The Sons of Ragnar Lothbrok

Tags

Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bernard Cornwell, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, Medieval: Total War, The Last Kingdom, The Vaselines, Total War, Vikings

This exercise with historical games began when I first started watching Vikings. I think I was originally watching on the History Channel; each new episode as it came out. When I first heard Vikings was going to be broadcast, I was a little nervous about a) how the History Channel might fumble the development of a historical-based drama and b) the obviously over-stylized interpretation of the period in question. As I watched a handful of the episodes, I wasn’t thrilled, but neither was I entirely put off. Eventually I lost track of the shows, as one often does when trying to catch things on the TV’s schedule.

Around that same time, I happened to be reading one of the books in The Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. It was a the combination of Cornwell’s writing and the depiction of a shield wall on Vikings that made me decide I wanted to find a game that would go with the experience. My first attempt was a using Medieval 2: Total War and a mod-package called The Last Kingdom, apparently made by someone inspired in a similar fashion as I. From there, I got interested in the Wolves from the Sea expansion for Field of Glory, which generated its own long and sordid tale. Worse yet, now that I finally have that expansion in hand, there were no battles created for the period of the Great Heathen Army or Alfred the Great. In any case, before I got very far, I ended up focusing on the Cold War period, rather than the Age of Vikings, and never got back to it.

Now, it seems, Vikings has come a full circle for me. I’ve watched up through the awkwardly-named Season 402, wherein the Sons of Ragnar Lothbrok (as defined by this series) threaten to intrude upon the story line of The Last Kingdom and the other books of The Saxon Chronicles, itself now a TV Series.

My initial misgivings aside, this is a period that’s ripe for a fictionalized treatment. Actually, with The Last Kingdom and Cornwall’s other works, I’ve always been impressed by his treatment of Dark Age history. Stories of Ragnar Lothbrok and his offspring survive today in the form of myth and legend. The primary source for this era, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is too thin on detail to create from it a modern novel-style narrative without a whole lot of elaboration and speculation. If the paucity of details weren’t bad enough, the accuracy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been called into question, at least in terms of some of is assertions. Being written in the court of Alfred the Great, one would have to expect an interpretation history favorable to his reign, as opposed to just a strict record of facts. To some extent, the self-history of the Saxons can be cross-referenced with the oral histories of the Norse via the Tale of Ragnar’s Sons. The Norse story, however, is clearly mythological in nature. Historians question whether Ragnar Lothbrok was was even a single personage, as opposed to an iconic representation of Scandinavian virtue. One can freely mix a story about the “real” Ragnar with mystical elements without worrying to much about “accuracy” because nobody really knows what an accurate version would look like.

Even still, one wonders at the necessity of shoving every Norse legend into a single TV show. Ragnar’s character on Vikings not only sires his sons through his wife Aslaug, as is documented in the sources, but his wife previous to Aslaug (when he is but a farmer) becomes the also-legendary Lagertha. His life-long friend Floki, having created the first fleet of boats capable of sailing to England, turns out to be none other than the historical Flóki Vilgerðarson, the discoverer and founder of the Norse colony on Iceland. We also find out that King Alfred the Great was, in fact, the bastard son of Queen Judith*. Not content to have this Judith marry two successive kings (father and son!), as her namesake did, this Judith not only has a long-running affair with the her father-in-law**, she has also produced a son with one Athelstan, one of the few survivors of the massacre at Lindisfarne Abbey, the first Viking raid upon the island of Britannia. Here, naturally, we credit the raid to Ragnar Lothbrok. Granted, these historical events are not well pinned down and did, in fact, all occur in the generation or two in which the story takes place. Nevertheless, it remains quite a stretch to weave them into a single familial narrative.

A little more problematically, from a math standpoint, Ragnar’s brother, Rollo, takes part along with Ragnar in both the raid on Lindisfarne (793) and the Siege of Paris (845). For Rollo to have accomplished all that he does in the show, from raiding Lindisfarne to besieging Paris to being crowned Duke of Normandy and founding the dynasty that would go on to rule England (as well as Sicily), he would have had to have lived to be around 140 years old.

The departure from the historical would seem to be particularly ironic by the fact that this is a History Channel production. One would expect a fidelity to the historical as a top priority. Of course, when Vikings first premiered, the History Channel was also running programs like Ancient Aliens and Pawn Stars. While long ridiculed for its seeming mockery of the channel’s name, by the time Vikings came out (and certainly by the time it was popular), nobody expected much history from the History Channel. The creator of Vikings, for his part, defended his decisions to heavily dramatize his story. He claimed that an exciting, albeit ahistorical show, would draw far more interest in actual Viking history than a dry and historically-accurate series. In this, history (so to speak) has backed his claim.

Particularly given that the depiction of small-force combat was one of the things I liked about Vikings, I’m a little sad to say that it doesn’t scale up. The portrayal of the larger battles, at least the ones I’ve seen so far, does not particularly impress. The emphasis is on the stock-fantasy “epic” battles, where the heroes smite the nameless hoards before facing off with each other in a one-on-one duel. Part of the problem is that there aren’t records of the battles whereby Ragnar’s sons conquered England. It is possible, even, that no big, decisive battle did occur. The campaign could easily have consisted of weaker armies retreating before stronger ones and a series of sieges and plunder.

Unfortunately, this inability to realistically visualize the period extends to the gaming world.

No One Else Can Take My Place

One game that is explicit in modeling the Sons of Ragnar and the Great Heathen Army is Crusader Kings II. A little over a year after the initial release, Crusader Kings‘ fifth expansion extended the start date for the game backwards to 867 AD, shortly after the start of the Great Heathen Army’s campaign. Other mechanics were added to add unique capabilities to the Vikings and to pagans in general. The technology system was revamped to allow for the greater range of advancement that will occur when you extend the potential length of the game backwards towards the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ivar the Boneless, supported by Sigurd, leads the Viking army in a war against East Anglia. It isn’t really 865 AD.

I’ve begun a new campaign, for academic purposes of course, that has me playing as Alfred the Great at the beginning of the Viking scenario. That means my older brother, Æthelred, is still king and I might expect to inherit his title if he dies reasonably soon. Of course, Crusader Kings can rapidly diverge from the historical formula so I could just as easily find myself fighting it out for control of Wessex as saving and uniting England. Doing my part to spoil the historical flavor up front, I’m arranging a marriage between myself and a Frankish princess, hoping to catapult my fortunes forward via continental politics.

The Saxons raise their forces to confront Ivar’s horde. 24,000+ Heathens is pretty great indeed.

Whatever happens politically, the challenge of this scenario is the Viking threat. Sons of Ragnar Ivar the Boneless and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye are leading the Great Heathen Army in the vicinity of York, a force that exceeds 24,000 soldiers when all totaled. While the very name of this force brings to mind a vast, angry horde, modern scholars’ estimates are far lower. A figure under 1000 has been arrived at by calculating the documented carrying capacity times the recorded number of boats. The consensus produces figures in the low 1000s.

Why Crusader Kings starts the Vikings off with an army roughly ten times the size it should be is a matter for speculation. I don’t think its as simple as they had some bad data. More likely, a part of it is the necessary balance to give the Viking forces the military power to accomplish what they historically accomplished. Within the game mechanics, historical outcomes may well require a force that is perhaps ten times the size of the real one.

I don’t think it is just the Vikings, either. Across the board, the Dark Age armies seem overpowered in a number of ways. It seems easier to raise large forces of 10s of 1000s of soldiers than historical data suggest it should be. The seasonal limits on military campaigns are also very weakly enforced. In reality, soldiers would have been sent home for the winter to avoid battling the elements. Not only that, they probably would have also been sent home during planting and harvest, so that war time wouldn’t interfere with unduly with their kingdom’s food supply. Crusader Kings, instead, uses the basic 4X mechanics of upkeep costs to the player’s treasury combined with war weariness calculations. It creates practical limits to the raising of armies, but not limits based on the same factors as were (likely) most important in reality.

I think I’ve complained about the seasons and weather before. If not, I’ll complain again. Crusader Kings (and the EU family of games) get points for modeling weather and the seasons. But only a few. The arrival of winter in the northern climates should, more often than not, put a dead halt to military action until the spring thaw. Instead, the way the game handles it – increasing attrition during winter months – makes it just one more “cost” to manage when maintaining an army. It seems to me that you’re more successful keeping your army in the field and just feeding money and reinforcements to it through the supply system versus actually losing the 4-5 months out of the year required to cycle your armies home and back with the weather.

