The Evil that Men Do

Tags

communism, george orwell, great depression, murder, Russian, shakespeare, Ukraine

I attended college with a young man whose parents, along with much extended family, had immigrated from Ukraine. The details of his immigration story he never shared with me; I wish I would have thought to ask. From his stories, I have to assume that they came post-World War II, possibly as part of the massive displacement resulting from the fighting that took place throughout their country.

Some of the stories he did tell about his family is what happened when, now living in the States, they gathered. When the men got together, they drank. They drank vodka. After drinking vodka, his uncles would rage against the Russians and against the Soviet Union (still a thing, in those days) and, as more vodka was poured, get ever more detailed about what sort of vengeance they would exact should they encounter a Russian. Sometimes weapons were produced.

My friend, himself, was also prone to anti-Russian tirades if he drank enough. I was impressed with his passion but I didn’t give too much thought to the details behind it. I knew, of course, that Ukraine was treated horribly by both the Russians and the Germans during the war and that Ukraine continued to be controlled and exploited by Moscow under the guise of a “Union” of cooperating states. In those times, popular culture was vehemently anti-Nazi but mildly pro-Communist and the contrarian in me liked hearing him opine that “Nazis may be bad, but the Communists were worse.” To what extent I believed that, I don’t know, but I didn’t seek out the evidence to back it up.

Fast forward to today.

The Soviet Union is no longer and Russians are now somewhat willing to criticize the likes of Stalin. The “evil empire” that was the Russians or the Soviet Union, depending on how you phrase it, has always been the enemy of the right side of the political spectrum but now, no matter who you are, Russians have become the bad guys. For conservatives, we still see Russia as attempting to revive and spread communism. The left blames them for electing Donald Trump. You have something bad to say about Russians? Bring it on!

While the Berlin Wall still stood, I was aware of the famines in Ukraine during the early 1930s. I had not, however, heard it described as a genocide. For mainstream thinkers, that a nation would suffer deprivation during the height of the depression didn’t seem remarkable. That parts of the Soviet Union had it worse that what we experienced in the West also made sense, given the inability of Communism to provide for its people. Even factual knowledge that Moscow tried to cover-up starvation in Ukraine would seem par for the course from a totalitarian state who used propaganda at every turn. Knowing a little, and being satisfied with that knowledge, obscured the bigger picture.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, more hard data became available to the rest of the world. The incongruity of farmers starving to death while the fruits of their labor was sent elsewhere, which perhaps should have been obvious from the get go, has backed by additional facts and testimony. In the decades since, nations have begun to use terms like “genocide” and “crime against humanity” to describe what the Ukrainians call Holodomor, or “murder by hunger.” Although some still defend Stalin, many of us see a clear political intent – the slaughter of some 4 million people who held a national identity that might challenge the hegemony of Moscow and their Russian-centric rule of the Soviet Union.

So this is the environment into which Mr. Jones was released. It was introduced in Poland (where it created and filmed, at least in part) and to festivals roughly a year ago, in October and November of 2019. In the USA, it was released in May, 2020 via streaming and other virtual substitutes for theater-going, and it is only over the summer that I first heard about it.

This is another in a line of films that I might rank higher, considering is social implications, that I might purely on entertainment value (if that’s even a phrase one dares associate with famine and genocide). The fact remains that much about this historical event remains unknown or unappreciated by the vast majority of the public; a tragedy and an insult to the memory of the millions that perished. The films title character, Gareth Jones, is a largely-unsung hero. The movie doesn’t show it, but Jones actually made three trips to the Soviet Union. The film portrays his third visit when he risked his life to uncover the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Ultimately, he was kidnapped and killed in China in 1935 in an incident that bears the fingerprints of Soviet intelligence. While Ukraine has acknowledged his sacrifice, he is mostly unknown outside of Ukraine and, perhaps, his native Wales.

