Quick Question on Wars of Napoleon

[elxaime]

From what I can tell, if you try and play the game PBEM with two players, England and France, the only forces those players actually control are those from those two nations + and any expeditionary forces they can get through diplomatic choices? Everything else is run by AI? So, for example, in two-player PBEM, if Britain is in a coalition with Russia and Austria against France, the Britain player basically just watches the French player battle the AI?

[Franz Ferdinand]

Yep, you would only control the UK. Still, you can also just switch to Austria and Russia, and give orders, if that is what you agree upon with your PBEM player.

[elxaime]

Yep, you would only control the UK. Still, you can also just switch to Austria and Russia, and give orders, if that is what you agree upon with your PBEM player.

I guess the pitfall to that is that once a player gets control of a nation, they also control its diplomacy and can ensure it never leaves the alliance.

I don't want to be a wet blanket on a truly impressive effort by AGEOD. But it sounds like 2-player PBEM (France and Britain) is basically the French player beating up on the AI while the British player watches, interspersed with possible head to head action between humans only if someone decides to have a replay of the Peninsular War, launch an amphibious raid, or there is an end-game Waterloo.

Post-launch, it would be great if AGEOD developed a two-player PBEM version of the campaign which would eliminate much of the diplomatic game in exchange for formation of the various coalitions being heavily scripted (but with some decision trees for players to steer things at the macro level) with the bonus of players fully controlling all the members of their alliance when a war breaks out. Neutral areas would be blacked out, unless scripted events allowed passage, and their forces would not be deployed unless they are at war or were part of an expedition (as determined by scripted events).

Admittedly, this would detract from a lot of the Europa Universalis IV aspects this title seems to have. But it would follow in the path of an old time board game like War and Peace (Avalon Hill) where the humans, not AI, ran all the action.

[Franz Ferdinand]

Yep, that is correct. Still, all depends on house rules. If I was you, I would rather try to find a 7 people game, that sounds like so much fun. We are actually assembling one right now, if you are interested email vicberg (email is in another thread). Thus far Prussia, Russia and France are taken. It should start once the first patch roles out.

[Pocus]

I think it is quite possible to set up some house rules for a 2 players PBEM game. My recommended setting would be to fully control the allied nation, if you manage to put it into your coalition, until a peace treaty is proposed by the enemy player to the allied nation. In this case decide if you accept peace by gentleman agreement or just with a random dice roll. If peace is accepted, break also the military treaty the country has, and then revert it to AI until one of the 2 sides manage to bring it back to his alliance.

For peace, you can also decide that any peace proposal is accepted if a margin of 10 in warscore is left to the benefit of the war loser, meaning a peace which is not a diktat.