Yes, I see what you mean. But perhaps it was not only the lack of the megalomanic campaigns that turned some people away from NCP. I haven't played NCP for a long time, so I can't quite remember what it was for me, but the lack of big campagins was certainly not amongst them. I think I felt overwhelmed with the huge amount of troops that had to be micro-managed in a negative way (micro-management can be positive; but here it felt like repetitive work) - the same problem that I have with my potential favourite RoP. There were also voices like caranorns':
caranorn wrote:2) Where I agree is that of course NCP's map scale did not allow a good representation of Napoleonic manoeuver and strategy. But the solution would not have been to up the scale to a more strategic level, but rather the opposite to make smaller regions to allow for manoeuver and look at ways for forces to react to the enemy, either automatically (based on leaders, doctrine and random factors) or semy-automatically (adding orders similar to the current stance and posture)...
I'm a fan of going "smaller", not "bigger", especially because I'd also like to delve into PBEM-games. I think that there is still a lot of depth to be discovered in the purely operational part of the game. But of course, it's also a matter of taste and preference. What the game needs, imho, is a reduction of scale and much much more feedback for the player, so that he can figure out what has happened during turn-procession and why those things happened. The core mechanics are great, operability is great (all you have to do is drag and drop; most of the time, you play the game by thinking, not by clicking), visual presentation is great (imho, please
never ever change to 3d maps!), but documentation and feedback are a big problem, as well as the lack of small and manageable scenarios.
Concerning the latter point, not only the overall length of the campaigns and the turn-intervalls (as desribed above) are the problem, but especially the big army sizes can lead to a huge amount of tedious micromanagement - e.g. in RoP, as the "Austro-Russian-French-Swedish" (
you might guess why I feel overwhelmed...) player, you need quite a lot of time to rotate ca. 50 individual hussar/cossack-units around (back and forth from supply points). It's really hard work that massively turns me off. Yet I don't want to omit what should be a central aspect of the game (raiding, reconnaissance). It's a case in which I think the big scenarios don't fit to the "operability" of the game/ the scale of the mechanics at all. Having individual regiments of Hussars as the core unit is good for a game focused on a single army/campagin, but once you're in command in 8 armies, it is suboptimal to say the least. But then again less units are no solution either, because reconnaissance works via a certain balance (amount of units versus amount of regions - of course one could give scouting units a larger "field of view" - 2 regions instead of 1 - but this comes at the cost of operational fine-tuning and depth). Here the scale of the game/scenario simply does not fit to the mechanics, which results in horrible operationability (=tedious and repetitive micromanagement): if you want to make proper use of the depth that the mechanics allow, you will have to move around individual hussar units for ca. 5-6 minutes every turn. I think that NCP, with its rather large armies, suffered from the same problem.
So my personal wishlist is:
1) Shorter turn intervalls in order to let the great military/operational mechanics do their magic. Turn intervalls of 30 days might be nice for a Total War -series game, but it doesn't do justice to AGEODs game (in my opinion
). So many operational options and fine-tuned gameplay is lost to oversized turn-intervalls - this is my problem with AJE.
2) Smaller scenarios (not neccessarily less provinces, but especially concerning army-sizes; the level of detail of the current mechanics is perhaps too fine for grand campaigns - playing them requires too much micormanagement which distracts from the game and disturbs the "flow" of the game). Plus smaller scenarios also motivate for PBEM games. This is my problem with RoP.
[edited in order to stay on topic a bit more]