From: Dave Kohr Subject: [consim-l] Re: Ancient Empires? Michael Nagel wrote: > I was in my local game store yesterday and took a look at a new > Warfrog game called (iirc) Ancient Empires. Empires of the Ancient World. This one is definitely a light wargame. Here's a report from an SVB session a few weeks ago. Dave Kohr Be sure to remove the SPAMFOILER! Visit the Silicon Valley Boardgamers at http://www.best.com/~davekohr/svb "We're an anarcho-syndicalist collective!" ------ Warfrog Games (Martin Wallace) "Empires of the Ancient World" (CharlesP: 94, JohnH: 101, EanH: 131, *Shay*: 139, DaveK: 88) : MANY thanks to Rick for teaching the rules and helping run the first half of the game! DaveK: "This is a very interesting light multiplayer wargame about building empires in the ancient Mediterranean. It is clearly several notches above Vinci in complexity and playing time. It's somewhat shorter than Britannia or History of the World, and I suspect it's slightly simpler rules-wise but we had some rules problems so I'm not sure. In any case, it inhabits a very popular gaming niche with several other good games, but is unique in being a bit more of a wargame than Vinci, and more convenient in playing time and number of players than History of the World or Civilization. An important feature of the game is that you score not just based on political/military control of provinces, but also based on control of trade in provinces. (There is also a tertiary scoring rule based on "plunder", which comes from winning battles in provinces with a large amount of trade.) This means there should be other viable strategies besides the usual "take over the world" approach that's common to empire-building games. It also should mean it's a little harder to gang up on the leader. Finally, there are VP penalties for holding the more powerful cards for army units and leaders, so the game doesn't suffer as much from the "rich get richer" syndrome of many empire-building games. The physical components are pretty good. The game comes in a bookcase-style box, reminiscent of Avalon Hill, and has a mounted map. Like many German games, there are wooden disks (political control markers) and cubes (trade markers) in an assortment of colors. The game was in fact published with the German market in mind, so there is both English and German text in the rules booklet. The large deck of cards is all in English. The map and card art is acceptable but not outstanding. Unfortunately a key piece of information ("fast" or "slow" speed) was left off the army unit cards, so you're left to guess based on the depiction of the unit. I think there are player aid cards, but these are unfortunately inadequate, so we ended up printing out some aids found on the Net and going through the rules while playing. We played with a full complement of 5. As the standard rules have it, there are 4 "epochs" (I forget precisely what they're called). The 1st has 10 turns, the 2nd has 9, then 8, then 7. There is a scoring round after the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th epoch. In each turn, each player gets to take one action. Although actions are usually short and simple, this is a lot of them to fit into one game, so it took us over 3 1/2 hours to play to completion, not including time spent teaching the rules. Turns became somewhat repetitive toward the end, and the situation on the map kind of static, so I think the game could reasonably be shorted by say 20% of the actions without losing too much. It may also be that 5 is really too many for this game. On the positive side, turns go around the table fairly quickly, because all actions except for battles are resolved easily. Actions consist of things like placing trade markers, attacking neutrals to try to place control markers, attacking other players' provinces (which causes a battle), taking a military unit or leader card from a selection of 6 face-up cards, building forts, or making special "diplomatic" attacks. The situation doesn't usually change too much from one of your turns to the next, so you can do some amount of long-range planning. This is a great improvement in interactivity over History of the World or even Vinci, where you can basically walk away from the table for awhile once your turn is over. I think the game's strongest point is its system for resolving battles, which is simple and elegant yet captures many tactical details. Before the battle, each side forms a face-down stack of 5 of their army cards. All "fast" units must precede all "slow" units (the Military Leader card allows you to put one card out of order). The players also put 3 "win" markers in between themselves. Then each player simultaneously flips up the topmost card on their stack. If a player's card has a higher value, one "win" marker moves from the middle to his side. (If none are in the middle, one moves from the opponent's side to the middle.) If at any time all 3 "win" markers are on a player's side, he immediately gains a "rout" over his opponent and the battle is over. (If the attacker wins in a rout, he gains an extra turn, which can obviously lead to fast conquests of others' provinces.) If there is no rout, you keep flipping cards until all 5 have been flipped over and resolved. Whoever has more "win" markers on his side at the end wins; defender wins ties. The tactical details are reprented by both the "slow" and "fast" attributes of the cards, and by some special rules and special abilities of certain cards. For example, elephant cards are powerful, but may rampage (if you roll a 1 on a 6-sided die) and give a win to the other player. Foot skirmishers and light horse serve primarily as blockers, and have only a 1 in 6 chance of giving you a win. Siege towers and artillery are especially powerful in sieges. Speaking of which, there are special rules for resolving naval battles and sieges. Naval battles allow only up to 2 infantry to participate, with the rest of your force made up of galleys. Sieges allow only 3 units per side, making it possible for a small but powerful force to hold off a large and powerful one. Finally, the way you take losses is fairly realistic. You lose one random card from those in your battle stack per "win" on the opponent's side at the end of the battle. All cards "native" to you (you get 6 at start) are