Although that’s one of my persistent complaints, lets just return to the army size and with it go back to something I said about Medieval II: Total War. Contrasting with Rome: Total War, medieval-period battles were much smaller than those of the classical age such that a “typical” fight could be played with the Medieval II units at a one-to-one ratio between rendered and modeled men. That goes doubly so for the Dark Ages, where the ability to support large armies was even less than in the tail-end of the High Medieval period. Remember, I was first drawn into Vikings by its depiction of shield wall combat in a battle consisting of hundreds of participants, not thousands – something at the low end of Medieval‘s range. The drawback, of course, is that Medieval II isn’t (nor is it really meant to be) much of a simulator of realistic combat.

The Last Kingdom is a comprehensive mod that includes a cinematic introduction.

Enter the Medieval II mod, The Last Kingdom. I first came across this overhaul of the Medieval‘s Kingdoms sequel many years ago. I recall reading introductory material from, I think, The Last Kingdom‘s developer’s website, which I can’t locate today. Whether I just can’t find it or whether the site has been taken down, I don’t know. This stuff is 10 years old by now. I’ll tell you what I remember, but half of how I remember it is probably wrong.

I believe the developer is, himself, in academics as a profession. His intent was to make a strictly historical mod, accurately portraying aspects of life the Viking Age. He found himself limited in that goal by the mechanics of Total War, and so the result is a mixed bag of historical fidelity and Total War mechanics. He also uses, as a major source, Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom. As a result, in addition to the historical elements he has some of Cornwell’s fictional or speculative characters participating in the campaigns.

The modified elements run the gamut of what conversions typically do. The artwork and skins are redone to provide a more authentic-looking Viking/Dark Age depiction of clothing, armor, and weaponry. New unit types are introduced to distinguish between the various Northern European cultures. The build-tree has also been redone to provide a set of buildings and technological advances more appropriate to the period. Lastly, the stats of the units have been altered to change the feeling of the real-time battles.

Non-campaign battles are built using army points, with random or automatic unit selection.

Originally, my interest in this was for historical battles, to the extent that we can find such. Like I said above, Medieval seems to be right at the spot where it is capable of representing the vast majority of organized fighting from it’s period as a one-to-one ratio.

Modifications include the graphics, unit types, and parameters that govern battle resolution. It looks nice.

My initial impressions of this mod were very good. Normally, Total War battles are frantic affairs. Units race around the field, often executing contorted commands frantically clicked in by the player. Almost any realism mod is going to start by slowing everything down. This mod does that, and more. I won’t speculate on exactly how it was done but the shield walls act like shield walls. When similar units meet, they’ll stand in line bashing away at each other for a long time. Eventually, one side or the other will begin to dominate. In reality, shield wall combat was exhausting but not particularly deadly as long as the line held. Once a line broke, the fleeing army might well get slaughtered unless they were protected by other, intact forces.

This is still Total War, so the downside of the more deliberate battles is there is a tendency to fight to the last man. I’m guessing the casualties are ahistorically high, but that is pretty much guesswork all around as we’re not going to be finding detailed battlefield reports circa 865 AD. A second major problem I have with this as a tool for fighting one-off historical battles is my inability to get those battles set up in the game engine.

I’ve long had trouble using the scenario editor in Medieval II: Kingdoms and this mod seems to exacerbate the problems that are already there. The random battles are fairly easy to use, especially (if you are trying to get a historical setup) since you can hand-pick the armies on both sides of the field. Two issues conspire to make this less than fully satisfactory, both obvious when comparing experience of playing Total War in the campaign mode. First, there is no way to “carry over” your army, from either a victory or a defeat, into a future battle. You can construct a new army, but all units will be at full strength. This is particularly noticeable in that the campaign engine manages casualties and experience, allowing your army to be reshaped by the battles in which it engages. Likewise, the terrain. In the campaign game, the battle maps are created based upon where the encounter takes place on the strategic map. In the single battle mode, you need to choose from a more limited set of maps, which can detract from the experience. For example, in that last screenshot, I didn’t actually want to fight the battle as a contested river crossing, it just seemed to turn out that way.

This heightened realism mod, whatever faults it has, does seem to be quite a find for Dark Ages tactical battles. The larger problem is the lack of historical information on battles to which to apply the engine. Information is scarce regarding the details of battles. Similarly, there are no strategic or operational engines that focus on realism. The Last Kingdom does add new life to its Viking-centric campaign, but at the end of the day it remains a Total War game. For Crusader Kings, it does a descent and immersive job of portraying the politics of the time but, as I’ve identified early in the article, it is probably pretty far from being an accurate operational engine for the Viking invasion of England.

*This character is a fictional daughter Ælla of Northumbria, who may or may not have had daughters. The name and some of the narrative is based on Judith of Flanders, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor.

**The mixing of fiction and fantasy can become confusing. Judith, the real Judith, was the second wife of Æthelwulf, son of Ecgberht, not his first as was shown in the series. As his second wife, the once-and-future kings of England were not her own children, but rather her stepsons. Indeed, it was cause for court intrigue as some wondered whether Judith’s children by Æthelwulf, being the grand-children of the Holy Roman Emperor, might claim the thrown of Wessex over their older half-brothers. As it turned out, she had no children in this, her first marriage, nor in her second to Æthelwulf’s son Æthelbald, who is left out of the Vikings series entirely (see the discussion on time compression in the main text).

Unwanted Relations

Tags

Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, The Accursed Kings, The Strangled Queen

How to deal with them.

In Crusader Kings 2, outright assassinating a troublesome relative often ends badly. The assassination may fail, leaving you even worse off. Even if it succeeds, all your other relatives (as well as unrelated vassals) get antsy about your tendency towards murder and become that much harder to govern.

What is a lot easier, however, is imprisoning people. A well-placed relative with claims on your own titles often gets a bit uppity when they feel they aren’t getting the respect they deserve. In turn, this tends to make them do things that violate either the law or just good form. While outright killing the person is very difficult and even fighting them in open battle tends to be problematic, one can generally imprison a proven transgressor with little blow-back.

Once in prison, your options open up. If you’re short of money, you can just use a little bit of extortion and release them in suitably short order in exchange for gold. However, if removing that person for good would substantially improve your situation, you’ll not want to see them released. You could just keep them imprisoned indefinitely and wait for nature to take its course or you could hasten things along. Imprisonment can vary in severity from something more like house arrest, to a standard lockup, to keeping the prisoner in such horrible circumstances that an untimely death becomes quite likely. Setting up a conspiracy to actively snuff out a prisoner under your control (while making it look like an accident) is also much easier than going after a free man.

In my Crusader Kings games, I’ve tried most of these options. It usually takes me considerable longer than I expect it to, but I’ve had the occasional success.

Thus a sense of deja vu as I wrap up the second book in the Accursed Kings series, The Strangled Queen. Depending on what version of events you want to accept, one or more of the Crusader Kings options come to life. Officially Queen Marguerite, wife of Louis X, died in prison from a cold as a result of the poor conditions within her prison. She had been sent away after having been accused and convicted of adultery in the the the Tour de Nesle Affair. Of course it is just possible, isn’t it, that someone who wanted Marguerite out of the way could have hastened that death along with a little foul play? The sooner she was gone for good, the better, particularly once there was a replacement queen waiting in the bullpen.

What I’m coming to appreciate about the series is the author’s fascination with seemingly small decisions that have nation-moving consequences. Something done for temporary political advantage, or even just because the mood strikes, might have the consequence of plunging France into one hundred years of war. It both makes an interesting story and an interesting way to foreshadow the narrative.

I also have noticed (and appreciate) the style of the book where the author is telling the 700-year-old story, but speaking to the reader in the present day (well, 1950s in the case, but close enough). It’s a small touch that adds to the readability of this well-written and well-translated series.

You See? Death Comes to Us All

Tags

A Game of Thrones, Braveheart, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, George R. R. Martin, Humphrey Hare, Isabella, Les Rois maudits, Maurice Druon, Neuchâtel, The Accursed Kings, The Iron King, Tour de Nesle

The title of this article is a line from Braveheart. It is delivered by soon-to-be Queen Isabella to the dying Edward I. While witnessing William Wallace’s execution, she tells him that her unborn child is not the offspring of her husband, Edward II, but is the result of a tryst with Wallace. She lets the King go to his grave knowing that his line will die with him.

Now, we all know that fictionalization of history can be used to add character and depth to a series of historical facts. We can’t know what the kings and queens of the 11th and 12th century said to each other, so a film must create entirely fictional dialog. This is understandable. Often, we don’t mind a dramatization going even further afield, advancing a compelling drama that capture the flavor of the times, if not the details. But sometimes a situation goes beyond even the absurd.

