Field of Glory II: Medieval - Rise of the Swiss (DLC)

Field of Glory II is a turn-based tactical wargame covering the Rise of Rome period, roughly 280 BC to 25 BC. Byzantine Games built it on the ruleset of the tabletop Field of Glory system, and that lineage shows immediately: this is a game about unit cohesion, terrain exploitation, flank charges, and the slow, grinding collapse of a battle line rather than anything resembling a real-time spectacle. You push hexes, you watch dice resolve, and you lose badly if you forget that heavy infantry hates rough ground. The core loop is pure wargame orthodoxy. Each army is a collection of unit classes - heavy foot, cavalry, skirmishers, elephants, war wagons - and each class behaves with distinct movement ranges, combat dice, and disruption thresholds. Routing a cohesive Roman legionary line requires wearing it down through missile fire, threatening flanks with cavalry, and exploiting any gap that opens. Doing it with a Carthaginian force feels genuinely different from doing it with Hellenistic pike phalanxes, and that faction asymmetry is where the game earns its keep. The campaign and scenario selection is deep, covering dozens of historical engagements, and the army builder for custom battles gives you access to a staggering list of rosters from the period. The AI is the honest surprise here. Slitherine titles have a mixed track record on AI quality, but Field of Glory II's opponent is genuinely competent on standard difficulty - it will identify your overextended flank, it will screen with skirmishers while its main line sets up, and it will not march cavalry straight into spearpoints. On higher difficulties it tightens further. The game also ships with multiplayer through Slitherine's PBEM system, which is the preferred competitive mode for the serious crowd, and the mod ecosystem on Steam Workshop extends the scenario list considerably. Now for the honest caveats. The tutorial does its job, but the learning curve is steeper than the tutorial implies. The ruleset rewards players who have already thought about concepts like zone of control, cohesion testing, and pursuit moves. If you have never played a hex wargame before, expect a few hours of uncomfortable losses before the logic clicks. The interface is functional rather than friendly - unit information is buried in stat panels, and there is no contextual tooltip system that holds your hand through every decision. The graphics are also workmanlike at best; the unit models and terrain get the job done without ever looking like anything other than a 2017 PC wargame budget production. For strategy players who already own something like Panzer Corps or a Slitherine hex title, the onboarding friction drops significantly. The systems are analogous enough that the first few hours feel like vocabulary drills rather than total unfamiliarity. And for that audience, the depth here is substantial. Build orders matter in the army construction phase, historical army restrictions create genuine puzzle-solving moments, and the sheer variety of the period - Pyrrhic wars, Punic wars, the rise of Macedon, the Social War - means there is always a new engagement type to stress-test your tactical intuitions against. At 200-plus hours of scenarios and DLC content across the full expanded library, the per-session value is high for anyone willing to put in the early work.

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