what a beautiful game.

50 years have past and life is becoming very interesting. ( one turn depicts a year of playing time )

With the extra focus on education and commercial activities Kolchis is now a regional player with an influence spanning miles and miles away. The capital remains a brooding place of backstabbing, ideology and world expanding idea's. The palace library is talk of the town as far away as Rome or even Egypt with scholars of renown visiting from all around the world to work on their studies.

With a military campaign against the Alani just done Kolchis now is in a position to dominate its surroundings. As you can see three armies have been into play decimating armies and fortifications in a matter of years. Alanis only chance was to accept a place as a civilization of former glory now firmly in the hands of our king as a client state

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/96f64f19356ace7620f38807c80b69f94a84b7f3.jpg

Of the three armies two will return back to the home nation. One will take its place up as regional army of honor after they quelled a minor rebellion ( really, if i don't hold back a full army at the capital its not to say what will happen, from a bribed city guard towards outbreaks of golgothic proportions in the city streets )

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/9858e22488a90454607337dab00a7da94a3e76aa.jpg

The other one will position its self on the southern borders of the empire for whatever might happen in the future.

The third army will go on a expedition claiming lands now in the hands of independently roaming tribes to see if we can force them to cooperate. Maybe i will even grant Alani a piece of their old territory to see if a bit of honey will let them be as warm wax in mah hands

https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2020/08/98fad4154cf4b5aa218a61864a63358b793889f8.jpg

This game feels as if its a child born from the hands of a random civ game married to some triple A arpg raised by his grandparents in good healty loving enviroment!

Minor Update

Bosporus seems to be essential to the survival of Kolchis. With emerging red and green blobs from the east ( sawa, kawa , partha ) yellow blue and green from the south ) yellow is egypt that much i know ( and rome convincingly growing to the west nothing is to be said for sure

I doubt Rome will amount to much...

How come ? They are number one in legacy score, lot of decadence going on that much is true, low decadence scores will contribute to a high amount of inner conflicts, corruption etc so they would have to deal with that, not sure if the game is configured in a way that nations will make the most of it depending on the situations governed by the will of the gods or that it tries and follow historical progress

just decided on checking a timeline photo and it does not seem they are far of their historical path

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/photos/9866440/Romans_expansion.png?1491404833

Yes, I would be just as wrong as those who said the same words back in the day in real life historical time. It was meant as a joke :-)

oooh lol, well good one!

I only know of that spartan machocisme as long as my spear etc etc etc , and from the game learned about laconisme, another spartan province who's ruler excelled in very short answers to anyone, amazing how such feets managed to survive into modern day language eh?

anyways, turn 210 .. struggling with income and loyalty, i fear i need to setup whorehouses and gambling dens since they seem to provide the highest population loyalty gain while at the same time increasing crime, marginal behavior etc etc

and with the decision of aiding pontus against the combined force of Macedonia, Pergamun and Kappadokia war really did broke out on a full scale. Luckely the Alani and Comagene joined in. I can't really move armies from up North but lets see what happens. there is enough manpower and material stock to raise another army in a split second , figure of speech

It nice when you throw someone off a tall spire the game actually puts a body at the bottom of it when you came down even though it's a different map.

Tyranny! Tyranny! Tyranny! Tyranny!

Fyi, you can zoom in further to the battlefield than what the default setting actually allows. And, you don't even have to edit any .ini files in order to do so. While in-game, just press Shift and 3 at the same time (press them again to return), and the game camera immediately puts you closer to the map than you could previously. Maybe you have been aware of this feature for a long time, maybe not. Either way, have fun with both Field of Glory 2 and Empires! :)

Anyway, here's another Field of Glory 2 picture. Title: "That moment when no matter what you do, you can't seem to ever stop the inevitable" Or in short, the most ancient fear of every general throughout history.

(What basically happens is that the unit with the blue banner inside the red circle (not exactly circle) I drew is about to butt flank my unit with the red banner that's close to breaking, indicated by the yellow stripe taking about one third of the red banner)

(Field of Glory 2)

oke, good to know though who would want to zoom in any closer ;) my next aim is to have huge numbers pitted against each other, 100 vs 100 or something in that area of numbers.... that will be the most troublesome battle ever ( 4/5 hours i presume )

Had some thoughts about the famous battle of Hannibal where he destroyed 2 gigantic roman armies by holding a line of wich the center would gradually fall back luring the romans inside of this trap soon to be formed. frontline romans where eager since they thought they would win and with the way how their formations where setup the backline only could follow as cattle, at a certain point the've reached a point where Hannibal could not outstretch his lines any further and this lead to the backline basically pushing forward against there own troops, leading to situations you only see these days with concerts, fans going unconscious etc. At a certain point Hannibal send a message to his relative who lead the cavalry.... they must have hidden well out of sight range and they smashed right into the hindsite of the roman combined forces.... the point that every general fears aye! those things seem only to be feasable on the battlefields of the old though i'm sure modern day warfare still knows its share of communication and ego blunders

When it comes to Hannibal, he's always been famous for his encirclement tactics, which he showed in the battles he took a part in such as the Battle of Trebia and the most famous one, the Battle of Cannae. From time to time, I come to wonder how was it possible for him to be able to pull off an encirclement on his enemies again and again haha.

That said, I actually suggested to the game's devs a mechanic that I believed would grant us players the ability to pull off the tactics that Hannibal did, which is a feature that will allow the players to covertly order their units in their own respective first turns (not during the preliminary formation stage) to slowly fall back while in combat (just like what you described), rather than having to simply rely on the possibility of your units getting pushed back by the enemies, which in itself is way too uncertain. If this feature got implemented into the game, which I really hope it did, FoG2 players would definitely be able to play more cunning tricks to make the battles more interesting.

that sounds like a great idea though i have trouble envisioning it in fog 2. in a total war game it is more or less doable but the scale is to small and soldiers numbers dwindle to fast for that to actually be a sustainable tactic. a shield wall option would already be something. Maybe that the designers of that new american civil war game hold the answer for the next generation of classical war games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/654890/Grand_Tactician_The_Civil_War_18611865/

this is an exciting time to live and see what the improvements in hardware will mean for the semi-realistic type of computer wargames

i belief wargamer did a review but i can't find it in a hurry ;)
https://www.wargamer.com/articles/upcoming-war-games-2020/

What game is this?

Yeah, I agree, they can keep the limit at the 2 mb, but don't limit the size per picture. I mean, it isn't hard to bring it to below 500 kb, but it is just as you said, like in the stone age.

Sure, you can always use some image host so you don't even need to bother with compression.