When William Wallace was executed, in 1305, Isabella was ten-years-old and still living in France, as of yet still 2-3 year away from her marriage to Edward II. It is unlikely she ever met Wallace. But on the outside chance that she did (when he was visiting France seeking political support), she was probably closer to the age of 5. Although Edward I arranged the betrothal of his own son and the daughter of Philip IV of France, the father had passed on before the marriage ever took place and he, likely, never met his future daughter-in-law either.

Stuffing Isabella into the Braveheart story is entirely unnecessary. She makes an interesting subject on her own and has been the subject of dramatizations starting from Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer and continuing to the present day. It is one of those present-day accounts I will turn to now.

Lost in Translation

When I was young, I had a bad experience with foreign novels.

There is no language, except English, where I have the proficiency to read anything of complexity. So any non-English novel that I want to read, I must read a translation of it. The first problem is that relatively few books are translated. I don’t have a handy source for my speculations, but I think that the number of non-English books published each year, which are subsequently translated to English and made available in the American market, is in the single-digits (percentage-wise). I’m talking in general, not classic literature, where the scholarly treatment is considerably different. I would think 5% would be a reasonable figure to use.

Once a book is translated, there is then another factor. Not only is the quality of the writing important, but the quality of the translation as well. Again, with classical works, academics will, over generations, work on refining translations to capture various aspects of the original language. But for a popular work, there is likely one translator, hired by a publisher, to do the work. That leaves us, as English-only consumers, as dependent on the translator as we are on the original author for a quality read. A really good translator needs to be not only proficient in both languages, but also should be a skilled writer (of the translated genre, one might imagine) in his own right as well as something of a literary critic.

I honestly don’t remember what caused it, but for years I simply assumed all translated books were going to be tough reads, and avoided them wherever possible. This finally changed in college when I was assigned a rather nice translation of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. But even with my prejudice lifted, there are still so many native language books to read that it is rare for me to take up a non-native work.

An Iron King for an Iron Throne?

I digress so because I was looking at some of the more modern dramatizations of the life of Isabella and I found that there are many. One that stood out for me was the author Maurice Druon and his series Les Rois maudits in that, despite being something like six decades old, the novels are receiving current attention. Most noticeable, the author and the series come recommended by George R. R. Martin, citing it as an inspiration for A Game of Thrones.

This last would seem to be more than just coincidental. As Martin discussed his appreciation for Druon and his works, the series was being re-released in English by Martin’s publisher. The “original Game of Thrones” line could be put on covers and sold to fans waiting, desperate and disappointed, for the next book in the actual Song of Fire and Ice series. Whatever the behind the scenes, it works out well for me. Instead of having to try to find used copies of translations from the 1960s, I can order a newly-printed, English version of The Iron King to be delivered to me two days’ hence and enjoy these books that were, until a couple of years ago, decades out of print.

The book is well written and an enjoyable read. This is a compliment not only to the author, but to the translator. The latter, Humphrey Hare, is the original translator of the book; it does not appear that the series was re-translated for the current printing, except that the final book in the series, which was never translated in the first place.

The opening book of the series ties together the execution of the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar (Jacques de Molay) with the crises of succession that began with the Tour de Nesle affair, the death of Philip IV of France, and the questions of inheritance that ultimate fueled the Hundred Years’ War. Historical events are convincingly, while also entertainingly, told. They are also almost certainly not accurate.

The relationship between Edward II and Isabella, as I said, has been developed over the centuries, creating a narrative of how the “She-wolf of France*” was ignored by her weak and homosexual husband, leading her to resent, hate, and ultimately kill him. While she did indeed play a major role in dethroning her own husband, there is plenty of evidence that their marriage was a happy and loving one. They had, together, four children and, when apart, addressed each other in  letters using affectionate pet names. Written signs of this affection extend even beyond the date when Edward had abdicated and was imprisoned. Isabella’s role in his death is by no means proven. More likely, established story of today is a combination of political rumor of the time combined with fanciful storytelling from future generations.

Even the titular “curse” may be a combination of a several different, yet similar events. There are even historians that doubt the veracity of the accusations of adultery. The proof of them are confessions obtained by torture, which is not the most reliable source of information.

As improbable as the narrative of Les Rois maudits matching the true events of the day may be, it is nevertheless impossible to prove that things did not take place in such a manner. The story fully fleshes out the tale in a way that is believable, compelling, and fun.

Agreed to Have a Battle

The Tour de Nesle was a political event which would not have counterparts in wargames. It is easy to trace the impact of what happened into the future of Europe. For example, with the parentage of the grandchildren of Phillip IV in doubt, French inheritance would come to emphasize the male relatives over closer relatives through the female relations. The difference in French and English interpretations led to Edward III’s claim to the French throne, a claim that led to the Hundred Years War. It is harder to find a companion game to share in the flavor and timeframe of The Iron King.

Instead, I’ll return to the alternate timeline that I had started earlier. My House Neuchâtel continues to rule Upper Burgundy with an eye to either independence or further prominence within the Holy Roman Empire. By this point we are obviously pretty far afield from any direct relation to historical events.

In fact, in this reality, we find ourselves with the Holy Roman Empire at war with England. King George (350 years too early) of England has managed to get himself excommunicated.  Holy Roman Emperor Bořivoj Přemyslid declared war on the Heretic, probably with good reason, but those reasons weren’t shared with me. I saw an opportunity to advance my position.

I managed to “discover” that I had a strong claim on the County of Auvergne, near enough to my coveted “Greater Burgundy,” but currently under the jurisdiction of King George. Having done so, I offered to send my forces in support of Emperor Boris. Now, as far as I know, my claim was rather irrelevant to the whole process. Unlike Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings does not allow a negotiated peace drawing from all sorts of potential concessions. The conclusion of a war results in exactly the peace conditions that were specified when the war was declared. However, I figured coming in on the side of the Emperor would improve my standing in his court, earn me some prestige from my victories, as well as smack England around making it easy to capture Auvergne in some future war. On top of that, the Emperor seemed like he could use the help.

August 1319. I have sent my armies into Auvergne to occupy the castle to which I claim title. While I got smacked around a bit at first, I managed to win a siege. The Emperor’s main army, besieging Toulouse, is about to face a larger English relief force.

This setup leads a to a battle that is interesting from a strategic perspective in that it engages the vast majority of the troops available to both sides. It is also interesting in that the outcome is by no means preordained. Because of the close match, I’m going to once again create a tactical version of the battle in Field of Glory.

The armies have engaged. The English have a slight advantage in numbers, but the Germans are operating from a semi-permanent siege camp.

Bringing my Burgundians into the battle gets the two armies very close to evenly-matched in numbers. As the main battle commences, my money was against the Empire. The English have a slight edge in numbers and in organization, although other factors work against them. Reconstructing this fight in FoG(U) creates an even bigger gap.

I array my army with the flanks anchored against two large hills. It proved to be sufficient to stop the English.

My first and obvious mistake was that I chose a map too big for the armies and the battle. It having been a while since I set up a random battle, I thought the two armies sounded really big. In fact, they are to the large end of medium. With the large battlefield, it took 7 turns for the two armies to move forward into a reasonable engagement distance. As we’ve seen before, the FoG(U) AI moves aggressively forward, without attempting to keep his armies in line. I, on the other hand, did my best to retain my formation until engagement. In addition to its size, this terrain is probably too flat and open for Southwestern France.  In FoG(U), random battle maps are not autogenerated. You must chose from a subset of the existing scenario library.

The last time I tried this, I thought the haphazard AI attack would be their undoing. It turned out not to be. In this case, my own line held together throughout the battle, and I was able to defeat the enemy as the waves came at me. In the end I won a solid victory.

The English line have broken, and the remnants of their armies flee the field. I cut them down with my pursuit.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the tactical result again matched the strategic result. Now, I’m not saying this is anything but dumb luck. While there may be factors that predicted a German win in Crusader Kings, there is nothing that translated those factors to the tactical battle. I just find it surprising that this exercise has worked, now, twice in a row.

Death Comes to Us All

In the end, everyone died. First King George, then the Emperor, and the my own Duke. The Emperor’s death, in particular, shook all of Europe. With the child heir now nominal Emperor, factions rose up across Europe trying to place a more capable successor on the imperial throne. Suddenly, the war with a now-dead excommunicated English king seemed like a minor worry. England’s armies had been beaten down enough that, while they were left to retake their lost castles rather unopposed, a truce was eventually declared with no clear winner (a White Peace in EU terms).

