical support.

It reminds me a little of how Russia and other Slavic nations (but especially Russia) operated before Stalin took control: your capital areas (whether Moscow or Petrograd) are developed up as feasibly as possible, but they kept everything around their key pop areas as a desolate waste so that attempts to invade them would miserably fail. The Russians were the world-class leaders on this for centuries, with artificial forests of doom hundreds of miles deep (some of their remnants surviving to today), dotted with easy-to-feed ranger forts, manned by light troops who knew how to move through their assigned areas. This was great until Napoleon arrived, and he only got through due to absolutely superior logistic train management -- until winter and the burning of Moscow! Then things went back to normal more or less for a while, but the strategy of keeping all border areas unlivable hell-holes for defense also meant Russia was increasingly self-crippled as an industrial power going into the 20th century. (By comparison contemporary to before the start of FogEmp and similar games, Alexander once famously quipped that the most terrified men in his army were his logistic officers, because they knew if he failed he'd kill them first!)

The Stalin comes along, taking over for Lenin in the second generation of the Revolution, and he not only starts breaking down the epic defensive barriers so that he can industrialize Russia at warp speed (part of the famous Five Year Plans and Hero Projects), he also starts moving war production westward to the borders and increasing logistic capability at the borders: because his armies are going to need full back-field support launchpadding westward into central and eventually western Europe. He progressively removes the more neutral border nations between him and Germany, too (the first super-power in the way -- and the home of "world socialism"), and crash-progams them into being high-caliber military logistic travel and supply areas. (But very very focused on shuttling troops forward; everything else is still a bunch of goatpaths. The Soviets up to 1941 were the utter portrait or crippling min/max overspecialization.  >:D )

Obviously Hitler is doing the same thing going east, but he doesn't have to work so hard at it, because he isn't starting with a thousand miles of worthless deathtrap hell (much less areas forted up solidly to prevent fast movements of crazy-large troops -- Stalin has been destroying the modern defensive wonder of the "Stalin Line" for ten years by the time 1941 rolls around.) But even then, Hitler knows that it would take a hundred years to make western Russia profitable to Germany: that isn't why he's going.

There's one obvious drawback to making your border areas logistically great for your armies to move forward (not so much "around" for defensive shuffling) and springboard off for invasion, of course -- a drawback that factors into FoGEmp and also other games with good logistic simulation (like the Hearts of Iron series). If someone else has an invading army on your doorstep, and they invade first, you're screwed! -- the invaders catch you out of defensive position, roll up your logistic lines raiding all your army supplies, and race into your backfield along the routes you were using to bring your troops easily and quickly up to the front! You'd better hope you have lottttsss of backfield, and two or three or four strategic reserves!

The Successor State Superpowers have similar problems and temptations, at a similar scale.  :coolsmiley:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!

devoncop

Turn 24

A turn where the die was cast in the Levant as Judean troops stormed the Capital region of Nabatea, ignoring warnings and proceeded to starve out the garrison. To every action...there is a reaction.

Significant moves in north western Europe where the Belgae have moved decisively across the channel into southern Britain and are now bordering the Britonae in the central belt....to add to the Britonae woes news punitive tax laws introduced have sparked riots among their restive population.......

In Spain the Iberii are making excellent progress against both the Lusitanii and the Celtiberi, with the latter being reduced to just two regions in the Hispania Ulterior province.

An interesting quirk is that at present imperilled Bactria, suffering greatly from the rampages of the Saka horsemen and Dacia are now generating more Legacy per turn than any other nation in the game...... :notworthy:

In ferocious fighting in the East Maurya has been reduced to just 10 disperate regions by the Seleucid/Antigonid unholy Alliance .

In a surprising move Rhodes continues to resist against a determined Antigonid siege...... :clap:
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=534&t=92000

Link to Field of Glory Empires MP forum with Slitherine Games

JasonPratt

Only more with me
Possibly could thwart
Qatabaian threat.
Ranging now to rule.


The fact of the matter is that Qataba (according to my check of their home territory) can bootstrap itself up faster than I can for the foreseeable future. They can afford more troops (including in manpower and metal), and their military can grow faster. Theoretically I can catch up and pass them eventually, since I have two territories and they only have one. But until then I'm vulnerable to problems.

One solution is to set up some skirms for home defense and hope for the best by sending my regular infantry with light cav support to take independents nearby -- one of them to my north is about to pick up their second worker's worth of population; and another one isn't terribly far from their third. But the slightly more populous desert area (both are simply oases right now) borders the Qats, and the slightly less populated area borders the Arabians who are MUCH more expanded with potential (and maybe actual) development.

Theoretically the most cost-effective way to gain some (eventual) speed to overtake and pass Qatabian limits, would be to ask Egypt for that anchorage area already. Which would involve a quick phony war and then peace again. I'm not happy with this idea...  :buck2:
ICEBREAKER THESIS CHRONOLOGY! -- Victor Suvorov's Stalin Grand Strategy theory, in lots and lots of chronological order...
Dawn of Armageddon -- narrative AAR for Dawn of War: Soulstorm: Ultimate Apocalypse
Survive Harder! -- Two season narrative AAR, an Amazon Blood Bowl career.
PanzOrc Corpz Generals -- Fantasy Wars narrative AAR, half a combined campaign.
Khazâd du-bekâr! -- narrative dwarf AAR for LotR BfME2 RotWK campaign.
RobO Q Campaign Generator -- archived classic CMBB/CMAK tool!