Rome II Total War

[ericatus]

Back in the early days of computer war gaming I had a game on floppy disc: Waterloo, Borodino and Austerlitz were the only battles featured in the game. The armies were portrayed on screen as coloured blocks which moved around the rather primitive landscape when ordered to by the player. The point I want to make here is the fact that the player gave orders to his sub-commanders by typing them out on the keyboard and then hitting the RETURN key. A typical order would look like this: “D’Erlon order Allix to attack La Haye Saint with 2 regiments of light infantry”. The order would only take effect when it reached the recipient, allowing for the distance and terrain involved. So the greater the distance Napoleon was from the indicated general, the longer it took to deliver that order. The player could issue pre-battle orders before starting which were implemented immediately. The parser used in the program was very effective.
Given today’s quality graphics, sound and features in the likes of Napoleon Total War, this is what I would like to see in the next offering in the TOTAL WAR series. For Rome II Total War is just the game I would like to buy.

[Cincinatus]

Was this Spectrum Holobyte's Fields of Glory? In some ways, I think that game is still more advanced than the Total war series. It had representations of actual total army sizes, like 100,000 troops for Napoleon at Waterloo, and a system to replace fallen commanders with a randomly generated npc commander. It was random in the stats and skills the new guy had, so you could have someone better or worse take over. That is one thing I wish total war did, realistic sizes. No it did not have 100,000 men, it was a small unit of something like 20 or 30 figures that represented a full batallion of say 1800 men. This game came out around 1993. It had those same battles, and about 2 what if battles in the game.

[Chris Death]

Was this Spectrum Holobyte's Fields of Glory? In some ways, I think that game is still more advanced than the Total war series. It had representations of actual total army sizes, like 100,000 troops for Napoleon at Waterloo, and a system to replace fallen commanders with a randomly generated npc commander. It was random in the stats and skills the new guy had, so you could have someone better or worse take over. That is one thing I wish total war did, realistic sizes. No it did not have 100,000 men, it was a small unit of something like 20 or 30 figures that represented a full batallion of say 1800 men. This game came out around 1993. It had those same battles, and about 2 what if battles in the game.

I had FoG and i doubt it was the one mentioned by the OP since the commanding
wasn't text based and the graphics were good for given timeframe - the units did look
like soldiers and not just coloured blocks.

:edit - actually i got to correct myself here - it seems there have been two fields of glory
games at around that time - i couldn't find the one i had yet but i found the one you meant.

Still no text based commanding there.

::edit - i think i found the one i meant

It was actually Fields of glory 2 (micropose)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW9NdA5zCrI

:::edit - Battles of Napoleon (SSI) maybe?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPLi03DouD4

~S~ CD

[ericatus]

No sir, It was played on a PC. I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the game.

I have been scouring the dusty corners of my memory and I believe the game was called "Napoleonics" but not the ones featured on youtube above. The game came with a rather beautiful manual containing the battle orders of the battles featured.

[The_Valiant]

That sounds like an excellent game. Maybe it could be revamped and rereleased on Steam or the Appstore...

[Mausolos of Caria]

I remember having a game called ''Waterloo'' which was similar when commanding the armies, but you could only play the battles of Waterloo and Ligny I think, not even something like Austerlitz so that might have been a different game.
As for a Rome II I think that would be a great feature, but it's too ''complicated'' for CA to implemend in coz a lot of people who are not into the historical stuff or do not want to play too long campaigns probably won't like it.

[Cincinatus]

It was Napoleonic Wars: Fields of Glory, I believe, not sure if it was one or two, it was developed by Spectrum Holobyte and Microprose may have either bought them or just distributed the game. I do remember too, that that game had individual battles recreated with real army total numbers like 110,000 french at waterloo, it was the battles centered around Napoleons return. Waterloo, Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre, and like 2 or 3 battles that could have happened in the future if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, or perhaps if he lost before Waterloo. One of the most impressive factors is having actual brigades of some 1,800 troops represented by a unit well 3 units in a way. Each unit had 2 wings or battalions and one commander in the middle. If you lost a single soldier it might mean you lost maybe 1/24th of your battalion (not sure if thats what the wing was called this was like 1993). The commander could rally troops and make them fight better and or bring them back from retreat. If a commander got killed a new one was randomly generated with good or bad stats. This could have a huge impact on the battle. Cannons had to be unlumbered before firing at least the mobile artillery units. Cavalry were smaller units but had a high charge effect. So when you went into battle your commander had several brigades that totaled from some 10,000 to some 150,000 troops per side per battle. Effectively you could have over 300,000 troops on screen at once, representative ishly speaking of course. Individual soldiers graphic wise it might be 1-10,000 (guessing, it was lower graphics but represented huge historically real armies in a scaled down mock up where one soldier image might be a whole company.

This is a upper end guess as I know at Waterloo in the game, Britain had something like 70,000 at least, France had 110,000, and Blucher (Prussia) had another 100,000 reinforcements at least. I am not sure of exact numbers but I am sure it was at least this or more for each side. That means this game effectively handled a total of 280,000. Even if you might only have between 560 up to 10,000 individual soldier unit icons on the battle map. This is another way even TW could handle and therefore add larger armies if they did not want to add or could not add more individual troops on screen.

Other games sometimes used this or a similar technique to functionally have historically realistically sized small up to mega armies. Historically armies could number up to and even a bit over 1 million soldiers. One of the biggest and bloodiest battles in human history occurred at a bend in a River along the Yangtze River called "CHI BI" (Pronounced Ch'ir Bee), or Red Cliffs. Here some nearly 1 million troops fought and up to 800,000 died in the battle. Even at the lowest estimates, the number of troops involved and who died make the battle of Charlons in Europe seem like a skirmish in comparison. This battle occurred in 208 AD during the height of the Three Kingdoms era which was equivalent in scope and scale well more so to the Hundred Years war as it lasted about 100 years but obviously had more troops and famous knights involved.

I really do not know of any text based strategy game. Since even the oldest most rudimentary games of this nature i recalled had some graphical representation namely, "Sun Tzu's Art of War: Wu Versus Chu", "Tobruk", and one small i think acorn pc based game called "Alamo" where you refought that battle on a square map with numbers so that was actually almost a text based game. Tobruk had X's for example to represent infantry, so that was almost text based. Sun Tzu had simple humanoid figures that ran side scroll toward each other from either end of the screen when a battle took place. and only like 5 to 12 soldiers per side. So it was very basic. And I think I recall one vaguely that was about the Civil War or perhaps that was part of another game called "Wargame Construction Set" which is what TW could be to the delight of all if it reached its zenith of perfection. Wargame Construction set goes back to the days when any program you had for a pc or even a apple, you had to program yourself from magazines or your own skill. Sometimes you could buy one with rudimentary graphics, if you can even call it that today. Wargame was one of these and like Tobruk, battles were fought with infantry represented by Xs like on a giant period war map. Cavalry was a slash in a square. Wargame I think had some civil war battles included.

I do not know if any of this helps you. If you could think perhaps of who made the game however, that might help us narrow down which one it was.