Fall of Empires:
Mapping Galicia
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2021

Infantry Attacks: Fall of Empires and Panzer Grenadier: Fire in the Steppe both take place in Galicia, the southern part of Poland ruled by the Habsburg Empire between 1795 and 1918. Fall of Empires takes place in 1914 and Fire in the Steppe in 1941, but over those 27 years very little changed. And so after designing Fire in the Steppe, I decided to use six of the same maps for Fall of Empires; the maps from the two series are at the same scale and interchangeable.

That didn’t work out exactly as I’d planned; the battles of Fall of Empires take place slightly farther to the west than those of Fire in the Steppe and the terrain has more hills. Those slopes play a key role in many scenarios, so they had to be in the map set. I substituted two maps that originally appeared in Panzer Grenadier: Broken Axis that had the exact hills I wanted, and original artist Guy Riessen altered the background to match those from Fire in the Steppe (Broken Axis has a springtime look, while Fire in the Steppe and Fall of Empires have the brown of a Galician late summer).

Here’s a look:

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published an uncountable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects; a few of them were actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold. Leopold enjoys gnawing his deer antler and editing Wikipedia pages.