My Problems are Legion

Tags

ancients, HPS Simulations: Punic Wars, Roman Republic

Post-script: I played the HPS Simulations: Punic Wars version of the Battle of Sentinum twice now and started a third. I keep trying over and over and I just can’t seem to get it right. Maybe I’m not very good at this. Maybe there is something else going on. Maybe it is both at the same time.

At first glance, Sentinum should be an ideal wargame scenario. At least as far as the historical record can enlighten us, the armies were very equally matched. While the narrative does seem to credit Rome with some superior tactical maneuvering which turned the tide, it was Rome who wrote the history books so… well, make of that what you will. Also, as I’ve pointed out, the HPS Ancients series seems to be targeted at table-top fans for play-by-email. Given that, I’d explect ANY scenario in the game be balanced so as to be suitable to head-to-head competitive play.

Nevertheless, when I played the Roman side, I got myself crushed. After only a dozen or so turns, the Republican army was demoralized and the game told me I had earned a major defeat. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d played that badly, although I’ll grant I made plenty of mistakes my first time through. I figured I’d give it another try to see if the result came out more balanced, with the benefit of a bit of hindsight.

After my first attempt, I complained bitterly about the way the game executes turns. If not clear at the time, this game is a “we-go” mechanic; you enter all your orders and then, during the execution phase, movement and combat takes place simultaneously. For a battle fielding two consular armies, said execution takes a considerable amount of time.

If you don’t have all day…

What I failed to mention is that the game does provide options for managing the phase. In the menu above, you can see (highlighted) an option for “Fast Computer processing,” which I have checked off. There is also a “Speed of Action” and “Fast Movement.” Of the three, I found “Fast Computer processing” to have the most impact. What it seems to do is to remove a delay – the purpose of which is to allow a player time to see what happens, as it happens. It seems that movement takes place a little faster, although I’m not entirely sure. The big effect is that after each combat computation (which takes place unit-pair by unit-pair, several times for each side in each turn), the display of the results is posted and immediately deleted. It is therefore no longer possible to tell how much damage was done during combat, but the turn can be reduced to 3-or-4 minutes rather than 15-20.

I note also it is generally not going to be productive to wait until a turn has executed and then try to look through, formation by formation, what has happened. Given the mechanics and the UI, the original (and slow) method of watching each “hit” as it occurs may be the best way to conceptualize the progression of the battle. On the other hand, one can only take so much of this and I can’t imagine many who could patiently watch 20 minutes worth of execution, turn-after-turn, even if he really wanted to grok all the results. It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. What I regret is implying that it is unavoidable.

Since I’m in complaining mode, I’ll warn you that, while this is indeed configurable, it is not “sticky.” The option to use “Fast Computer processing” doesn’t save with your scenario, so when you load up a game-in-progress, it flips you back to slow processing. Forget to set it again and you’ve either got a 25 minute wait until the turn finishes processing or you’ve got to kill the game, reload, and configure it properly.

Getting back to the play, my second try at the battle was very similar to the first: a quick and decisive loss. In this case, I really felt I was managing my forces competently. I held my right wing together and was making some progress turning the enemy flank when I got shut down. Major defeat.

To investigate, I decided to give the Italian side a try. The resulting game was something a lot closer to balanced. Despite some initial errors, I saw a quick point grab at start followed by Rome’s catching up. The entire game sat in the “draw” scoring zone.

I do wonder if part of my of my problem isn’t the optional “Routed Unit Points Loss” configuration. The manual helpfully explains, “[t]o count the loss of victory points in the game when a routed unit flees the battlefield the player must tick the [option in the] game start menu,” but I’m not sure quite what it means.  Will using this option imbalance a scenario? Will it cause the game to end sooner by running up the victory points faster? Are there battles where routed units should count towards losses and other battles where they shouldn’t? Maybe I shouldn’t just reflexively play with all options turned on.

Another factor where the manual doesn’t explain. Setting a side to be played by the “AI” apparently gives it certain bonuses. I noticed that when I played as the Romans, I was seeing a lot of Roman units “surrender,” particularly when they were still near full strength. Yet, when I switched sides, the opposite seems true. I also notice that some of the healthier legionnaires that I battle against are clearly larger than the starting-strength versions than I had when I played the Romans. Reading the manual couldn’t find any guidance on the subject and the forum that used to provide user-based support for these games seems to have been swallowed by the ravages of internet-time.

Playing as the barbarians makes for a “better” game in that it is more evenly matched and solid play would seemingly produce victory. However, it fails in exactly the ways that originally piqued my interest. The Roman legions no longer behave like Roman legions. Sometimes they come at me with the Hastati taking the lead, sometimes with Triarii. I also have to wonder about the game’s value as a historical tool if the “balancing” to make the AI viable is as significant as it appears to be in this scenario.

That was quite a post-script. At least its not as long as the original.

I Can’t Get No Sentinum

Tags

ancients, Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, Field of Glory II, Field of Glory: Empires, HPS Simulations: Punic Wars, Roman Republic

Having worked my way through the opening moves of Imperium: Rome, a couple of obvious comparisons immediate demand exploration. The competing efforts behind Imperium and Field of Glory: Empires released games at nearly the same time on the same subject. How do they compare? In addition, given how quickly Imperium: Rome departed from the historical record, does Field of Glory provide a better historical experience? And are there any other option for experiencing early history of Rome at the turn of the 3rd century BC? Read on, my quarantined friends.

Samnite Wars, redux.

One immediate and obvious distinction of Field of Glory: Empires is that it is a much coarser game. The provinces are bigger and the armies fewer and less maneuverable. While different than Imperium: Rome, I’m not sure it is any less valid. When we read about, for example, the Third Samnite War, descriptions likely focus on the decisive Battle of Sentinum. Yet that battle was one fight among several during a single campaign season in a war that was already three years old and would last for another two. Does it make for a better game to try to include all the ancillary pieces, or would it be better if we could distill the entire war into that one battle, as the history books often do?

Imperium: Rome, in its way, reproduces the minor engagements and secondary movements that might lead up to that decisive battle. Likewise, once the battle is won, you still have to win the war. A large battle will still be followed by a process of taking territory and running down survivors so as to obtain the most favorable surrender turns. Field of Glory: Empires, to contrast, seems more likely to limit the conflict to that deciding battle. Not explicitly, as you aren’t required to fight one-and-only-one battle. Rather, it is a function of the number of provinces and the “distances” between them. Does it make sense to fight a battle that is less than your best effort to win it? And if you lose after your best effort, there is no room to recover (at least not when the Republic is a mere three provinces).

If you look closely at the screenshot above, you’ll see that I did, in fact, bring less than my “best effort” to the fight against Senones. This was a mistake. I made the same mistake when I first installed Field of Glory: Empires at the end of last year. Last December, I tried out the Pyrrhus Scenario, a mini-campaign included along side the full campaign. In my opening move, I marched my legions south just to see what was up and was surprised by a superior Epirote force (which had been obscured by the fog of war). Field of Glory: Empires‘ limited information means that you don’t see enemy units in neighboring provinces unless you have an army there. That is, owned but unoccupied provinces can’t “see”. Although my mistake is easily avoided, I’m sure I’ll make it again – next time I pick up Field of Glory: Empires after a break.

Losses? What losses? We haven’t even started yet!

As unintended as my move and subsequent battle was, I did draw one thing from it; the detailed battle was was similar enough to the what happened historically in the Third Samnite War. Granted, the specifics of the tribes are still a little mixed up, but I fought my battle in roughly the historical location using roughly historic force mix. At the screenshot above (taken during the set-up phase for the exported battle) shows, the forces are not close to being balanced. It is recorded that the Battle of Sentinum was very evenly matched, whereas here Rome is at a considerable disadvantage. Imbalance aside, the size of the Roman army is a fraction of the historical force. Rome fielded two Consular armies, each containing two Roman legions plus allied infantry. This is off by a factor of six.

For the auto-generated battle, the roughly two-to-one disparity in forces is more than I can manage, particularly given my lack of skill playing Field of Glory II. No surprise, I lost and that loss fed back to losing the war on the strategic map. However, given that I’m getting close to the historical battle, a battle Rome actually won, I’m kind of in the mood to play that scenario.

The Battle of Sentinum is not one of the pre-made battles in the FoG2 distribution. A little more surprisingly, no user has tackled it yet. While I searched for a downloadable version, I couldn’t find one. What I can and did do was use the quick battle generator create another approximation using FoG2‘s template for the Second Samnite War. After some fiddling, I wound up going with the biggest (Very Large) scenario possible. That gave me a total Roman force of 16,000+ soldiers, still less than half of Rome’s force at Sentinum. Furthermore, the auto-generation doesn’t produce the two-army force that Rome fielded. More fidelity, obviously, would require a hand-built scenario.

The Triarii won’t be sitting this one out.

This exercise highlights one area where FoG2 seems to be faltering. Out-of-the-box, the unit size/unit count is too small to recreate the pivotal battles of the ancient world. Of course, every part of the scenario creation process is editable. The number of individuals per in-game unit can be set in the script which generates battles, either for quick-setups or as part of a campaign. Compare the size of the armies in the above scenarios with the Battle of Ashdown to see this illustrated.

The obvious implication of this is that the FoG2 is intended to be scale-independent. You could have “stands” the size* of a cohort, and this seems to be the standard. However, there is nothing that says you must commit to this standard. You could model the individual maniples, as the HPS system does. You could create individual units that are half or a third of a legion. Tactically speaking, and in terms of combat resolution, each of these systems should behave rather differently. Yet, in FoG2, this would be impossible to account for without a serious rework of the game. So while I could generate a battle between Rome and Samnium where Rome fields two consular armies, having the confidence that would produce a meaningful result is another question entirely. As flexible as this system is, this “cohort” scale seems to be THE correct one.

Going back to the units in the above screenshot, careful inspection reveals something interesting. The Roman heavy infantry is called Hastati/Principes. I think what we’re seeing is a representation of the manipular legion tactics implicit in the unit statistic. Contrast this to the Great Battles/SPQR system where the modeling of the quincunx (checkerboard formations) and its deployment into the battle line are explicit. In FoG2, we need to think of each “stand” as two maniples of hastati backed by the corresponding two maniples of principes. The associated** triarii are represented as independent pieces. Using either the unit size or the unit-count-per-legion, the triarii seem to represent four maniples rather than two. In game turns, this allows the player to be flexible in his use of the triarii. They could be held as a reserve, used to support their own cohorts, or redeployed as an independent reaction force, all of which was done successfully by one Roman commander or another. Again, contrast with the SPQR restrictions where only Scipio Africanus can use triarii before 200 BC. In all other cases, the triarii are unable to move until “activated” by certain specified triggers.

FoG2 has added (relative either to the original FoG or to Pike & Shot) the ability of skirmishing units to retreat though (and advance through, for that matter) line infantry. Although this isn’t restricted to Roman units, it does provide an excellent representation of Roman tactics, whereby the velites withdrew behind the protection of the heavy infantry after initial engagement. The similar tactics which allowed the principes to replace the hastati as the front line, I think, should be seen as implicit in the stats for the combined Hastati/Principes unit. Within this understanding, the checkboard deployment of the Roman legions in FoG2 is more cosmetic than anything else. At the frontage of four maniples, the Roman configuration would not have appeared to be staggered.