Somewhere in here, my aging Duke died leaving  his inheritance to his grandson. The claim on the English county died with the elder Duke, leaving the whole episode an exercise in pointlessness. Welcome to the twelfth century.

*The epithet was used by Shakespeare in History of Henry VI, Part III to describe Margaret of Anjou, but was reapplied to Isabella by Thomas Gray in 1757. Isabella is probably most associated with the term today.

Benevolence of the Butcher

Tags

Adam Smith, city builder, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, left-handed mouse, Patrician II, Patrician III, Patrician IV

The game Patrician II was released in 2000. It came at a time of popularity for trading games.

The favorite setting for such games seemed to be the Caribbean and the colonial period. The various towns in the Caribbean, controlled by their colonial masters, provided an economy connecting by shipping. You played as a ship’s captain, capable of “buying low, selling high” to make a steady income transporting goods between nodes. This was integrated with a possible career as a pirate, either stealing goods from merchants or engaging in the various colonial wars as a privateer. Sid Meier created his Pirates! in 1987, but by 2000 there were a number of similar games based the then-modern “strategy” interface.

Patrician II was a variation on the theme that moved the setting to the north of Europe during the 1300s. Obviously, it is a sequel. The original Patrician was a similarly-themed game, but with a very different looking interface, released in 1992. I’ve never actually played it. The focus on Northern Europe means you now are one of a number of competing merchants in the Hanseatic League cities of Germany, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The open warfare of the Caribbean is gone, but pirates remain in play. Just not for the player.

In 2003, Patrician III came out in the U.S. The Patrician series was developed in and original targeted to Germany. What was released as Patrician III in the U.S. was actually an expansion to the Patrician II release in Germany. Patrons (heh) not paying attention could easily be deceived into thinking they had a new game on their hands, whereas at least one review described it as a glorified patch. Looking back some 15-18 years later, however, it is the Patrician III release that we consider relevant.

So how does the game hold up?

Games like Patrician III promised to be a departure from the RTS fare of the day. Still played in “real time,” there is copious room for leisurely decision making (at least for the most parts of the game). The “build buildings to construct units to conquer territories” is jettisoned in favor of the economic underpinnings. This means that the martial “theme” of most games is replaced with a more peaceful structure. Being by and for Germans, it has a unique look and feel that I will always associate with the German-produced games circa 2000.

The “game” is in the model that underlies the system as much as it is in the player interaction. There are several layers of interaction. First is that dynamic market model, where prices rise and fall with the law of supply and demand. Cities sell cheaply what they produce and can pay high prices for what they demand. Arbitrage between the comparative advantages among cities is what allows you to make a steady profit. But this is mitigated by the fact that you aren’t the only trader in the northern seas. Between the time when you see a shortage (e.g. that lack of whale oil in Lubeck) and when you actually go and collect those goods to sell them, an AI opponent may have already supplied the needed product and reduced the opportunity for profit.

The basic interface. The ship is in port. Trade can be either with between the ship and town, or the ship and office.

The second level is the interaction between the town and the player. Townspeople respond to the availability of goods, or lack thereof, by coming to or leaving a town. Thus, keeping the full range of goods in supply has the effect of nurturing the town and growing the population. That population is divided between the poor, wealthy, and middle class, all of which respond to different incentives and goods. As you please the people, your reputation in the town also can grow. This can mean the prestige of “promotions” or inclusion in the town government. In this, he game borrows a bit from the “city builder” genre. Your cities are populated by little sims-like people, that can be clicked on for color commentary. Keeping all of them happy is the key to city growth.

Yet another level is that you can build the supply chain infrastructure. While the town and your competitors are building structures, you can too. So not only can you profit off of trading but you can help drive the market and profit from the production end as well. Similarly, as you grow your town, you are also growing the consumption end of the equation. You can further support the population by creating additional housing for them. Going further, you could expand beyond your original towns into others.

Once you shift your focus from trading to building, you’ve also got to refocus your trading. In order to build a building, you need a sizeable supply of the raw materials (bricks, wood, etc) to construct that building. You can always simply buy those materials on the local market, but the law of supply and demand says if you suddenly make a massive purchase on the open market, you’ll pay through the nose. So your ships need to be changing their focus from turning a profit to one of gathering those needed supplies from the four corners of the Baltic Sea, thus bringing down the average price.

One final piece to the game draws from pedigree of the pirate game genre. As I said, there are pirates in the Baltic and North Seas as well. When they set upon your ship, you are put into a real-time, sailing game where you manage your ships sails and cannon. At the time it came out, there were a number of games trying to perfect the Age of Sail experience, and this has the components common to that effort. You have a range of different armaments, each having their own reload times. You need to be aware of the importance of wind gauge. As you progress in the game you gain access to ship upgrades that increase speed, maneuverability, and firepower. In the end, though, the naval combat piece of this game underwhelms; not only in retrospect, but it was considered the weak point at the time. It is a departure from the rest of the game, transforming a leisurely and thoughtful process into one where you are now forced to click-click-click over and over until you win or lose the battle.

Pirate fight clicking aside, it’s a model that is complex enough that it would seem a player can only grasp small snapshots of it at any given time. So, perhaps, given a handful of favorite goods, you could learn to recognize the right price points to buy and sell, getting pretty efficient at moving that product around. Or you focus on production and consumption of a particular set of goods in your home town, enhancing that ability. It seems unlikely that anyone could keep it all in their head at any one time. So the model is complex enough to be just out of the player’s grasp, at least in its entirety.

Harder than it looks.

The result is a game that is strangely addictive. You might wonder how much fun it can be, buying pig iron at 956 and selling at 1415, and then repeating that process over and over. But once you get going, it is difficult to stop. Maybe just one more port of call before calling quits for the night turns into just five more, or ten more, or twenty. I think I played a lot of this when it was new, and it remains addictive.

Facelift

Ten years on, the original developer was out of business. Enter the developer Kalypso (of the Tropico series, among others) who purchased the intellectual property and developed a new version of the game, I would assume using their Tropico 3 engine.

The opening screen. It does look pretty.

Right from the starting gate, things go bad. The first red flag was when Steam started to install the game, a pop-up warned that there was a product key that needed to be entered later. This turned out to be fairly seamless, although I recall having a problem with another installation. But it is a warning that there is a sort of double DRM involved with the purchase, both the Steam system itself and the the self-rolled DRM from the developer.

Having passed that hurdle, some button (hard to read, as it was fighting with the Steam popups) said something about installing an update from within the Patrician configuration system. I’m assuming this was just whatever patch was pushed through by Steam, so I said OK. But then it required that I enter an email account and password.

So now I’m looking at DRM level 3. Not only do I have it on Steam, and had to enter my product code, but the game is unplayable unless I register for Kalypso account “to receive product information!” What am I going to do? I signed up for the account, got my confirmation, and it finally allowed me to see the “play” button.

So far so bad, but the worst is yet to come.

I get to the main menu and nothing is working, and I realize why. The right-handed mouse configuration (I use a left-handed mouse) is hard-coded into the game. There are some minimal reconfiguration options available, but nothing to remap keys or correctly configure the mouse. I can tell now this game won’t be long for my system.

So we finally can get to the game. From appearances, this is the same game as Patrician III, with the primary update being to the interface. One assumes there are some difference in the events and economics engine as well, but I would also assume that this is nothing game-changing. The interface is “modernized.” The “table of numbers” style interface in the original game is replaced with more icons and graphics. International marketing of games does favor graphics over text, so the impetus for this is clear. The result is less so.

The interface looks nicer, but doesn’t work so nice. Instead of click-to-buy, purchasing is done through holding down and moving a slider. Not fun, especially with the mouse buttons reversed.

The graphics and updated interface seems to keep more information hidden. In the old game, the market conditions were readily available just looking at the screen (see the topmost screenshot to compare and contrast). Goods with short supply or high demand show a large gap between buy and sell prices. Clicking on the price to buy (or sell) seems intuitive and natural. Contrast to that above. There is now only a single price (which may be a difference in modeling – I haven’t got out the manual), so until I learn “the market” I have no way of knowing that price is high or low. Dragging the slider is awkward and easy to make a mistake. The icons will also take some learning, now that beer isn’t “beer” but a picture that may or may not be so obvious at first. Finally, notice that unlike the original, there is a slider to show the rest of the market goods. Whereas the original allowed to player to see the entire market at one glance, the Patrician IV player is forced to scroll up and down just to get the full picture.

