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Dears,
It's time for Napoleon's Campaigns TWO. It's very easy, The PON ENGINE can be used for diplomatic features.
I hope that Phil. Thibaud will informe us very soon next great napleonic game... NAPOLEON'S CAMPAIGNS TWO
Murat

+1

We all hope ...

+1

+1

murat wrote:Dears,
It's time for Napoleon's Campaigns TWO. It's very easy, The PON ENGINE can be used for diplomatic features.
I hope that Phil. Thibaud will informe us very soon next great napleonic game... NAPOLEON'S CAMPAIGNS TWO
Murat

I think that you won't be disappointed in a near future...

Oh, so Bohemond is doing something?

yay! and the French Revolutionary Wars...with italy and egypt? maybe even the caribbean campaign to reimpose servitude in haiti or the quasi-war w/ USA?

or even a shot at taking the Armée d'Orient to India!

I would settle for a dlc of a 'grand campaign'

But NC 2 would be sweet.

Yes +1

This would be great....

Any release date yet?

J'espère bien. AGEOD devrait se concentrer sur ce qui marche, et faire un wargame stratégique et grand opérationnel réussit : importer les parties du moteur de PON utiles pour la diplomatie, mais surtout construire le jeu sur la base d'AACW avec une carte à la bonne échelle (celle de ROP, pas de NCP) et une durée de tour d'une semaine. Ensuite avec un systeme d'achat des renforts similaire à celui de AACW, il y a moyen de faire un jeu réussit et assez simple, donc pas trop lourd et intimidant, donc pas trop buggué, donc qui rentre des sous, comme l'a fait AACW.

Le fait qu'il n'y ai pas de grande campagne ne me poserait pas de problème, mais il faut au moins avoir des campagnes intermédiaires, ie 1805-1807, 1812-1814, guerre d'Espagne par exemple.

Bonne chance à Ageod et j'acheterai avec joie ce jeu.

Une carte à l'échelle de ROP couvrant l'ensemble de l'Europe serait ingérable dans le moteur actuel, sauf a perdre énormément en qualité graphique...en outre, cela voudrait dire (à la louche) pas loin de 6000 provinces, or même PON n'en a pas plus de 3000 (donc 2500 utiles...)

C'est j'imagine un vrai problème qui doit etre au coeur du design du jeu. Je ne veux que du bien à AGEOD et donc que vous puissiez sortir un jeu qui se vende sans vous demander 3 ans de travail. Le but est de construire sur le succès d'AACW en le dépassant évidemment. Une des forces d'AACW outre votre super boulot a été que le jeu a suffisament séduit pour qu'une communauté robuste se forme et contribue à son amélioration. NCP aurait pu devenir un très bon jeu si la communauté avait décollé, et qui sait, avec un mod à la Bohémond il y 3 ans ce jeu aurait peut etre mieux marché.

AACW capture l'esprit de la guerre de sécession parce que le joueur est immergé dans les décisions opérationnelles et que l'échelle du jeu est grosso-modo adapté au mode de campagne. Sur des routes meilleures et dans un territoire densément peuplé comme l'Allemagne ou l'Italie, l'echelle ne peut qu'Etre plus réduite ou alors le jeu ne fonctionnera pas et comme NCP on aura ses campagnes trop rapides et brutales, ou au final la "pile" avec napo éclate tout.

Je ne sais pas graphiquement quelle pourrait etre la solution ? Peut etre avoir des cartes coupées selon les scénarios ? Peut-etre pour réussir le jeu vaut_il mieux renoncer à une carte de l'europe complète et faire plutot une carte allant de la Loire à Moscou et de Rome à Copenhague, sans s'embarasser de la Méditerranée et des Balkans ?

Personnellement je préfèrerais jouer les campagnes de 1805-1807, 1809 et 1812-1814 sur une carte plus petite mais où je pourrais vraiment avoir le plaisir de faire des manoeuvres, d'adosser un encerclement à une rivière, de menacer le ravitaillement, de tourner une ligne de fortifications, plutot que de jouer à un Empire in Arms amélioré, avec une grosse pile sous les ordres de Napoléon capable d'aller de Strasbourg à Munich en un tour ( avec une carte peu détaillée et des tours de 15 jours ) sans avoir cette sensation de campagne militaire...

