This is a truly great game of Napoleonic warfare, covering the whole era thereof. It mixes real wargaming and Diplomacy-style diplomacy on a nice big map with lots of counters. There are some small scenarios, including at least one for two players, but the main attraction is the big campaign game that covers the whole era.

There is a well-developed economics system, and therein lies Part One the superiority of the game to some others of its genre: one faces a realistic choice between war and peace. Wars are expensive, and cost lots of money that could otherwise be spent to buy victory points (I oversimplify, but that's the effect). Part Two of the superiority is that multiple people can win (as in real life, but not as in many games): victory is defined as reaching a preset victory point level by the end of the game.

The different nationalities (British, French, Austrians, Prussians, Spanish, Russians, and Turks) have unique traits. For example, the Turks can raise large amounts of low-quality cavalry, the Austrians handle their manpower differently, and so on. Large sections of the rules deal with these unique traits, and it might be worth going through the rulebook and underlining general rules so that these stand out from the mass of special considerations. The special considerations aside, the game is actually not very complicated.

Recently AH has come out with a second supplement for Napoleon's Battles that includes, among other things, an interface to Empires in Arms so that one can fight out battles in the latter using the miniatures rules in the former. Note that the campaign game in Empires in Arms is a 100+ hour proposition in the first place. I guess that means that a few extra sessions fighting out key battles really wouldn't add that much time,... percentage-wise. One could certainly fight out sea battles (which are rare) in WSIM purely for the sake of .doing so. The other idea for using NB and EIA together would be to play a two-player scenario of EIA (the invasion of Russia) primarily as a scenario generator for Napoleon's Battles.

Miniatures enthusiasts would need lots of miniatures (less so in NB than in other systems, though, because of its higher ratio of real troops to figures) because EIA armies tend to get somewhat bigger than those of real history, so battles are at or beyond the large end of historical Napoleonic battles.

I think the clearest sign that there's something special about EIA is that I am so taken with it, because I'm not really a Napoleonics kind of guy.