This all left me feeling that something was missing. I could, I think, get the battle set up properly (1200-man Hastati/Principes units might actually work) and FoG2 more-or-less accounts for the tactics, but I’m a long way and a lot of scenario editing from a satisfying representation of this battle.

Feeling disappointed, I began looking for alternatives. Surely someone must have modeled this battle and someone may have even got it right. What pops up foremost in a search is a Commands & Colors: Ancients scenario*** for the battle. There are also plenty of pictures of miniatures recreations of the battles, some using a Commands & Colors ruleset, others using various miniatures systems. I don’t have Commands & Colors: Ancients and I don’t want to be digging through miniatures rules. However, it is a quick indication of what that scaled-up battle that I propose might look like. A little more focused digging reminded me that Sentinum was one of the stock scenarios in the original Field of Glory.

The enemies of Rome advance.

I loaded up the Field of Glory – Unity (FoG(U)) version of the scenario first. The graphics are a little less glitchy in the newer version making it 10x easier to take screenshots. I’ll come back to that decision, in terms of gameplay, in a moment. I chose to play the “barbarians” as this was the “first side”.

The first impression was, again, a failure to engage me with the historical feel of the Roman legions. Yes, I can see that the units are labeled appropriately, but they just don’t act like Romans in terms of doctrine or tactics. You can see in the screenshot that follows; the AI has rushed his principes in ahead of the hastati. If that weren’t bad enough, the AI just isn’t very good. I beat the Romans with little effort.

The Roman AI leads with his Principes. This just is not right.

As usual, I wondered if my experience was made worse by the FoG(U) reimplimentation and, in fact, that appears to be the case. Replaying the scenario from the same side with similar tactics, but in the original engine, resulted in a much closer and more reasonable game. The AI was still not what I would consider strong, but the result wasn’t as completely lopsided. I’ll also note that the original AI, likewise, broke the Roman formation and moved his principes to the front, so I’m can’t claim that this version was good. Just not as bad. It’s so far removed from a historical recreation, that I feel cheated for having taken the time to load it up (strongly suspecting what I had coming).

I had pretty-much despaired finding anything else that even came close when I stumbled across another option, entirely by accident. Given my comments above, I wanted to verify exactly how the units were sized in HPS’s ancients games. Scrolling around in the loaded game, I realized that the Battle of Sentinum is one of the scenarios that came with HPS Simulations – Punic Wars, and that’s a game that I own.

The full array of the battle lines, with appropriate historical detail.

Also surprisingly, this ranks as the best experience that I’ve had with this battle. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably figuring that’s not saying much – which is true. However, Punic Wars gets certain things right – certain things that it handles uniquely. Make no mistake, it also does a lot of things wrong. I feel cheated in that the 3D unit models are all but useless and I’m stuck playing in this low-res, minimalistic 2D view. It’s awful that, despite 25-year-old graphics, the turn resolution is interminably long. The UI interaction is bound to drive up my blood pressure and take a few months off of my life. Get any of the many specific, sequential, and non-intuitive clicks wrong and the whole game is going to lock up on you. But other than that…

Liberal use of group moves makes this game bearable.

The best thing about this game is that it actually simulates the army composition in the realistic way. Obviously, the actual order-of-battle is itself speculative after 2300 years, but the modeling of the proposed forces has a clear basis. Each unit represents a maniple, allowing the model to track very clearly to the Roman military specifications. In the above screenshot, as an example, we see the right wing of the Roman side consisting of one of Rome’s two consular armies. In the bottom right corner is a Roman legion in proper historic formation. Leves are screening the front with a line of hastati and principes following. The triarii and additional skirmishers bring up the rear. For those unfamiliar with this system, leaders (down to a Tribunus commanding each class of infantry) are represented by their own unit, indicated on the screen with a helmet.

As I pointed out before, this series seems to have been designed primarily for playing 2-player over email. Forum comments have long argued that the true purpose of the AI is allow players to learn the rules well enough so that they feel comfortable going head-to-head with other enthusiasts. Within this context, I’d imagine games are played with plenty of house rules in force. A disciplined player can enforce Roman doctrine, even if he perceives that breaking it (within the limits of the rules) would give him an advantage. For example, as the Roman, I could agree not to move my triarii out of formation until the line of the principes breaks – à la SPQR. Taking the Roman side in single player games allows that to work, for the most part, even without an agreeable partner.

But what, you may be saying, about those checkerboard Roman lines and the resultant ability to retreat through advancing formations? Well, like I pointed out for FoG2 above, this isn’t necessary (albeit for different reasons). Punic Wars does not have single-unit stacking within a hex. This makes it feasible to, for example, retreat faltering hastati through the advancing line of principes. The transition between the staggered quincunx and the deployed line of battle is “internal” to a counter representing the maniple. In fact, it is assumed that the counter is in whatever formation is has to be in at any given time – an assumption that, given the remarkable amount of micro-management already present, is probably a relief. As best I can tell, the game makes no special allowance for unique abilities possessed by hastati and principes. But even if it doesn’t, what is the right way to model this? Should allowing retreating hastati to pass through their lines disrupt principes? Doesn’t that appropriately simulate the staggered deployment of the centuriae or is it better to allow them to pass without disruption? I have no idea, and it isn’t clear from the documents that this has been deliberately simulated or accounted for.

Two legions, engaged in line of battle, attriting one, two, three soldiers at time.

Each turn, in the HPS ancients series, represents 15 minutes of real time. Execution of that turn takes up approximately that same duration on the real clock, although it seems like longer. This means that an 8-hour-plus battle, as this scenario estimates Sentinum to be, will engage you for at least that amount of uninterrupted game time. For me, that suggests weeks of playing one-or-two turns a night. For head-to-head, it probably means aiming for an exchange-a-day. One might also try to replicate a miniatures session, where you intend to spend the better part of a day and evening endeavoring to complete much or all of the battle. It is quite an investment, especially considering that I’d expect to finish the same battle in FoG2 in under an hour.

One dreams of being able to automated some of these functions, to command legions with few clicks, but even manually, the experience is worthwhile. Nowhere else could I find a reasonable representation of the circa 300 BC Roman army for the stuck-at-home computer gamer.

*While the roughly 500 men in each unit in the screenshot is numerically equivalent to a “cohort,” this tactical designation was by depth, not breadth. That is to say, a cohort in the early-to-mid Roman legion consisted of the velites, hastati, principes, and triarii which created a frontage of one maniple. Besides the organizational/definitional problem presented in creating 500-person “stands” hastati, 500 principes, etc., there is the implication in tactics and battle resolution. This organization, and this applies to pretty much every Roman Republic game I have played, encourages non-standard tactics by the way the units are grouped. It makes me wonder if there are any readily-available alternatives.

**The velites are also, obviously, separate stands and, I’m going to assume, less closely associated with their cohort than the line infantry is. Skirmishers were used for functions other than leading the main battle line, including screening and cavalry support. Their disconnection from the Hastati/Principes blocks, with which they share adminstrative organization, probably makes sense. For those with a keen sense of history, the very terminology of velites is an anachronism. In the legion of this time, the skirmishing infantry were the leves. It would be another 80-90 years before including velites in the army would be historically correct.

***The units of C&C:A scaled to a very coarse representation of scale. For the infantry, there are three unit types. Light Infantry (the skirmishers), Heavy Infantry (the Roman legion, including all ranks), and a medium infantry to represent the Allied forces. A Roman legion is thus represented by two blocks, the skirmishers and the line infantry.

When in Rome, Don’t Feed the Lions

Tags

ancients, Imperator: Rome, Roman Republic, Trashcan Sinatras

With a couple of days to try it gratis, I’ve jumped into Imperator: Rome. Because I can.

My very first impression is that it really does look like a sequel to Europa Universalis: Rome. This is to contrast with alternative impressions such as “Crusader Kings II ported to Rome” or “Europa Universalis IV ported to Rome.” This actually surprises me, because I fully expected one of the latter two. EU: Rome seemed created, in part, to be a stepping stone between the original Crusader Kings and the sequel, which launched* the second version of the Clausewitz Engine. Likewise, the timing of Imperator: Rome suggests it could be a stepping stone to Crusader Kings III. Although I’ve made peace with the original EU: Rome, it still has the feel of an ugly stepsister to Paradox’s flagship games. Despite initial impressions, time spent playing allays that first impression of a EU: Rome with a graphical facelift.

My second first impression came from noticing that the Consuls have five-year (lustrum!) terms in office instead of one. Recall that my latest interest in all-things-Rome was sparked by the Senatorial politics of the Roman Republic. Part of me just wants a bug-free, feature complete version of Pax Romana. Such an obvious historical misstep makes me wonder if I’m going to get just another Rome: Total War faction management rather than the politics of ancient Rome. My concern, here too, abated with time and reason. Apparently, the thinking behind five year turns was to make the game more manageable and I suppose that makes some sense. In a game that lasts centuries, holding an election every year means you, the player, would be spending all your time on elections AND changing primary characters incessantly. Five-year elections provides a stability and continuity to the government that like would emerge from a realistic model of politics. If Harris’ works were reliable, I’d expect political alliances to mean that consul succession was considerably less dramatic than it otherwise might seem to be.

Having made peace with the election cycle, what do I make of the political portion of the game? Three hours isn’t enough to tell. So far, the simulation seems deeper than anything post-Pax Romana. The two biggest items I’m looking for is the impact that one’s resume has on future game impacts (i.e. the cursus honorum) and meaningful interplay between the political factions. There certainly seem to be plenty of political options on the table and I’m a long way from understanding their impact. Can the player create and manage alliances among AI-controlled characters? Potentially, this could be an area ripe for expansion by user-created mods, although I don’t see anything created yet.

So enough of what I didn’t see. What did I see?

Plenty of allies means light work.

Imperator: Rome starts you out with a well-constructed tutorial. There are a series of goals which propel you forward in a logical manner and also earn you special bonus for completion. The tutorial explains that doing your missions in the order presented helps acclimatize you to the game’s features. But although I liked the structure, I found it surprisingly difficult. One expects the tutorial to be idiot-proof. In this case, it starts you off by asking you to beef-up your army and navy, but when I did so the expense overwhelmed my economy. I made it through the first few goals but I felt I’d dug myself into a hole from which I’d never get back out of.

Time to start again.

I started over at the top of the grand campaign, this time without the tutorial turned on. Like in the tutorial, you begin just after the close of the Second (Great) Samnite War. Like Crusader Kings, you do not have event-branching that tries to follow a historical path. To substitute, there is a more complex mission structure whereby you establish longer-range goals and then incrementally move toward them. However, as I began my efforts to unify Italy, the Etruscans asked for an alliance and then proceeded to to beat on the Umbri.

