Great news: Waterloo will be the next Scourge of war game

BIG NEWS! … Scourge of War: WATERLOO is Coming!

http://the-strategy-wargamer.tumblr.com/

Cheers

Oh wow! Fantastic! Absolutely amazing news! This is going to be awesome.

Yes, great news.  Here's a link to the podcast featuring Norb & Jim

https://plus.google.com/events/c68v0o8a65qdume1v3s9r8cirho

There is a list of questions about the new game on the right hand side of the screen.  Click on that and it will take you straight to the part of the podcast which has the answer.  Nice feature.

Martin (J)

I was astonished at how young Norb is.

Anyone up for some discussion about this? Obviously Stefan you knew, but did anyone else?

Is there a process by which the work already done (especially by Kevin) on the KSNapoleonMod can be fed into the development? Hopefully that might help speed things.

Martin (J)

I don't think the mod would be of much use to NSD beyond showing them the sort of things that are important to include. It also gives them a crude idea of how these battles were fought. The real work is writing the rules that the AI will use to fight the battle. That's going to be a problem, especially for Norb. His current AI relies on a few general principles, not a lot of; if this happens, do that. That's why SOW battles tend to become chaotic with brigades intermixing and everyone trying to get into the fight at the same time. If he can evolve his AI to make use of a large well thought out rule set it will be a worthy opponent.

I agree that the crowd rampage mentality of the AI is one of its weak points. I mentioned before - and included in the wish-list to Stefan - that an AI routine where battalions/squadrons, brigades and divisions respect boundaries and don't intermingle would be a big step forwards. I notice that many paintings by ACW artists focus on the men, their faces and their actions. Don Trioani (sp?) paints such pictures. Focussing on the acts of the individual is a cultural trait of American art and you can end up with depictions of action that seem intensely crowded, cramped and confused. I feel sure that Norb and his fellow programmers take these images and subconsciously depict their units interactions this way.

Now take a look at most Napoleonic art. It falls broadly into two groups. One set of paintings is "battle portraiture" where great men such as Napoleon or Wellington are seen commanding battles, reviewing troops or inspiring their men. The focus of paintings is upon Great Men and the class-system of European culture has always done this. The average man-in-the-ranks that Don Trioani focuses upon is a faceless nobody in the background or a pawn cheering and admiring the Great Man as he passes by.

The second class of Napoleonic paintings depict battles as a whole, often from some fictional elevated viewpoint and usually with a cluster of foreground figures (again, often a general and his cronies). These paintings though are of real interest because they often show how amazingly open and empty a Napoleonic battlefield was, with enormous gaps between brigades, artillery batteries and so on. Quite the opposite of how wargames depict battles whether they use miniatures on a tabletop or digital men on a monitor.

Histwar is the only game I know that addresses this correctly and its battlefields are empty to a degree that makes watching an SoW scrum seem chaotic and messy by comparison. We've often complained about SoW units getting trapped and being unable to march a clear path to where they're ordered (Jack was a famous moaner about this). We just need to accept that our units should be further apart and to help us the AI needs to understand this too.