First of all, let me say that it's refreshing to see a strategy game that takes place in the Napoleonic era, not too many of those around from what I can tell. This is a real-time empire building strategy game. Not the same as what a "real-time-strategy" is usually referring to (command&conquer, ect). In this game, you can command either the French, Austrians, English, Prussian, or Russian empires. You control research, production, and military combat across a realistic looking map of most of the world. This sounds great, and it is. But not as great as it sounds. The control over research, economy, and production is very simplified, this is a good or bad thing based on the player; I prefer more detail and deeper involvement. Despite the simple ways you build up your empire (building ports to build ships, barracks for troops, ect), acually conquering towns can be very easy or very hard. This sounds confusing, but its true. Sometimes you can find it easy to take a town, then hard to take others. Fortifications do have an effect, but sometimes you just meet bad luck. It becomes hard to manage the fighting when you fight more than one battle at a time across different fronts, this seems to reflect the difficulty that nations have in multi-front wars. All-in-all, you'll never play the same game twise, there are so many variable. Has good, if not great, replay value, and also seems to be a very unique game. Im hopeing to see more games like ot in the future.
Being a war games fan, I jumped to the opportunity to acquire this game; it belonged to my favourite era of Napoleonic war. The installation was choppy and I had to re-install twice before it stopped crashing after a ver... Read Full Review
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