Score: 8.2
This post is an addendum to the post below about Medieval: Total War. This is a mod (sort of how Counter-Strike is a mod for Half-Life) which re-uses the basic engine of Total War and sets it during the Napoleonic age. Though I only played one game and did not play it through to the end, I caught enough of the changes to pass some sort of judgment.
The biggest change is obviously in the battles: musketry and artillery play a much larger role in this game, since they were the weapons of choice in this era. Thankfully they do much more damage than they did in the original source game, and they also change the dynamics enough to make the battles far more interesting. Battles no longer resort to the infantry rushes which plagued the original, since the infantry is now a ranged unit. The best few battles I fought were a mix of infantry just standing across from one another and firing away, and the occasional cavalry flank or artillery bombardment, just as would have happened on real battlefields of the day. I always felt that the battles in Medieval were slightly too formulaic and based more on morale than on strategy or numbers even; in Napoleonic, there is just greater balance and variety in the battles. As well, my previous concern over the battles winding up being just a war of the first thousand or so soldiers who then just hold the borders doesn't apply here, as the damage seems to be inflicted with far more focus on units that are in poor position. The result is that unless you stage your battle perfectly, you're going to lose some soldiers, and be forced to call in reserves. As well, since the soldiers' morale was increased to such a high degree (probably to overcome the fact that all the weapons in the game were originally designed to decrease morale), the computer does not flee all at once, mitigating a more relaxed retreat which gives them time to bring on reinforcements and hold their line against you with more aplomb. It's a minor change really, but it does wonders to balance the gameplay.
However in the turn-based strategy part of the game, the mod falls apart a little bit. It's started off with a hodge-podge of stock and modified components in the visuals, which lack cohesion and are at times just downright hard to decipher. The amateur nature of these visuals is also readily apparent, though not much more can really be expected short of a professional budget for the creators. On the gameplay side it gets a little more disturbing - the game I played began around 1750, and as the French, I was expecting some sort of change in the experience around 1789. Nothing came. In fact it was 1812 and not a single difference sprouted up at any time; not to mention I'm not really sure how I could possibly have recreated the Napoleonic advances. While it's fairly easy to levy huge numbers of troops, all the countries in the game have this ability to some extent or another, and it would be difficult to mimic Napoleon's march across Europe, let alone reaching Moscow in the seventy or so turns you have available to you. Other little oddities popped up as well: the English navy, for instance, was incredibly weak, and I conquered the island almost instantly, since, for some reason, they felt it urgent to destroy Denmark and try and conquer Germany as opposed to protecting their base of operations. It was really quite strange actually, and has not been a problem with any other Total War game I've played through, the computer usually acts fairly logically if somewhat predictably. Similarly confusing were some of the extra structures that could be built, which didn't seem to really add much of anything to the game, some of which were just downright useless and confusing, such as the infrastructure add-on, which seems like a good idea, but falls short of usefulness in practice.
Other minor facets include not changing the music of the game, which can easily be forgiven since I don't personally want computer-programmers making music very often; the existence of rebel provinces during this period also seems highly unlikely; and the use of castles is really extraneous since castles were non-factors by this point in history, they merely confound what would be a glorious conquest of a new province.
Overall though, this is a very well-done modification for an already pretty good game. Apparently the same creators, The Lordz, have already put together a second version for Rome: Total War. Still waiting on that new video card however...
