Would-Be Grognard Looking for Good Introductory Games

[Cheimison]

I've been playing Paradox strategy games and Total War for years, but I have only a bit of experience with the more simulation-oriented games. I have played a bit of the HPS/Tiller games "Ancient Warfare" (though not the one I really want to, Diadochi Wars) but I have to admit I didn't know what I was doing.
The interfaces are pretty clunky (basically a Windows 95 program bar). I'm sure I could figure it out, but I'm just used to the more polished GUIs that Paradox puts out. The trouble is that I have so little experience with these games that I get killed fifty times without even knowing what's going on. Which probably happened to a lot of real commanders on the battlefield, but I have limited frustration thresholds!

As far as era, I have nooooo interest in WW2 or the American Civil War, and only very limited interest in WW1 and Napoleonic Games, which cuts out like 80% of the HPS/Tiller titles right off the bat. Ancient to early modern warfare are generally interesting to me. I have a special love for Persianids and steppe horseman more generally, but their tactics don't seem to really work well in the sort of decisive engagements that are in most tactical games.

I've also played a bit of the Slitherine/Matrix published games like Tin Soldiers and the Battle Academy/Pike & Shot games, not that I am any good at them.

As to 'why' I'm interested in grognard games, one is because I'm a history nerd, and another is that I get tired of swarm battles (every RTS ever) and invincible empires (every grand strategy ever). I am also really intrigued by systems like simultaneous turns and generals giving orders by runners instead of having telepathic control over all their units.

Aside from game recommendations, recommendations on FAQS/guides/youtubes on said games would be appreciated.

Thanks!

EDIT: I figured I'd share some of the games I already own but just haven't played enough to know which to start with, since many of the reccomendations are games I've had for a couple years:

Advanced Tactics Gold (played a few hours of this)
Alea Jacta Est
Commander: The Great War (played a few minutes, watched some Youtube tutorials)
Field of Glory II
Hearts of Iron III GOG bundle with all DLCs
Hegemon Gold
Legion Gold
Musket & Pike: Renaissance
Pike and Shot: Campaigns
Unity of Command w/ Red Turn

[bbmike]

Welcome to Grogheads! I think with a bit more detail we could help you with game suggestions. Is there a specific era you are interested in historically?

[bayonetbrant]

Welcome Cheimison!

Is there a specific era you are interested in historically?

Ancient to early modern warfare are generally interesting to me. I have a special love for Persianids and steppe horseman more generally, but their tactics don't seem to really work well in the sort of decisive engagements that are in most tactical games.

[bbmike]

^Yeah, but Field of Glory II is the obvious answer yet again. I was hoping for yet another era that might prove interesting.  8)

[bayonetbrant]

hahaha - fair 'nuff :)

[Cheimison]

^Yeah, but Field of Glory II is the obvious answer yet again. I was hoping for yet another era that might prove interesting.  8)

I just bought FoG2, heh. I actually have some of the rule books for the tabletop game.

[Phantom]

A little off the wall maybe for your needs, but similar in style  to Paradox games (strategic with semi abstracted battles, though not as abstracted as Paradox) - an interesting Ancient Rome/Carthage title...
http://www.matrixgames.com/products/product.asp?gid=388
I also think there's a demo on this one.
Regards
Keith

[spelk]

Aside from game recommendations, recommendations on FAQS/guides/youtubes on said games would be appreciated.

Have a squizz here for some ideas:

https://www.reddit.com/r/computerwargames/wiki/gateway

and welcome to Grogheads.com!

[Cheimison]

A little off the wall maybe for your needs, but similar in style  to Paradox games (strategic with semi abstracted battles, though not as abstracted as Paradox) - an interesting Ancient Rome/Carthage title...
http://www.matrixgames.com/products/product.asp?gid=388
I also think there's a demo on this one.
Regards
Keith

Haha, that's sure fresh off the presses! What is it, a month ago? Then I noticed 2010!
Looks interesting anyway.

Have a squizz here for some ideas:

https://www.reddit.com/r/computerwargames/wiki/gateway

and welcome to Grogheads.com!

