4X strategy is a particularly challenging genre, given the number of dynamics at play. It’s not just that you need to give players a good military strategy experience. You also need to make the economic system interesting and strategic in its own right, implement a diplomacy system that isn’t easy to manipulate, and then make it authentic to whatever time period you’ve set the game. There are great examples – Crusader Kings or Nobunaga’s Ambition, for example. But it’s a particularly hard slog to bring all of that together for any developer who doesn’t have some deep resources available to it.
Field of Glory: Kingdoms will be Slitherine’s next play in the genre, and from what I’ve played so far, the ambition and understanding of the genre are both there. Developed by the specialist AGEOD team, this game takes plays from 1054 in Europe, and then covers over 200 years of history, concluding with the desperate effort to hold back the Mongols at the end.
The dominant players in the games I’ve played in the scenarios I’ve messed around with have been England, France and the Holy Roman Empire, but there are also plenty of minor nations to test yourself with, such as Scotland or Aragon. The numbers that the developer is citing for the full game is impressive too: 375 factions, 325 units, 600 buildings, and 90 cultural traits.
It’s not just about the military strength. You need to maintain Authority over your territories to keep control. This acts like a resource that fluctuates, and if you go about declaring war with impunity and let your nation become destabilised, it is liable to descent into chaos.
That’s just one idea that AGEOD has cribbed from the likes of Paradox to spin into its own take. You also need to grapple with dynasties and make sure that you keep your succession lines strong. There’s also a religion system. If your neighbour belongs to a different religion, wars are more likely to break out. Furthermore, if you lose too many holy cities, a Crusade of Jihad can form, and as anyone who knows anything about history knows, that was not a good time for anyone.
What is perhaps most intriguing, however, is that Field of Glory: Kingdoms has Field of Glory 2 integration built into it. Field of Glory 2 is a tactical battle-level strategy game, meaning that when units clash in Field of Glory: Kingdoms, you can export that battle, load it up in Field of Glory 2, play through the battle there, and then load the results back up into Kingdoms. By default combat in Kingdoms plays out automatically, so I feel like there are times I could have helped my armies perform better.
Unfortunately, I don’t actually own Field of Glory 2 (I will remedy that before writing a full review), and the whole “export, play and then import” approach does sound more clumsy than the elegant transition between the regional empire-building and on-the-ground tactics of something like the Total War series. Then again, Field of Glory’s strategy is turn-based, and I do prefer that to real-time strategy.
I do think that Field of Glory: Kingdoms will struggle to make a big splash. Nobunaga’s Ambition and Crusader Kings is on everything at this point, offers an almost obscene amount of depth itself, and has some lovely presentation. AGEOD’s, by comparison, is much more functional. It’s easy to make your way around the interface (after completing the tutorial at any rate), and follow along with the amount of information being thrown at you. It just doesn’t have the gorgeous aesthetics that the higher-profile 4Xes do. The loading screens, which depict medieval art, are lovely though.
As with any 4X, it takes a long time to know if you truly love a game like Field of Glory: Kingdoms or not. It takes many hours of play to properly gauge whether balancing is calibrated well when in such complex games with such nuanced and interconnected systems. But after a few hours of puttering around, I am impressed by what I’ve seen in Field of Glory: Kingdoms. It’s clearly a genre play and people that are deep into the genre will consider it, but I have faith that the people behind it are such veterans of that genre that they’ll do both the history and military and diplomatic context justice.
