What-if scenarios

[Rasputitsa]

Playing as Austrian/Coalition against the French AI has been more challenging, especially with 'house rules' to replicate the slow movement and lack of co-ordination within the Austrian forces. No use of 'To the guns', or 'forced march' for corps commanders. Austrian commanders are likely to break before their troops, sometimes even before combat has occurred.

Handling the Austrians is certainly more challenging.

However, playing as the French is much more fun, except that the game is so historically unbalanced against the Austrian AI. Playing as NAPOLEON is pretty safe unless you mess up big time.

One way to get a more balanced game, when playing as the French, is to remove some of the French units, but the game has no editor.

There are 'what-if' historical situations which might have drawn off some of NAPOLEON's forces. For both 1805 and 1809 there was a possibility of a British landing somewhere on the Channel coast, or Prussia may have been drawn into the conflict, by the infringement of their territory at Ansbach in 1805, or the insulting dictats that NAPOLEON imposed on them leading up to 1809.

Part of the Austrian plan was to encourage uprisings against NAPOLEON in the German States, 'what-if' that worked, as it did in the Tyrol.

The plan is to 'park' selected French corps out of the conflict to simulate forces sent to other theatres.

They have to be far enough away so as not to influence the AI moves, so I am trying hexes 01,22 and 01,01 to see if that is effective in removing forces without affecting the game.

It will take some practice to find the units to remove to get a nice balance to play a challenging game as NAPOLEON.