The obvious comparison, here, is with Field of Glory: Empires, which starts at roughly the same time. They have the same “course of Empire” focus and therefore will offer a similar feel. Given the “tactical battles” feature of FoG:E it is perhaps counter-intuitive but it is Imperator: Rome that feels more like it is correctly getting into details of the battles. I’d go so far as to say that the balance between the timescales seems to have finally been correctly struck – the fight between two field armies now takes a matter of days to resolve, not weeks or months.

Outside of the the war-cycle, I’m a little less clear on what I am doing and three hours wasn’t enough to appreciate the big picture. In the great Latin War, my capture of “Interamnia” (see screenshot) put me in a good position to profit from the peace treaty. Rome was granted control over a chunk of Sabinum. Immediately, I got a warning that my new province was short of food. It also doesn’t have much in the way of people, or buildings, or anything else. So despite the complaints about lack of food, that doesn’t seem like its going to be a problem. Nevertheless, that suggests that my goal should be to develop commerce in that new province. Developing commerce was not part of the tutorial. Time, I suppose for some good old trial and error. And to do that, I’m going to need more than a few days of free trial, aren’t I?

It would appear that Paradox’s marketing move worked its intended magic upon me. A few days of free trial got me interested enough to spring for the paid game, and the simultaneously-discounted price meant that I couldn’t dither – I had to buy before the price went back up. So I did. The same move didn’t work for Half-Life. As much as I was steadily making it through the Black Mesa facility, I’m not tempted to drop $10 to keep playing, much less purchase the Half-Life 1/2 bundle package. Ah well. You win some, you lose some.

*Well, not really. The first game on that engine was Sengoku, a sort of Crusader Kings in Japan. Many saw Sengoku, also, as a trial run for CK2. Gameplay-wise, it seems to be overtaken by Crusader Kings II and period-wise by EU4. I’ve never played it, myself.

Standing Armies

Tags

Cicero, civil war, Dictator, Field of Glory, Field of Glory II, Great Battles of Caesar, Hoplites, Julius Caesar, Mare Nostrvm, Roman Empire, Roman Republic, shakespeare, ship combat, wargames

Can a constitution devised centuries ago to replace a monarchy, and based on a citizens’ militia, possibly hope to run an empire whose scope is beyond anything ever dreamed by its framers? Or must the existence of standing armies and the influx of inconceivable wealth inevitably destroy our democratic system?

In the first two novels of his Rome trilogy, author Robert Harris re-tells the life of Cicero so as to be easily relatable to the modern reader. Besides making the subject matter not just digestible, but delicious, he illustrates the link between our modern republican governments and the ancient model upon which they were based. Following a six-year wait (the book was published in 2009), he completes the series with Dictator. With this third book, I sense him speaking much more directly to modern politics.

Take, for example, the leading quote. I immediately put down the book when I read it, because I felt it worth some further thought. Later, I discovered that this passage is not only used by the book’s publisher to advertise the work, but it is also frequently quoted in reviews. It’s phrasing (obviously) can refer, also, to the American Constitution and pretty much anyone reading will immediately grasp the analogy. One’s mind would be forgive for immediately applying the quote debate over the U.S. Constitution circa 2019.

The meaning of such a phrase to Cicero, however, isn’t the same as to the reader. The reference to militia and standing armies returns to the title of the first novel, Imperium. The checks and balances which made up the government of Rome were designed to prevent concentrating power (imperium) in a single individual, or allowing those in power to retain it over a long period of time. Elections were held annually and the most powerful position, that of consul, could only be re-sought after 10 years out of office. Likewise, military command was by appointment of the Senate and also would expire annually (subject to renewal). This prevented the permanent, centralized “deep state” that, nevertheless, seemed to becoming a necessity when governing an expansive empire.

Putting the above quote back into the context of the novel, it is preceded by “And so we drifted towards calamity. At times, Cicero was shrewd enough to see it.” This leads to the above quotation, supposedly spoken by Cicero to Tiro. The author’s voice then continues.

And then at other times [Cicero] would dismiss such apocalyptic talk as excessively gloomy and argue that the republic had endured all manner of disaster in the past – invasions, revolutions, civil wars – and had always somehow survived them: why should this time be any different?

This may be one of the strongest arguments against overreacting to today’s events. We have passed through times that must have seemed at least as serious as our current situation. I would imagine that the turmoil of 50 years ago felt similarly divisive to Americans. In terms of actual civil unrest, actual incidents of violence, it was demonstrably worse. Yet here we stand, stronger and more prosperous than ever. Is it our hubris that insists that we are unique? In this, we’re usually wrong.

Of course, Cicero was (assuming he did, in fact, “dismiss such apocalyptic talk”) wrong. Caesar did cast aside centuries of tradition to seize power. Rome fought a Civil War that saw Romans killing their fellow Romans. A good chunk of the Senate died in those wars and the Senate that replaced them was hardly the Republican institution which Cicero defended. Caesar was assassinated. Cicero, on the orders of the government, was killed by soldiers outside his home.

Even still, the Roman Empire went on for another 500 years after Caesar’s dictatorship. In those centuries, the Empire continued to expand and to grow in both wealth and strength. Change isn’t always good, but it also isn’t always bad. It is inevitable. Even if the end result of today’s machinations is a major restructuring of the whole of Western Civilization, that still may not count as an “apocalypse.”

That the novel Dictator happens to be more provocative along these lines in a large part due to its subject matter. For much of this book, Cicero is out of power. As a result, the narrative is less about his political maneuverings and more about his political philosophy. Even after the death of Caesar, when Cicero was the de facto ruler of Rome (by virtue of being a senior ex-consul), we see him as much being swept along by events as making them happen. Even his position of power, his imperium if you will, derives more through luck than from desire – he is the last man standing. Pompey, Crassus, Catiline, Clodius, Cato, and Caesar are all dead. The two consuls are away leading the SPQR legions (as it happens, never to return) and other senior military men are in distant provinces.

Cicero spent the last part of his life committing his thoughts to writing. He attempted to translate Greek thought into Latin and to preserve his own philosophies for the ages. In a further attempt to extend his life’s work beyond his own time, he archived his letters to his friends. Wikipedia quotes Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński on the importance of Cicero’s letters to Western Europe’s appreciation of classical civilizations. Would there have been an enlightenment, an American revolution, without Cicero to guide us?

[T]he Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity.

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

Let us step back from the speculative and return our attention to the imaginative. I looked at the strategic/operational treatment of the Roman Civil War in an earlier post and now want to consider the operational/tactical level. I refer to these in combination because the subject matter cries out for some higher-level, unifying context for the handful of great battles between Caesar and the defenders of the Republic. Both of the games I played here have a operational piece in addition to allowing one-off play of individual battles.

Rome versus Rome.

In Great Battles of Caesar, each battle can be played as a stand-alone scenario in whatever order the player desires. Great Battles‘ campaign game has the player, as Caesar, choosing where to move after each victory against some computer-executed responses. Overall victory comes through eliminating all of the Pompeian armies. There isn’t any interaction between battles – the details of your results in an earlier battle don’t alter the setup for subsequent encounters. Really, its just a matter of picking a non-historical order for the scenarios.

For myself, I tried to follow the historical course of the war. I first took Caesar to Spain before heading east. The result was it had me fight the Battle of Munda, Caesar’s end-of-war, post-victory mop up. Putting that battle up front really doesn’t make any sense, nor is there any strategy to ordering the battles. The only real variety that can come from the campaign game is when, as shown below, you are unable to reach a province containing an enemy army. In that case, a “turn” simply goes by without a battle. There’s not much point to it all.

The interface is ancient but the concept works well enough. I move my army from Rome to Asia Minor.

Within each battle, however, I continue to warm to the way that the Roman armies are simulated in this old series. Is it the scale – the size of the formation which units represent and the length of a battle (number of turns)? It is the command and control – particularly the requirements to use group movement and to balance movement and morale? It really makes me wish I could somehow force the Great Battles board game combat tables and rules into the Field of Glory engine. That 1990s UI begins to weigh on you after a few fights.

I did have a couple of crashes as I fought against Pompey’s armies. It is hard to pin them down, but I have a guess. While I turned animations off in the options, there are still some animations that play during combat. One of them is the animation that occurs when a unit uses its missile capability as a precursor for an infantry attack. I suspect that when the AI has Roman legions and is using both the pila and the group move, these incidental animations can become significant enough to cause whatever crash I’ve been seeing in Great Battles of Caesar.

The Roman far right at Thapsus. Those elephants aren’t so tough.

I leave this game with the screenshot from the Battle of Thapsus and do so for a couple of reasons. Again, it illustrates relationship between game units and the armies’ formations. This relationship feels more like a try at the historical order of battle and less like a miniatures’ take. I’ll also note a historical detail, which is actually implement above. At Thapsus, Caesar found himself at considerable disadvantage (3:1?) when it came to the relative balance of mounted units. To mitigate, Caesar mixed infantry into his Cavalry wing. His gambit was successful. He had his infantry use their pila like pikes rather than spears and his wings were able to hold, bringing him victory. In Field of Glory II, each wing is two “stands” of cavalry.

This screenshot also shows, although not particularly clearly, the brittleness of the Senatorial elephants. Caesar’s army was able to disrupt the opponent’s elephants with volleys of arrows, causing them to panic and rampage among their own troops. Great Battles of Caesar demonstrates both effects in action and shows them to work. Compare and contrast with the elephants in Field of Glory, which are nigh on indestructible.

On to Africa. The last three stages in the Caesar campaign portray the Civil war.

The campaign in Field of Glory II is considerably more than a “Load Scenario” UI. The structure has you start with a core army which you must husband through the seven battles in the campaign. You get some reinforcements along the way, but are also required to bleed off some of your army to “garrison” your victory locations. The underlying system has considerable flexibility. In FoG2, for example, it is possible to create a branching campaign (although that wasn’t done in this case) and potentially much, much more. Of course, scripting a complex campaign is a lot of work that might not, at the end of it all, make the campaign any more fun. In any case, this campaign is a linear series of randomly-generated battles whereby the strength and quality of one’s army depends on the earlier results.

One little feature I appreciated in the FoG2 campaign system is what happens when you lose. Losing a battle one time takes you to a second chance to fight it with that portion of your army that managed to survive the first attempt. If you lose a second time, the game prompts you to go back to an earlier stage, before you lost. It’s really no different than working your way back through your own save games, attempting to figure out where you’ve gone wrong. Still, the fact that I’m guided though my attempts at redemption feels better than when I have to do it myself.

The historical Thapsus. Those elephants are like ancient tanks.

The biggest drawback when playing the campaign scenarios is that they ARE randomly generated and DO depend on previous results. Because of this, you get a battle that is somewhat similar to the historical fight, but not exactly like it. In many ways, this takes the soul out of refighting Caesar’s war.

