Matrix Games Forums

I don't know how many of you lot play Napoleonic miniatures in addition to the computer games. I'm willing to bet it's more than a small percentage who _would_ play with miniatures if you don't actually own the miniatures themselves.

I've been miniature wargaming since the late '70s, at least in a mass battles style and I do so now when I am lucky enough to find an opponent with a full kit.

I'm currently working on an 1805 French army in 6mm using "Grand Armee" (a grand tactical rules set).

I do think COG would make an excellent miniature campaign moderator. With a few minor feature additions, those of us who "push lead" will have a powerful tool for our other hobby.

I feel we'd see more sales of COG as a result, by virtue of the additional exposure of the software in action.

So, although I have mentioned some of these items elsewhere, I'd like to clearly state what features, if added, would make COG not only an excellent game, but a worthy campaign tool as well.


1) Ability to modify unit costs and construction time.
2) Ability to modify unit size during any point of the orders phase as well as after a battle during the resolution part of a turn.
3) Ability to add/delete commanders during a turn.
4) Ability to print the OOBs for each side prior to conducting a battle.
5) Ability to choose to "fight on the tabletop" in addition to quick and detailed battles.
6) Ability to decrease/increase operational movement speeds.

There are a few more features that would be useful, but these would make for a campaign moderator that could be used properly.

If this can't happen for COG, I'd sure like to see it for COGII.

I'd not mind paying an additional $10 to unlock the campaign tool portion of the game, either. I feel it would be well worth the investment.

CEiA is said to have an option where you can manually enter the result of battles. BTW can someone tell me why are the sizes of the armies so ridiculously big in CoG (excpet for the battle of Leipzig there were no battle featuring 100,000s of soldiers)? Seeing the AARs depicting 200-300.000 soldiers per side, compared to Austerltz 80,000 something vs 70,000 something or Wagram 120.000 vs 110,000, still keeps me on the hesiating side.

I know Hard Sarge what you intend to say, but this game costs a lot of money for me, and I dont want get disappointed again because of design features, like I did with UV.

Regards

Although EiA was a good boardgame, as a computer game it is currently vaporware. COG has been released, it works, it is supported. I may purchase the EiA computer version if it ever sees daylight, then again, maybe not.

The developers have erred on the side of the player with regards to army sizes. Many people don't like being limited by the game as to how many men they can eventually field. It has been mentioned though, that future features may include the ability for users to modify the economy as to reduce the overall amount of troops fielded per side.

Although Austerlitz was fairly small <!!>, with only about 150,000 engaged, Dresden and Leipsig were huge affairs and the invasion of Russia saw nearly 600,000 involved on the French side alone.

Although I, personally, would prefer to have less troops available overall, the excess isn't a game breaker for me.

For what it's worth, my list of battles with over 100,000 soldiers on a side is:

Aspern-Essling, Bautzen, Berezina, Borodino, Dresden, Jena-Auerstadt, La Rothiere, Leipzig, Lutzen, Wagram, and Waterloo.

(Source: The Campaigns of Napoleon, Chandler)

Never-the-less, our army sizes are larger than historical numbers. Although we tried to make the game as historical as possible, we do place the primary design emphasis on game playability in Crown of Glory, and as such there are a number of factors that we feel justify the larger armies for the sake of playability. If you look in some recent threads, we discuss how in order to keep the AI competitive at the campaign level against experienced players we need to give the AI economic handicaps, which in turn leads to troop-inflation. Similarly, there are threads wherein we discuss how our original attempts to limit army sizes by economic factors were simply very unpopular with players.

We could simply scale down the strength of divisions -- instead of the current 10,000 size limit, reduce this to say 6,000 (which was a more typical size limit, 10,000 was a more theoretical limit), but as our measure of a division's size is simply refered to in the game in most places as "strength", you could perhaps think of it as a measure of guns and horses as well.

We have tried our best to tweak the design of the game to accomodate player feedback on these forums; the clear majority of this feedback has shown a dislike for strong limitations on economy, army sizes, and even our battle size limit rules -- which keep the battles limited to about 200,000 men per side -- seem to have only lukewarm reception at best: the majority of people who have written feedback on this want no limit on the size of battles.

As a side note, we originally designed the game with the notion that the campaign level would be a shorter, fiercer struggle toward a relatively small glory limit (and we balanced much of the game based on this), but we have found that most players seem to prefer longer, more open ended, epic campaigns (we added the 23 year option in the first patch in response to overwhelming player requests for this). This is another reason why economies and armies tend to grow larger than we normally found in our testing.