Some issues from the Prussian Perspective

[deTemple]

If the following points have already been discussed, please accept my apologies...

1. The detailed battle bug ??
a) as Prussia, it has not been possible to start a detailed battle in Kracow (against the Free Polish Forces[;)]) => the game starts loading the detailed battle scene, but crashes after some seconds...
b) the same happened when I attacked the Turks in Styria (those counted 400.000 men - perhaps the numbers do matter despite your contrary claim?)

2. The fleet production bug
In the middle of the long campaign (ca. 1800-1805) my ports start producing senseless fleet units (automatically - yes, the production manager is disabled). Really annoying if you are husbanding your textiles for some nice Rifles... Or should this be interpreted as a simulation of economic inefficiences? [;)]

3. The surrender-"mistreating"
Most likely not a bug, but still pretty unlogical... When France did surrender, my forces had to retire to my nearest province (Lorraine). However, my supply chain had been based on depots in temporarily captured French provinces (Soissons, Champagne) that were automatically destroyed after the end of the fighting. In consequence, my troops suffered more casualities during the retreat after the cease fire than in the battles before... Which country would accept such a fate for its occupation forces after the enemy surrendered? Me thinks, exactly the necessary countermeasures against this would be part of the cease fire negotiations...

Nonetheless, I admit that Crown of Glory is simply the game that impressed me the most in the last five years. Very well done! Btw: Hope to see a sequel covering the period of the English civil war and the 30-years-war...

Peter T.

P.S.: The static leader treatment in the long campaign had already been discussed. But to a Prussian the ratings of certain leaders like Gneisenau are simply not acceptable [;)] Why?
Perhaps the following excerpt taken from Hofschroer's new book about the battles of Ligny and Quatre-Bras will make my point clearer (Pen&Sword, 2005, p. 109ff.):

"What was important was the development of a uniformly trained general staff to manage the functioning of all components of such armies. Napoleon did not have such a general staff and this weakness caused communication problems with Marshal Ney on 16 June and Marshal Grouchy on 18 June that cost him the campaign...
Wellington too did not have a uniformly trained staff, as the training of staff officers in the Bristish Army was still in its infancy in 1815...
Of all the armies of this period, it was perhaps the Prussian that best analysed the developments in warfare in recent years and set about optimising their military structures...
In terms of the quality of the manpower, equipment and training, the Prussian Army of the Lower Rhine was the worst fielded by Prussia in the entire Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Yet it was this army that marched the most, fought the most and bled the most, making the largest contribution to the Allied victory in 1815. This was due largely to the quality of its leadership."

[Hard Sarge]

not to sound dumb, but is this game patched to 1.1 ?

I not heard of any trouble loading a Detail battle, last night I had one with 713,000 Turks vs 307,000 French that loaded with no hassle

yes, that has been reported, and hopefully fixed, now captured province will still make some troops, and Protectorates will make lots of troops

for the fleets, if you don't have ships for them, sail them into battle, the enemy will kill them off and you will not have to pay upkeep on them

havn't really seen much of this issue during the testing of the patch

interesting point on the leaders, but again, from another point of view, there have been a number of books written about what Nay did that day, and nobody really understands what he was thinking or doing, it was very unNay like, some have enough bought up the idea that he was trying to lose, or was bribed and working for the English

it is funny, a number of people talk about Nappy and his skills being lost towards the end, it was Nay who lost the begining of Waterloo

ahhh, we got a chance to get new Leaders based on battle, so that should help improve your leadership during the campaign

[ericbabe]

I assuming you're using version 1.1? On an XP machine?

1a) One of our testers fights battles against the Polish forces frequently and we haven't seen crashes on the loading of detailed battles in our beta testing at all. This leads me to believe that the crash you are experiencing is machine-specific, perhaps related to your virtual memory. Perhaps try to increase your virtual memory page size (Control Panel | System | Advanced | Performance / Settings) and see if this has any effect?

Also, please try running in low animation mode (see the readme.txt file for information on how to do this) and see if you still get the same crash in that mode. You could also try running in the no sound mode as that frees up a few megabytes.


1b) I'm not sure to which "contrary claim" you are refering, but I don't believe that the numbers of troops in a battle per-se would have any effect on whether it loads or not simply because of the way that memory is allocated. What may have an effect is if more *types* of troops are present in the battle, as this requires that more graphic memory be allocated.

2) I don't believe I've seen a report of spontaneous fleet builds before. Is this reproducible? Does it happen as nations other than Prussia? (Prussia is one of my favorite nations to play but I've never seen this -- though there may be some circumstance that brings it about.)

3) Other players have complained about their troops' teleporting and becoming out-of-supply as a result. We are considering ways to address this in the next patch. One way would be to give any troop that teleports free supply for the duration of the turn.


Thank you for the kind words. I also think English Civil War and the Thirty Years War would make excellent games. Unfortunately I don't think there's enough of a market to do them as full-blown projects (how I wish there were...) If you can round up just four thousand people willing to pre-order a Thirty Years War game, I'd *love* to do that era. (Or, heck, 100 people willing to pay $1,600 each for a pre-order of Thirty Years War would be OK too [:)] -- just need to pay the bills... Or maybe there's a Thirty Years War Society willing to give me a grant...)

p.s.: The leader attributes are easily modifiable in the commndr.txt file. Just open the file in a spreadsheet as a tab-delimited file.

