Does having the FoG2 DLC impact the battles from FoG:E in any way?

Originally posted by Santini-:

Does having the FoG2 DLC impact the battles from FoG:E in any way?

Not at all.

"..Couldn't be that much simpler..." Seriously??
You could have just used the same battle system on Empire as you did in FoG II...Rather than requiring a purchase of two games, just to effectively play one.

Yes, Empires does do an auto resolve of the battles, (great for players who don't want to fight every single battle), BUT the AI selects the combination of units, places them right in front of each other and they go head to head...Not much in the way of strategy, tactics or even utilization of terrain.
Rather than use the battle field, it sections off the battle to a prescribed "combat width" based on terrain type (neat concept for auto resolve) and the armies just go head to head over and over until one side is worn out.

I like the game, but having to purchase Two games, so I can export battles to one, so I can play the latter game more effectively, seems like it should have just migrated the battle system to the new game.

Great game. Economics, and depth of empire building is fantastic. Auto resolve for battles is good, but after seeing what you had in FoG II, it feels like this sequel falls short of expectations.

Hi Mourdeeb,

I can see your point. However i believe it lies on a flawed assumption, that FOG2 and FOG Empires are games built with the same engine and code and therefore the integration could have been done better than just the auto-export option actually in place.

Please consider that these are two completely different developers (AGEod and Byzantine Games) with different code bases. Their codes don't talk to each other, their design is very different, so it is not just a matter of considering Fog2 the tactical layer for Fog Empires of viceversa.

Second thing to take into account is that even if from a technical standpoint it could have been possible to melt together in a single game Fog2 and Fog Empires, that would have meant - doubtless - an higher price tag. You can easily see why forcing people to pay a lot for an option that many just use occasionally is not a good idea.

There are other things to consider, but i hope that the two above are sufficiently solid to make the situation clearer.

Other points to consider are also:
a) in Empires, a battle is often won or lost before starting (as an eminent Chinese strategist said...). It is how you have built your army, how you have positioned it and in which shape it is which will determine the outcome. Once the battle starts, outcome is at least 50-75% done.
b) Empires stands on its own and is balanced around its battle system. Know that playing too many battles in FOG II will first extend a typical game by dozens of hours, and second will make your conquests in Empires much easier.

I really appreciate your responses. It's nice to see active Developers in a game.

To the point about costs, would possible DLC for the FoGII battle system be in the future? Even if it were a $15 USD DLC it would still be far less costly than a $30 USD game for a feature that , as you point out, is only used once and a while.

As far as the battles being over essentially before they start, I have had battles that looked like I could not loose, but the terrain bottle necked my armies, the AI placed weaker units in the front lines and I lost. That's not a bad thing! It adds depth and allows for the realistic defeat of much stronger forces by smaller, well positioned armies. The auto battles are a well balanced mechanic in this game. Great job!
I just fell in love with the turn based Warhammer-esque, battle system. I hope you can add this to the game in the future.

Thanks again for engaging me in conversation!

I'd be happy just to skip both games' launchers - save a couple clicks. Any way to bypass them? Really enjoying playing both anyway.

Originally posted by NeonHaggis:

I'd be happy just to skip both games' launchers - save a couple clicks. Any way to bypass them?

Unfortunately not with the STEAM version. Something to do with way STEAM works.

Can anyone answer why my stack of 70 would get attacked by a stack of 110, and when exporting the battle I have under 20 units at my disposal while the enemy has about 3 times that amount? Perhaps it is something about their relative power far outweighing mine, but why such a small part of my huge army? And then when I lose, that somehow works out as losing 49 units.

I will try playing around with settings, but I can't see anything in either game that would seem to affect having so few units on the export - I would have thought playing the full battle with all units should be possible.

[Edit] I tried turning the FOG 'unit conversion' feature up to 150% and still only ended up with 29 units. So the question remains, why does my army hide so in what should be full-scale battles? For the record, I have had larger exported battles with a stack of 30...

jedmeister, I've been playing around with battle sizes. I had a battle where my elite spartan army of about 30-40 units got jumped on by 203!!! units. The battle scaled down due to size and my force was tiny. I understand I was going to have issues with being outflanked etc etc, but it was so scaled down for me that I had almost no options with so few units - it is hard to refuse a flank when you don't have enough units to even have a separate flank.

Anyway, this edge case made me look at the script and make the following discoveries.

(in your FOG2 folder you will find a file called LiaisonTools.bsf, just open this in some basic text editor)

There is are 2 values at the top of the file:

#define LIAISON_CONVERSION_RATIO 50 // Actual ratio of AGEOD points to FOG points x 100
#define MAX_LIAISON_BATTLE_SIZE 24// If either side has more liaison units than this, the battle scales accordingly.


This appears to be where you set the way the battle scales, in particular the 2nd value (24) is the number of units where the game will start scaling down the units you get. It also feeds into how much it will scale. If you decrease this then it will scale down sooner and by more, whilst in theory increasing it will mean it will not scale down so soon or by so much.

In practise that didn't work. You then need to search further down the file for this line:

gMaxLiaisonBattleSize = Min((MAX_LIAISON_BATTLE_SIZE * LIAISON_CONVERSION_RATIO) / gLiaisonConversionRatio, 24);

That line is ensuring that the battle size number cannot be higher than 24. If you change it to:

gMaxLiaisonBattleSize = Min((MAX_LIAISON_BATTLE_SIZE * LIAISON_CONVERSION_RATIO) / gLiaisonConversionRatio, MAX_LIAISON_BATTLE_SIZE);

It will now use the value you changed start with all the time. NB gLiaisonConversionRatio may or may not be defaulted or pulled in from some other config I never looked into, so that may impact you (it didn't me).


