Victorian Warfare is a computerised wargame management system by Schematica Software covering warfare in Victoria's reign, although the rules claim to be useable for a wider period It is available on diskette for Amiga, Atari and IBM-compatible PC's and the copy I reviewed bore a price of £ 19.95 although the program may be obtainable for less now.

The PC version of the program is character-based and runs in DOS with unspecified memory requirements. I ran it on both a 16Mb 586/133 and an 8Mb 486 DX2/66 with no problems while the game was playing, but quitting the program after saving the game to the machine's hard-disk gave me some problems with DOSSHELL v.6. I would accordingly recommend that you save armies to a diskette.

As you may know from previous reviews, I am not a fan of "moderator" programs such as this, and my suspicions about this one were aroused on reading the documentation. The author tells us that the rules can be used with any scale of figure, the basic move being 100mm (i.e. 100 yds) whatever the scale. This is rationalised by saying that the height of the figure is irrelevant.

True enough, but the software allows you to specify any number of real men per figure, so surely both this decision and the figure size make a difference to unit frontage and thus groundscale? This sort of gap in reasoning is OK if you know what you are doing, but is no help in leading a novice to a realistic start to a game, let alone a realistic result. Overall, I was left with similar feelings about the whole product, and would not recommend it.

The software comes on a single diskette in a plastic envelope with a simple printout of the user instructions. I decided on a small squadron/company level game set in the US/Mexican War to try the system out, and I soon encountered problems. The software first allows you to define units onto an army disc. This was a simple matter of choosing from a quite limited range of troop and weapon types, and had the useful feature of letting you make your next unit a copy of the one before with a different name. This was a pretty rapid process, but I was puzzled to find that whilst Lance or Lance/Carbine was a legal weapon type, Sabre or Sabre/Carbine was not! This left Ringgold's Dragoons fighting with lances, although what difference it made to the game I couldn't tell.

To set up the battle, you then choose the units you want from the army disc and proceed to the combat module proper. This is very simple, as it does not attempt to control the movement of the figures either as a result of morale checks or by showing you a table of very simple movement rates. Both movement and combat are regarded as "actions" which are taken by alternate sides, a simple but elegant "initiative" option allowing one side or the other (usually that with the better commander) to hold back some actions until the other has finished. A further phase follows the main one, allowing units within 100 yds of one another to take further actions such as charging to contact. Whilst this gives a fast-moving game, it offers no particular attractions to the solo wargamer and thus cannot be regarded as a selling point in these pages.

Although I encountered only one cosmetic bug in the code, problems in running the game abounded. Although the maximum weapon ranges are written in the user instructions, the program didn't seem to know about them and allowed Ringgold's Dragoons to fire while out of range (rewarding them with their best shot all day!). Neither this nor any other combat result could be undone once committed unless you restored to the last position saved to disc. The rules were ambiguous about when morale tests were needed, and several times in response to an action which was made by a unit within 100 yards of its opponents, I was told they had fired back at 300 yards.

Although I struggled through to the end of a very fast little game and got a reasonable result out of it, I was led to conclude that this was more a testament to my own experience than the quality of the program, and I certainly wouldn't use it again. To my mind there is nothing magical about a computerised set of wargames rules, and you have to start with a first-class product on paper if you are to end up with a first-class product on disc. Schematica are offering neither here, and (unless the price has dropped radically from that shown in this review) you could buy a good few sets of first-class rules on paper for the cost of this software. For my money, this would be a better deal.

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Games Corner: Industry News
Victorian Warfare
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Battleground: Waterloo
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