Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle

Ok, so being the best Napoleonic era startegy can't be too hard...there aren't too many about! That said, the game is limited to just the one battle (the reason I gave it only 4/5 for overall playability)...Waterloo where you can play as one of three armies; Blucher's Prussians, Wellington's Anglo-Allied or Napoleon's Armee du Nord.

That said, the amount of detail, research and historical accuracy that has gone into this one battle is amazing...Corps stregths right down to individual battalion and company strengths all accurate, and more pleasingly, so too is the layout of the land surrounding the battlefield. It is not possible to concentrate on one area of the battlefield (say the defence around Hougement) as to do so invariably results in part of your line crumbling elsewhere.

The game features several large scenarios on the Waterloo battle, an historically accurate version from the opening of the guns to the retreating of the French (if you manage to defeat them as the Anglo-Allies), or a longer possible scenarios of what ifs (such as napoleon attacking at 9, etc.).

The tutorials are very useful to play through, just to give you a basic idea of how to play the game and the CD manual's tips on combined arms tactics (you will come to fear any movement of cavalry and artillery near your line). Included on the CD is also a history of the battle and the 100 days war for those who want background of the battle.

The battles themselves can be played in four difficulty levels, and scenario variants last from 1 hour to 12/13 hours (computer simulated time), though you frequently spend more time if you play the game on a hard setting...you find yourself pausing the game (a very useful command and strategy!) every few seconds to exploit an enemy weakness of just to issue orders such as forming square, attack columns or lines (either 2 or 4 ranks deep).

A feature which keeps me coming back to the game is the fact that you can create your own scenarios and custom battles on the Waterloo map, choose which of the three armies to play as, corp and divisional commanders and which brigades (including those based in the Hal area not directly involved in the battle), cavalry regiments and artillery companies to have involved. In every battle the idea is to control victory locations (or hold them) in order to score points, the larger the scenario, the more victory locations, or you can try the ultimate and rout the enemy from the field!

Having said all of this, unfortunately the AI can let the game down sometimes...a routed unit will randomly flee to the enemy, and so will a retreating battalion (to your utmost annoyance as they invariably get cut to pieces by cavalry), though downloading of the patch rectifies this to some degree. The patch aslo allows the much needed sheltering of artillerymen into the nearest infantry square, a feature that is definately needed if you want artillery near the end of the battle.

However, there are a few mods available on the internet that allow you to convert the game into the struggle of Quatre Bras and one that transforms the entire game into the war in the Peninsular featuring such battles as Talavera, Albuhera and Vimeiro.

All in all...one of the most enjoyable games I have ever played! =D

I was really looking forward to playing this title, using the Sid Meier "Gettysburg" engine (which is excellent) and being interested in the historical period I thought this would be great, but.....

The graphics are terrible, in order to get a feel for each battle, you have to zoom out so far the picture becomes very messy very quickly, if you zoom in, the graphics are OK but you can't see what's going on. The use of Cavalry also doesn't work - it ends up spoiling each scenario as you try to counter each uncoordinated and illogical AI Cavalry move rather than enjoy the battle as a whole. Scenarios are also just glorified meeting engagements, you do have time to set up before each army meets, but you wont be anywhere near your objectives, then you run out of time.
Overall scenery graphics are very bland, gameplay is terrible, don't waste your money (as I did) - there's a lot more I could write, but that would waste even more of my time on something that just isn't worth it.........

Its just like that, it will problably get surpassed by "Histwar Les Grognards" comming out early 2008, but untill that, any one that likes Napoleonic warfare, can only find an historicaly accurate simulation in this game or in its sequel "Austerlitz Napoleon's greatest victory", any thing else doesent matter.
Its a shame that this engine has been totally surpassed now, because it was far from getting perfect.
the game has many bugs in gameplay, mainly because of the A.I being very confused, and not having any type of tactical intuition. The units just tend to crumple toghether and do not act in coordination (curiosly this was the main problem in commanding a real unit in combat).
Any way, you can still get some very enjoiable moments with this game, but only if you are really interested in XVIIIth and XIXth century warfare.

By the way, there are allot of great mods with many napoleonic battles and a total conversion with the battle of Fontennoy!!