Field of Glory: Kingdoms - Burghers and Bombards

Field of Glory: Kingdoms - Burghers and Bombards is a paid expansion for AGEOD's grand-strategy title, and it pulls in two directions at once: it deepens the economic simulation while simultaneously blowing up (literally) the late-medieval military meta. If you have logged serious hours in the base game, this is the content drop that resets your mental model and forces you to relearn systems you thought you had mastered. That is a feature, not a bug. The headline addition is the Advanced Economy layer built around Burghers, Guilds, and Inflation. This is not a cosmetic reskin of the existing ledger. Guilds introduce a new class of economic actor that sits between your nobility and your treasury, generating wealth but also political friction. Inflation is a genuine long-term pressure mechanic: overspend on campaigns or over-develop your commercial sector and you will find your currency softening at the worst possible moment. Players who treat economics as a checkbox will get punished here. Players who treat it like a second wargame running underneath the military one will find enormous room for optimisation. I spent a full campaign session just stress-testing guild placement relative to trade-route geography before touching an army, and that session was not wasted. On the military side, handgunners, bombards, and cannon-equipped galleys arrive as the period-appropriate shock to a system still dominated by knights and pike blocks. Bombards in particular reshape siege calculations dramatically. If you have ever found the siege phase of grand-strategy games to be a waiting room rather than a decision space, the artillery additions here add real texture: you now have to weigh bombardment attrition against logistical cost and campaign-season timing. The fortress adaptation mechanic is a smart counterpoint - defenders can retrofit existing fortifications to absorb artillery fire, which means a besieging player cannot simply assume tech advantage will auto-win a prolonged investment. The two new campaigns give you focused starting scenarios to stress-test these systems rather than dumping you into a sandbox. For newcomers to the Kingdoms ecosystem, I would honestly recommend starting here rather than with the open-ended base-game campaign. Scoped scenarios with defined objectives are almost always a friendlier on-ramp than an open map with 300 years of possibility. The tutorial content has not been massively expanded, but the campaign framing does a lot of implicit teaching through constrained choices. You will understand why inflation matters because you will feel it, not just read about it in a tooltip. The review sample is thin at launch - 17 Steam reviews is not enough data to draw firm conclusions about edge-case balance. The 88% positive rate is encouraging but needs more weight behind it before it means much. AGEOD's track record with post-launch patching is solid, and Slitherine's publishing relationship means the mod ecosystem has a reasonable floor for longevity. If you are already invested in the base game, the calculus is straightforward: this is substantive mechanical expansion, not a cosmetic content pack. If you are brand new, grab the base game first, spend a campaign learning the core loop, and then let Burghers and Bombards complicate your life on purpose.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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