never discarded, but any others that were acquired by taking the draw action are discarded. So the more you use powerful units, the more likely you are to lose them, a very elegant way to represent attrition. Many of the actions require a dice roll for success. Unfortunately this makes the game somewhat vulnerable to hot or cold runs of dice rolls. It's particularly frustrating to fail to make a roll to cross the Med. to invade somebody, or to lose a province despite having a strong army just because an opponent made a lucky roll during a diplomatic attack. Wargamers are used to being subject to the whims of the dice gods, but Eurogamers may not like this lack of control. Here's what happened in our game: I started in a badly boxed-in position in Libya (Carthage), and never expanded very far. I snagged Western Africa, Siciliy, Crete, and right near the end I swiped Asia Minor from Shay with a desperate invasion from Crete, but that was it as far as territory and it was far too little for a victory. The naval war was something else entirely. I got some extra ships on turn 1, then cleared the Mediterranean in 1 player turn with a pair of smashing naval victories. This really woke up the other players, and it was terrible timing on my part because I took over the Med. during the first game turn, which has no following scoring round. In quick succession, Shay built an awesome navy and took over the whole Med. to score 24 points in the turn 2 scoring round, then Charles did the same on turn 3 for another 24 points, and finally Shay took it back on turn 4 for 16 points (John used a diplomatic attack to grab the Western Med. late in the game). These wild swings were exciting, and determined the ultimate winner (as Ean would have won if Shay hadn't taken back the Med.), but they weren't very strategically interesting. In fact, by the end of the third turn, the map had become fairly static militarily (I compared it to WWI trench warfare), with all the valuable provinces occupied by somebody's empire, and military victories hard to come by. This was true for the land areas; the Med. of course was hotly contested and changed hands a lot. There was some jostling for control of trade in the larger provinces, but this wasn't terribly interesting and you don't get enough trade cubes to place them everywhere you might like (I made a mistake by never taking any of the personalities, in particular no Merchants, so I was feeling particularly poor compared to others). Nonetheless, I found something useful to do every turn, even though I felt out of the game for the second half of it, with no good way to come from behind. At the end, I had my little Carthaginian empire, Shay had a somewhat scattered maritime empire (most of the Med., Cyrenaica, and pieces of south-central Europe), Charles had failed to replicate the Roman Empire (he was confined mostly to Italy and environs), and John had locked up Western Europe: Gallia, Germania, and Britannia. In the end, we agreed that scoring is weighted too heavily on controlling the Mediteranean, since each of its 3 areas counts for 8, and the highest land area is just a 6 or 7. (And the Med. areas are really worth more than that, there are 4 points for controlling trade--which fortunately is open for others besides the owner to win, and typically the owner gets a bunch of plunder when he takes them over militarily.) I also thought there was a bit too much weight to controlling provinces, which means empires that are small and boxed in have little chance to win. While it may be possible to tweak the VP awards to fix this, I think the best solution would be a more major change to the game system, to include some VP-scoring civilization building cards or something to go along with the military and commerce VPs. All in all, I thought it was a fun game, and worth spending an entire SVB session on. However, it does lack a certain amount of polish, and I think it could have used another round of development to fix at least all the minor physical and rules problems we encountered. It will require more play to determine whether our misgivings about the victory conditions are accurate or misplaced. But I like it enough that I'd gladly give it another go. I'll give it a tentative grade of B- (5.5 on a 10 point scale), since it seems to need some further development but shows promise. This could easily move up after further playings." Rick: "My pleasure. I didn't see the whole game, but it sounds like the players may have fallen into a groupthink trap over the sea zones, getting caught up in the excitement of taking them and concluding the short term grabbing of them the only viable strategy. They even increased the value of these areas by adding trade tokens to them, thereby augmenting the effect. Well, except maybe for Dave who was so hemmed in that probably he didn't have any other choice anyway. But I would challenge the players to next time see if there isn't any other way to win. For example, when Shay conquered the sea, why didn't his neighbors consider taking away all of his land areas. It's doubtful that he could be master of both land and sea without paying a rather high maintenance cost. I'm not sure how Dave equates a 5.5/10 to a B-, but I would rate this game an 8 so far, the main objection just being the length. My thought for a variant would be to lop off the 4th game turn, include scoring on the first game turn, multiply the trade token rate of income by 4/3 and allow 3 trade tokens to be placed per action. I would also like to try designing an historical setup for the game and wonder if anyone has looked into this yet?" DaveK: "Actually Shay was getting beaten up on land while he held the Med. Perhaps we had made some mistake earlier on, which let him get too big a lead. In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if the VP awards aren't more balanced than they seemed after this first playing. But so far they seem a bit off to me, and the game length is definitely off and there are other clear problems, so I can't rate the game an 8 because it contains what appear to be obvious flaws that more thorough development would have corrected. As for how a B- comes out to 5.5, if you equate B- to 5.0 and add 1.0 for each increment, then A+ comes out to 10.0. So I'm giving Empires a bit more than a B-."