Patrician IV lacks the tutorial that began Patrician III. That may be a factor in the longer learning curve, but with the original once I got into it, I felt I had a handle right away on how to do everything that I needed to do. With Patrician IV, the interface seems harder to grasp. Especially since almost half of my clicks are with the wrong mouse button, I end up confusing myself more as I go along. Where is that button to go out to the “world” view? I know I found it once, but I forget where it was. Some of this would be overcome with some playing time, but as I said, this one is not going to be staying on my hard drive.

One feature I stumbled across that does look like an improvement is better auto-management of trade routes. At some point, chasing every ship around the North will get tedious and moving to the game’s next level (politics and such) would benefit from pushing the lower-level stuff onto the computer. I’m not going to be playing long enough to get there, but it looks like a good addition. I also wonder how much improved the pirate-fighting interface is after ten years, but again I dread trying to manage a mouse-heavy fight with the buttons reversed.

Overall, the promise that this game held out wound up being majorly disappointing. My only consolation is that I got it with a really, really deep discount.

Vote for Me and I’ll Set You Free

One review that I looked at (of Patrician IV, although it probably applies across the board)  said that the best part of the game is at the highest levels – when you’ve built up enough power and influence to enter the political game. There are new features to play games of intrigue against your rivals. In addition, the market itself can become a weapon. Want to destabilize a mayor of some other city? How about sailing in and buying up all the meat, driving his market into chaos and causing riots in the streets? That review, however, pointed out the downside that you’ve got to play through hours of “leveling up” to get to that part of the game.

In 2013, Crusader Kings II entered this historical space with a new DLC called The Republic. It allows players to game as part of a merchant republic rather than a feudal hierarchy. While Venice is probably your key player in this regard, Lübeck and the Hanseatic League are also one of the playable factions. However, true to the Crusader Kings scope, you do not play as a merchant with a handful of ships. Instead, you lead one of five merchant families who are all attempting to expand their influence in the burgeoning markets of Northern Europe. Essentially, you start out as the end-game “Patrician,” already active in politics.

Management at a much higher level. Things are about to go very wrong.

Rather than controlling a county, the player’s base is a really nice house somewhere in Lübeck. The plus is that you are protected from envious counts in neighboring territories from coming to conquer your palace – it commands no territory. The down side is that, well, it commands no territory. While you can upgrade your palace, it is just a matter of pay-the-money and wait. There is no opportunity to rise through the ruling class by obtaining titles. In addition, each merchant family can building trading posts in eligible cities with which they will trade. For the Hansa, these are coastal cities in Northern Europe. Other merchant republics have different rules, including land-based trade routes. These too are pay-the-money-and-wait affairs. Of course it all interacts; more trade posts means more income which means more prestige which means the ability to control more trade posts.

The five patrician families also elect one as a Lord Mayor of Lübeck, allowing that player to also control the county, in a slightly more traditional style of play. Election has to do with building up prestige, which comes mostly with age, and being the most popular at election time (when the previous Lord Mayor dies). Again it becomes mostly a waiting game. As a side complaint, I did get myself stuck in a glitch of sorts the first time I took held the higher office. Having won the election, I still remain mortal. Upon death, one would presume, I again take over the merchant family as my own heir while another more prestigious patrician wins the next election as Lord Mayor. The game seemed to have a lot of trouble with the succession, losing track of the heir and deciding that, in fact, I had no successor and the game must be over. With lots of saving and reloading, I did manage to get past it. It seems an obvious bug, so perhaps it will be repaired soon enough (if it hasn’t already).

I’ve mentioned it before that when it comes to the standard Crusader Kings, and Europa Universalis as well, it often seems to pay to do as little as possible. Avoiding wars, grooming your family, and trying to increase income is a lower risk way of slowing gaining power. Pouring money into frequent wars was generally a bad strategy historically and that can often show up in the game. But avoiding all the fighting and backstabbing also means a less exciting game. The Republic seems to take that to another level.

As a merchant prince, there is little productive to do except invest in your operations and slowly watch them grow. While there is the occasional fighting, removing the incentive to capture titles through warfare means that battles are high risk, low reward. There is some chance of gaining skill and prestige, of course, but there is also the chance of being killed or maimed in battle. That means thinning out the number of heirs, which also hurts on the operations side. The ability to control more trade routes is, among many things, a function of how many males their are in the family.

In the screenshot above I am about to be thrust into a much more tenuous position. The early 1300s (in game, at least) saw the Black Plague sweeping through Northern Europe. As a result, I lost a good chunk of the male members of the my merchant family. Following this, I find myself playing on the thin edge of extinction. I seem only to manage to keep the last male member of my line alive long enough to have a single male child, setting up a decade or two of new succession crisis while we wait to see if he can produce an heir before dying. While there is a game here, it is a long game played over generations rather than in weeks or months. Building up a trading empire ship-voyage-by-ship-voyage in Patrician III just seems to connect with the period a lot better than sitting around waiting for one’s wife to get pregnant.

So surprisingly, it is the oldest of the games that still has the most addictive qualities. Just last night I was up an extra hour making just “one more” trade before I went to bed.  It’s a different gaming style than most of what is successful in the gaming market, but at least for me, it works. Crusader Kings inclusion of merchant republics is a nice change of pace from the original, but also doesn’t really compete with the original in its appeal.

And as to Patrician IV? Frankly the mere fact that it exists makes me a little angry.

Lame

Tags

Charles of Anjou, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis, Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, Neuchâtel, Paradox, ship combat, Vicky, War of the Sicilian Vespers

Charles the Lame, that is.

Crusader Kings was the last of the Paradox games that spawned from Europa Universalis. Earlier I was thinking about the release of that engine as it tied into the Civilization and Age of Empires advances, with each pushing the other forward. The original EU release was not too long after Age of Kings and shortly before Civilization III. EU and EU II were barely more than a year apart, making EU almost a paid public beta for EU II.

Following on the heels of the success of EU II, Paradox moved the engine to the Second World War with the release of Hearts of Iron. This was not a mere re-skinning of the EU engine, however. Unlike the EU clock, which ticked through the centuries represented in that game, Hearts of Iron played strategically but simulated hour-by-hour. Thus, operations could be planned so as to coordinate attacks from land, sea, and air, scheduling them all to hit their target at a given H-hour. The series became very successful in its own right and is the most recent of the Paradox games to be reworked as a new version.

The next of the EU spin-offs was Victoria: An Empire Under the Sun. Vicky, as fans like to refer to it, returned to the the massive scale of EU but added in the more complexity to account for the economics of the Victorian era. Rather than simulate a population of a territory as a whole, Vicky breaks down the population into different categories: the wealthy versus the poor, the skilled versus the unskilled, the soldiers versus factory workers, etc. Managing the economy, then, involves managing this detail.

The final (unless you count Stellaris) branching of the the Paradox engine came in the spring of 2004. This game started with the invasion of England by William the Conqueror (in 1066) and lasted until 1452, just before the fall of Constantinople. The focus of the game was less on nation states and more on dynasties. The player has control over a middle-ages noble and his court and must manage the lands and armies to which that noble has title. Those titles can be lost in battle, so maintaining and growing one’s domain requires alliances and warfare. Upon death, titles are redistributed according to the hereditary rules in effect for that place and time (and they can be altered by the player to suit). So another important part of the game was ensuring suitable heirs were present when the current noble shuffles off this mortal coil.

This last bit became a complex and critical part of the game. Too few offspring and you might find your only heir to the throne is wiped out by the plague just as you need him to inherit. Too many heirs and the mighty kingdom you’ve painstaking built up shatters as it is divided among squabbling children. Furthermore, the “stats” for each noble is also hereditary. So “good breeding” became a matter of selecting wives and husbands for your family and was necessary for prevailing in future battles.

It was a game monumental in its scope. While in many ways based on its EU roots, there were several areas of departure. In addition to the need to manage your family, there was considerable less reliance on that historical timeline and the event system that kept things somewhat on track. All it takes is one extra boy being born, and a pivotal succession crisis will never take place.

One more very popular addition was to allow a game completed in Crusader Kings to be exported and used as a starting point for EU II. All of the games in the EU family have been fairly open and modable, granting them a lot of attention both in terms of improvements and also “total conversions.” Shortly after the game started covering different eras, users took an interest in moving a given game-produced world from one product to the next, chronologically. EU games were ported to Vicky, although there is quite a gap between the two. The post-World War I ending of Vicky can be sent on to Hearts of Iron for the WWII, and that game was modded to extend into the Cold War. With one of their Crusader Kings patches, Paradox got in on the action and officially made it possible to continue playing with a CK world in EU II.