Looking over that list, I've played Unity of Command, Hearts of Iron 2/3 and Hegemony Gold (which is a really interesting Bizarro Total War, where EVERYTHING is on the RTS map).
Some of those John Tiller/HPS games really intrigue me but the learning curve is pretty steep. Musket & Pike and Ancient Warfare, specifically, seem pretty kewl.
I'm pretty handy at Paradox games, but it's the tactical stuff I'm more interested in learning. I also want to play Alea Jacta Est but my computer chugs bad when I try to run it.

[Philippe]

If you want to ease into WW II at a tactical level, Battlefield Academy (western Europe and North Africa) or Battlefield Academy 2 (Eastern Front) are good choices.  There are mods to make them a little more historical looking.

If you want to ease into WW II at a more operational level that allows you to see what the major battles looked like, the three Unity of Command games are quite good.  A bit chess-like at times (especially the counters), but one of the few games where the AI will clean your clock if you aren't paying attention.

If you want to ease into WW II at a strategic level you should probably take a look at Strategic Command, but it has so many moving parts it's probably medium complexity.

I hesitate to mention Commander: the Great War for WW I because there's a lot wrong with it.  But as an introductory game it's perfectly fine and plays out at a strategic level (low complexity).  You might eventually graduate up to one of the Ageod games, but they aren't really for beginners and have their own peculiarities.  One of the Tiller games (France 1914) is an absolute masterpiece, but it's operational and if you aren't used to playing at that level the complexity might be a bit mind-numbing.

I'm not that familiar with the Ultimate General ACW games, but they're worth taking a look at even though I don't think they're turn-based.

I haven't seen any good introductory level games for the Napoleonic period.  There was a tactical game that came out recently about the Peninsular War (that company also produced one about trench warfare in WW I), but I disliked it so much I promptly asked Steam for a refund.  If you feel like risking a Tiller game (and I'm not talking about the revamped dinosaurs that Matrix sells), be aware that the quality of the games depends very much on the designer.  Most of the Tiller Napoleonics were designed by Bill Peters who is very good.  He did not design Waterloo, Napoleon in Russia, which are subsequent editions of earlier Talonsoft titles under the 'modern' Tiller Napoleonic engine.  Bill's designs have gotten better the more games he designs, and his later titles are marvelous, though most of them are too complex for introductory games because of too many moving parts.  But if you want to dip your toe into a Napoleonic game that has a lot of the feel of a boardgame and a tabletop game, I'd suggest his (currently) latest title Marengo about the campaigns in Italy in 1796, 1797, and 1800.  There were a lot of battles and most of them were fairly small, so it will be easier to learn the system with them rather than plunging in to a monster like Leipzig.  Be aware that native Tiller graphics are eye bleedingly awful, but there's a mod that fixes that.

For the period before Napoleonics I'm tempted to mention Pike and Shot.  It has a boatload of user-made scenarios that you can download from within the game, and many of these (depending on the designer) are better than the ones that came with the vanilla game.  The engine does a good job of modeling late 16th and early 17th century warfare, and can be stretched to cover the late 15th to the late 17th century without too much violence to realism.  The engine does not work for the 18th and 19th centuries, though that hasn't stopped people from making scenarios during those periods.  If you find you like that style of combat and want a change of pace, try Sengoku Jidai which covers the same period but in the Far East, and has marvelous artwork and music.  I should mention that the combat system in these games (and in Field of Glory II which covers ancients) takes a little getting used to, but once you figure out how to handle cavalry you should be all right. 

[DennisS]

^Yeah, but Field of Glory II is the obvious answer yet again. I was hoping for yet another era that might prove interesting.  8)

I will be purchasing Field of Glory II here in about ten minutes..this would be my very first choice as well. I just finished watching about three hours' worth of video from youtube, and it hits all the spots. Random maps, 46 army lists, all 46 armies available in a campaign, and with many variants for each army list.

[Cyrano]

1:  Welcome.

2:  FoG2, but, well, you're there already.

3:  Poorly supported, but still a great game (based on a board game), Heroes of Normandy.  Uses a lot of tropes that become far more complex in later WWII tactical systems, but it's got a fun "hey, we're not super-serious here" vibe you might like.

4:  I know you expressed disinterest in the ACW, but, as a game, there's little better to introduce a new-comer to the feeling of 19th Century warfare than Ultimate General: Gettysburg.  Dirt cheap on sale, very accessible, and fun in the bargain.