Those 2 changes ensured that it was now not scaling really large battles quite so aggressively. However, for me I had another issue - the sheer disparity of the 2 armies meant my small army was scaled down a lot just because of a very large enemy. If you search further down the file you will find a line:
liaisonUnitCount = Max(gLiaisonUnitCount[0], gLiaisonUnitCount[1]);

This is the start of where it actually works out whether and (then in the next couple of lines) by how much to scale by. The line shown here is only using the value of the largest army in its maths. In my original case the maths was working out as 24 (from above) divided by 203 (the larest army), so the battle size was only 11% the size as 'normal'. That works fine for the large army, but for my edge case not so much. I changed this to use the average of the 2 armies, so the scaling is less extreme for such a lop sided battle.

i.e. change it to be:
liaisonUnitCount = (gLiaisonUnitCount[0] + gLiaisonUnitCount[1])/2;

This meant the scaling would have been 24/120 (the average of our army sizes) or 20%. As I changed the 24 above to 36 It was more like 36/120=30%. This gave me enough of a force to at least work with, even though the enemy was really big, like really really big.

I still lost but at least it was fun, I almost beat him (the enemy pushed me to 26% just as I sent him over way 40% and then I totally collapsed due to exhaustion and lack of a solid line :( ).

PS I took a copy of that file i case i need to put it back and modified the main install version, I tried to create a global mod to make use of some changes I had in it for other bits (playing with leader experience mods etc), but that does not seem to work. If the developer comes along again can you confirm whether I can have a FOG2 global mod with a custom LiaisonTools.bsf file? I've not tried modding this game before, but the FOG2 recognises my mod to choose yet does not use my customer BSF file. Are global mods restricted in what they can do, or is the empires conversion a special case that doesn't etc?

This is really useful Puree, thank you for sharing.

And @Devs, a huge +1 for any such mod that could fix things in this manner.
I have now seen the Dev responses about keeping battles to a points roof to prevent bugs, but in the case of large imported Empires battles it feels like it has *broken the game* by placing a small percentage of my army (and weaker elements at that), and while giving the enemy a significantly greater percentage, to try to avoid minor bugs around *some units potentially not being placed* (?)

In this case, me simply having any units at all would allow an actual battle, I doubt the potential to not place a few units when the battlefield is filling up would be worse than the following:
I feel I cannot have a serious battle with powerful armies over a certain size, it does indeed (after a little more testing with unit conversion parameters) seem to skew the units placed more than even relative army power and size attributes would suggest it should.

I understand that balanced numbers and power compositions, as I found in early game imported battles, should result in even armies - this certainly worked. However, playing into even the Empires mid game with greater power (when no two major armies are evenly matched anymore); it really is not looking like the math checks out at all, making the imported battles something to avoid, sadly - the whole reason I bought the game in the package, too.

You haven't really been given a small percentage of your army, you have it all still and they were all placed (barring reinforcement/flanking forces etc). However, as the number of empire units goes up it makes use of FOG2 scaling that says each unit now represents more men etc. FOG2 can handle any battle whilst staying within a certain number of units, which it does via scaling what a unit represents. You see this in the converted battles when you hover over your units, the number of men will be shown. In smaller battles each unit maybe 500 hoplites and in larger (scaled) battles each unit maybe 2000 hoplites. So the same number of men are represented; both sides each have less units that represent more men.

I haven't had an issue for the most part, it was just that edge case of a small elite force against a mass horde. Scaling based purely on the horde side felt like I was scaled down to where I didn't have the number of counters to do anything with (even though they did represent my whole army). I don't claim my maths is that much better, it is very subjective. In my game I had a good size force, but the horde was massive, even after the same scaling down. That meant the enemy turns took a long time. The end of game summary showed I took on 150,000!? enemy with my 50,000.

The disparity in converted units etc is probably nothing to do with scaling by itself, but just the very different armies. Different unit types convert very different. In Empires my armies have a balance between light and heavy, which in FOG2 means a lot of heavy units but only a few light units due to the point conversion. This hasn't felt overly wrong so far for me, but armies with different combinations could convert to very different numbers of units, irrespective of scaling.

When battles are scaled, the scaling is exactly the same for both sides, so the ratio of opposing forces will not change.

But as Puree says, Empires units don't all convert to the same number of FOG2 units. For example two equivalent Empires Heavy Infantry units will scale to a very different number of FOG2 units if one converts to Pike Phalanx and the other to Irregular Foot, because a pike phalanx is much more powerful than an Irregular Foot unit in FOG2. (And costs 2.4 times as much in FOG2 points). So to maintain the equal power of two equal Heavy Infantry units when exported to FOG2, the one that converts to Irregular Foot will get 2.4 times as many FOG2 units as the one that converts to Pike Phalanx.

Originally posted by puree:

PS I took a copy of that file i case i need to put it back and modified the main install version, I tried to create a global mod to make use of some changes I had in it for other bits (playing with leader experience mods etc), but that does not seem to work. If the developer comes along again can you confirm whether I can have a FOG2 global mod with a custom LiaisonTools.bsf file? I've not tried modding this game before, but the FOG2 recognises my mod to choose yet does not use my customer BSF file. Are global mods restricted in what they can do, or is the empires conversion a special case that doesn't etc?

See my replies on the Slitherine board.

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=492&t=98883