Alternatively, you can just fight single scenarios in the same way that Great Battles of Caesar allows. The hand-designed scenario makes Field of Glory look a little better. No longer are you fielding armies that somewhat-resemble the historical forces – an actual effort has been made to reproduce the historical order of battle. Even still, the line-up in Great Battles of Caesar felt a little more authentic. Part of the problem may be that Field of Glory is more generic and therefore more flexible. There’s nothing that says a unit has to represent a cohort (or 2 or 5 or 10), so you try to optimize the number of units relative to the capabilities of the engine and the AI. The screenshot above looks considerably more like Roman legions arrayed for battle than the campaign’s auto-scenarios, and yet… compare it to the setup for Great Battles (with just under twice the unit count), and it might feel like you didn’t have quite enough stands of infantry to go around.

I’m picking a little bit too much on what may be some minor points. Field of Glory II does plenty of things better than Great Battles of Caesar, including not crashing. It’s just that I want it to do everything better.

When fighting the war against Caesar, the forces of Pompey and his Senate allies felt they had a decisive advantage. Even after evacuating Italy, they retained a superiority in naval forces. With their resultant control of the Mediterranean, they assumed that Caesar’s legions would be hemmed in while their own could move about at will. Caesar proved them wrong. Despite an insufficient transport fleet and a deficit in warships, he was able to outmaneuver Pompey’s forces to land in Greece and then ultimately defeat him at Pharsalus.

Chaos in a rain storm. It may not look it, but I’m about to take the lead.

If I felt that land battles were underrepresented in computer gaming, the situation for naval battles is even worse. If (besides Mare Nostrvm) there’s been another computer game covering tactical sea battles in the ancient world, I’m not aware of it.

Mare Nostrvm has a three-scenario campaign to represent the Roman Civil War. It begins with a battle taking place shortly after Pharsalus where a Caesarian fleet defeated Pompey’s forces off the coast of Illyricum, The “campaign” is a simple unlocking series of scenarios, ending with the decisive Battle of Actium (Octavian’s defeat of Mark Antony).

When I first got out Mare Nostrvm, I was having quite a bit of trouble. Taking control of this Pompeian fleet, I continued to struggle, at least initially. It took me a glance at the Slitherine forums and a run through the manual to get a grip. The biggest thing I was missing was that the speed of the boat is always determined by the plotted distance. I had been plotting ramming attacks by placing the “ram” icon (the spikey ball in the above screenshot) in the hex where I wanted the attack to take place. Because attacks are usually made against a nearby boat, that typically meant two or three hexes away. However, plotting a short move means that the ship moves slowly during its execution (see green lines, above). To achieve ramming speed, it is necessary to plot your move through and beyond your target hex so as to maximize your damage when you hit. Referring to the above, see the yellow, orange, and red lines which plot an attack on the “cut off” red (Caesarean) ship just to the left of center.

Beyond that, I had trouble (still do, for that matter) anticipating the movements of the enemy ships as I plot my own moves. Guessing where an enemy is going to be after I move one or two hexes seems to befuddle me. Embarrassingly, I’m often getting even the direction of the enemy’s move wrong (i.e. I fail to distinguish front from back). It’s something that gets better the longer one spends in the game and could be immensely improved by some board-game-like planning to carefully determine the results of moves. Assuming this is the right way to play the game, I could sure do with some in-game tools to help visualize movement while plotting turns. I don’t want to be poking my fingers on my screen.

Speaking of forums, strategies, and poking fingers, I did read some of the chatter on the Slitherine forums regarding the future state of the game. Several posters complained that the game was too easy, which shamed me into trying to improve my own skills. To me, the challenge level of the AI seems decent. I suspect it can re-plot movement between turns as a way to make up for its lack of more complex strategic thought, but that might just be my own incompetence talking.

There were also complaints about the lack of developer activity from the game. Shortly after release, there was talk about adding a scenario editor and other improvements. From about a year ago, the posts have been primarily wondering if the game is dead. Mare Nostrvm came out of a barely-more-than-one-man development effort. Given its limitations, it’s a very good (not to mention the only) product. I don’t think one can fairly complain that it was left “unfinished,” even if you do long for more features or expansions. This may just be a signal that the model – the tiny, independent developer making niche wargaming products – is not a viable one. It would be a shame, because this is the kind of game computer-wargaming needs more of.

We obviously need more options. My look through the clearly historically-rich setting of late-Republic Rome, I have played only two examples of tactical land combat and one of them is quite a bit out-of-date. For balance, I’ll throw in one more, also quite a bit out-of-date. Back in the interval after Great Battles of Caesar called it quits but before Field of Glory made its run, there was a independently-made, free-download option.

As my army closes on the Pompeian forces, his skirmishers retreat.

Hoplites is described as a card-based version of GMT’s SPQR. SPQR (1992) is one of the Great Battles of History boardgames. It was the sequel to Great Battles of Alexander and is (at least to some extent) the board game which became, in its computer incarnation, Great Battles of Hannibal. But Hoplites, as even the title will indicate, is not limited to the early Roman Republic. It ranges from ancient Israel through the Tokugawa shogunate, tossing in a few high-fantasy armies for good measure. I don’t know what went through the mind of its creator, but I do remember thoughts I had around that time. Most (if not all) efforts to create a decent, historically-accurate tactical wargame (particularly focusing on the pre-gunpowder battles) required an AI that could competently control the armies. Even if you have some innovative ideas about command and control or combat resolution, you’ve first got to create an engine that can handle hex-and-counter battlefield manipulation. Unless…

What if you can just get rid of the hexes and counters? This actually kills two centurions with one pilum (sorry, that was awful). The linear deployment of armies was necessary to maintain force cohesion, meaning a 2-dimensional board is already presenting a dimension too many relative to how a battle was actually fought. Forces lined up facing each other, often extending their lines so as to match the enemy’s deployment. Just because a game player can figure out how to whirl units around an enemy flank via complex and innovative use of the movement points doesn’t mean he should. Repositioning or even just turning a unit in the thick of battle would have been quite a challenge on the ancient battlefield. Therefore, a board without hexes, without movement, in many ways distills a battle down to its most basic, functional components.

A solid wall of legionary cohorts breaks through the enemy line, smashing the disordered rear.

That said, Hoplites in no way replaces a Great Battles or a Field of Glory II. Most critically, there is no way to recreate a historical fight. The variability in the game is the “armies.” In the above screenshots, I’ve used a Julius Caesar army against a generic Roman Republic army (given the commander, it is about 100 years out of date). The armies are then brought into contact one unit (card) at a time, the order determine by a combination of player choice and luck-of-the-draw from the army deck. It simulates, reasonably enough, difficulties of command and the fog of war. There is really no way, though, to capture the historical feel of a battle nor to try out strategies appropriate to that historical setup. For example, in many of these battles I tried to take advantage of Caesar’s superior quality, but numerically inferior, force by engaging in some form of oblique attack. Despite what seems to be a reasonable representation of the main line and flanking forces, I see no way to mimic these kinds of tactical maneuvers.

So many years later, Hoplites remains a decent little program. Besides that, its price is right. It’s free, it runs without crashing, and it does at least as well with ancient tactical combat as most of what’s out there.

So what else is out there? I’ll make a few honorable mentions. There are obviously far more than three tactical games covering this era of ancient Rome. Although I’m surprised nobody has yet gotten it exactly right, I can’t say that nobody has made the effort. Tin Soldiers, which briefly seemed like a good attempt to fill this gap, is now completely eclipsed by Field of Glory II. Tiller’s heirs at HPS have a product that covers the Civil War, but I can’t see laying out the money to get it. Playing the Punic Wars did not leave me wanting more. The package has a nice set of battles modeled in considerable detail – but I just don’t want to play it.

I’ve disparaged Total War a bit when talking at the strategic level and so I’ll hold off smacking it around again at the tactical level. If nothing else, I’ve yet to spring for Rome 2. From its genesis, Total War has always seemed to march in the wrong direction and so I’ve been in no hurry to pay for the new version of Rome. One of these days, I’ll find it cheap enough and probably pick it up. We should remember, while we’re at it, that Rome: Total War came to us as a reaction to any number of RTS titles. Perhaps one of the more tactics-oriented was Celtic Kings (a Caesar in Gaul title, which I have played) and its sequels (which I have not). Still, there are any number of RTS titles (starting with the original Age of Empires) covering this era. It’s just that there are next to none that I can think of that have a good, historical model of Roman legion combat.

While on this topic, I’ll make one last comment. I also moved along though S2:E2 of Roman Empire: Reign of Blood. It is difficult to stomach. Again, I have to wonder why they bothered putting together a show in a “documentary” style only to make it so inaccurate. The overall arc of history is pretty much correct but the details are immensely sloppy. For example, the office of consul is described as a single position rather than the two-man office that was so critical to the Republic. Caesar’s assignment in Gaul is portrayed as a punishment rather than the choice posting that Caesar maneuvered himself into. I could go on, but what’s the point.

I feel similarly about the series.

Constitutionalism

Tags

Cicero, Roman Republic

In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.

Condemned to Repeat It

Tags

Cicero, civil war, Cold War, communism, Lustrum, McCarthyism, media, Roman Republic, The Crucible

I’ve now re-read Conspirata, the second in Robert Harris’ historical fiction trilogy covering the career of Marcus Tullius Cicero. When I first purchased this book, nearly five years ago, I had a terrible time finding it. The reason is because the title, Conspirata, was only used in the United States and in Italy. Elsewhere, the book was sold under its original title, Lustrum. The book, at that time about six years beyond its publishing date, seemed nowhere to be found I was convinced it was out of print. It is not; it can easily be found, here, just under its American name.

The original title, Lustrum, is the Latin term for a half-a-decade, the period of the census in the Roman Republic*. The taking of the census also had religious trappings, so the Romans associated the word with sacred rituals. Within the story, its use specifically refers to Caesar’s securing of a 5-year military command in Gaul at a time when terms were limited to a single year (although they were renewable). Someone at the publisher, apparently, decided that this was a bit too obscure for the American consumer and went with a title that more obviously references the Catiline Conspiracy. Conspirata/Lustrum begins where the previous volume left off, with Cicero as Consul. We follow through Cicero’s discovery and foiling of Catiline’s plans as well as the fallout in the years thereafter.

Having simultaneously read Conspirata and watched Good Night, and Good Luck, I got to thinking about what these two historical events have to tell us about American politics in the here and now. The last shall be first.

The excesses of Joseph McCarthy’s hearings are a defining characteristic of the modern body politic. For as long as I have been alive, all Americans, no matter their political leanings, agree that the “witch hunt” of McCarthyism is a dark mark on our democracy. Particularly in the mid-to-late 1950s, the consensus of America was decidedly anti-communist, but it was also decidedly anti-McCarthyism. It was a living example of ends not justifying the means. Generations grew up with The Crucible being taught in schools and the imagery of colonial Salem’s court and McCarthy’s hearing room being tied together.