Mr. Jones lets the rest of us know who Gareth Jones was and what he accomplished. It also exposes the way that the governments of England and the United States turned a blind eye to Soviet misdeeds, either out of sympathy to the socialist philosophy or simply a desire to profit from the industrialization of Russia. More importantly, it shows the complicity of those like Walter Duranty, Englishman and Moscow-based writer for the New York Times, who willingly aided Stalin’s deceit of the West. As with any historical-based drama, the story deviates from the pure facts. I think, once again, those differences can be overlooked and forgiven.

Granted, the film has made some odd choices. I wonder about the decision to show Ukraine’s plight interspersed with George Orwell’s composition of Animal Farm. The movie suggests that they met and may have shared an agent or a publisher, but I was unable to find a substantial connection between the two. At the time shown in the film, the writing of Animal Farm is still a decade into the future. Orwell is shown, appropriately, as a supporter of Socialism. It was Stalin’s totalitarianism (and Hitler’s) to which he objected, not the concept of a socialist society if it could be facilitated through democracy. Are we seeing an attempt to separate the evils of Stalin with the present-day acceptance of socialism’s goodness? I don’t know.

Whatever flaws this film might have, they pale in comparison to the service done by showing the world what happened almost 90 years ago. Defenders of Stalin remain to this day and many more defend communism against its crimes. Even the film refrains from definitively declaring whether the famine was deliberate or happenstance. One really must wonder how one might think Stalin “innocent” if you thought that it was mismanagement rather than political and ethnic targetting that killed millions of people. Personally, I see the latter motivation being so consistent with much else during his time in power that it seems obvious, but the famine was a horror no matter how you look at it.

Stalin’s gold? Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Beauties and Beasties

Tags

BBC, England, Happy Valley, netflix, Richard III, shakespeare

I have long blamed Shakespeare, but I fear it was unjustly so.

Richard III is a classic example of the evil character who looks the part. His deformities and his ugliness are indicative of his murderous character. Yet while Shakespeare exaggerates Richard’s appearance, such exaggerations did not originate with him. From Richard’s death and the installment of the Tudor dynasty, both Richard’s evil nature and his genetic shortcomings were played up in support of the politics. For Shakespeare’s part, he is probably no more (and possibly less) susceptible to using this literary device.

The blame may be due the ancient Greeks. Their literature and even society reflected the idea that good looks, good character, and divine favor all went hand-in-hand. The Athenians used the phrase καλοι κ’αγαθοι (Kaloi k’agathoi), roughly the equivalent of the English “the Great and the Good.” In their case, the notion of beauty was part of that phrase. The literature of the Greeks and Romans, of fairy tales, classic novels (Frankenstein is often cited), and various works into the present day use this imagery.

Also to this day, the bias remains within society. Studies show that people are more lenient in their evaluation of beautiful people than they are with ugly people. In fact, in some cases, the bias might be justified. There are statistical correlations between beauty and intelligence and between beauty and capability that underlie people’s prejudice. Features that people associate with human beauty (e.g. facial symmetry) may be recognized as such because they correlate with genetic fitness.

This returned to my mind as I began watching the British TV series Happy Valley. The show has been on Netflix streaming for some time and has long been recommended for me (by Netflix, naturally). Mid-March, however, it is going away, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

The show began its first season in 2014 and, while not specific, would seem to take place in the present (at the time). It focuses on a police sergeant, Catherine Caywood, living in a region sometimes referred to as “Happy Valley” in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a persistent drug abuse problem. Caywood, played by British television actress Sarah Lancashire, is a middle aged woman who has suffered the loss of her daughter to suicide, a tragedy that has weighed heavily upon her personally. As a new and serious crime unfolds, she doesn’t (at first) realize that it is tied to her own past troubles.

