Tides of Conquest campaign tool - new version with Bronze Age scenarios and icons out April 21 2023

[Nijis]

900CEScreenshotSmall.png (331.38 KiB) Viewed 9546 times

What's this?
A unofficial stand-alone tool that can be used for single-player campaigns. Plan your campaigns here, fight battles in FoG2, enter the results here, and follow the progress of your realm through history. There are 11 starting setups from 1500 BC through to 1500 CE, the entire period covered by FoG2 and its DLCs. The map covers Europe, northern Africa and Asia. Playing in the Far East will require the Silk Road mod.

Download link:
LATEST VERSION
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2q88bpy1aem8z ... 2.rar?dl=0
(Link moved to Dropbox from Mediafire on 5.25.2023)

I plan to run two new multiplayer campaigns using this tool. Sign up here if interested...
https://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=111935

Thanks to Miguel Sales for the new icons!

Features include
* A relatively realistic ebb and flow of power that will yield believable alternate histories. Even the biggest empires will crash eventually, urban civilization will slowly spread outward from its cradles into more peripheral regions, etc..
* FoG2 army lists assigned dynamically according to a realm's culture, the time period, social organization, and its location
* In addition to realm vs realm conflict, fight battles triggered by religious upheaval to social unrest to nomad migrations
* Players can fight FoG2 battles at their preferred level of difficulty, with low levels representing cautious campaigns and high levels represent Alexander- or Caesar-style high stakes gambles.
* A broad range of institutions that differentiate realms from one another. You can borrow ideas from your neighbors and spread them to the successor states that follow after you.

1.02x includes...
* Bronze Age and 1400 CE scenarios for Swifter than Eagles and Sublime Porte/Rise of the Swiss
* New icons showing provinces' religions and social organization

Installation instructions for the Unity version
The tool comes in a WinRar archive. You'll need some version of WinRar. First you extract the file into a folder, which is a WinRar option if you right-click on the package.
When you open it, click on the TidesOfConquestUnity icon with the Unity symbol.
The game was written and was tested on 64-bit Windows 10.

There is a "Help" link at the top-right corner of the page which gives advice on basic game concepts.

A number of issues related to bugs encountered while installing it are on page 5 and 6 of this thread, and also page 13. These apply to the older Monogame version, and not the new Unity version.

CREDIT: Province sprites were made by Miguel Sales and myself, modifying icons found at https://game-icons.net/ and https://thenounproject.com/.

[rbodleyscott]

I tried but was unable to get it to do anything.

All I got was the screen below. Clicking on the two items in the top left did nothing. Clicking on Save crashed it..

Maybe some more detailed instructions would overcome the hurdle. Or maybe some run-time library which I do not have is required.

[Nijis]

My apologies. I suspect it's that you need to click very close to the beginning of the text in the link. If a link is active the text should turn purple. I'll redo with bigger links, and also expand the instructions a bit.

The programming is all very simple stuff and I've tried it on a computer that does not have Monogame installed. so I don't think there would be any runtime library issues. But if clicking close to the beginning of the link doesn't work, I'd welcome any suggestions from anyone on what else could be wrong.

[rbodleyscott]

I suspect it's that you need to click very close to the beginning of the text in the link.

Knowing that makes all the difference!

Now all I have to figure out is how to enter orders.

[Lysimachos]

Seems really very, very interesting!!!

[Nijis]

Thanks!

For most orders, left-click on a province with an army, then right-click on the target. You can also give province orders, listed down on the right. I will make the instructions more detailed and also include them in a separate text document.

[jomni]

Any plans for a map editor?

[Nijis]

Any plans for a map editor?

I'm hoping to add one fairly soon. In the meantime, if you have a version of Visual Studio and can download Monogame, I can send you the C# solution and you could do a scenario that way. One could also start a game, save it, and edit the xml files. To start that scenario you'd just load the edited saved game. Did you have a particular scenario in mind? I'm hoping to add your Silk Road powers to a pan-Eurasian mega-scenario, maybe set around 250 BC to catch the end of the Warring States.

[jomni]

Any plans for a map editor?

I'm hoping to add one fairly soon. In the meantime, if you have a version of Visual Studio and can download Monogame, I can send you the C# solution and you could do a scenario that way. One could also start a game, save it, and edit the xml files. To start that scenario you'd just load the edited saved game. Did you have a particular scenario in mind? I'm hoping to add your Silk Road powers to a pan-Eurasian mega-scenario, maybe set around 250 BC to catch the end of the Warring States.

Not really planning to do one myself at the moment. But the idea of extending to China is cool.

