For the past 5 years or so, the tactical computer game market has been dominated by the Talonsoft Battlefield series that started with Gettysburg and branched off into the Napoleonic realm to cover Waterloo and Borodino, games that I reviewed a few issues ago in PA. My feelings about those games were decidedly mixed, mainly because Talonsoft spent more time developing neato sound and visuals than they spent on the game system, which was embarrassingly unhistorical in places. I asked then, "Will a computer company ever zap the graphics and musketry that sounds like farting and design a decent historical tactical model that doesn't take up 500 Megs of hard drive space and require a Strategic Air Command computer to run?
And Shrapnel Games replied, "Sure we will, and we will sell you Horse & Musket."
Shrapnel Games are the same folks that gave us Dragoon a couple of years ago. Dragoon was a simple tactical battle game system that covered the battles of Frederick the Great with reasonably historical game play and a minimum of cartoony flourishes. Horse builds on the Dragoon model, but takes it to the American Revolution and Wars of Austrian and Spanish Succession to cover battles like Minden, Fontenoy, Blenheim, Monmouth, and Malplaquet.
Like most computer tactical games, Horse is essentially a board wargame where you boss the units around while the game acts as both your opponent and your faithful butler, handling the unglamorous stuff like calculating command ranges, determining LOS, and rolling the combat dice. I used to think this was a dandy arrangement, but as other computer game types become more advanced I think computer wargames can do more. (I'm thinking of action games like Thief and Half-Life, where there is a story going on around you and you are a character trying to catch on to the not-always-obvious plot). The computer's ability to run the game out of the player's sight and generate total fog of war means that it can inject tons of chaos into the traditionally all-knowing, all-seeing board wargame. The game that comes closest to doing this is Microsoft's excellent Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far, but I realise that this requires a sophisticated game engine with hefty system requirements, so we are back to the 500 Meg/SAC computer dilemma.
So if we think as Horse as less a computer wargame, and more as a sophisticated, semi self-propelled board wargame, we're on firmer ground. And it is the only game that I know of that includes battles like Rossbach and Minden (a particular favourite of mine). Horse uses the traditional multi-phased tactical game structure passed down from La Bataille De Moskowa—Command Phase, Movement Phase, Offensive & Defensive Fire Phase, Melee Phase, etc. A system of alternating commander activations replaces the old-fashioned Igo/Hugo sequence, with the more aggressive leaders activating first (lots of Prussian officers here) all the way down to the sluggards (Sackville at Minden and any French leader facing Marlborough).
Leaders must roll against their Leadership Rating to activate, which can be improved by Command Points from the Overall Commander. However, expect many non-Prussian leaders and their units to spend lots of time standing around and gaping at the battle going on around them, a good way to simulate the Lord Sackvilles of history. Unfortunately the game does not tell you what the Leadership Ratings are, so the identities of the hot dogs and slugbutts remain a mystery and you don't know who to assign Command Points to until the slugs flunk a few activation attempts. This information IS available in the scenario editor, however, so I found myself loading the scenario editor and noting down all of the leader ratings before play. Which didn't make me real happy.
As you'd expect in this era the formation rules are quite strict, so you can forget the old La Bataille trick of whipping battalions from Column to Line and back again like gymnasts. Units in Horse gain Disruption Points whenever they change formation or march too quickly in Line. Gain too many Disruption Points and you can't move at all ! I like this rule a lot as it enforces very historical behaviour; I found myself having to pause constantly to dress my lines. And here's another advantage of computers—in a boardgame it would be exceedingly tedious to track Disruption Points, not so by computer. (Incidentally, this should allow strategic/operational level computer wargames to have sophisticated supply rules, but aside from the old V For Victory series, I don't think they've taken advantage of this).
The rest of the tactical system is the familiar Move/Defensive Fire/Offensive Fire/Shock sequence. One strong note of caution—a unit, once selected for movement or fire or whatever, STAYS selected until you tell the game to leave him alone and fiddle with another. This leads to very embarrassing situations where I would select a unit, move it, then scroll around the map and click on another unit, only to see my original unit, loyal to the end, turn and march towards where I was pointing! Luckily there is an Undo Last Move button to remedy such blunders.
