Am I the only one unhappy?
I downloaded and installed LME with high hopes, particularly with regard to the 1792 start. I have always been interested in the Revolutionary War period and was looking forward to some interesting gameplay.
I did not get interesting gameplay.
My first 1792 campaign was as Britain. I quite quickly found that this was incredibly dull. The mod seems to have fallen back on the old vanilla option of the AI not building any ships bigger than a '38 and not being particularly aggressive. Instead i was able to establish total sea control within a year and a half, and by extension control of a lot of the trade nodes. This made me rich as Croesus, funding the navy and allowing me to just churn out armies at will. So, the great battles of the period such as the Glorious First of June, Camperdown, Cape St Vincent, the Nile, first Copenhagen: forget it. Some of the 'special' ships were not even around in 1792, and some ones that were undoubtedly special, like Agamemnon, were not even included. Britain also started at war with France in 1792, which was odd considering...
Then, on land, the 1790's chocolate box of units was also just not forthcoming: no Black Cockade units or Swiss mercenaries for example. You did, at least, start with Hanover, but were not able to build specific Hanoverian army units which seems like a very strange oversight. Admiral cornwallis was clearly using the picture of General Cornwallis who should have been off running India around this time. A small, but jarring, inconsistency that went along with 'Gentlemen' and spies using pictures of some famous people like Lafayette who i thought was fighting on the other side in 1792.
Then I met the French in the field. It was 1793, and I as driving on Rheims from the Austrian Netherlands. So, there was the Grand Old Duke of York meeting...some Napoleon bloke. Who I thought was still an artillery Captain in 1793. I did later run into Dumouriez, Jourdan, Kleber and Kellermann: maybe this was a need to appease people who just needed Boney as some sort of in-game comfort blanket? The Brits started with Wellington who was a battalion commander in 1792 and his inclusion was equally surprising. The French army I met was also full of surprises. No 'les blancs' infantry or recognisably French unit from 1792/93. Instead a lot of Carabiniers and Consular Guard and Legion Polonaise and Cuirassier. This looked like a 1799 army, but certainly not a 1793 one, that maybe had fallen through some sort of timewarp? With so much cash rolling in there was no gameplay challenge to be had here.
So, abandoning sea, I decided to go entirely land and play Austria in 1792. This turned out to be worse. You could not build any units in the Austrian Netherlands and it did not start with a garrison. You had to negotiate access rights over the Holy Roman Empire which seemed a strange thing for the Holy Roman Emperor to have to do. Just to note, the Austrians raised five infantry regiments in the territory, plus the two associated grenadier battalions and the Latour Dragoons. On top of this there was a specific regiment of Artillery as the province contained one of two major cannon foundries in the Empire (the other was just outside Vienna). On top of this was the additional garrison of regiment from other parts of the Empire like Regiment Szataray and the Coburg Dragoons - there was concern as the territory had gone through internal convulsions due to Joseph's reforms. it was these troops that defended the territory against the first French invasion of April 1792 and then kept the french off balance for several months.
There was no freicorps: No Mihailovich, Grun-Loudon, Gyulai or Luttich units. In point of fact Hungarian infantry was just renamed Austrian Infantry and had no obvious differences (like blue trousers). The only ones that had had roman helmets and were clearly borrowed from another scenario, the same as the other 'special' Austrian units that were just, well, wrong. I could add to the list of leaders, but I can understand that they were all somewhat obscure and needed research. In other words this army felt as out of place and time as the French did.
Diplomatically, i soldiered on until early 1794 when Russia, Prussia and Turkey all declared war on me in the same turn. At this point I had had more than enough of this sort of lunacy, as it had ceased to be about the 1790's and was just as bad as a vanilla-game land grab with no sense of time, place or reason.
The 1796 Italian campaign is best skated over as just badly researched again. By this time I was beginning to sense a theme developing.
So, if anyone is going to try for a proper French Revolutionary War start (please, it could be so good if it was done right) there are some things worth recalling:
1) This is not the Napoleonic Wars. You cannot read history backwards, and certainly seeing this event through a Napoleonic prism will just make it a napoleonic game in a slightly different skin.
2) Seapower is a big part of the period.
3) Armies are different and the French in particular are in flux. This represents a challenge, but one that could be overcome with some left-field thinking. For example: no bloody Landwehr!
4) More technologies is good, but some could be more country-specific. Try to introduce conscription into Britain or Hungary and there would have been uproar. Conscription and the levy en masse should be French advantages that the Revolution gives them licence to undertake.
5) Export of the Revolution at the point of the bayonet! France should be looking to create puppet Republics on her own model.
6) The driver of the war was the internal politics of France, how that affected her external policy and how other countries reacted. Austria posed as the guardian of legitimacy and the old order; which should make it impossible for her just to invade countries willy-nilly. France, on the other hand, did it all the time. Battles need context. A campaign needs a reason.
These are just a few factors, but it is only scratching the surface of how to make a Revolutionary War mod appear believable and playable and look something like the 1790's without having to work on tramlines. But countries had policies and interests beyond the immediacy of a particular war, and they should act as guides and constraints on what a country can legitimately undertake.
StV
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