What does this mean today? For George Clooney** in 2005, he saw shadows of the 50s in the media and politics of that present day. Jump ahead fifteen years, and I have to wonder how much that context has changed in a rather short time. Clooney, quoting Edward R. Murrow, raises the issue of the responsibility of television and, by extension, film to not just entertain, but to inform. In the case of Murrow, with his direct criticism of McCarthy, he was pushing an envelope – framing newsworthy events of the day within editorializing opinion. From Clooney’s standpoint, one might assume, this duty to inform includes separating right opinions from wrong opinions when “reporting” the news.

But now we are fifteen years into the future of Good Night‘s present. The likes of CBS are no longer leaders in terms of informing the American public. People get their news from a variety of sources and trust in major media*** is low. The old networks, for that matter, can barely hang on to their role as entertainers much less use their bully pulpit to cultivate, convince, and cajole.

Consider also whether a “witch hunt” atmosphere pervades our society today (or, at least, is on the rise). Assuming it is even possible, try to see past the othering and objectively consider from whence restrictions on speech and restrictions on thought come. This isn’t the 1950s, so using the pressure of “the system” to control political dissent doesn’t seem to be possible anymore – if it was even then. Instead, the phrase “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences” is used to justify an enforcement of conformity without, ostensibly, restricting speech or using the power of the state to suppress dissent. Is driving a cake-maker out of business really any less onerous than seeing that a newsreader or screenwriter can no longer find employment in the industry? Is there much difference?

So perhaps America is condemned to repeat our periodic witch trials, in one form or another, because the impulses that lead to them are so ingrained in our nature. Furthermore, we’ve proven we can survive it; even thrive. A defining characteristic of the McCarthy period is, despite an overwhelming anti-communist consensus, we rapidly integrated into our national self-image that the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience which our nation protects is more important than the political consensus du jour. Thus far, we’ve always come out of it alright, albeit occasionally at great cost. We are not, after all, like the late Roman Republic, where bribery, murder, intimidation, and might-makes-right were considered politics-as-usual? Are we?

The Catiline Conspiracy is a lesser-known incident in the tumultuous period leading up to the end of the ancient Republic. In popular culture it is overshadowed by Plutarch-cum-Shakespeare and our focus on the life of Julius Caesar. It is Cataline, not Caesar, however who would seem a little more at home in the current election cycle.

Cataline, or Lucius Sergius Catilina, was understood to be descendant from Sergestus, a figure who had come with Aeneas to Italy following the Trojan War. His family name was synonymous with old money and old power, although it lacked the clout that it once wielded as well as the wealth that so often is required to back up power. On top of his ancestry, Cataline had distinguished himself with his military service during tumultuous times. Amazingly, he also avoiding becoming entangled in Sulla’s civil war. While he supported Sulla in the end, he also had marital ties to Marius. With his reputation and name, he expected to eventually rise to the consulship of Rome.

He wasn’t all solemnity and service, however, as it was well known he had his dark side and more than few skeletons in his closet. Cataline was accused of killing his brother-in-law and suspected of killing his first wife and son (so that he could remarry more favorably). He was brought to trial for defiling a Vestal Virgin, which was then a capital crime. Although he was acquitted, it more likely was due to his political connections than his actual innocence. Conspirata portrays him as slightly mad and more than a bit homicidal.

Misbehavior while Governor of Africa resulted in delaying his run for Consul (Senators on trial could not stand for the consulship). The result of the delay was that he found himself running against the ambitious Cicero, rather than the unremarkable Gaius Marcius Figulus. While Cataline’s campaign had massive financial backing from dark money (again, relying on Harris as my source), Cicero was able to secure the unlikely support of the “old guard.” A key plank of Cataline’s platform was a blanket forgiveness of student (oops, wrong millennium) debt. Cataline lost and blamed Cicero for stealing an election for the office which was his destiny.

By the following election, when Cataline ran a second time, an alliance between Cataline and Julius Caesar had become evident. The two Senators advocated the combination of debt cancellation and distribution of free land to the poor as a vote-grabbing, populist platform. While Caesar was, himself, too young to stand for Consul, he managed to secure the position of Pontifex Maximus – ruffling more than a few feathers. Cataline began to be seen as Caesar’s proxy in the Consul’s seat. Appreciating the threat, (again****, we’ll rely on Harris’ narrative), Cicero conspired with the patrician establishment and wealthy general Lucius Licinius Lucullus to block Cataline from the office. As Consul, Cicero proposed to hold a triumph for Lucullus concurrent to the next election. A legionnaires traveled from distance provinces to celebrate within Rome’s walls voting would be titled toward’s Lucullus’ lieutenent Lucius Licinius Murena, another candidate for the office. Murena won, but it was a dirty election even by Roman standards.

Outright bribery aside (which was both frowned upon and condoned simultaneously), the annual election season was expected to be accompanied by lavish spending by the candidates. Frustrated by the obvious corruption, Cato (the younger) with consular candidate Servius Sulpicius Rufus (a student and friend of Cicero, thrown under the bus to foil Cataline) proposed a law which declared the hosting of banquets and games to be bribery, prosecutable**** under the law.

Up until this point, I feel like it would only take some minor adjustments to match today’s political environment to Cataline’s story. What is also missing is the dark forces behind the scenes that were funding  it all. One must assume that the populist leanings of Cataline, Caesar, and the likes of Publius Clodius Pulcher were merely the means to power, not an end unto themselves. Similarly the money and backing of Crassus and Pompey, critical to any conspiracy, was invested according to the self-interest of the investor. Do the politics of today similarly have a unifying purpose behind them all? Or is that sort of thing just the fantasies of the far-flung partisan commentators. What about what happened next in Rome? Could anything like it happen in the here and now?

After losing the election to Murena and Decimus Junius Silanus, Cataline felt that he had been robbed by his birthright not once, but twice, by Cicero. Feeling he had no other recourse, he plotted the murder of Cicero and the armed overthrow of the Roman Republic. Although originally to be an expression of the will of the people over corrupt, moneyed interests, his proposed tactics began turning ugly (again*****). He planned to kill not only Cicero, but other Senators who represented Rome’s ancient nobility. His forces would burn Rome and sow destruction and chaos. He even proposed augmenting his army by instigating a slave uprising and taking the side of their revolution.

For Cataline, the defense of freedom was too important to let tradition, law, order, or much of anything stand in the way of removing the illegitimate politicians from power. For most of Rome, he had taken it too far.

So where are we, now, on this timeline?

*The primary reason for the census was to determine the number of men eligible for military service.

**I’ve long been aware of the fame of Clooney’s aunt. I did not realize that his father was a network anchorman and a (failed) candidate for the U.S. House. Dad, need I say, is a Democrat. Clooney needed to establish himself as an actor well before he became an activist, but Clooney first attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps by majoring in journalism.

***Identification of big media as biased or “fake news” is nearly universal if one allows that the culprit is restricted to those on the other side of the political divide from one’s self.

****In the Roman Republic, there were no public prosecutions. Instead, prosecutions were done by private individuals. After losing the consular election it was Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Cato who prosecuted the winning candidate for bribery.

*****The heavily politicized environment means there are two sides to each of these stories. Cataline was considered a reformer and a friend to the common man by many and one must assume that any of the evils of which he stands accused by history may well have been exaggerated or even fabricated by those who were against him.

The Installation is Divided into Three Parts

Tags

Bibracte, Field of Glory II, France, Great Battles of Caesar, Julius Caesar, Roman Republic

I’ve always liked Good Old Games, better known as just GOG. I’ve bought quite a few items from them over the years – certainly far more than I’ve played. Their mainstay is resurrecting old games that are no longer compatible with the latest in operating systems and getting them to work. In other cases, they simply repackage a game no longer being sold by the original publisher. Lately, they also seem to be trying to break into the business of publishing new releases, from which I have also taken a bite. Are they distracting themselves from their original and successful model? I try to mostly ignore the newly-developed games which, based entirely on superficial impressions, are of a decidedly lower-quality than their re-releases.

Besides buying old games that I may or may not feel the urge to play anytime soon I am apt (as are others, based on comments) to repurchase games that I already own. I’ve done it to get a reliably up-to-date patch or a pre-configured DOSBox setup. I’ve even done it to avoid the hassle of running off of my old CD. The uniformly positive experiences I’ve had with their games mean I’m willing to toss money at them without scrutinizing what I’m getting and why.

Now let’s move from the general to the specific. If you’ve followed my Great Battles saga from the beginning, you’ll know I was shying away from reinstalling the game because I recalled suffering through stability problems. Having mentioned it online, I was told the the GOG version resolved the issues that the game had. Since then, I repurchased the game through GOG. I’ve been able to install and play the GOG versions of Alexander and Hannibal but it wasn’t until today I tried installing The Great Battles of Caesar. You see where this is going – it didn’t work.

GOG’s business model, apparently, was a successful one. They could acquire the rights to old games (abandonware for nothing and others for a trivial amount, one imagines), and, with only a small, further investment in fixing compatibility issues, get the program running again. They could then sell the games for amounts that we gamers considered trivial and still make good money in the process. Yet a flaw in this model may be becoming apparent. Compatibility with current operating systems isn’t a static measure. Windows has now advanced a few versions since GOG hit the scene and games for which, perhaps, they have already milked the value out of the market now require additional support.

The GOG message boards are littered with complaints about compatibility problems relative to the Great Battles series. Most of them focus on Windows 10, and GOG’s solution has simply been to declare that the game works only up through Windows 8. It does appear to me that compatibility problems are not restricted by operating system. Some purchasers are only able to play Great Battles of Alexander while others do fine with two out of three. I do not run on Windows 10, but I do seem to be in that latter category. When I play the GOG version, some scenarios crash the program on load while others initially run but then go into an error-throwing cycle.

Among the subset of posters who say they’ve found a solution, there is quite a bit of variability. It took me some trial and error to find the method that worked for me. First of all, the best patch for Caesar looks to be what’s available at this fan-made support website (http://www.ianm1.plus.com/). His patches contain what he refers to as the “latest” patch for each game in the series. I’m assuming he means the patch released by the publisher before support for the game was dropped. Applying this patch over the GOG version forces it to ask for the original CD – a step backward. There is a second patch, which he calls a new version, apparently from an enthusiastic player with a hex editor. Among other things, this removes the CD requirement.

On the GOG forum, this patch has mixed results and it certainly did not work well for me. Presumably the 1.1 patch (again concentrating on Caesar) is only fully compatible with the install (production CD) that it was made for. One user who successfully applied all patches explained that it is necessary to contact GOG support and ask them to give you their unmodified installer. Rather than do that, I dug out my Great Battles Collector’s Edition CDs and installed from there. Applying the 1.1 patch and then the “new version” patch resulted in a) some immediate graphic improvements and b) an executable that could load and run the scenarios that crashed under GOG. Again, this was my magic combination; others reported different results.

It is not polite to point.

Of course, it still crashed.

Now, one thing I had noticed after installing this “new version” is that the sounds and animations were all turned off by default. As I’ve said, I actually consider the animations a high point of this game. They’re both oddly aesthetic and help me take in enemy movements. After 2 or 3 crashes, all occurring after animating a large, enemy group move, I figured that maybe that animation was turned off for a reason. I set it all off and was able to complete the Battle of Bibracte without further incident.