Lancaster looks the part of a blue-collar, middle class worker. Similarly, a major supporting character playing an accountant fits the mould in both appearance and grating personality. I’ve mused on this before, but European productions seem more comfortable with casting “regular-looking” people in major roles. However, Northern England is not all plain folk. Oddly enough, it is the criminals of this story that are fairly good-looking. In fact, the more amoral and scheming the criminal (and in many cases, competent), the better he/she looks.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I believe the show specifically identifies everyone’s goodness or wrongness via the character’s looks. I can name some clear counter-examples. I would be surprised, however, if there weren’t at least some deliberation behind the casting of this store.

The show itself is very good. Like River, it excels at portraying the mental and emotional struggle caused by traumatic events. It also stretches the story well beyond the boundries of “the good guys versus the bad guys.” We might find our loyalties flitting around between different characters as we slowly learn more about them. One figure might come to seem more heroic as we learn more while the “root for the villain” urge falls to the wayside as we learn just how deplorable the person actually is.

The show ran for two seasons, and I’ll probably be hard pressed to get through both of them before it goes away. I’m a-gonna try, though.

When Madmen Lead the Blind

Tags

brexit, corona, Michael Crichton, Plague Inc, shakespeare

I noted earlier that the CDC had spoken favorably of the modeling used in Plague, Inc. for epidemiology. Shortly after I wrote that, the world learned of a new and fearsome virus. Labeled 2019-nCoV or the Wuhan Corona Virus, infections numbered in the 10s of thousands and deaths in the hundreds within a month or two of virus identification. The spread of the virus, first beyond the city of Wuhan and then beyond China’s national borders, is causing alarm around the planet. As of January 30th, the World Health Organization has declared a “global emergency” citing the “unprecedented outbreak” that the virus represents.

Too soon?

By late January, Plague, Inc. had become the top download in China. This even spurred an announcement from the game’s developers to remind us all that Plague, Inc. is just a game, not a scientific simulation.

The WHO is awfully sanguine. 68,000 dead only gets my virus on a “watch list.”

Like the Chinese and gamers all around the world, a few headlines made me want to play some more Plague, Inc myself. I managed to unlock the “virus” ability and was quickly able to set about killing every last human on the face of the earth with my new Corona & Lime Virus, a strain particularly prone to mutations. That, in turn, got me thinking about one of the big gaps between game and reality and, resultingly, the reason why global plagues are so rare and, at least so far, have yet to wipe out our entire species.

Toppling governments. Now that’s power.

My Plague, Inc. strategy of choice (at this time) is try to spread my disease completely across the globe while maintaining relatively innocuous symptoms. Then, as the research towards a cure starts to progress, I try to rapidly evolve my virus into something deadly. Having used a virus, and given the options I’ve “unlocked” so far, I can and enjoy maximizing free mutations. That helps make sure I leave enough DNA points to execute a proper end game. These “freebees” come at a cost – a self-evolving virus can tip off the authorities too early and grant them a chance to effectively quarantine a country or two, which is usually enough to prevent a victory. It is also possible for a virus to cause a disease so deadly that it kills its victims faster than they can pass the virus on to the healthy population.

That right there is one of the problems with real-world diseases and the true risk of a pandemic. Something like Ebola, as truly awful as it is to an infected population, just isn’t dangerous as a world wide threat. Ebola is so deadly that the risk of becoming widespread is quite low.

Understatement of the century.

So what about a virus, in nature, that  uses my strategy? Can some new variation infect the world and then mutate into something deadly? Fortunately, disease doesn’t really work that way. When a virus (or a bacteria, parasite, fugus, etc.) mutates, it is a single organism that experiences the mutation, not the archetype for the illness. So if we look at the screenshot above, where my virus has infected the vast majority of the world’s population – what would happen if it mutated into a particularly deadly strain? Well, one person would die. If he died without passing on his particular variation of the virus (which he now hosts along with other, non-deadly organisms), then that mutation would never be seen again. If he does pass it along, then he becomes the new patient zero for a new disease (albeit a variant of a previous one) that must, person-by-person, reinfect the entire world.