While on the topic of mods, one of the most popular for CK was the Game of Thrones conversion. That popularity exploded with the conversion of the novels to the HBO series. I recall reading, back in 2011 or 2012, how Crusader Kings was the best Game of Thrones game available, and it wasn’t even a Game of Thrones game. It seemed ideally suited to model just the sort of politics/warfare/sex battlefields that people love about the show, and that was part of what created the medieval history that we know.

But all was not perfect. The game progressed at essentially two different speeds. Personal interactions could be happening rather frequently whereas realm development took place over years and decades. Speeding the game up meant being innundated with messages about various characters and their interactions within the game. Like EU, CK allowed the player to customize the handling of event notifications. The problem was, even a minor character looking for a suitable wife could be critical to the game. Because character statistics of newborns were based on the statistics of their parents, selective breeding was necessary to create a competent court from which to draw your generals and administrators. I recall, back in the day, likening it to a computerized version of whack-a-mole.

My other huge complaint with the model was the handling of ships. Unlike the other games of the EU pantheon, the handling of ships was abstracted. In the time before sea-going warfare, it made sense not to model ships as combat units. What shipbound fighting existed at the time was very different that what the Age of Sail would bring in the timeframe of EU. The problem with abstracting it entirely way is there were significant factors limiting sail and oar powered shipping, particularly outside of the Mediterranean. I often played my games somewhere on the British Isle, and inevitably at some point the Muslim hoards would sail to my island and attempt to covert me. It was a historical impossibility, but why?

This game, and pretty much all games for that matter, fail to model the effects of currents and prevailing winds on medieval sea travel. In this instance, traversing the points at the tip of Brittany, near Brest, or the south-eastern tip of England, near Dover, might involve waiting patiently for the forces of nature to help you around the bend. If the “you” in this case is a massive fleet sailing from Tripoli for the purposes of conquest, that would provide a point where the invaders are particularly vulnerable to interdiction. For example, the details of the (much later) defeat of the Spanish Armada cannot be fully comprehended without understanding these limitations on sailing routes.

Mercifully, Crusader Kings skipped over the EU III engine and, instead, became (as Crusader Kings II) the first of the games built on the current engine. And while it started its distribution through multiple channels, it eventually became sold exclusively through Steam.

Paradox has long had a reputation for releasing games with initial bugs. Crusader Kings II seemed to live up to that promise. This was a game that I wanted, badly, even before it came out. I was very much into Crusader Kings (I) and saw a promise in the sequel to fix some of the issues I talk about above. But it took some time before I finally pulled the trigger. Even then, I refused to buy through Steam or any of the Steam-like services. I like to own the games I buy, not rent them. I finally found a sale through GamersGate, which offered a DRM-free version and happily began enjoying the new version.

Some months later, however, Paradox announced that they could no longer support the product through GamersGate and I had to move my license to Steam. This caused me to actually get a Steam account, which has grown nearly-uncontrollably ever since. It also started my relationship with Paradox and their DLC model for supporting their games.  It fixes, from the game companies’ standpoint, a long standing issue with game support. When a game requires ongoing maintenance, particularly for new features and other improvements, it is done at an increasingly uncompensated cost. Eventually, the company must release an expansion or a new version to generate the necessary revenue, often frustrating users who can sometimes feel they are being forced to pay for a bug-fix patch. The DLC model, while in some ways exacerbating the situation, may actually make it more palatable by seeking revenue more regularly, but in smaller chunks. In any case, I’ve resigned myself to periodically buying newer content for Crusader Kings and EU, and have been rewarded with not only years of active support, but sometimes game-changing improvements in the features.

DLCs have also been used to expand the chronological scope of the game. Add-ons have extended the starting point backwards some 500 years. A player can start, not just with the Norman domination of England, but back to the viking invasions or further back to reign of Charlemagne.

Charles the Lame

Earlier, I contrasted Crusader Kings with EU particularly in the area of historical fidelity. In the discussed game, I played a scenario and highlighted a particular place where the game (through an invasion of France by the HRE) departed substantially from history.

Continuing on with that game, I also continue to drift away from an actual tracking of historical events. On the other hand, gaming in the same medieval “world” will always mean there are some parallels between what the game creates and analogous situations that really happened.

As before, I am still playing as the Duke of Upper Burgundy, where I have hopes of expanding my power and possibly once again ruling over a Burgundian kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.

In the real world, from the late 1270s into the early 1280s, the counties that would comprise the Kingdom of Arles, a kingdom of Upper and Lower Burgundy, were under the control of Charles of Anjou. In addition to these titles (the counties of Provence and Forcalquier), Charles I held claim to Anjou and Maine in France. He had been invested by the pope as the King of Sicily, after killing the previous ruler, Manfred (a bastard son at the end of the Hohenstaufen line), at the Battle of Benevento.

The son of Charles I, also Charles (II) and known as Charles the Lame, was at the time Regent of Provence and heir to the titles of Anjou. A plan was hatched between the elder Charles, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph I, and Pope Martin IV. Charles the Lame’s son, Charles Martel would, upon marrying the daughter of Rudolph, receive the title of King of Arles and preside over that historical kingdom. In exchange, Charles I was to back the an inheritance of the title of Emperor to be passed through the House of Habsburg. Finally, the pope’s family would be granted a Kingdom located in northern Italy. Instead, Sicily revolted against Charles’ (I) rule in the War of the Sicilian Vespers and the marriage and the creation of the new kingdoms was never to occur.

That’s a lot of Charleses.

In my world, Sicily is controlled not by the French (as was the case in 1282), but by the Holy Roman Empire. By 1286, a war has begun between two claimants to the title King of Sicily. The conflict has drawn in the Emperor himself, and fighting has spread far enough north to impact my own duchy and, in doing so, drawn my attention.

The year is 1286 and a war has broken out in a Sicily divided over who is to rule them. This may be a chance for my family to press their claims in Italy.

With Sicily in chaos, I have decided to advance an imperial claim on one of the central Italian counties. Unlike in the real world, where the Hapsburgs have begun their ascendancy to pan-European power, in mine Rudoph von Habsburg is a count in Upper Burgundy and my chief administrator. I am married to a princess of the empire, the sister to the predecessor and the cousin to the current Emperor Václav II.

I’ve moved my army into the war torn peninsula, but I am without friends.

I have forgotten a key feature of Crusader Kings II and civil wars. It may seem like a rebellious lord is easy pickings, and making a claim on a pretender’s holding will allow you to pile on to an already winning side. But that’s not quite right. As I have made a claim on a county claimed by both sides in the war, they actually both consider me an enemy. In the above screenshot, while I was biding my time, waiting for the pretender king (whose claim I have challenged) to weaken before I deal with him, I was ambushed by the loyalist armies. The king who is still recognized by the Emperor as the true King of Sicily still believes the title to the usurper’s lands lay with him. I had a chance against one of them, but not both.

The screen above represents one of the major features the Crusader Kings II introduced, and one that has been enhanced since the original release. From the beginning, the EU franchise resolved battles using a pop-up screen where the armies would attrit in “real time” as the strategic clock advanced. Interaction is minimal while the battle was ongoing, with the ability to send reinforcements (if another army is close enough) or retreat from the battle before being forced to by the battle engine. Obviously the timescales don’t quite work, but it provides a workable interface for both the strategic game and individual battles that occur within it.

In Crusader Kings, that battle engine now has considerably more depth. Each fight sees the the units involved divided into three “battles,” as the language of the time would describe them. If there are insufficient sub-units, only two or maybe only one of the battles will be populated. Each battle can be allotted a commander, which will improve performance when fighting. As the enemy forces engage, each wing attacks the corresponding wing of the opposing army and goes through various types of combat. In the previous screenshot, the armies are beginning an engagement in skirmish mode (see the blue bow-and-arrow icons for all six battles). A unit will progress through that skirmishing into an infantry mode. Once one side breaks, the opposing side will have a pursuit phase. As the opponents wings are eliminated, a winning army will engage with multiple-on-one attacks among those forces that remain.

There is additional detail in the model. I occasionally see special indicators during a fight, like a “shield wall” icon popping up. One presumes that the effectiveness of the unit during the different phases depends, not only on the commander, but on the mix of weaponry in the component units. More and better archers should mean more effective skirmishing, and so forth. As before, you have little interaction once the armies are engaged. But the depth of the battle model is engaging, with an effective user interface to show progress. It is also limits the engagement to that appropriate for a supreme commander. In doing so, it encourages you to control the things that a supreme commander could control – better leaders and a better mix of weaponry – rather than having you micromanage every unit in every battle, Total War -style.

