However this message system is not as helpful as it could be.
An example is a message reporting 'III(A) has been overrun' and, as I have units chasing the Austrians, I thought that they had caught HOHENZOLLERN's artillery. Later, much later, when checking through the French corps, I see that DAVOUT's III Corps is missing its artillery, so unexpectedly the loss was mine. The lesson is to always check the situation with the corps units, either with 'view units', or shuffling stacks and clicking through the unit counters.
The reason seemed to be that, during the chase, some of the French units followed the order to move on DEGGENDORF, whilst most of DAVOUT's III Corps ignored the order and followed the enemy retreat toward PASSAU and the artillery became isolated and was lost. However the point is that the message text is not as helpful as it could have been. Other message text is 'Enemy division blocked at xx.xx' (hex) which is much more useful, except that I cannot look at the hex to see how important that message is.
Access to an archive of previous messages would be useful in reviewing what had happened during a turn resolution, as once the message panel is cancelled the data has gone forever.
The background of the message panel is always the rain scene, which comes from the 'graphics/backgrounds/WeatherRainBackg' file, the game doesn't select the background for clear weather, whenever that applies. Not a big issue, but something which is not WAD.
The message data seems to be restricted in the number of text characters which can be shown, this results in some longer messages not being shown in full.
Whilst the message panel is on screen the map is frozen and it is not possible to scroll the map and sweeping the mouse over the map does not bring up the hex co-ordinates to find the hex where the event is taking place, which would have been useful in understanding what is happening. To unfreeze the map the message panel must be cancelled and the message text is lost unless you make notes, or take a screen shot, which I am doing, but a message archive would be so much easier.