5:  I'll throw a second "yes" behind Philippe's Commander: The Great War.  The Napoleonic version is absurd, but the WWI iteration is extremely well done for all its faults and gives a great game.

This is a pretty wonderful time to be getting into the hobby.  Enjoy it.

[Cheimison]

Commander: The Great War

I actually own this on STEAM but have never really played it.
AGEOD games really intrigue me but most of them run so slowly, like ten year old games run worse than real-time, far more graphically intensive Paradox titles with fifty times as many countries from last year. This implies some serious optimization problems on the part of their programmers.

[JasonPratt]

I'm going back to think about the question on game systems that use orders and order-delay. The only ones on the PC I can recall offhand are World War II games (especially Command Ops 2 and its predecessors), and the ACW/Nappy game system Scourge of War -- but I'm not really sure the courier system works well for AI elements outside of visual range. The user interface(s) can take a lot of time getting used to. (The UI is different enough between the ACW and the Nappy games that learning one may actually mess you up on the other.)


However, if you shift a bit to the notion of 'a general sets up his troops and gives them basic ideas and then hopes everything goes right', the old Slitherine game system starting with Legion might work. That one is set in the Roman period; Chariots of War is set in the period of the Levantine micro-empires (e.g. David and Solomon); Spartan / Gates of Troy are (a game and its standalone expansion) set during the more-or-less pre-Roman Grecian period (with the latter game being set during the Trojan period naturally). They all have actual strategic campaigns, and the system was partly remade (with influence from a History Channel series) as Egypt: Engineering an Empire -- but I don't recall what the combat is like there. (I played it on the Playstation Portable and don't recall any real-time combat at all, but then I didn't play it much; it made me seasick.)

People enjoyed the combat enough that the system was extracted as its own set of games, set in the Roman period again (plus a fantasy expansion from the same period), the title(s) of which I've forgotten but which was intended to be a testbed for Legion 2, though I don't recall the developers ever getting that far. A loose campaign tied together the battles, but the system was mainly about upgrading your troops between fights and then seeing if/how you could beat the next fight.

This game was eventually remade as The History Channel: Great Battles of Rome. I own it, but have never played it, and it essentially replaces the earlier game whose name I can't recall (though without the fantasy campaign expansion).

The next game in the series, The History Channel: Great Battles Medieval, became Slitherine's first big hit on mobile platforms, and kinnnnnnd of led to SlitherMatrixene deciding maybe they should get onto Steam after all. It keeps the basic campaign concept of the prior game -- a series of battles, set during the 100 years war this time, between which you pay to buy and upgrade your squads of troops as well as you can -- but ditches the prior system of setting everyone up with basic orders and then releasing them to hope everything turns out right (with a few special commands capable of being thrown in to help out). Now it's a pausible real-time squad management game, set on an invisible grid of squares. (I played a few missions and moderately liked it, but too many other things to play.)

[Nefaro]

Commander: The Great War

I actually own this on STEAM but have never really played it.
AGEOD games really intrigue me but most of them run so slowly, like ten year old games run worse than real-time, far more graphically intensive Paradox titles with fifty times as many countries from last year. This implies some serious optimization problems on the part of their programmers.

AGE's Alea Jacta Est and Birth Of Rome are enjoyable, on the grand scale, without getting too bogged down as in others.  There is no rigid command structure in them, as opposed to a few other AGE games, for example.  They also run about as fast as the AGE engine does these days.

Birth of Rome has some smaller scenarios covering the earlier republican period which make it easier to get into. 

However, you mentioned enjoying smaller scale tactical battles more, so I'm not sure if those titles should be high on your list.  They should be, for both theme and less difficulty, in regards to AGE games alone, though.




If you want to experience 19th century battlefield command, and it's problems, I'd recommend the Scourge of War series.  Waterloo or Gettysburg, whichever appeals.  Even if you don't use the full courier command system, which can be rather wonky, you can still use the courier delay option which will give you varied delays to go with the intrinsic tendency of your subordinate commanders to get sidetracked or drag their feet.

I always enjoyed SOW:Gettysburg's tutorials.  They were not only informative, but fun.   Not sure if the Waterloo tutorials are likewise enjoyable.