Back to the battle within the context of the game. As the attack started I made an assumption, which turned out to be correct, that the numerical advantage (albeit a slight one) of the Sicilian army would be all it took to tip the odds against me within Crusader Kings II. It seems like it would set up an even battle in FoG(U), with the slight numerical advantage countering any weakness in UI play. In fact, I assumed that the battle would produce the opposite result given the nearly even armies. So much so, I was afraid that the fight wouldn’t even be close and the results would be entirely misaligned with what I saw in the strategic level.

I used the army-building tools to recreate the fight from Crusader Kings. The two armies clash on Turn 4 of the battle.

As the armies moved to contact (screenshot above), my fears seemed to be realized and then some. While I made an effort to keep my lines organized as I moved them forward, the AI charged pell-mell across the open field, hitting my lines piecemeal just as I was moving out of my own encampment. It appeared that I would easily defeat the enemy in detail.

My left wing is utterly collapsing and any hope I have of salvaging the battle on my right seems to have slipped away.

As it turns out, the AI may have been aggressive but was not “too aggressive.” Despite the fact that my lines were better ordered, I was overwhelmed by the enemy assaults.

This is no organized analysis, but there seems to be a clear difference between AI performance in the original version and the Unity version. In the old version I had scenarios where holding back to draw the enemy into assaulting my position would result in running out of turns before the enemy was even engaged. This new AI seems to want to begin killing me as fast as possible. Furthermore, it is effective at doing so.

I stand corrected. The Sicilians have obtained a decisive victory over me and come pretty close to matching the results I saw in the Crusader Kings resolution of the battle.

This was effectively the end of my campaign to gain influence on the Italian peninsula, although I refused to admit it at the time. Like so many commanders before me, I figured that I had weakened the enemy even as he had weakened me, and that one more push would put me back on top. I assembled a second army, this time made mostly of mercenaries, and moved them in for a reprise. The problem remained, however, that I was outnumbered by both sides of the Sicilian Succession War combatants when they were combined and I was again forced to to wait out the enemy, hoping to see him weaken himself. In this case, the enemy was able to wait me out. As funds to pay my mercenary army ran low, an enemy was able to bribe them to flip sides and my next battle, instead of being a nearly even fight, turned into a massacre. So I had to return home, not just a loser, but a broke loser.

A Ship and a Sea to Sail Upon

Fighting up and down Italy doesn’t require much in the way of sea transport, but given the vehemence of my complaining, I had probably better mention that aspect of Crusader Kings II. In this iteration, ships have returned to an explicitly-modeled factor in the game. They are available to be raised in the same way as land armies, based on the counties you control, or hired as mercenaries. Either way, they are terribly expensive.

What it means is that, if there is a sea-transport component to your campaign, you’re going to have to have a lot of extra money set aside before you start. You’ll also want to plan appropriately. Having fleets sitting around idling will mean your treasury quickly runs dry. You’ll want to get your transporting done as rapidly as possible and then release those ships back to wherever they came from.

It still doesn’t model sailing in a realistic detail, but from the games I’ve played so far, it seems to create realistic end results. Sea invasions are huge deals, even over short stretches of ocean. While I usually end up at some point during a game paying the cost to send a Crusader army across the water to the Holy Land, I almost never bring them home again. And I’ve never seen the marauding north-African hordes laying waste to the shores of England and Wales in Crusader Kings II.

Similarly, the frantic dating game into which the original Crusader Kings could descend has been largely fixed. This latest engine (CK II, EU4, and the new Hearts of Iron) has added in a better user interface which is particularly effective when it comes to the decision-making aspects of the game.  A player no longer has to keep their eyes glued on dozens of different factors as time goes by, hoping not to miss a critical event. Instead, many of the decisions are presented as alerts to the player.

Add to that some better browsing tools and, when playing the marriage game, it becomes easier to stay abreast of it all without the frantic effort of the original Crusader Kings. The model for marriages has become more complex as well, meaning that unless you are marrying off a particular enticing child, you’re not going to be able to scour the world for a tall, barrel-chested woman to breed a race of warrior-giants. Furthermore, the “mini-game” of influencing your children’s statistics has become deeper and more multi-dimensional. There are the statistics and there are traits, which each influence the other. These come from not just who the parents are, but also decisions that are made during their upbringing. It is, at the same time, both a more interesting game and one that is no longer critical to overall success or failure.

Charles may have been called lame, but Crusader Kings II is not.

Wolves of the First Reich

Tags

Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, crusades, Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, Germany, Holy Roman Empire, Neuchâtel, Oath of Fealty, Unity, Wolves from the Sea

The main reason I bought Field of Glory when I did was because Slitherine was preparing an additional module called Wolves from the Sea. That module is focused on the Viking Age armies and battles, expanding from the late-Roman Empire offered in earlier modules. At that time, I was indulging in the History Channel’s Vikings series, and was seeking wargaming tie-ins with that period. Outside of Medieval: Total War with some Viking oriented mods, I could not find a serious treatment of this at a tactical level.

Field of Glory, at that time, was going through some difficulties. The game was originally released in 2009, which isn’t all that long ago by the standards of many of the games I’ve been playing. Nevertheless, a couple of years after its initial release, there were issues. The original developer was no longer supporting the game, but it it remained popular enough and Slitherine was continuing to release new modules. I have this vague memory that there was a hard-core user who had taken on the original source code, but that would require searching back through the forums, which I won’t do. Whether a false start was abandoned, or never really took off in the first place, Slitherine ultimately decided that the source code (in Real Basic) was not maintainable.

By around 2012 another group of developers came up with a plan to port the system to the Unity gaming engine. The release of the Wolves from the Sea became tied to that project – that is, the new module would be released to run on the updated base game. Then the years began to go by and neither the new version nor the new module were available to the paying public.

I had been eyeing the product since it’s original release. I was deterred by lackluster reviews (particularly as a single-player experience) and one design flaw. I was persuaded by a particular criticism concerning the use of hexes versus squares – for the linear battles of the Roman era, the use of hexes for the map just seemed to throw things off.

Then a couple of years ago, I was (as I said) searching for a serious, tactical Viking game. That imminent Wolves of the Sea release popped up again. The situation at the time was that the Unity project was well under way and was trying to reproduce faithfully the original Field of Glory experience. That Unity version (Fog(U)) was available for download for FoG players in a beta form. I read that the beta included a (beta) Wolves of the Sea module. I decided that the combination was enough to put me over the edge and I bought the original FoG, discounted as part of that year’s Christmas sale.

By the time I got everything installed and working and was able to try out the combinations, the availability of the free Wolves of the Sea was no longer part of the package. The Unity version was available, but only to play modules that were duly purchased for the original game. Furthermore, the state of Fog(U) at the time was buggy enough that the best experience was to play in the original engine. And so I stuck with the old engine. Any experience up to this point focuses on that version.

The long delay in release bled much of the steam out of FoG(U)‘s engine. The delay certainly halted the momentum of frequent expansion modules, which of course will blunt enthusiasm for a game. Furthermore, as the development remained focused on getting a non-buggy reproduction of the original Field of Glory, but in the new engine, that meant work was not going into the improvements to the engine – the whole raison d’être for upgrading the engine in the first place. Finally, by the time FoG was released and moving forward again, Field of Glory II was in development. At least for me, FoGII looks to deliver much of the promise that FoG doesn’t fulfill.

Once again, however, it is time for the Slitherine/Matrix Games Christmas sale, and this time it finds me again dwelling on medieval fighting. As before, I am looking at the period leading up to the ascendancy of Charles V to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. This time, however, I decided to go way, way back to the chronological predecessor of Europa Univeralis. That is, Crusader Kings 2 ($10 in the Steam Christmas sale, I might add).

Crusader Kings was a follow-on to Europa Universalis, but its predecessor in terms of historical chronology. CK2 can start as early as the beginning of Charlemagne’s rule and lasts until where Europa Universalis takes over. There are several start dates scattered throughout that period. I was actually a little surprised that there aren’t mods out there to capture other snapshots of history. Maybe the sheer amount of work to research the name of every count, duke, king and emperor for a given date dissuades anyone who might decide to try.