Julius Caesar urges his forces forward to meet the Gauls at Bibracte.

Reading, as I was, the GOG forums I noticed posts that have been made after the release of Field of Glory II (FoG2). Although these are the Great Battles fanatics talking, there were a surprising number of posts talking about how FoG2 did not measure up to Great Battles. To an extent, I can see their point. In FoG2, the miniatures roots seem to shine through more. It may be in part due to unit size difference. It may be the different implementation of command and control. It may even have to do be the way the Great Battles battlefields and how they are more restricted.

Great Battles of Caesar, featuring Roman forces, don’t center on the phalanx formation that I found so special in the early iterations. Other unique features, however, do impact game play. In particular, a Roman army needs to make good use of group movement and group attacks. Without it, the lower-level legion commanders (labeled as tribunes in this battle) are allowed command over only two units. Practically speaking, this means that a legion can advance or attack straight ahead on its own, but repositioning or recovering from a heavily-contested fight requires the intervention of a general on par with Caesar.

My battle is nearly won when Gallic reinforcements threaten from my right. Who will break first?

Unfortunately, neither FoG2 nor Great Battles of Caesar enforce the Roman manipular deployment (although in both you can try to enforce it on your own). Great Battles falls short of FoG2 when it comes to scenario and campaign development. Between the modern scenario editing tools, “quick” battles, and the access to scenario scripting (both for play and for automated scenario construction), FoG2 makes a far better game for true sandbox play. In FoG2, it also seems easier to set up a challenging game without feeling entirely like it is “cheating.” Lastly, there are those crashes. Even though I feel like I’ve a handle on these recent crashes, I still want to tiptoe around my Great Battles fights with frequent saves. The current state-of-the-art in game engine technology brings with it an expectation of bug free, crash free game play.

Caesar takes on the Gauls in the linked campaign.

So why am I dwelling on Caesar’s Gallic Wars at all right now? The answer is in Field of Glory II. Whereas the linked campaign in Great Battles of Caesar is the war between Pompey and Caesar, for the campaign in FoG2 you must fight your way through Gaul. As I mentioned above, FoG2 has a superior system for creating a semi-random campaign based upon, potentially, all manner of criteria. So rather than the Great Battles method of playing the historical battles but selecting the order, FoG2 results from one battle can truly feed back into the campaign. Furthermore, the individual battles (different terrain, different forces) can be randomized, adding substantially to replayability.

As the lines clash, the Roman situation starts to look tenuous.

Like the well-designed single-player battles, a well-design campaign can be pretty challenging. To start the campaign, Caesar must meet a larger Gallic force in open battle; there is no initial branching. However, as the Romans, I do get to customize the makeup of my army. I have given Caesar a mixed bag when it comes to the legions he commands. While he has a core of seasoned legions in his center, the remaining forces are either newly-raised or otherwise just mediocre. The lack of quality shows when I start to take a beating on left side of my line. While some parts of my line are clearly superior, others are notably inferior.

When the tide turned, the shift was rapid.

Of course, one unit routing won’t lose you the battle. A whole bunch of units routing certainly will. Despite some weak points in my line, the generally-superior center held up well and I had enough of a lead to make up for weakness on my flanks. When the Gallic reinforcements showed up on my right, it was too little too late. Speaking of compare and contrast, compare the screenshot above with the Great Battles grab of the Roman center. Which one gives the better impression of four Roman legions arrayed against an enemy?

This looks more like Roman legions, all though it is more in appearance than in detail.

I can also divide my experience of the Battle of Bibracte across three different plays. In addition to the Caesar campaign, Field of Glory II has a one-off version of the fight. As you can see in the above screenshot, the way this scenario sets up the Roman attack gives a much better impression of a properly-organized Roman army. The skirmishers lead off and then are able to retreat through the advancing heavy infantry. The tough Roman legions (decent ones this time) are set up hit the enemy line in waves.

The battle is driven by a few key skirmishes. Here I break the primary infantry unit, securing my victory.

In this battle, the FoG2 importance of commanders comes into play, providing a contrast to Great Battles of Caesar with its activation and command limits. The key to the entire battle is a handful of key skirmishes around the map. If I am able to break an enemy strong point – his best troops – I will snowball towards victory. Those critical locations are defined by the troop quality, obviously, but also the location of the enemy generals.

FoG2‘s implementation of leadership bonuses makes for a faster, smoother game. There’s no more fiddling around with a general’s horse to try to get some extra forces into the command radius. Sensibly, the generals simply move with the units they command. It is also less engaging. Generals are simply a buff for a couple of your units with the added feature that they can be a target (a General’s death really hurts morale). I think FoG2 tells less of a “story.” Compare with a Caesar riding off mid-battle to shore up a flank and unexpectedly getting three initiatives, turning the tide of the battle. Is either implementation more historical or “realistic” than the other? I don’t know.

It may also be worth, once again, contrasting the screen grabs between the two engines. Once again, it is clear that Great Battles of Caesar implements the units at a finer grain and with more of a one-to-one relation to the historic order-of-battle. The simplicity is part of what makes FoG2 play smoother and probably also helps with the AI, but have we lost something as well?

Here they come again!

The result from all three battles was roughly the same. Rather than take advantage of my good defensive position, I moved out sharply and engaged. The move paid off when was able to pull irreversibly ahead before enemy reinforcements arrive. Of the three, it was the campaign version that proved the most challenging, even though the end-result matched the other two. Of course, the challenge level has as much to do with difficulty settings and luck of the dice as anything. What I wonder most, going forward, is if Great Battles of Caesar is going to hold up, stability-wise, for the remainder of the scenarios. I also wonder if the user-made battles of the past ages are still out there for download and if they can be played without the dreaded crash.

Dotting the Ides and Crossing the Rubicon

Tags

Alea Jacta Est, Cicero, Crusader Kings 3, Europa Universalis, Europa Universalis: Rome, Imperator: Rome, Julius Caesar, Paradox, Pax Romana, Republic of Rome, Roman Republic, shakespeare, wargames

The word Imperium, in Latin, means the political power or authority that is held by an individual. It is also the name of the first book in a trilogy by Robert Harris which follows the career of Marcus Tullius Cicero through historical fiction.

Coincidentally, the Cicero Update is the first major overhaul of the the Paradox game of the ancient world, Imperator: Rome. I’ll return to this and a few other of the more recent developments at the tail end of this post.

But first, the serendipity of all this has made me decide it is time to do another comparative gaming exercise for the ancients PC games. In this, the first of two posts, I’ll focus on the Strategic/Operational level. I’ll take on Operational/Tactical separately so as not to compare olives to pomegranates within these overlapping scopes.

To cut to the chase, what I’m finding is a different answer than what I opined after the first two times.

Before I get into my current explorations, I want to make an honorable mention. Of all the games I’ve played, the one that has come the closest to getting the decline of the Roman Republic right (especially internal politics) is Pax Romana. So close and yet so far.

The Old Republic

Pax Romana was a 2002 title, created by a French company called Galiléa, founded by game designer Philippe Thibaut. Thibaut is the designer for the board game Europa Universalis, a 1993 title. At the end of the 90s, Thibaut worked on the Paradox team that brought the initial iteration of Europa Universalis to life on the PC. Following the completion of EU/EU2, Thibaut separated from Paradox and the turmoil surrounding collapse of Strategy First to develop a PC game based on the Roman Republic.

With the benefit of hindsight, one might see the seeds of Pax Romana‘s ultimate failure from the very beginning. Pax Romana is a computer version of the board game Republic of Rome, published by Avalon Hill in 1990. The game has been described as exemplifying some of the best and some of the worst of board gaming circa 30 years ago. Republic of Rome sports a thick rulebook, often inscrutable as a result of heavy cross referencing and vague specification. Decades of errata and user discussion have resolved most of the issues (and resulted in a reprint in 2009), leaving a game that rates pretty highly among its fans.

The strategic map from Pax Romana. Compare to the EU: Rome screen, below. [www.mobygames.com]

For a board game conversion, some things are easy and some are hard. For graphics, Thibaut had his EU experience, which had built an effective grand-strategy interface (compare the Pax Romana and EU2-era EU:Rome screenshots). Tables, charts, and die rolls all get handled by the computer and tracking the details becomes much easier. You are no longer limited 1-or-2 step armies designated by cardboard counters. Unit strengths, senatorial support, provincial income can all be tallied as fine-grained as desired without any additional computing effort. The resulting complexity growth may even be an advantage. You reach a point where a weak computer AI can derive some advantage simply by accounting for equations that are too complex for a player to follow.

What an AI is going to be disastrous at, however, is the social aspect of a game. Yet it is this, according to many, that is really the key to Republic of Rome gameplay. RoR is a six-player game where each controls a faction within the Roman Republic. Players try to increase their own power and glory with an end-game goal being to claim the role taken by Caesar thereby creating the Roman Empire. At the same time, the players must also cooperate to keep Rome from falling to ruin or being defeated by foreign forces. Over the course of the game it will be necessary to cooperate with some players in order to compete with others. Negotiation is key. The rule book says that anything is on the table, as long as it doesn’t break the rules. Deals can be public or secret with the advantage of public deals being that they are binding.

This sets up an impossible goal for the PC version programmer. The computer is never going to get the human aspects (bluffing, goodwill, etc.) of negotiation right. Furthermore, it is impossible for a computer to “think outside the box.” Negotiation with computer players all-but-requires selecting options from a finite list. Getting this balanced right was going to be difficult to impossible. Add to that the feature creep inevitable in the conversion and you’d begin to doubt that such a game could ever be completed.

Pax Romana was released in pretty rough condition. Several patches improved upon the game, but the economics of fixing a failed release is a losing one. If I recall, the CD also shipped with the hated StarForce copy protection, which I have to believe further hurt its prospects. With the project coming apart economically, a final “unofficial” patch came out of the development team. Even with that patch applied, bugs remain. Furthermore, a comparison between the manual and the gameplay demonstrates there are features of the game that were intended but never implemented. Yet, even in this fragmented state, the vision of the developer can be glimpsed through the fog. Were it all to work, this might have been the ultimate game of the Roman Republic.

But That I Loved Rome More

Back at Paradox, EU had spun off its family of strategy games; Hearts of Iron, Victoria, and Crusader Kings. The success was enough* to create a new-engine version of their line, starting with Europa Universalis III. In 2008, one year after EU3, Paradox released Europa Universalis: Rome. At the time, I was none too pleased with EU3 and, with it, Paradox. I also thought that EU: Rome looked like a cheap grab at more sales by shoehorning Roman uniforms onto the EU3 sprites. What I didn’t realize at the time was that EU: Rome was also a kind of Crusader Kings 1.5. That is, along with taking the EU format back in time it also built upon the Crusader Kings system of dynastic-based play to model the cursus honorum of the Roman Republic.

Caesar’s forces are digging into Gaul for the long haul.