Ce sont des choix difficiles á faire, mais je crois que le succès ludique qu'est AACW repose sur le fait que l'arbitrage durée des tours et taille des provinces était dans l'Ensemble réussi et adapté à ce jeu. Ce sont les considérations de game play qui doivent, ahma, dicter la durée des tours et la taille de la carte, l'échelle de temps et de taille ne doit pas etre un présupposé, sous peine de ne pas atteindre la cible comme dans NCP.

Car si NCP m'a décu c'est surtout pour ca, plus encore que l'absence de grande campagne. Entre une carte pas assez détaillée et un set up par trop contraint, on se retrouve avec une camapgne des 100 jours qui n'est qu'un blitz un peu brutal, sans capacité de manoeuvre...

Ensuite dans une jeu plus long, soit carrément une grande campagne, soit juste des campagnes de 2/3 ans l#autre problématique est la gestion des tours de paix, dans lequel le jeu devrait pouvoir passer assez vite et réduire les moyens des joueurs pour éviter les accumulations ahistoriques de grosses armées en attendant la reprise du conflit.

La décision est difficile et les contraintes nombreuses, on ne peut pas satisfaire tout le monde, et j'espère que vous réussirez à faire un bon jeu.

I agree with you, veji1. But most of the players, the vocal ones at least, seem to prefer a Grand Campaign NCP, on a larger Europe-wide scale with diplomacy and "production". Like Empire in Arms.

Or, if you prefer, courtesy of Google Translate, English -> French

Je conviens avec vous, veji1. Mais la plupart des joueurs, les vocaux au moins, semblent préférer un NCP Grande Campagne, sur une Europe élargie à l'échelle échelle avec la diplomatie et la «production». Comme l'Empire in Arms.

You might be right Berto, but I honerstly think it would be a mistake. copying the province size and turn delay (2 weeks) of AACW and adding the diplomacy of PON would be a mistake as it would dilute the interest of the napoleonic campaigning. In making an operational wargame about Napoleonic wars you must focus on the feel of the times that the player should get. of course you can't fully emulate history, but for Ageod the questions to ask should be :
How do i create a game where a player can take control of the French or coalition side, and from a historical setting of circumstances, allow the course of history to diverge but at the same time give the players the tools to recreate it ?
This means that a player should be able to emulate the Ulm and Ratisbonne type manoeuvers, as well as the Leipzig or Waterloo type of manoeuvers, allow the supply issues to be modelled well (french ability to forage early on compared to the other armies), emulate the evolution of fighting abilities, with the use of skirmishers, etc....
To do that you need to tweak the AACW engine with new set of abilities for troops, and adjust the size of the map and space of the game because simply put, napoleonic war in Europe didn@t work like AACW.

If in order to achieve that you need to sacrifice some aspects of the game, ie a massive map, the naval side of the game, a humongous grand campaign, well you should do it. Making a grand campaign on an ill adapted engine is taking to big a bite and risking failure...

I actually think that for the time being the best Napoleonic scenario that could be played in one of Ageods existing game would be a 1805/1807 scenario, or at least a 1806 scenario : the map is the perfect scale and if a modder was to give it a try, I am sure it could be great...

The questions of emphasis and scope have been discussed here in the fora endlessly for the past several years. Alas, the users have clearly spoken more in favor of an EIA-like game.

I share your preferences. But Vox populi, vox dei.

You never know, we might be lucky enough to just get what would basically be double the ROP map focused on continental Europe : From a Normandy-Marseilles line in the west to a Minsk/simplified Moscow in the East, and from a Marseille-Florence-Belgrad line in the south to a Copenhagen-Riga-simplified St Petersburg line in the north. You could even just draw a line from Zagreb to Lvov an have nothing south of that.