[pipfromslitherine]

This is very cool

Cheers

Pip

[Archaeologist1970]

I think on one hand its awesome, on the other hand, I'd be pretty embarrassed as the developer that a lone dude with no resources pretty much made a single player campaign for you. Just saying, maybe offer this guy a job and see what he can do getting paid....

[mceochaidh]

This is outstanding. It does so much more than I am able to do manually in my Hellenistic Campaign 280 B.C. I will download and try to learn to use it.

Mac

[Ludendorf]

This looks really exciting, Nijis.

[Nijis]

Thanks for the kind words, all! The single player campaign is still very much a work in progress, though, as there's no AI yet, let alone one that has been extensively playtested.

The way I was thinking of going with the single-player: as you gain legacy points, your empire loses its political cohesion, Ibn Khaldoun's asabiya. Your rulers become worse and worse, swayed this way and that by factionalized petty court politics, and consequently the difficulty rating of your battles becomes higher and higher (or at least the suggested difficulty - you start your own battles so players can adjust as they see fit.) You start off as an Alexander or Caesar, sweeping all before you, and end up as Stilicho or Yue Fei, scrambling to hold things together for as long as possible with fewer and fewer resources. Random events could add a bit of narrative drama to the decline.

[Ludendorf]

From my limited knowledge of game design, it might be best to playtest something small and basic; just the pieces on the board. I remember this from a free game design course which admittedly I did not complete, and there are way more experienced people here (you know; actual game designers) who can run roughshod over what I'm saying if I'm wrong, but one of the principles of game design is to come up with a core mechanic and then slowly add or subtract rules from it depending on how the mechanic works out.

As empires grow up, I imagine coalitions of players will band together to keep the large empire in check. Just as the Roman empire had threats on every border towards the end, big players are likely going to find their resources stretched thin as everybody tries to take them down. It's only when a player's position becomes truly overwhelming that I see this breaking down, and by that point, that player has probably conclusively won the campaign anyway.

[Nijis]

Thanks for the feedback - the multiplayer basically just is pieces on the board. I was counting on peripheral players to keep the big empires busy.

The imperial decay system described above would be for single-player games, where I can't count on the AI to cooperate against a player. Ancient empires did have a tendency to collapse rather quickly, though, the Byzantines being a relatively rare example of a regional hegemon power being reduced to a regional peer power.

So, given that there already is a variable difficulty system in single-player FoG, I thought I'd take advantage of that. Sometimes when I play single-player it feels that I'm choosing whether I win or lose when I select the difficulty rating. I was thinking I might actually welcome another party telling me when I should play at a hard level, or when I should give myself a break by playing at a lower level.

I want just enough complexity in the multiplayer game to model most of the major map-altering political and military events of the ancient world in some way. One of the best parts of multiplayer campaigns I think are the AARs, and one of the things that make AARs interesting are narrative turning points. So it would be fun, for example, to have a major migration of tribes spark a crisis from time to time. That means I need a few basic mechanisms for migrations, and civil wars, and a couple of other things.

However, sometimes it's fun between turns to look over your position at leisure, to tweak things here and there. So I might add a layer of chrome that has very subtle effects on small things - ie, regional decisions that add extra units to a custom army list, for example, assuming that custom lists can be handled easily.

The one pitfall is that I want battles to always be at least as competitive as a potluck custom battle. Ie, the point of the game is to put competitive FoG battles into an interesting narrative context, not to make people play FoG battles that were decided beforehand on the strategic map, because I don't think players will do that.

[SteveD64]

Thank you for this. I agree with your design philosophy as well, I hope you stick with this.

[pipfromslitherine]

It would not be outside the realms of possibility to allow some way to spawn the FoG2 EXE with a command line to start up battles. Obviously we would need to determine what is needed to kick off a game, and the level of customisation required, i.e. specific unit selections vs potluck etc.

Cheers

Pip

[Nijis]

That's great to hear!

Right now, the battles are generated when the orders are in and the GM hits the button, "Process orders." The way I envisioned things for the time being would be that the game would tell the players what battlefield type to use and what lists to use. The players would then select their own units, as though playing a custom game.

In the case of a solitaire campaign, the tool (ToC) would also set the difficulty level for battles. (I'm currently envisioning a Stilicho solo scenario, where the more success you have, the fewer resources the emperor will grant you.) This is not essential, though.

Customized lists is set for a bit in the future.

[Lysimachos]

I tried to have a go with this very interesting tool but I have to say I was nearly able to do nothing because it's quite impossible to have the pointer rightly clicking on the province or the orders I wanted to select.

It's a real pity because the idea is great and seems very well developed ...