Relation to FoG: Empires

[rwlyraa]

Apologies for asking a rather dumb question, but I couldn't find any detailed comparison/breakdown between these two titles.
Is Kingdoms a straight sequel to Empires or do they differ in covered time periods or mechanics? Is there a reason to get the previous title?

[PatRat]

They are of different time periods, empires is ancient Greece, Rome, etc, and kingdoms is from the Medieval period. From what I've seen, kingdoms the mechanics are similar but more refined than empires.

If I understand correctly, kingdoms improvements may be back ported, if that's the correct term, to empires eventually.

I would recommend getting empires, it's a great game in its own right.

I'm not sure if you are aware, but if you own FOG2 ancients, you can export your battles to it from empires, and fight them out in more tactical detail than empires allows, though I find the in game system in empires very satisfying myself.

The same goes for kingdoms and FOG2 medieval.

[rwlyraa]

Yeah, I own FoG2 (ancient) :)
Thanks! Everything is clear now ^_^

[PocusFR]

Entirely new systems would be Religions and Dynasties.

Now, everything has changed so much. You still have buildings, sure, but they are all new; you build castles progressively, you have Piety and Stewardship structures, Trade is quantitative, etc.

You could say that vassals are basically client-states from Empires, but this again has been reworked extensively; you can now directly control their troops, get multi-choice decisions about them, and so on.

So even existing systems are vastly different!

[PatRat]

I should of mentioned in my post, that I would heartily recommend getting Kingdoms as well as Empires. For the reasons that Pocus has mentioned. I am really looking forward to it.

[gameburn]

I'm still early with Kingdoms, but I would say the big thing is that the historical periods covered in each are very different. Kingdoms feels more fractured and varied, but has less differentiation at the granular level when you play. The developers were surprisingly fair to the historical differences. The ancient world had hundreds of languages and very different approaches to how you lived and organised your people/nation. Medieval period feels a bit more homogeneous, but on the other hand the Medieval period is handled so well by the developers that it doesn't feel "smaller." We're talking feudalism vs. empire building and all that that entails. They decided not to go too far down the Crusader Kings road where personalities and idiosyncrasies of inheritance mean so much. War and nation building is superior in this game, in my opinion. Feels like you spend all your time in CK worrying about marriage, DNA degradation, and keeping your vassals under control.