With such a map at the level of detail of the ROP map, with one week turns, you could have a blast playing the different continental campaigns of the whole revolutionary wars from 1791 to 1800, as well as the 1805 to 1815 campaigns. Basically that would just sacrifice the peninsular war, the hypothetical invasion of the UK and the naval side of the game.

I am not saying I want to see a game limited to this, but that I'd rather have that than have an EiA. AGEOD should remember that NCP has 2 fundemental flaws :
- an inadequacy of the time/space scale of the game for napoleonic warfare (EDIT : i know NCP had 1 week turns, while ROP has 2 weeks turns)
- a lack of immersion due to too short or predetermined scenarios.

Fixing the second one without fixing the first would lead to another disappointment. Simply put even with the present limitations NCP can't pull its weight when it comes to its scenarios (1805 campaign for example), because of this scale problem.

Is the map I am suggesting doable ? I don't know. But with such a map and one week turns, one could just as well play short scenarios (the 1815 campaign would be about 25 turns max, the 1805 Austerlitz campaign about the same length) or longer ones (a 1805 to 1807 campaign could last 130 turns, a 1813-1815 about 150) or even some form of grand campaign if the game engine so allows it, freezing the troops in time of peace and having a diplomatic engine made of options à la PON to allow for new crisis to developp and allow the game to start a new campaign.

But the idea is that in such a game you could have a blast playing the italian campaigns of Napoleon for 40 or 50 turns because the scale would allow you to play it, to feel the importance of the different valleys and rivers, the forts such as Mantova, etc... You would get a satisfying enough "grand campaign" type of game, and also be able to enjoy the engine for shorter spurts.

One can dream, but too big a scale in a Napoleonic game would kill the manoeuvering and end up with a stack against stack, Napoleon's stack wns game...

One last thing. I applaud the fact that AGEOD games abstract the tactical battles, when this is well done it allows the player to focus on the operational and strategic choices. It works wonders in AACW because the scale is just right. But it puts a massive pressure on the operational side of the game. If this part is not 100pc satisfactory, than you are left with just stack pushing, and this is what happened in NCP.. I just hope that whichever the choice that is made, it is well thought out....

veji1 wrote:You never know, we might be lucky enough to just get what would basically be double the ROP map focused on continental Europe : From a Normandy-Marseilles line in the west to a Minsk/simplified Moscow in the East, and from a Marseille-Florence-Belgrad line in the south to a Copenhagen-Riga-simplified St Petersburg line in the north. You could even just draw a line from Zagreb to Lvov an have nothing south of that...

This is basically the map of the old War & Peace boardgame from Avalan Hill....

If you own our WW1 Gold game, have a look at its map...it's scale is much bigger than NCP's (yes, Spain is missing) and I wonder if it could be used (in a mod)...

But with the Iberian Peninsula

A napoleonic game without the spanish ulcer?


Err... Well, only if you create a Peninsular War game, with a full campaign and annual campaigns, and in the monster level: battalion, squadron and battery

PhilThib wrote:This is basically the map of the old War & Peace boardgame from Avalan Hill....

If you own our WW1 Gold game, have a look at its map...it's scale is much bigger than NCP's (yes, Spain is missing) and I wonder if it could be used (in a mod)...

Les grands esprits se rencontrent n'est-ce pas ?

I have one question regarding graphic requirements. You say that a map of Europe detailed à la ROP would be way to heavy an slow down everything (plus the work it represents), but would cruder graphics not be possible ? It already looks to me that ROP and RUS graphics are significantly cruder than the esthetically magnificent NCP map. What gets me thinking is that for example WITP or WITE have massive maps, cruder, but massive, and work based on a hex grid which makes it simpler to overlay game data and graph.

Couldn't AGEOD maps for an NCP 2 work an similar way ? I am just saying this because for me NCP2, just like AACW, needs to be detailed enough to appeal to the wargame fans, all those veterans of the HPS and Talonsoft games for example. having a Napoleonic EiA would not be a NCP2, it would be a napoleonic Hearts of Iron...

