Computer Games Saturday

This week, Fenris and I were back to that classic, Dark Ages Warlord with the full Expansion Pack.

For three weeks now Fenris has been playing the Byzantines. Thats one hundred years of grim early medieval warfare. Fenris fought his first, and longest, war with the Turks. Byzantine troops were able to raze the Turkish homelands and let famine finish them off. This left the land fallow and easily colonized with loyalist peasants and pensioned off soldiery.

Fenris turned his hungry eyes on his next set of neighbours even as he was digesting the Turkish lands and revenues. He built up massive forces quickly, concentating by sea. Heavy infantry, technologically advanced bowmen led by heavily armored aristocrats. The Hungarians were overwhelmed by the marching legions before the Lombards of Wargeric II or the Conrad the Clerk, Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope allied himself with Fenris, seeking advantage against the Sicilians under Roger the Assassin, Duke of Sicily.

Again, taking advantage of sea transport, Fenris moved his experienced troops and overwhelmed the Egyptians by a combination of amphibious attack, and brutal frontal assaults.

It took twenty game turns ... thats twenty years ... for the Byzantines to digest their massive meal. Fenris built roads and aquaducts and taxed the booming trade routes. He increased food production to grow more soldiers. His navy dominated the entire Mediterreanean Sea.

Unexpectedly, the Italians dissolved into civil war. Fenris reacted quickly, sending his standing army, flushed out with a fresh crop of recruits, into the power vacume of Lombardy. He moved south and swallowed up the Pope and then Sicily.

The Germans, French, and English were locked into a savage three way war which Fenris adeptly exploited, as the English were gobbled up by the French, and then the French gobbled up by Fenris.

The Byzantines held sixty percent of the medieval world when the game triggered a move into the next level. Fenris was suddenly faced with two empires, the Persian, and the Mongol.

We will find out how Fenris dealt with the Mongols and the Persians next week ...