I rarely play these though in theory I like them, on demos at least, played Empires demo constantly but I rarely do them in the full game.

Completed my first historic battle on this just now, Waterloo on the hardest setting (With the fire by rank mod). Did really badly the first try, mostly out of laziness. I just left my troups in the default positions to see what would happen, nothing good.

Second time around I gave up my artillery and pulled all my forces together behind that large ridge where I was protected from Napoleons artillery fire, not that I cared about that I just felt that behind the ridge I would have more time to set up and control the situation better.

Most of the battle I was beating off Napoleons attacks, tweaking my position and taking any advantage I could. Then the re-enforcements came but Napoleon sent two units of Old Guard after me, while the rest of his remaining army when after the Prussians. I fell back further and redeployed to thicken my lines against the tired but untouched Old Guard. They crushed my units that were engaging them, taking out nearly half the unit in one volley, so I needed to keep pulling them back, thankfully one Old Guard unit was undecided if he was going to go fight the Prussians or me so I was able to force all my fire on that one unit and wipe them out with my depleted unit of cav.

The Prussians injured Napoleon and routed the forces they were engaging, the French force they faced was quite small but I was completely expecting the French to route the Prussians. And with the rest of the army routing the last unit of Old Guard routed without much trouble and I killed every single unit of Old Guard as the ran from the field since they gave me so much trouble.

I'm pleased with how it went, wish I could have engaged Napoleon himself but I couldn't have gone on the offensive, just the Old Guard units could have wiped me out if they had worked together.