We have a tool to make Hexes on a map, no problem...we just need to select the proper size...

Now, the quality of the map graphics (crude or not) has nothing to do with the performance issue, because what matters is the map size in pixels for one and, more important, how many regions you "cut" from the map...so if we take the NCP map and cut - let's say - twice as many regions in it to cover your requirements, it will be twice as big in internal engine weight, for the same graphical size orginally (but with smaller regions of course)...this all comes done to the "number" of different 'sprites' the engine has to display...

Look at this...



at this size, NCP has 23,000 regions (compared to 2300 in the original and less than 3000 in PON !!)...even if seas are made bigger, this would slow down the engine to a halt...

But it could be worth trying if we find volunteers...

veji1 wrote:... needs to be detailed enough to appeal to the wargame fans, all those veterans of the HPS and Talonsoft games for example ...

Hey, how about us SPI La Grande Armee fans?

PhilThib wrote:... at this size, NCP has 23,000 regions (compared to 2300 in the original and less than 3000 in PON !!)...even if seas are made bigger, this would slow down the engine to a halt...

We need to realize that AGE cannot be all things to all people. Adaptive Game Engine it is, but not ridiculously so. (Pocus & PhilT surely know that.)

PhilThib wrote:We have a tool to make Hexes on a map, no problem...we just need to select the proper size...

Now, the quality of the map graphics (crude or not) has nothing to do with the performance issue, because what matters is the map size in pixels for one and, more important, how many regions you "cut" from the map...so if we take the NCP map and cut - let's say - twice as many regions in it to cover your requirements, it will be twice as big in internal engine weight, for the same graphical size orginally (but with smaller regions of course)...this all comes done to the "number" of different 'sprites' the engine has to display...


at this size, NCP has 23,000 regions (compared to 2300 in the original and less than 3000 in PON !!)...even if seas are made bigger, this would slow down the engine to a halt...

But it could be worth trying if we find volunteers...

Well, there are several things to discuss here. the first one is a question of choice : Do we need the whole NCP map ? I venture that we don't. We could at least get rid of the south of the mediterranean, just keeping some sea zones for the naval aspect of the game, using the clever "box" system that you use to emulate farther sea area. Sure some guys fantasize about egypt, but we know it is not at the heart of the game.

If we wanted to have a game with all of Napoleon's campaign except Egypt, we would need a Map going from Gibraltar to Moscow (with bigger coarser provinces past the Niemen river) , and from a Rome-Kiev line in the south to a Copenhagen-St Petersburg line in the north. I grossly calculate that you could achieve that with about 3 times the amount of regions in ROP, comfortably with 4 times. I read that ROP had 1000 regions, this means that NCP2 could function on the same scale with [EDIT 4000 to 5000] regions. Since its data crunching duties would be lighter than PON (no 50 countries thinking, trading and colonising at once) how would it not be possible ?

If the simplest way was to apply a grid overlay to the existing NCP map (cutting out some bits, about a good 35pc with most of the med and Balkans), wich ended up with say 12 000 provinces (between the cuts and the simplified see provinces), why wouldn't be able to function, when WITP-AE has about 15 000 hexes as far as i know ?

Different engines so you cannot compare

For example Jena Campaign map in HPS-John Tiller game has more than 600.000 hexes. The map is not created from smaller pieces of the original map like in AGEod games, the hexes are joined by the engine from a terrain template.


These HPS games will work in rather old PCs.

Maybe, but AGEOD should think about adapting its engine so that it can churn out games at a faster pace. Why would a detailed map of Europe be a worthy investment, because they could than with minimal changes churn out games on a multitude of periods : 7 years war, 30 years war, 1850/1870 wars, war of austrian succesion, etc... All those could be easily done with minor tweaks of the map. This is a reson why an investment is worth it.

One last thing, a game like Crusader Kings from Paradox had an interesting scale, not so far away from ROPs, perhaps a bit too crude, but still closer than NCP to what it should be, and it managed to run pretty well despite having 100s of playable factions acting and waging war a the same time...