If that doesn’t tilt the odds enough against me, there is more. Note that most of the world is already infected with a non-mutated version of the disease. That now-ubiquitous virus is very, very similar to the newly-created, deadly strain. In most cases, that infected population will now enjoy a resistance, if not an outright immunity, to my latest mutation. The success I had in spreading, under the radar, a milder version of the disease will actually work against me when I now try to turn my outbreak deadly. In reality, an evolving virus (like the flu or like this year’s corona virus*), must keep making run after run at the population. 100 years ago, nature demonstrated the potential of just the right combination of infectiousness and virulence to cause mass mortality. Yet it is a feat that that has not been repeated in the century since.

It is possible to conceive of a fast-acting, deadly epidemic that threatens the entire world population a la The Andromeda Strain. However, like that story, one would almost be compelled to imagine it as an organism that is only incidentally a “disease.” Crichton’s super-bug did not evolve to kill humans. That was merely an accidental and, from the organism’s own perspective, irrelevant happenstance. All this makes for a good story, and a good game, but not a particularly good simulation.

I pondered a little bit about what it might look at to model realistic mutations. The best I could come up with it would definitely wreck the concept of the game as it is played today. I’m not sure its even feasible to to implement this concept (player is the plague) within the parameters of realistic science on mutation. This is of course OK. For all talk about CDC valuing the game’s educational aspects regarding transmission and impacts of symptoms, nobody should ever mistake games for simulations.

While we’re on the topic, Plague, Inc also seems to have missed the ball on Brexit. As Brexit came and went, the running gags Brexit still pervade the game. Along with relevant pandemic updates news-of-the-weird, the headlines about how the UK population that voted for Brexit without understanding what they’d done continue apace. I suppose the narrative that the yahoos of England “didn’t mean it, really” when they decided they wanted out of the EU will persist among the “elite” for years to come. The insistence that the blue collar types would all take it back if they could – well that just didn’t work out. No matter how many times and ways it came up, England stuck to their (no longer legal?) guns – they meant what they said when they said they wanted out. Now they’re out. I, for one, think its going to turn out OK for them.

*Let’s nod our heads towards the conspiracy theory that says that the Wuhan virus was genetically engineered. That may be a little out there, but if the severity of the impact of this disease continues to grow, there is going to be a strong tendency to blame the government (either mismanagement, misinformation, or outright malfeasance) for what has gone wrong.

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.

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 Plague o’ Both Your Houses!

Tags

brexit, Plague Inc, Rebel Inc, shakespeare

The front page of the Wall St. Journal yesterday morning has the headline “Ebola Is Now a Disease We Can Treat.” It is a spark of good news in the battle with a disease that has a lethality as high as 90% for some strains. It also meshed well with a game that I’ve been playing over the last few days.

India sounds like an ideal place to launch a plague.

It was years ago when I loaded the free version of Plague, Inc. app on my tablet. I had read some very positive things about it and, well, it was free. Why not give it a try? Unfortunately for me, in order to run, the game required some kind of Google Play network support, which I did not have installed. I have a pretty old tablet and a) I didn’t want to install a new background program that was going to make it run even slower than it already does and b) I’m not sure Google-whatever would be compatible with my ancient operating system.

Again?! You’d think they’d have learned their lesson in 2019.

Periodically, I thought about trying to make it work but never quite managed to motivate myself. I even picked up the PC version (Steam) in a package deal, but still just didn’t have the right combination of interest and stellar alignment to get it running.

Finally on the radar in India, where they are calling my disease the “Oozing Gak.” Not, however, before I’ve spread to the U.K. and the U.S.

A week or two ago, however, I noticed that there the company who created Plague Inc.: Evolved (the name of the extended, PC version) has a new game in development called Rebel Inc: Escalation. They’re taking the same gaming engine that works so well for epidemiological modeling and using it to take on the challenges of counter-insurgency operations. It seems like a wonderful idea. It seems like an idea I could have, nay should have, come up with myself. The new game is in early access now, and I’ll probably look to get it sooner rather than later, but meanwhile…

I don’t get the feeling that the Ndemic programming team is pro-Brexit.

