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"Follow The Eagle and Napoleon's Wars" Topic


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Personal logo Whirlwind Supporting Member of TMP27 Apr 2017 7:06 p.m. PST

These two computer-moderated rulesets were advertised in Miniature Wargames in the late 1980s, the first apparently with the same sort of scope as Eaglebearer, the second designed as a game where brigades are the smallest formation represented; both published by WARCOM Wargame Services. Does anyone know anything about these two rulesets?

vagamer6327 Apr 2017 10:14 p.m. PST

I believe Dave folded the tent on Follow the Eagle software a few years ago. The old web site doesn't even come up anymore in searches.

Personal logo Whirlwind Supporting Member of TMP27 Apr 2017 10:47 p.m. PST

What was the game like?

davbenbak28 Apr 2017 5:40 a.m. PST

Try Carnage & Glory II. It has a very active Yahoo group.

Personal logo Whirlwind Supporting Member of TMP28 Apr 2017 6:09 a.m. PST

@davbenbak,

Yes, I'm aware of C&G2, it looks an excellent system. I was asking more out of historical curiosity.

Oakley30 Nov 2019 11:35 a.m. PST

Back in the day when a PC had about 1MB of memory and a hard drive, if you had one, was not more than 40MB and windows were things you looked out of. I was inspired to get my first computer following a demonstration game put on by Danny Boreham at a wargames show (WARCON) in Edgebaston. For me the attraction of the game was the lack of rules as I knew them and despite not having a computer I bought a copy of Eagle Bearer published by WARCOM.
It was some time later I discovered that the program had actually been written by Dave Watkins and the code had been illegally copied. Watkins under the banner of Eagle-Software marketed the rules as Follow The Eagle with a number of versions as he developed the rules and interface over several years.
For about five years the group of wargaming friends I was with used Eagle software exclusively for several years to play some amazing re-fights of most of the classic Napoleonic battles with a huge collective pool of 15mm figures. The attraction was the computer whilst adding its own fog of war looked after record keeping, the shooting, hand-to-hand combat, morale and fatigue which allowed the player to concentrate on the action on the table as opposed to the finer points of the rule book. I do remember the dramatic moments when a charge took place and the computer told you that the 2nd Foot and Mouth "Hold their fire", or "They fire early". This gave you a clue as to how successfully the charge into the 2nd Foot and Mouth was going to be.
The problems that I remember was keeping track of where the units were on the table. Every unit needed to be labelled. Secondly, each game required a considerable amount of set-up time with both the building of the armies in the computer and assembling the figures pre-game.

Idler20326 Aug 2022 8:38 a.m. PST

The arrival of the computer rules Eaglebearer, followed, because of a dispute about copyright and ownership, shortly afterwards by Follow The Eagle represents for me a golden period in Napoleonic wargaming. Of course, in wargaming things just get better and better all the time – rules, figures, terrain, ideas, connectivity and reporting. But we lose that innocence and wild-eyed appreciation I think we had when encountering these things for the first time; it is not the absolute quality of all that you are beholding but the sense of wonderment that follows from the occasional leap forward, and size and, to my mind, the arrival of Follow The Eagle was such a leap.
 
Napoleonic wargaming had started for me in the 1970s and it was typically chaotic, governed by the limitations of pocket money and what was available in the shops. Quarrie, by providing so much background information on how armies were organised and battles were fought, had done a lot to tame this, but, by the time I went off to university my Airfix armies, organisationally, and aesthetically were still all over the place. And there I left it for some time.
 
I came back to it in the period when I had a salary but had not yet had children. I was put in touch with Robert by the chap who ran the local wargame shop and Robert, who was perhaps 8 years older, did Napoleonic wargaming not just on a grand scale but with tremendous style and made it more immersive than I had so far experienced. What was new to me then is now so commonplace that it is hardly worth mentioning but it was the buying, building and painting of armies to fill out historic orders of battle so actual battles rather than fictitious ones could be fought, backed up by a much more serious reading of the history, drill movements and tactics.
 
All this was astonishing enough but it got a massive boost when bursting on to the scene came not just Follow The Eagle by Dave Watkins but Dave's Napoleonic magazine First Empire and the Battle Honours 15mm figures, which, like Eagle Bearer, soon metamorphosised into something else—AB figures and, as I understand, for similar copyright reasons.
 
It felt like a revolutionary moment. Follow the Eagle, as with other wargame computer assistance programmes, works with lists, where battalions need to be organised in brigades, brigades into divisions and so on up the chain. You need to know the size of the battalions, their training and quality, who commanded them and how good he was, both technically and inspirationally. The need for lists, on the one hand, reinforced the idea—new for me at that time—that one should really be buying units to fill out a particular order of battle, and, on the other gave rise for a need for such lists. Providing such level of detail was one of the many things that First Empire Magazine did so well. And then there were the figures, which were and remain just astonishing.

As for the actual computer based rules they felt tremendous at the time and probably stand the test of time reasonably well. The debate for and against computer assisted rules is well trodden and so no need to rehearse it here. If you like computer rules these gave exciting and rewarding games. They were DOS-based and can still be made to run on Windows 10. It would fall over once and a while but this was mostly recoverable. One of the things that fans of computer assisted games like is how the changing stats of a Napoleonic unit, things like causalities, ammo, fatigue and moral can be kept hidden from the players. With Carnage and Glory, which assumes an umpire, it is left to him to give hints about how a unit is faring. Follow the Eagle allowed you to turn off the stats completely, meaning there was less need for an umpire and both sides could take turns inputting the data. It could throw googlies at you by bringing on a sudden squall and you would find your muskets would not fire.

Follow the Eagle was well supported while Dave was alive (he died of pancreatic cancer in 2015) with a very good campaign system, a post-battle moderator and a brigade level version of the game. There was a more updated windows version of the game which had the novel feature of allowing the computer to take control of brigade commanders moving them around their brigade. I never discovered whether this was just random or whether there was any AI involved. It meant the brigade commanders, independently of player control would move from battalion battalion within their brigade and sometimes not attaching themselves to any particular battalion. It meant that brigade commanders were only very occasionally where you wanted them to be

So the answer to the question what was Eaglebearer like is a broader question than the one I think you intended: it was not just the qualities of a star performer but more like a stunning full cast performance – rules that took you to a new level of detail, a magazine that supported and celebrated that level of detail and figures that focused and held attention and made the whole act come alive; and then, if this was not enough the Sharpe TV series started up.

Personal logo Whirlwind Supporting Member of TMP20 May 2023 1:49 p.m. PST

Thanks very much Idler. It somehow feels just a tiny bit important that these things get remembered. It would be a shame if all the old rules were kept alive somewhere – even, ironically, digitally – whereas all the old computer-assisted games were lost forever.

Mik 105504 Nov 2024 10:15 a.m. PST

@whirlwind, do you know whether there is anyone maintaining/caring for these rules (FTE or EB)? I used both of them in the past, on the Atari ST and on the PC, and have had my interest sparked by these posts, but after a sundry number of life's upheavals, the discs have disappeared… :-( Any assistance would be appreciated.

Mik 105508 Nov 2024 11:34 a.m. PST

@Idler203, maybe I should have addressed the query to yourself?

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