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Four thousand words of notes. Hoboy. Field of Glory Colon Kingdoms is definitely thought-provoking.
It was also complaint-provoking in the fairly long period where I didn’t understand what it’s trying to do. Reaching that point, luckily for you, means we can cut out a lot of the “confused whingeing” subsection of those notes. Though it still has its shortcomings, I’ve come to appreciate that I was reading Kingdoms all wrong. Although it talks big about characters, politics, and religion, they’re not what it’s about. It’s about building.
Field of Glory is a series of turn-based wargames built on the same ruleset, focusing on short campaigns over multiple linked battles. 2019’s Empires spun off into a grand strategy about developing an ancient empire, and Kingdoms overhauls and brings that to the High Middle Ages. It’ll sound very familiar. You pick a throne, and control all the land it oversees. You raise armies to conquer new lands or murder your Abrahamic siblings for definitely not politically expedient reasons, and you try to maintain and develop your holdings, and gather resources both tangible and conceptual. Occasionally your king will die and/or there’ll be a coup or civil war, but you’ll continue as whoever sits on your original throne. If your new emperor is a tactless dipshit, well, them’s the breaks, you’ll have to adjust.
There aren’t really any characters. I bring this up because the natural reference point is Crusader Kings, a series all about personal feuds and elaborate schemes: the pettiness and loyalty and chaos of humanity and power. The drama. FOG Kingdoms, by comparison, is anaemic. Individuals are few, and limited to numbers that apply bonuses if they lead a province or army, plus a character trait that might make them more likely to sack a city. Disloyalty might spur a coup if they can access soldiers or riches, but you barely interact with them. Even heirs are easily forgotten. I’ve burned through three kings in a row with little more reaction than a disappointed shrug, replacement of a general, and some reprioritisation of construction projects.
When you contrast them though, it’s clearer that they’re not the same kind of game, really. Kingdoms isn’t about dramatic events or the reasons behind them; it’s about those construction projects. Even its semi-random optional events are partly generated by specific buildings, and serve as strategic tools rather than driving a story.
It’s still part wargame. Battles takes advantage of FoG’s large catalogue of stabmen, with your starting culture providing local flavours of javelad, axeboy, and so on, and introducing more as your society figures out which end of a horse the food goes in. Combat is detailed, but heavily condensed from the core rules, as each unit fights one turn against its opposite in linear order. Far from taking over as I’d anticipated, its option to export and play out field battles in FoG Medieval is more a bonus addition to the latter game. Army composition is important to learn, but the real point is how you sustain that army to begin with.
Conscripting levies costs manpower and equipment, and more again to maintain, making mercenaries a good option even early on because they provide their own. They cost more in cash, but that’s simple: mo money, mo prodmens. A standing army is heavily dependent on your ruler, but tends to become more viable over time as your kingdom’s development lifts some restrictions. And because you’ll have actually built the infrastructure that provides more equipment and labour.
A little like Bellwright, it’s decided not by fighting but by building. No king is as useful as a well-integrated region. Each region is its own little Civilisation-ish operation whose labour produces food and infrastructure points, and opens the building slots that define the game. You don’t just build a farm: you build multiple types of farm, pasture, orchard, beehives, barns, and dozens more. Hundreds of buildings, whose purposes overlap, interact, and often cost a tradeoff. As important, though, is that their opportunity cost is far greater because you can’t build whatever you want. When a slot opens, you’re given one option per category (six total). A little like Shadow Empire, it’s what the locals are proposing. You’re not the God Emperor. You can spend Authority points (more on those later) to get a wider selection. But even that only opens six options per category; better, but no guarantee.
It emphasises that medieval development is slooow. But the most interesting result is that even if you really throw your Authority around, you don’t get stuck into the usual build orders, minmaxing, or rote uniformity. You have to roll with things. Not in the dramatic, story-generating way, but one that makes your lands more organic, and every decision more active. I hadn’t planned on it, but if I build this clothier, it’d make use of that weaver in Lothian, and export to the camp in Moray.
That’s the other construction concern: many also produce tangible goods. Without specific goods, many buildings operate at massive cost, if at all. It’s a whole extra management layer, and the most enjoyable trade system I’ve seen in a grand strategy game. It ties your lands together, encouraging organic networks – yes, a local production chain is good, but a distributed one might come sooner, plus trade within your borders generates money. It’s a machine, but an irregular, shifting one. This is the real heart of Kingdoms. Development isn’t pushing a number up; it takes careful management of each region, and the interdependencies between them.
That’s emphasised further by the Authority system. Going from a hick to an Emperor means unpredictably long periods of maintaining high Authority relative to other rulers, slowly extending the innate bonuses of your rule (usually – intermediary phases often mean upheaval penalties). It’s best gained by staying within your maximum “demesne” (land you directly rule), complicating expansion in a frustrating way. But the point is that variety again, that encouragement of actually building something. Stability and consolidation, not grabbing everything in sight.
Authority also comes from winning battles, and taking lands you have a claim on (absurdly easy to acquire – merely insult someone and your ruler will often unilaterally declare several claims). But you can’t build the perpetual motion machine, and overreach almost inevitably leads to decline. Until you realise that a few buildings generate tiny amounts of Authority each turn, and others still a small chance of causing an Authority-bumping event. It’s risky, but possible to push past your limits for a time. You’re even encouraged to burn rather than stockpile Authority, since the higher it gets, the faster it passively drains. It’s a balancing act that took me dozens of hours to understand because I was still comparing, not contrasting it to its peers.
It still has issues. The building panel’s flavour text is nice, but sorely lacks information about prerequisites and relationships. The map could use better and more interactive overlays, labour management and army splitting are needlessly fiddly, and kingdoms reform and split without notice, not helped by their bizarre naming habits. Naples forms in Bulgaria, calls itself Poland (not Lesser Poland, which is in Belarus) and declares war on Bohemia, which is in Russia. Vassalise your uncle and he might take on a foreign culture and the name of a place from hundreds of miles and a third culture away. I didn’t sail from Connacht and unite Alba into a duchy so you could call it fucking York, Niall. Who even told you York exists?
Limited diplomacy also lets Kingdoms down. Crusades and Jihads mostly invite confusion and notification spam, and “war weariness” because of a forgotten faction thousands of miles away. There’s little explanation for anyone’s attitude, your only real PR move is repeated bribes, and the delay between sending and resolving truces leads to confusing outcomes. Part of that comes from the way army movement is resolved simultaneously (sort of), not helped by several army actions being toggles rather than distinct orders.
But I find myself forgiving Kingdoms a lot. Even as it gets easier to break by puzzling out its ideas, I enjoy developing my realm rather than just watching borders spread and numbers go up. I might complain more about Kingdoms, how it can be counter-intuitive, and limited in a few areas we might expect more from in the wake of so many grand strategy behemoths. But that feels unappreciative of its effort to instill a different mindset. The slow burn of Authority, and its elaborate building system suggest an interpretation of progress as driven not by Remarkable Men, or even ideology, but by building. Not just militarisation but the growth of complex, interconnected public works, of stewardship rather than pumping research points so you can get a shinier, stabbier toy. Even Legacy, effectively score, is based heavily on the standard of learning in your kingdom rather than just military conquest or personal deeds.
I suspect my opinion of Kingdoms will continue to waver for a long while, and that I’ll appreciate its approach all the more in a few years. It has too many problems to recommend without caveats, and its scale may mean such a small developer can only do so much to tune or follow it up. But in the meantime, it’s a valiant attempt, and might appeal to building lovers more than the warfare or feudalism sim fans it courts.