The tactical model and its results are quite sound, with one exception. Infantry rules the game and requires a good pounding to be defeated; cavalry that charges an undisrupted battalion is certain to come to grief. Close range artillery is deadly (probably a little too deadly actually), so a line of infantry stacked with a few batteries is a tough nut to crack. This forces players to look for a flank to turn and save the cavalry for hitting a weakened defender or exploiting a breakthrough. I particularly liked my fight for the village of Malbergen covering the French centre at the Battle of Minden. As the mindless redcoats I first moved in a couple of battalions of Prussians to drive out a pesky French battery. The French then almost drove me out with some of their infantry. I responded by pushing in the entire Prussian brigade; the beastly French hanging onto the edge of the village grimly until I finally cleared them out by bringing in my Hessian reserves. Excellent!
The exception is the morale system. Fundamentally it is sound. All units have Morale of 10 which decreases as they take casualties, are shocked, or fail morale checks. Once you get down to 0 you Rout. But the computer is very literal about this, so it's common to see a shock combat result in both sides simultaneously reaching 0 and routing. This happens a lot in the Great Battles of History computer games, too, and is very silly since it should be easy to write a combat morale hierarchy where one unit routs while the other hovers at 1. Rally is very strange, too. Every leader has a number of Rally Points that are used to pump up his units' morale within his command range. What is this, some sort of communal mind where the General thinks real hard and zap! All of his soldiers feel braver and stronger? This is another one of those La Bataille De Moskowa/Terrible Swift Sword whoppers that I wish tactical games would rid themselves of.
The game features a very good range of battles. All four of Marlborough's victories are here, along with Fontenoy, Minden, Rossbach, Jagersdorf, Poltava, Monmouth, Brandywine, and Germantown. Smaller scenarios are available for playing portions of the larger battles. "They damn well better be available," says Charles.
The graphics are very crude compared to the modern standard, which is a shame, as the designers have obviously done heroic work to get the uniforms and flags right but are stymied by smudgy colours and indistinct uniform detail. Zooming in a level reduces the figures to clumps of pixels; zooming out gives us barely a bird's eye view. But this is not necessarily a drawback, as dull graphics = small file size that equals good game speed, even on feeble old computers.
The battle research can be spotty. I was disappointed while playing the French at Blenheim to see a surprising number of French units labelled "French Infantry" and "Bavarian Cavalry". Especially with A Famous Victory 's OOB hanging around to help you out (I spent many hours working on the OOB for Famous Victory, so I should know). Yet Minden, a very difficult battle on which to find information, had every unit labelled and different uniforms for British, Prussian, Hanoverian, French, and Saxon, so the glass is either half-full or half-empty.
I should also mention the scenario editor, which allows you to use the game engine to design your own battles or edit the existing ones, so I guess I could stop complaining and go into the Blenheim files and add the unit names. I have a good little book on Cowpens, too (A Devil Of A Whipping by Babits) and have always wanted to play that battle. Hmmm….
The final sacrifice to file size is the AI. The computer is a very feeble opponent in Horse, stolid, unimaginative, often unwilling to react to your moves. At Rossbach, as the French it sat motionless as I first mangled its advance guard cavalry then enveloped the infantry of the van. At Minden, again as the French, it made no attempt to reinforce its cavalry centre as my stout red-coated battalions advanced and split its army in two. Internet play is available (which I've never tried of course), but if you're still looking for a solitaire challenge the best answer is to take the scenario's underdog and let history balance out the game.
I admire Shrapnel Games for labouring away on such an unusual subject. They do almost no mass marketing- I only heard about Horse & Musket from a review on a computer game website - but produce a two or three games per year on themes that the big guys won't touch and are a welcome break from the annual Big Panzers In Russia game. Horse, even with its disappointing flaws, is still a better tactical game than anything Talonsoft's Battleground series ever produced with a much heftier design and advertising budget, and I think it's well worth buying.
The Shrapnel Games website promises an expansion disk with more battles from 18th Century Europe and the American Revolution.
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© Copyright 2000 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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