Napoleonic Wargame Club

It seems that all campaigns start with a 524 turn scenario; and while I am a monster gaming at heart, unless I missed something and there are some campaigns in the title that don't start with a 524 turn scenario -that this sort of thing kills off almost any chance of anyone playing the campaign via email.

Are you sure? I thought that there was one way to start it that started with the twin battles...I do not have it installed to double check but I thought that, at least in an update, that was in there...

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I'm on turn 400 against one partner; and in playtesting we reached about 450 turns before I discovered the Russians had no artillery ammo. It depends on turnover - occasionally we managed some 6 turns per day or more.

Ok -it was the one that I had not gotten around to checking - there is one that drops you into a 160 turn scenario to start (Scharnhorst's Alternate Campaign Plan).

The other three have an initial scenario of 524 turns.

Interesting, I had thought there was a one or two day battle one that was shorter. But I have not played Jena in 2 or 3 years and not played the campaign in 4.

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I should mention that I am going by the JTS version, and it might be that something is missing -I will drop Rich a line regarding it.

(Follow up note) - you might be right Jim- I had a look at the HPS version and there does appear to be a different campaign game offering that is not in the JTS version....

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Clifton, I am sorry that I did not reply to this sooner, as I misunderstood what you were asking of whom. I did post a reply to one of the other threads - if you have the HPS version of a title, don't ever try to apply an update for the JTS version as one of the things that it might do would be to convert the HPS version to the JTS version -which causes a problem, in that the JTS version will all of a sudden want a serial number from you -which you won't have.

As an aside there is at least one issue with the JTS version's campaigns -basically it looks like one of the campaigns got duplicated and overlaid another campaign (this is in the update being tested). I don't know that they will put out an HPS version for testing until whatever it was that did that in the JTS version gets corrected. It doesn't look like it ever impacted the HPS version however I imagine that they are wanting to check that out in order to make sure. So it probably won't be out as quickly as Wagram was. Fwiw I did not find anything else with Jena -so hopefully if will be out soon -even so you may not want to use that in competitive play since the point of testing it is to make sure there are no issues. Some things that have happened in the past with other titles (probably won't happen with this one since it applied more to titles where scenarios were reworked -and that I don't think is the case with Bill's titles- he looks to have done this earlier iirc)... artillery would not fire (caused by pointing OOB weapons to a line on the weapons.dat file that I think got deleted by accident -effectively meaning that the weapon code in the OOB file did not exist any longer ... things like this is something that you don't want to be dealing with in an ongoing game ... so if it were me I would not apply a test version, in any case, to a title where I had an ongoing match -just to be on the safe side.

Feel free to add in a variant campaign that adds in shorter scenarios if you like. I felt that this method was best for the players. They have more freedom over where the battles take place. And the playtesters seemed in agreement over that too.

Adding in a new campaign at this point that adds in a plethora of scenarios and choices would be time prohibitive. There are a lot of nice maps from Leipzign and Bautzen that would work well in this title but alas I do not have the time to add in a new campaign.

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Bill Peters - Prussian civilian observer
Scenario Designer for Napoleonic Battles and Panzer Campigns series - John Tiller Software

It was a review of the product as delivered - it is something that customers should be aware of; and it was also something that was not relevant as feedback to the technical aspects of the update that had been undergoing public testing at the time.

I fully get that you don't like criticism - but frankly as far as work goes it is what it is - 2 massive opening scenarios for the campaigns and the AI does not handle massive well.

I don't care if you change it or not; I am not going to change it -and I am not suggesting that it should be changed -I am only saying that it is something that players will want to be aware of before diving into this - these, specifically, are designed for head to head play and this is something that players need to be aware of first.

I was not asking for your defence of your design choice.

Oh I can handle criticism. LOL I have had to do that over the years.

We never promote in a negative way "If you were looking for short scenarios in the campaign you wont find them." That would not be wise.

Again, based on my experience with the campaigns, and feedback from the playtesters, we all agreed that one long scenario was the best way to play it. Trying to factor in all the movements of the various bodies of Prussian-Saxon and French troops would very difficult. Very dynamic campaign. And in those days I had my full mental wits about me too! Nowadays I could not do the Jena campaign as it would involve far too much planning.

The large Marengo campaign nearly "sunk my ship" as it is. So there it is. Not offended by the feedback ... and certainly not defensive. Just saying how it had to be for the Jena campaign. We discussed it and it was put out as it is.

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Bill Peters - Prussian civilian observer
Scenario Designer for Napoleonic Battles and Panzer Campigns series - John Tiller Software

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Général Christian Hecht - Commandant en Chef de la Grande Armée