[deTemple]

HardSarge,

thanks for your reply.

a) the game is running on version 1.1 (btw: there are no "dumb" replies, only people forgetting who was the person looking for help and who was so kind to offer a possible solution to a problem) - still those detailed battles crash from time to time - if the numbers don't matter, then perhaps the specific province the battle will be fought in?

b) I assume your hints concerning the production possibilities in conquered countries as well as in protectorates refer to my annotations in regards to the "unlogical retreat treatment" for the occupation forces after a cease fire. Most likely, I had not been able to make my point clear enough due to the language barrier between us. Actually, I would like to see that units involved in a retreat after a cease fire be exempted from attrition casualties because of the reasoning given in my previous posting. Once again sorry, if I had not been able to formulate this proposition in a correct manner...

c) I admit, I already accepted these fleet markers as signposts to the economic inefficiency of feudalism[:)], so your solution to get rid of them had been beyond my intellectual capabilities. Very smart!

d) the waning skills of Napoleon in his last campaign - a nice theme for a "chimney talk" - if you ever happen to visit Germany, please let me know so I could arrange a meeting of this kind... In the meantime I will eagerly await patch 1.2...

Have a nice weekend - Peter T.

P.S.: Btw - are you the same HardSarge who was a loyal supporter to the "Bombing the Reich Forum" run by Jean-Luc? Then I would like to "up my thanks" even more because I already enjoyed your helpful comments in this other context during the last few years...

[deTemple]

Ericbabe,

many thanks for your helpful comments, too.

1) Exactly, I'm running the game on a Xp-Laptop. So my problems are most likely machine-related. Sorry, that I had not been specific in regards to this information causing some unnecessary irritation to you and HardSarge.

2) In order to replicate this fleet-production-mechanism, would it be helpful to send a corresponding save-file? If yes, to which address should I send it?

3) Your comments about the future possibilities of a 30-Years-War-scenario had been very enlightening to me because I'm very interested in the production and marketing topics of the Computer Gaming Industry. Yes, that's right, the market for this period should not be considered too large ex ante. However, I would compare it to the market for games covering the civil wars in Japan during the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century (Gempei-Period). And Creative Assembly had been able to make its first mark with a title covering this period. So perhaps the chosen timeframe is not so important when it comes to achieve the necessary sales volumes in comparison to the fact, that most clients considered the game design of "Shogun" simply "revolutionary"? Anyway, the game you and your collegues provided is imho simply a very convincing blend of strategic decisions relating to the political and economy dimensions of a nation in a historical setting on one hand and the tactical challenges of Napoleonic Warfare on the other. So I wish the sales of your game will give you the chance to explore other periods that had not been covered by other games before - or at least had not been handled in a satisfying manner...

Best wishes - Peter T.

[Hard Sarge]

Hi Peter T

Thank you sir, yes this is still me, I try to use the same handle in all of my Fourms, we still Kicking on BTR and hopefully the item on the home page here will be good news for us down the road

your hassles may be linked to the Laptop (maybe vid card, mem, hopefully some of the ideas Eric came up will help) game is much better in detail combat then quick battle IMHO

the teleporting Troops is still a oddity, Eric and others have some ideas on working around/changeing it, but that is more down the road, so didn't want to get into it, as it may raise hopes, that will not be seen for a while

one thing for the fleets, when I have seen and tracked this, it seems to build 5, then stop, I had a province build 5 Armies, another build 5 Fleets (really, really a hassle when you don't have any money) but, yea, units like that, if no other units are added to them, will disappear if in the same hex with a enemy unit, plus I think it is more of a upkeeping move, then a combat function, so it don't cost you morale lose or points

keep asking questions, we will keep the light on for you

if I ever make it back to Germany, I would enjoy that very much

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: deTemple
2) In order to replicate this fleet-production-mechanism, would it be helpful to send a corresponding save-file? If yes, to which address should I send it?

If you don't mind, let's wait till the next patch is out. The save games aren't backwards compatible and I don't currently have an old version of code up and running on a debugger. If you're still having the fleet problem in the next version, then by all means send a save game to ericbabe@west-civ.com and I'll look it over.

3) Your comments about the future possibilities of a 30-Years-War-scenario had been very enlightening to me because I'm very interested in the production and marketing topics of the Computer Gaming Industry. Yes, that's right, the market for this period should not be considered too large ex ante. However, I would compare it to the market for games covering the civil wars in Japan during the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century (Gempei-Period). And Creative Assembly had been able to make its first mark with a title covering this period. So perhaps the chosen timeframe is not so important when it comes to achieve the necessary sales volumes in comparison to the fact, that most clients considered the game design of "Shogun" simply "revolutionary"? Anyway, the game you and your collegues provided is imho simply a very convincing blend of strategic decisions relating to the political and economy dimensions of a nation in a historical setting on one hand and the tactical challenges of Napoleonic Warfare on the other. So I wish the sales of your game will give you the chance to explore other periods that had not been covered by other games before - or at least had not been handled in a satisfying manner...

I wish that about the sales of our game too! Maybe you should write the review for our sequel in Computer Gaming World... [:)]

[Joram]

ORIGINAL: ericbabe
Thank you for the kind words. I also think English Civil War and the Thirty Years War would make excellent games. Unfortunately I don't think there's enough of a market to do them as full-blown projects (how I wish there were...) If you can round up just four thousand people willing to pre-order a Thirty Years War game, I'd *love* to do that era. (Or, heck, 100 people willing to pay $1,600 each for a pre-order of Thirty Years War would be OK too -- just need to pay the bills... Or maybe there's a Thirty Years War Society willing to give me a grant...)

Sign me up!!! [:)]