I was diddling around on my tablet and once again launched the Plague app, perhaps with my mind on the above. As usual, it failed due to the lack of the networking software. However, this time, after telling me it wasn’t going to work, the game actually launched and allowed me to run the tutorial. The free version is missing some of the features, but it was enough to motivate me to install it on the PC and try it again there.

By the time India has attributed my first death, I’m already well established around the world.

Plague Inc.: Evolved a fun, light game. I think it took me in the neighborhood of 20-30 minutes to finish a session. The variety isn’t huge, although there are many different settings which ramp up the difficulty if you want to keep it challenging. There is also a range of locked content to keep you playing, should that float your boat. Otherwise, it is a fairly simply game that, once you get the hang of it, there isn’t going to be that much more too it.

I fear making the same mistake as before. Greenland is disease free and I need to find a way to spread my Gak there.

Essentially, you’ve got to spread your disease, inhibit research, and then kill all the people. These three goals have to be kept in balance. Spread too alarmingly or manifest yourself as too deadly, and the world’s countermeasures will ramp up and stop you. In my first game, I got too lethal too fast and ended up wiping out most of the earth but leaving several countries (Cuba and New Zealand, as I recall) disease free with no way to transmit the disease there.

Despite all the options for replay, I think this would only last your typical gamer so long. This is not Crusader Kings. Roleplaying as a bacterium doesn’t have quite the emotional engagement as manipulating politics to put your son onto the throne of France.

In the end I could only kill about 2 billion before a cure was discovered. Shouldn’t I at least get a marginal victory, having stopped Brexit?

It’s deep enough, though, to be enjoyable and realistic enough to have captured the attention of the CDC. The interface is pleasant, intuitive, and runs smoothly and without issues. It’s also only $15 full-price and even less if you pick it up in a sale (it’s 60% off as I type this). So maybe it isn’t novel or deep, but it is a well made little game that I shouldn’t have waited so long to try out.

The Winter of our Discontent Made Glorious Summer

Tags

Field of Glory, Field of Glory - Unity, Richard III, Richard III: England's Most Controversial King, shakespeare, Wars of the Roses

I’m an American. Although this is probably clear from many of my writings, I still thought I had better lead off to that because it explains some of what will follow.

My understanding of the Wars of the Roses has always been a bit foggy, even when I’m at my best. I knew there were Yorkists and I knew there were Lancasters and I could probably quote a few of the more famous, relevant Shakespearean passages, but I did not have the general sense of the flow of history as England moved, sometimes violently, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors. In fact, I didn’t even know that Richard III’s body had been found beneath a modern car park until I read about it in a review 2018’s Richard III: England’s Most Controversial King, a new analysis of his life and reign. It is sad because, should such a thing have happened a bit closer to home, I would have been knee-deep in the details.

Despite my lack of period knowledge, there was game that occupied a lot of thinking when I was much younger. That game was Kingmaker, the 1974 classic from the Avalon Hill catalog. For this one I will lay the blame for my ignorance on youth – as a teenager I was even less cognizant of history (outside those particular periods that I favored) than I have been as an adult. In fact, I seem to recall that my early impressions of Kingmaker was that it was more of a generic game like Diplomacy or Blitzkrieg – with historical theme but not context. At some point I read enough about it to understand it was a more strictly-themed Wars of the Roses game, but not enough to develop a better understand of what it meant to be “about the Wars of the Roses.” Most embarrassingly, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized that the “Kingmaker” was a person, not a general concept (like “Diplomacy” or “Blitzkrieg”).

As much as I may have drooled over my Avalon Hill catalog for Kingmaker, I never purchased nor played it. In fact, I’ve never did involve myself in Wars of the Roses history, be it by book, game, or big screen. Perhaps because of this, when Richard III: England’s Most Controversial King was published, I quickly added it to my bookshelf. Now, I didn’t read it, at least not straight away, but it sat high on my to-read list. I hoped it might bring me to finally understand this turning point in history for which I, and probably many non-Britons, have only a cartoonish understanding of what really happened.