When I played the Punic Wars in EU: Rome, I found it to be a reasonable match for the period, at least at the start. Early on in her fight against Carthage, Rome demonstrated the ability to bounce back from massive losses. Even in the face of total disaster, Rome could raise new legions, build new ships, and appoint new generals so as to continue the fight. EU‘s combined economic/military simulation which allows semi-free construction of armies worked fairly well.

Loading the Roman Civil Wars scenario, though, I find it doesn’t work so well. The scenario opens with Caesar poised to cross the Rubicon, as he should be historically, but with Pompey’s armies across the river defending the “front.” Shortly after starting, I am engaged in three major battles, spread roughly across the southern border of Gaul, pitting similarly-sized armies against each other. While it’s better to win, of course, losers still live to fight another day while winners feel the toll from closely-fought combat. Unlike newer iterations of this series, depleted units do not refit in the field. To bring a damaged unit back to full strength, one must merge it with other units of the same type. Thus, the Roman Civil War quickly turns into an economic war. Caesar uses the economic power and manpower of Gaul to feed the meat grinder while (the AI) Pompey does the same using his territories. It does not feel like an accurate representation of history

The Cast of Die-hards

After the failure of Galiléa, Thibaut began afresh with AgeOD and the creation of the game Birth of America. This was one solution** to the problems of the continuous-time, grand-strategy predecessors. I’ve likened the first generation of EU and Crusader Kings to a computer version of Whack-a-Mole. Run at normal speed, the game grew tedious as one waited for something significant to happen. At high speed, the screen was bombarded by alert messages. Dismissal require quickly hitting the right button on the right message before the next one popped up. Failure to keep up meant you might race by something requiring your attention. Birth of America, to contrast, was implemented as a turn-based game. Orders are given between turns and then executed without any player intervention. The game also added innovative gameplay in terms of leader management and logistics as well as presenting a fresh-looking graphical interface.

In the years that followed, Thibaut had a hand in a number of Birth of America spin-offs.  In 2012, AgeOD took the engine to ancient Rome in the form of Alea Jacta Est, a release did not seem to include the technical involvement of Thibaut.

Caesar prepares to cross the Rubicon.

As I stated at the beginning, when I looked at the game in the contexts of the Pyrrhic War and the Second Punic War, I was not particularly pleased with the Alea Jacta Est treatment (technically via its expansion/add-on The Birth of Rome). I found the game stuck in the dull center between the two ends that fire a gamer’s imagination about the Roman Republic. It abstracts away the strategic decisions and the politics, which Pax Romana tried to capture. It also automates the tactical details of battle. For the Pyrrhic War, the operational control armies in Southern Italy seemed like too little and too constrained to make for an entertaining game. In the Punic War, the operational nature of the game lost the connection with the decisive battles that made the campaign against Hannibal so dramatic.

For the Roman Civil War, the focus of Alea Jacta Est seems far more appropriate. When playing as Caesar or Pompey, I don’t think we want to be distracted by the details of Roman politics. Alea Jacta Est still factors in national morale and the economy, but reduces their management to a handful of major decisions (scripted so as to retain a historical connection) rather than ongoing, attention-demanding simulation. At the same time, the battlefield spans the entire Mediterranean, and so the broad, operational movement of forces is more interesting than in either the previous two examples.

The game starts, as shown in the first screenshot in this section, with Caesar poised to cross the Rubicon. The introductory text stresses the importance of taking Rome. Upon doing so, events are triggered that divide the Roman territories between the two fighting factions along historical lines. As Caesar, you then must decide whether to point your initial thrust west toward Spain or head east toward Egypt and the Levant. Again, the scenario notes helpfully explain this.

Caesar, with the support of a second army, wrests control of Spain from Pompey.

I suspect the key to enjoying this game, much like its Paradox predecessors, lies in learning to ignore what should be ignored. The initial flood of messages as Caesar seizes control of Rome are entertaining and informative. Thirty-to-fifty new messages on each and every turn are considerable less so. What I found was that, a year or so into the scenario, most of the notices have no meaning to me as I play. At the game’s start, I needed to figure out what units are available and get them organized into command structures. After that, while the alerts do involve impacts to morale and logistics, it seems better concentrate on what I am trying to do. I know where my forces are and I kind of know from whence they are threatened. Turns can then move by pretty quickly.

Each turn is one month. During execution, turns are broken down and evaluated day-by-day. Because logistics and other details are taken into account, conquering enemy territory is a multi-turn (i.e. multi-month) prospect. To take a city, a nearby unit must be active (lesser commanders aren’t always available) and be superior to any enemy armies waiting to defend. After your army moves, and assuming they win any initial battles, they then must lay siege to the enemy-controlled city. After (sometimes) many months of siege, the defenses may be breached allowing an all-out assault on the city. Launching an assault too soon could reap unnecessary losses. Waiting too long means the turns tick by without making any meaningful progress toward scenario victory. After a battle/siege/assault cycle, the attacking army is likely depleted in terms of supplies and fighting power. A turn or two of refitting might be prudent to get them ready for the next operation.

Ignoring the details, as I’ve settled into doing, probably means that I’m mismanaging my logistics; either the economic acquisition of resources or the resupply process. Many a time I’ve spent months looking at an underfed army, waiting for them to refresh themselves, wondering if the reason the process is slow is because I’m not doing it right. Yet most of the time, a common sense approach seems to work. Control a connected string of provinces and supplies seem to flow.

It is left to Marc Antony to expel Pompey from Italy and pursue him into Greece.

I’ve yet to complete the scenario and I feel I’m moving too slowly to gain a victory. It took me a year or two to get a reasonable balance of size and number of armies. I made the choice to have Caesar, supported by a second army, take Spain. Marc Antony, with his own full army, got the responsibility of running Pompey out of Italy. This he managed to accomplish despite Pompey having the numbers. One saving grace is that, throughout the game, scripts trigger to advance the historical narrative. You’re not left entirely to the mercy of the game engine.

As with the Second Punic War, the game tends bog down in the tedium of the siege process and chasing around enemy nuisance stacks. It fails to tell a story through the iconic battles of the war. This is less of an issue, however, in a war where the iconic battles aren’t quite so iconic.

The Memory of the Living

Returning now to Robert Harris’ Imperium, now on its second reading, wherein I found clear satisfaction to contrast with the mixed results of my gaming. The novel is a thing of beauty that I’ve enjoyed on many different levels.

The basic idea behind the novel is this. Cicero had a slave, Tiro, who accompanied him from the beginning of his political career. Tiro was an accomplished figure in his own right having, for example, developed a shorthand system (features of which are still used today) for recording speeches verbatim. Tiro was eventually freed by Cicero and lived many years after Cicero’s death when, among other occupations, he became a writer and a publisher. He put together the collected works of Cicero and penned at least four books himself. One of those was was a “biography***” of Cicero, which has not survived in any form but is referenced by Plutarch and others. Harris’ book, therefore, pretends to be that biography of Tiro’s. It is divided into “scrolls” rather than chapters and uses Tiro in first-person voice. It is also written in contemporary language.

The first book starts (some background aside) with Cicero’s entry into politics. It features three main events. Cicero’s prosecution of Gaius Verres, the installation of Pompey as supreme Roman commander, and Cicero’s election to Consul. Major events and Cicero’s speeches are preserved in scholarly history so Harris just needs to fill in the blanks with solid historical fiction. In his afterward he writes about his intent: For everything that is in the historical record, those events are accurately described in his novel. Where something is unknown to history, his version is at least plausible. In no case, he hopes, is his version of events refutable by actual, recorded history.

If nothing else, the book it is a great history-lite for those of us who want to understand the life and importance of Cicero, but don’t want to wade through dry history books or difficult-to-read Senate speeches. Also, by placing 2000+ year-old events into current language, the book takes on meaning for our current times.

Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were marked by a return to classical scholarship. One result is that the structure of the Enlightenment-inspired U.S. government (and that of the several States) was based on the government of Rome in many important ways. It actually took me this second read-through to realize something important about the Roman Senate. The Senate of Rome was not a legislative body; it was an executive body. Its closest relative in modern American might be the small-town New England Board of Selectmen. The Senate of Rome had the power of the executive (typical of an American Governor or a President or, of course, a Board of Selectmen) as well as the power of the purse (usually the House in a bicameral Legislative structure). They did not, however, have the power to make laws; that right was reserved to the people in a method more akin to Constitutional amendments.

That said, Harris’ Cicero has a lot to say that is applicable to modern legistlating, politicking, and electioneering. He also has criticisms for the “Deep State” and the bankruptcy inherent giving free stuff away to win political support. In some of these cases, I wish I knew what were actual Cicero quotations versus fictive speculation; I’d hate to go around quoting Harris and claiming it to be the words of Cicero. In addition to the timeless truths, I also recognize modern personalities in these ancient personae. Despite the massive differences in the surrounding culture, I have in my head a handful of actual people from the local political scene who match very well with the book. Uncannily so, in some cases.

Cicero’s political strategy also makes me yearn for a game like Pax Romana, but one that gets it right. Military service was often critical to political success in Rome, but there were exceptions. Cicero is one. His military service was the bare minimum for a Senator and later in his career he forwent the glory that many politicians sought through military command. In fact, he tried not to leave the city of Rome if at all possible, not wanting to get too far from the halls of power.  The methods and outcomes of chasing and exercising political Imperium can be just as fascinating as Rome’s military campaigns. Pax Romana and its board game ilk tantalize us with the gaming possibilities.

Having reread the book at the same time I started in with Season 2 of Roman Empire: Reign of Blood., I find myself even more disappointing with the latter than I was before. The novel and S2:E1 cover almost exactly the same time frame, with the show focused on Julius Caesar rather than Marcus Cicero. I’m glad I looked at the two side-by-side as it makes it all the more obvious how off the rails the Netflix production has gone. Cicero (and Harris’ Tiro) are witness to the rise of Caesar in politics and the formation of the first triumvirate (not yet extant when Cicero was consul) which closes Episode 1. Harris reveals Caesar’s role to be defining despite also being subtle, conducted behind the scenes. In Roman Empire, the second season is in some ways a little better quality than the first. There is less narrative repetition and more content in the acted-out portions of the show. The accuracy of those reenactments, however, has taken a turn for the worse. On screen we have Caesar leading one of Crassus’ legions to defeat Spartacus. Caesar then resolves the conflict over credit for that victory via a back-alley deal (literally a back alley meeting is portrayed on screen) to divide power between them. One wonders what’s the point of including obviously inaccurate details. Wouldn’t it have been just as easy (and just as dramatic) to be accurate?

To Be Continued

More to come as I continue on with both the Harris trilogy and, with trepidation,the second season of Roman Empire. I’ll also want to look at some of the Operational/Tactical games that cover this same period of warfare.

Beyond that, there are also some games I want to mention. While they fit in with those above, I haven’t played them in this go around. I’ve deliberately left out the various incarnations of Rome: Total War. The newest Rome 2 (already more than six years old) did update the political aspects of the game. Rome (Carthage as well) has three factions with which a Roman player must compete. However, when I’ve decided to dig out a Total War game for a historical experience, I am typically left disappointed. This time, I pass.

