"Campaigns on the Danube Review for the Wargamer" Topic

My tome for the week. NAPOLEONICS for the computer WITH an (wait for it) HISTORICAL MINIATURES WARGAMING battle option built in. So read on you must young Padawan. Wisdom awaits you.

link

Colonel Bill

An excellent and thorough report. Thanks.

While I don't even own any Napoleonics, interesting stuff and nice article!

Good shout- I'll give it a go.

Interesting, sounds worth a look!

I seem to remember that Adanac also had a title representing the 1806 campaign, though not to the same standard as this.

Just missed this on the holiday sale 50% off.

It's not a bad strategic game but it appears, based on my own experience and comments on the game forum site, the interface between the computer strategic and miniatures is very clunky and no one seems to have been able to make it work consistently.

Thanks

I read this review too: link

Can you also edit this game's battles to reflect tabletop fights with miniatures?

Old North,

Not my experience, BUT, I was playing with the latest patch which came out June 2017. I've not seen much anything negative since then so if there were issues they don't seem to exist now. But it is a MANUAL interface, not an automatic digital transfer. I got a very negative note about my review and I think this might be at the crux of the matter.

When you hit the miniatures option for battle, the game saves the numbers and stops. When you finish your mini game you reload the game and it presents you with a screen to fill out. It asks you to declare a winner and for each unit to provide the end of battle strength, morale and fatigue in the format it understands. That means you have to convert your game results into Danube format. For example if Delzone starts the mini battle with 12 Danube strength points, that 6000 men. If my mini game is Age of Eagles and Delzone loses 4 stands, that's 1440 men or in Danube terms, 3 strength points. Thus when I fill in the screen I type in 9 as Delzone's new strength. Some simple math conversion is unfortunately necessary, but it does mean you can use nearly any rules with it.

For the review I played both an 1805 and 1809 campaign, no biggie because historically they were very short. I took three computer battles as miniature test cases. One I used the HPS Campaign Eckmuhl game to resolve the contest, the other two I plugged in numbers from two AOE playtests I did many moons ago. The computer accepted the numbers I provided, made the necessary changes to the units involved, and play continued without a problem.

There is an ancients computer game coming out with a direct digital transfer interface for miniature play. Its called Field of Glory: Empires and it directly interfaces with the Field of Glory miniatures game, but the computer game version thereof which was also designed by Richard Bodley Scott, the pewter rules designer. Likewise C&G has a similar system under development, but again its only designed to interface with C&G.

Outside C&G, if you want to use a PC game as a campaign system and battle generator, I think its going to have to be manual. Right now Danube is the only one I know that allows that and the fact there haven't been any more games designed to do that indicates that part of it likely wasn't popular.

But then again, there are always Kevin Zucker's campaign boardgames.

weg

Right now Danube is the only one I know that allows that and the fact there haven't been any more games designed to do that indicates that part of it likely wasn't popular.

Empires in Arms link has a similar option. One day I am actually going to do it!

Colonel Bill,

Thanks very much for that review, it has really got my interest. I had just been starting to consider how to do a refight of the 1805 campaign.