This is another book that straddles the categories of popular reading and serious academic writing. Compared to other works marketed to the masses that I have read, this leans more toward the academic end. The goal of the book is to attempt to gain a clearer view of the facts of Richard’s ascendancy and reign. In order to do this, it prioritizes contemporary records over those that were created after his death (which would have been twisted by the politics of their own time). As such, many of the sources are financial records, as these presumably do not lie. One assumes that nobody would go back and falsify accounts for the purposes of political propaganda – at least not in Richard’s time. Today, well, who can say?

The author begins the preface almost defensively. We, the public, tend to be aware that Richard’s legacy was distorted by his political enemies – that he wasn’t among the winners who get to write history. As a result, however, people’s inquiries follow two trains of thought. Did Richard actually kill his nephews, King Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York? Secondly, as history has painted Richard as evil, was that in fact accurate? Was he a good king or an evil king? The author explains that, like most of life, reality is messy. In fact (once you’ve read far enough into the book), the author’s position is that it doesn’t really matter what happened to the two Princes in the Tower; what matters is what people thought happened to the Princes in the Tower – and people did assume foul play and that assumption, true or not, de-legitimized Richard’s reign.

For a book that seems to devote a large percentage of the text to reviewing accounting entries, it is a surprisingly easy read. The “story” of Richard III might seem a little thin. England quickly lost interest in his reign and his motivations as the Tudor kings made him into an evil caricature to help legitimize their divine right. Thus narrative, in particular balanced and fair narrative, is in very short supply. The book instead extrapolate Richard’s intent and motivation from the records of his movements, purchases, and grants. The final chapter, on the Battle of Bosworth Field, reads a little differently. For this, there are multiple sources describing the battle and Richard’s fall.

I’m going to read the mind of the author and say the goal of this book is to provide well-documented facts to try to prise additional scholarship and understanding about Richard III’s short and his troubled reign. For me, I was just looking to understand the context of the War of the Roses and the genesis of the Tudor dynasty. As to the former, I wouldn’t know how to judge it, but it looks to be a solid work. For the latter, it succeeded admirably.

Warwick’s bombards and John Neville’s horsemen quickly dispatch a Lancastrian mounted unit that had advance to far, instantly evening the odds.

Being unable to play Kingmaker without extraordinary efforts on my part, I’ve elected to play as The Kingmaker, loading up the Second Battle of St. Albans in Field of Glory. I take the persona of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, leading the Yorkist forces. What I found was similar to my other experiences with the original Field of Glory. As an official scenario, it is not the epic, sprawling affair that usually characterizes user-made scenarios. It is a small map, one that tightly constrains the scenario. Even though the map is small and kept simple, one of my main complaints is present, although in this case it is not as obvious usual. The Second Battle of St. Albans was characterized by literal house-to-house fighting within the town. Field of Glory does not model urban settings and is, anyway, probably the wrong scale for it.  As a result, the portrayal of the fight is constrained by the river and its single crossing with no clear “town” component, even though that was where the battle was. I have to wonder, like before, if the design of the scenario depends on the weak on-the-attack AI to force a Yorkist player to fight a piecemeal battle against a defensively-arrayed AI opponent. This not only might have increased the player’s difficulty, but it would have made for a better approximation of the historical sequence of the battle. Unlike before, I did not play the battle sequentially in both versions.

By the end of the book and the end of the Wars of the Roses, the York faction had lost their place in history. They did so not on the battlefield but among the clash of personalities that played out as an English version of a game of thrones. Richard’s ultimate loss and demise, at the Battle of Bosworth Field (and perhaps I’ll return to this), probably had more to do with the reluctance of Richard’s allies than strategy and tactics. I was not entirely satisfied with my Second Battle of St. Albans, but maybe satisfaction will remain elusive on this one.