I was hoping to target the ascendancy of the House of Hapsburg from mere control of a county to the control of the empire. Roughly, the mid 1270s. Within CK2, their main scenarios taking place around this time start at 1220 (titled Age of the Mongols) and at 1337 (focusing on the Hundred Years War). I went this time with the 1220 date. Further, I decided the emperor himself was a shaky play. The game warns that the Holy Roman Emperor is a “difficult” faction to play. Historically, the Hohenstaufens were a decade or so from being eliminated as a political power. Instead, I searched for a lesser title in the Empire that the game ranked as a little easier. I ended up settling on Ulrich III, Count of Neuenburg (or Neuchâtel from the French side of the border), who in CK2 is given a ducal title.

It is another lesson in the illusion of detail within the Paradox engine. So much is modeled within the engine, it is sometimes a shock when things are not. From 1152, the house of Zähringen had been granted a duke-level title (Rector) over the former Kingdom of Arles or Kingdom of Burgundy. That dynasty ended with the death of Berthold V, and the duchy was divided rather than assumed. At the start of the game, Ulrich III held county titles to Neuchâtel, Fenis, Aarberg, and Strassberg, as well as lower level titles. Bern, by contrast, become a Reichsfrei, a free imperial city beholden only to the Emperor himself. CK2 discourages flat hierarchies and, for example, an Emperor directly controlling a city would cause problems for the algorithms that are their to penalize the unwillingness to delegate. Although technically Ulrich was not a duke, within the game it probably makes sense to set it up as such.

Besides being ranked as “average” difficulty, this duchy for the Kingdom of Burgundy has some other appeal. Historically, the lands became part of the Hapsburg holdings, and so fit in with the theme I’m trying to follow. Also, I can perhaps aspire to uniting the French and German Burgundian holdings into a single, perhaps independent, Kingdom and elevating my faction to the global stage.

Unlike EU, CK2 does not have the driving set of historical events behind it. While the first decade or so of game play has a chance of resembling history, the game is most likely to rapidly veer off from the historical path. So it was in my game. Initially, the game begins with an active call for the Fifth Crusade and I so sent off some of my soldiers. My armies were soon overwhelmed the vast Muslim armies and I was forced to disband my crusading force before the war’s end, leaving them to return from Jerusalem on their own. And that end was not a successful one for Christianity, either, with the crusade ending in failure. Shortly thereafter, Ulrich’s death resulted in a lot of bellyaching from the other counts in his domain and several small wars were required to keep them all in line. By the time another (the Sixth) Crusade was called, I was in debt and suffering from depleted manpower as a result of my own succession struggles and so I did not participate.

As to the Emperor Frederick II, despite his German titles he considered himself to be a Roman Emperor in the historical sense. His focus was on uniting Sicily and Italy to Europe so as to recreate the reach of ancient Rome. Indeed, in the game, Frederick finds himself fighting wars in Naples as he deals with Italian rulers reluctant to conform to his plans.

The departure comes in the mid-1230s. Historically, Frederick was friendly with France, helping them to quell a succession war over Champagne (although the intervention probably had more to do with the succession fights in Germany than the actual politics in France). In the game, however, Frederick challenges France over territory in the low countries. Sensing an opportunity to further ingratiate myself to the emperor, I sent my soldiers to help in his fight.

It’s hard to read, but a French army of just over 20,000 is attempting to lift the Imperial siege with its roughly 23,000 soldiers. The timely arrival of my own Burgundians tilted the numbers to Germany.

In the above screenshot, the king of France has fielded an army of over 20,000 men and is leading it to lift the siege of the contested province. My own army, of some 4,000, has just arrived from the south putting the besiegers at a slight advantage.

Give Me Unity or Give Me Death

This battle is close enough to make it interesting as a tactical fight. So back to Field of Glory – Unity and my new Christmas purchases (namely the Oath of Fealty module). First order of business is creating the above army in Field of Glory‘s Digital Army Generator.

As I began building the armies, I see that one of the criticisms I had of Field of Glory has been corrected in this version. Specifically, I complained that the only choice in the random skirmish mode was to create two evenly-matched armies. The FoG(U) interface now matches up two entirely pre-built armies, one for each side. So I can construct exactly the match-up that I desire. The downside to that is, unlike Pike and Shot (and, indeed, the original FoG), you cannot leave the computer opponent to generate their own army given the number of points. It became an easy shortcut in the other games to a) not have to build an enemy army in addition to building your own and b) give some random variation – you couldn’t know exactly what you’ll face. However, in using the engine to match up specific armies (either historic or generated by a strategic engine), you are probably given the makeup in advance, so it really isn’t that much of a loss.

In this case, I did not dwell on the detail. While CK2 breaks down the armies into different troop types, I did not try to match what was in CK2 with what I created in FoG(U). In fact, an army of 23,000+ men is about double the size of the armies that come with the modules, and so the choices when filling out the large army become limited (without some off-line modification of the army data.) In most cases, I’m not sure the detail is all that important, but I’ll put some more effort into it another time. In this case, I was able to narrow in on a suitable match-up very quickly. The experience was much more like the positive Pike and Shot games than my previous FoG games.

We move forward to battle across an open field. On the third turn, our skirmishers meet. I’m not sure why the setup forced me to have only a single unit of skirmishers ahead of my army, but I make do with what I have.

The interface for FoG(U) largely reproduces that of FoG. You can see some upgraded look-and-feel in the main menu and some of the quirkiness of the original unit interaction has been improved. In other cases, though, it seems to have regressed. In the above screenshot, note the brown box in the lower left. It’s title is a “=>”. I don’t know what that means here but, in fact, there is some ample use of animated ASCII graphics to convey information, particular combat details. Some of the screens look more like a error log dump than a circa-2015 user interface. For some other features that seemed better the old way, I do wonder if that’s just because I got used to the old way.

I ran into a couple of bugs, but nothing too significant. The worst of them were when I tried to run the game in full screen mode. In full screen certain UI functions were just not working. Those problems seemed to go away when I windowed the game. However, for the window size that I’m using, the design doesn’t seem to account for the Windows tool bar. This means that the last line of the unit reports (brown boxes, again) is obscured and unreadable. While slightly sloppy looking, it isn’t show-stopping. Between this an other minor issues I’ve come across, there is nothing that says I should prefer to use FoG when both are available – with one exception. As far as I can tell (and I haven’t tried very hard yet), the user-made scenarios for FoG don’t automatically carry forward to Fog(U).  I am assuming that to play the scenarios which I’ve downloaded, I’ve got to load them in the version for which they are made.

The lines are becoming fully engaged. We’ve run off each others skirmishers, which is a big advantage to me as I only had the one unit.

Having created French and German armies of approximately the right size, I loaded them on to a battlefield. The field of battle is picked randomly from pre-built choices. I honestly don’t know if FoG did it differently, but clearly there is no such thing as a randomly-generated terrain in this version. Once begun, the battle should not be in doubt. Unless the AI has made huge progress since the earlier version, I’ll always have an advantage over the computer in an even fight. And this fight isn’t even. The Empire is starting with a sizable 15% force advantage.

I’ve broken the enemy’s left and center. I would probably lose my own left in the process, but the enemy army is about to collapse before that can happen.

The enemy is fairly aggressive, perhaps more so than I remember from FoG. Having run off my lone skirmisher, they hit my main lines and hard. In many cases, though, I have heavy foot defending against assaults from lighter units and skirmishers. My little men aren’t about to be chased off and give more than they take. On top of that, of course, I just have more men on the field. The early momentum continues to build inevitably towards…

A substantial victory. Probably a forgone conclusion given my initial advantage in numbers.

… victory.

The fact that the Germans were victorious, as well as the size of the victory, is consistent with the results back in Crusader Kings. But I’m not sure if that says anything useful given the circumstance.

In contrast to earlier versions of the Paradox engines, and even EU4, the Crusader Kings 2 engine works to simulate the battle at a higher fidelity. I’ll dwell on this more in a future post, but it does question the desirability of fighting a battle off-line in a “tactical” engine when the battle tactics are portrayed for you right on-screen. Furthermore, the CK2 detailed battle is generating the results needed for the operational layer of the game. As units break away from the fight, distinctions are made between casualties, desertions, and just broken morale such that when the losing army retires from the field, it has some substantial portion of its force ready to reform and perhaps fight again. Can a table-top style simulation of that battle add anything that would justify changing these results?

The Battle of Cambrai. This is going to cause 680 years from now when historians want to talk about the First World War battle.

In the end, either way you look at it, the Holy Roman Empire was victorious in battle and picked up a county from France. History is off and running down an alternate path.