For me, the most obvious omission is the “sequel” to EU:Rome, Imperator: Rome. As EU:Rome was a practice run for Crusader Kings II, so Imperator: Rome appears to be a prelude to the release of Crusader Kings III. Imperator adds a new 64-bit component to the Crusader Kings II/EU4/HoI4 engine and, presumably, adds new style and functionality to the previous generation of games. However, like the Crusader Kings II initial release, the Imperator seems to have been pushed out in an unsatisfactory state. The original version prompted many complaints about both bugs and play issues. After some major updates, the buzz is that the game is far more stable and sensible, but still lacks the breadth and depth that one would expect from a Crusader Kings cousin. Someday, I expect to get this but that day is not today. When I do, I fully expect there will be a Roman Civil War scenario**** that will make a nice substitute for my EU:Rome section, above. I hope and expect that my verdict will be better with the newer game.

Following shortly after the release of Paradox’s Imperator: Rome, AgeOD’s challenger Field of Glory: Empires hit the streets. This one had a much better initial reception and I, in fact, have already purchased it but not got in much in the way of play. FoG: Empires is in something of an upgrade to the Alea Jacta Est family, almost seeming to respond to my original criticism of that game. It de-emphisizes the operational/logistics focus of the older series and adds layers both above and below. There is more of the grand strategy of empire building as you must manage the culture and finances of your nation. FoG: Empires also adds the ability to export battles into the Field of Glory II for a tactical resolution. In addition to that, it adds in another feature taken from my above history-of-the-genre.

After Philippe Thibaut was, more or less, forced away from the development of Pax Romana by the various business pressures, he focused on a sequel. Instead of modeling the creation of the Roman Empire, he moved on to its fall. Great Invasions was in may ways similar to Pax Romana, but the focus was on the many “barbarian” nations that chipped away at Rome’s power. One unique feature was that the rise and collapse of these factions was part and parcel of the game. In nearly any other grand-strategic game, you needed to lead your nation (be it Greece, Rome, or the Visigoths) to world domination and cause it to “stand the test of time.” In Great Invasions, by contrast, the scoring took into account that most of the warring tribes of Europe were destined to fall into obscurity. Similarly, Field of Glory: Empires adapts a version of this natural course of an empire within its game mechanics.

I also note that Field of Glory: Empires ships with a Pyrrhic War scenario in addition to its grand campaign start point. One of these days I’ve really got to compare and contrast it to my earlier ancients lineup. Beyond those two, however, Field of Glory: Empires lacks any focused scenarios. It would surprise me if either the developers or fans don’t, someday soon, create a series of scenarios based upon interesting periods of Roman history. As of yet, though, nothing appears close to available (on the forums, there is a Europa Barbarorum total conversion, a reference to the Total War version of Great Invasions). Were there a Roman Civil War scenario for Field of Glory: Empires, it would be a great comparison to the above. But, alas, there is not.

On the near horizon, newish developer Avalon Digital is about to release a computer version of the Columbia block-game Julius Caesar. Although the game is targeted for release within the next few days, I don’t see myself purchasing it in the very near term. If I had it, it would make a great contrast to Alea Jacta Est. The games are at a nearly identical scale but the block version strips away all the numbers and complexity. In this version of the war you get right down to moving your armies and fighting your battles. Clean and to the point.

Coincidentally, Avalon Digital has a handful of both digital and board games in development, often launching them via Kickstarter campaigns. Among their list of existing products, they sell Pax Romana as a download for just 1 Euro. Besides the problems I mention above, they point out that the game doesn’t work on any system newer than Windows 7. So for anyone wishing to kick the tires on that old title, there is another strike against it.

The board games at the Avalon link are sold through what appears to be a sister company, Wisdom Owl. Philippe Thibaut, via Kickstarter and Wisdom Owl, is taking his Great Invasions into the land of cardboard. I don’t see any listing of the management behind the Avalon and Wisdom Owl effort but something tells me that Thibaut must be a key player.

So much seems to be going on in the penumbra of a dead, 17-year-old game.

*Hearts of Iron II released before EU3. While the first of the “sequels” (not counting the mostly-similar EU/EU2), it was created in parallel with but not on top of the new Clausewitz Engine.

**Pax Romana also attempted to work around the same flaw. While most of the year executed in a continuous-time mode, much the same as EU, election time was different. When it came time to take action in the Senate, you were kicked out of the “real time” mode and into more of a turn-based paradigm.

***In Roman time, a biography was a specific form of literature. While it told the life story of its subject, it was not a scholarly work. It was written for a more mass consumption and typically featured gossip as well as facts. The expression of this biography in contemporary English makes more sense in this context.

****Already, a Punic Wars DLC is on the near horizon and is intended to be offered for no extra charge.

A Multiplied Disaster

Tags

ancients, Cannae, Field of Glory II, Livy, Roman Republic

If you’re playing a grand strategy game and have a major loss, do you do what I do? Assuming available resources, the plan is often to max out the build queue, build an even bigger army, and then go after the force that just defeated us. Essentially this was the Roman Republic’s reaction following the losses at Trebia and Lake Trasimene. Rome raised a new army centered around eight legions, more than she had ever deployed in her history. By way of contrast, a Roman field army typically consisted of two legions under the command of a Consul. In extraordinary circumstances, two consular armies could combine to present four legions and accompanying support. Hannibal got eight and and the proceeded to wipe them out at Cannae, including one of the consuls.

Cannae is one of the “Epic Battles” in Field of Glory II. Playing it, as I recently did taking Hannibal’s forces, gives some insight into Field of Glory II scenario design.

The introductory text to the battle’s scenario explains Hannibal’s strategy. He knows he is outnumbered but also knows he is facing a newly-recruited army. Because, you are told, the Romans know the weakness of their green troops, they deploy them in a deeper-than-usual formation. Hannibal puts his strongest forces on his wings, particularly beefing up his left-flank cavalry. He also deploys his infantry in an inverted crescent formation, calculated to draw the Roman’s inward, allowing his lines to extend beyond the Roman flanks, despite his inferiority in numbers.

As the game begins and the battle lines come together, this is exactly what happens in Field of Glory II. The initial meeting of infantry is at the center of the line, with the advantage going to the Carthaginian veterans. This draws the Roman wings inward allowing the Carthaginian wings to flank them. The slaughter of the Roman army ensues*.

It would seem next-to-impossible that a generic AI would react in just this way, reproducing Rome’s loss. Particularly given the depth of the deployed forces, it would seem smarter to feed the rear lines into the weakening center while using superior numbers to try to outflank the Carthaginians. Note, I haven’t tried this strategy, nor am I speculating that it would work; it is just what I’d expect the game to attempt to do given the situation in the early turns. My point is that, in order to create a satisfying Battle of Cannae, the AI has to be nudged in the historically-accurate direction. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

What it highlights is the qualities that will go into a well-crafted historical scenario in this game system and that it means more than a well-researched order of battle. It also has strong implications for randomly generated battles for play against the AI and the single player campaigns which are made of those random battles. I commented on this before, specifically with respect to Hannibal, but it may apply across the board; a hard-coded campaign of chained historical battles is probably the only way to reproduce history.

*I note that the victory screen did not reflect that complete destruction of the Roman forces that history records. Field of Glory II presents an option to continue fighting after you’ve won “on points.” The way it is phrased, it implies that such continuation can allow for higher casualties but I don’t know if it works out that way. One of these days I’d like to experiment – is it possible to achieve the complete destruction of the enemy by refusing to allow the game to end until all enemies are removed from the board?

 

So Row Well and Live

Tags

ancients, Carthage, Mare Nostrvm, Roman Republic, ship combat

Speaking of departing from reality, we saw in a previous screenshot Scipio headed back to Rome for his new assignment, but many months too late. Had he been where he was supposed to be, he would have been already fighting in Spain and Rome would have won The Battle of Ebro River. Yet in my Alea Jact Est game, no naval combat took place for me so far.

For naval combat I had to dig into my Mare Nostrvm installation. I can’t believe this game has been out for five years now, but there it is. It’s a tactical game of galley warfare in the Ancient world. A player can either engage in a series of linked historical battles or random fights based on army point allocations. The latter can be played either against the AI or against another player. The historical battles are organized as campaigns requiring one to win one battle to move on to the next one in that campaign. Campaigns span history from Greeks fighting Carthage pre-500 BC up to the end of the Roman Republic and the Roman Civil Wars.

Planning a turn. This should be an easy victory.

The turns are played in a planning phase followed by simultaneous execution. Your ships follow exactly the orders that they are given, although they do have to remain within command distance of their squadron leader (three such leaders are visible in the above screenshot, see the trailing red banner) to be under player control. Commands can also be given just to the lead ships, in which case all subordinates will adopt the same orders, as well as to each ship individually. You can mix-and-match as needed, first giving division-level orders and making individual exceptions.

Executing. Those Carthaginians may not be where you thought they’d be.

It’s not a fancy game, but it has enough bells and whistles to make entertaining. As your plan is executed, the sounds of drums and waves accompany the little ships as they move. The decks are animated with red and blue dots running about. When two ships get close, missiles fly between them and when then grapple, the little dots rush forward to engage their counterparts.

The commands themselves are limited. You can instruct your ship either to try to ram the enemy or to grapple. If a ship is not moving fast enough, the ram option might be missing. Plowing into a ship broadside will sink it immediately where as entangling two ships cause a battle to ensue between their crews which might take several turns to resolve. Ships can be sunk, captured, damaged, or just ensnared by another ship.

As far as the simulation goes, it has the features that one might ask for in a game of this type. It models both sail and oar power (although sails may be disabled per scenario, as was the case here). It also (obviously, from the screenshots) includes land. There is little in the way of own-side AI. You, the player, needs to anticipate where the enemy ships are going to be in a turn or two and plan accordingly. In other words, you plot your moves by targeting hexes and not enemies. The computer AI seems competent enough – I’ve been beaten by it a few times and not seen it do obviously stupid stuff.

Quite a mess. Rome prevailed, but it was not the one-sided battle of antiquity.

In the real Battle of Ebro River, Rome used the element of surprise to rapidly gain the upper hand, at which point the Carthaginians turned tail, abandoning their ships on the shore. No such outcome here. Although Rome still won, the battle was a close-fought thing. As you can see, my formations were completely disordered and I lost a number of ships to enemy rams*. If anything, the computer seems like he is holding it together better than I am. However, Carthage started at a disadvantage all around.

The Carthaginian fleet was surprised while foraging, modeled here by restricting Carthage’s movement during the first turn. Their ships were also manned by novice crews, making them inferior to the Romans in ability. Rome also had larger and more ships, giving them further advantage when the fighting turned to hand-to-hand. The Carthaginian’s one advantage was the superior maneuverability of their smaller ships. It was not enough for them to defeat Rome and it was also insufficient here.

*For some reason, I have been unable to sink any enemies using rams in this scenario. Every enemy I have defeated, I have defeated through capturing. I should probably just read the manual.