What would it be like to command Davout's 1st Corps at Borodino, defend the Great Redoubt against multiple assaults by the Grande Armee or even manage Napoleon's entire Army in the savage encounter he described as 'the greatest of all my battles'?
The answers to these questions and many more are contained in Napoleon in Russia, the sixth and most ambitious CD-Rom release to date in Talonsoft's Battleground wargame series. Readers must not be misled by the title: it should more correctly be sold as Battleground Borodino since the 21 historical and hypothetical scenarios it offers refer only to events relating to the Borodino battlefield. It excludes the other key 1812 Russian Campaign battles at Mogilev, Smolensk, Malo-Jaroslavets, and the Crossing of the Berezina.
The game architecture is largely identical to Talonsoft's previously released Waterloo module and readers should refer to my review of this earlier Battleground package in Age of Napoleon Issue No. 21 for the basics of the game system. There are some minor enhancements over Waterloo: these include seven new 'optional rules' which can be selected at the beginning of each scenario. These include 'extreme fog of war', and some minor enhancements to the tools in the pull-down menus.
Napoleon in Russia offers a complete tour de force of the 'actual' and 'what-if' potential of the battle of Borodino, supported by highly detailed orders of battle and game notes. It is played down to battalion/squadron level including skirmisher units. The historical backdrop to the battle originates in Napoleon's failure to annihilate the Russian 1st and 2nd Armies at Smolensk on August 17th 1812 and his fateful decision on August 24th to drive the Grande Armee juggernaut 280 miles further East to capture Moscow. The Russian commander Kutuzov interposed the combined 1st and 2nd Russian Armies en route to the Capital. This position was around the village of Borodino on the Kolocha River, 72 miles West of Moscow, astride the main route to the City.
The first two scenarios of Napoleon in Russia are faithful historical recreations of Murat's initial 'contact engagement' on 5th September with the Russian outpost defending the 'Shevardino' redoubt, three miles Southwest of Borodino. These scenarios provide the uninitiated gamer with an excellent demonstration of fanatical Russian resistance and the awesome firepower of the 12-gun Russian artillery batteries that would feature large in the main battle.
The subsequent scenarios bring the action forward to the opening of the main battle on 7th September. The 133,000 men and 587 cannon of the Grande Armee opposed the 120,860 men and 640 cannon (including 10,000 poorly trained militia and peasant levies) of the Russian deployment. The interest for the wargamer divides in two at this point since Napoleon in Russia offers a choice of 'historical' and 'what-if' scenarios demonstrating the rich variety of tactical issues underpinning the battle. The 'historical' scenarios give the player the option of either assuming the awesome task of re-fighting the entire battle from either side or playing shorter scenarios. These focus on interesting sub-areas of the battle such as the struggle for the Bagration Flechés and the Great Redoubt.
The 'what-if' scenarios explore alternative variations of the battle closely based on the historical evidence. They include options such as: Davout's 1st Corps performing an outflanking manoeuvre around the weak Russian left wing (a proposal Davout made to Napoleon on the eve of battle); Napoleon releasing the Imperial Guard Corps (instead of retaining it as an 'absolute reserve'); Kutusov launching a counter-attack on the weak French left wing (a proposal Bagration made which Kutusov ignored); a full-scale Russian outflanking manoeuvre around the French left wing (Uvarov's cavalry discovered a fording point on the Kolocha but were refused reinforcements by Kutusov to exploit the weakness in Napoleon's position).
The terrain and unit detail contained in the game are excellent and the designers deserve praise for bringing a complex battle, with over a quarter of a million combatants, alive. For a game sold beyond the strict confines of pure wargames hobby the designers have made remarkably few compromises on historical accuracy. Gamers will be surprised by the painstaking depth of research involved in the production of the game. There are many surprising insights to the tactical issues of the battle together with a brilliant array of national unit types (including the Croatian riflemen of the Grande Armee!) which impress the gamer with the host of nationalities comprising Napoleon's amalgam of units.
Unfortunately the ambitious scale of this game presents the player with what can best be described as 'time management problems', particularly in the larger scenarios. Assuming the human player does not have infinite time to invest in making every move in the game it quickly becomes apparent areas of command must be partly delegated to the game's artificial intelligence (A.I.). This allows a focus on the core areas of interest within a reasonable time-frame for play.
At this point the interface between 'manual' and the supporting 'A.I. control' software quickly reveals itself to be poorly designed and cumbersome to execute. It relies on painstakingly assigning orders to individual Division/Brigade commanders (there are c.100 per side!). There is no editing feature for directing, and restricting, the A.I. to controlling only particular Corps or Divisions. This would seem to be the natural method of control and the designers offer only an 'all or nothing' solution to the problem.
It is thus frustrating to find the A.I. interfering in the operations of Corps the player aims to preserve exclusively for manual control. A further irritation is for orders given to Division/Brigade commanders via the A.I. defaulting back to 'no order' each time the human player toggles the system back to 'manual control'. This necessitates the re-inputting of all order objectives time and again! If the game is to become truly playable the designers should offer a 'patch' to rectify this aspect of the programming that, in the current state, detracts seriously from the enjoyment of the game. Another significant enhancement to speeding up the game would be the inclusion of an option for 'simultaneous fire resolution' to avoid painstakingly running every firepower combat result on screen.
This would have particular benefits, for example, in speeding the firing actions of skirmisher sub-units which can literally run to hundreds of minor units in the larger scenarios. The designers have rightly placed emphasis on the need for Division/Brigade commanders to remain 'within command radius' of their sub-units and this plays a central role in determining combat effectiveness and cohesion. However, the designers have not backed-up this requirement with a clear-cut tool for identifying units 'out of command radius' per Division/Brigade commander. The result of this deficit is much painstaking searching of the screen to locate all designated units.
Finally it would be a great help if the orders of battle supplied with the game could be formatted in such a way as to be printable in succinct pages. As currently supplied, the format is a rambling 40 page per army!
In a game on the ambitious scale of Napoleon in Russia the foregoing criticisms weigh heavily on the player at a practical level. A useful tip when embarking on a large scenario is to play the Russian side which involves less unit control / movment then the French given the predominatly defensive nature of the Russian position. Whilst the quality of the A.I.opponent has improved over the waterloo module it is notably less aggressive in attack than in defence and I noted a tendency for it to incline towards withdrawal and re-grouping of units when taking heavy losses at critical points in the action.
In addition there apperas to be a minor bug in the A.I. software which somtimes renders command units 'left behind' making them easy targets for capture. Fortunatly the Talonsoft designers are continuously working on enhancements to previous game releases by offering game 'patches'.either to downloaded from the Talonsoft website on the Internet or as software included on future Talonsoft game releases (e.g the Napoleon in Russia CD includes many other Battleground upgrade patches inculding Waterloo).
In summary the Battleground series is a remarkable wargaming achievement and represents a synthesis of an enormous body of wargames research. In spite of the shortcomings in Napoleon in Russia outlined above the game brings wargaming to a point of scale and sophistication which would seem unbelievable 10 years ago. With a future 1997 release covering the Quatre Bras and Ligny episode entitled Prelude to Waterloo there will be much to interest the Napoleonic wargamer from the Talonsoft stable in future.
The game requires IBM PC and Compatibles, available on CD-Rom only. Windows 3.1. or 95, 486DX33 or higher, 20 MB free hard disk space. Double speed CD-Rom, 8Mb RAM, 256 SVGA (640x480) .
Screen Shots: extremely slow: 405K)
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