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A Sunny Day in Belgium
By Jim "Bismarck" CobbReview Version: 1.00
The Art of War
Waterloo fascinates most people with its drama and romance. You know, the brilliant but terribly misguided comet being extinguished by grit and a timely rescue, all played out in a swirl of color on a picturesque field reminiscent of Gainsborough. In fact, the real excitement was at Leipzig in 1813. The Hundred Days was just a sad episode with an inevitable conclusion. Had Napoleon not been beaten in Belgium, he would have been beaten on the Rhine. Serious gamers, though, see Waterloo as a microcosm of the development of the art of war since 1618. The infantry’s versatile formations, the artillery’s relative mobility and power and the cavalry’s exertion of shock, all evolving between 1618 and 1795, were used on June 18, 1815 by three masters of the art with a force composed of their best and worst troops. The designers at Breakaway try to capture both the grandeur and the technical completeness of this battle. In doing so, they might have overreached themselves.
The Steel Quadrille
Waterloo uses the Sid Meier real-time, battalion-level Gettysburg/Antietam! American Civil War system. Most of the basics are the same: clicking on individual unit flags allows you to move them in a certain formation and deploy into another through click-and-drag and menu choices or hot keys. Brigades and divisions can be handled the same way by clicking on brigade and division commanders who, in Waterloo also can form grand batteries. (Corps and army commanders can only rally and form grand batteries.)
The heart of combat rests on the triple concepts of cohesion, morale and battle stress. Cohesion represents the unit’s ability to maintain its formation. Cohesion will degenerate as it moves and is especially affected by orders to move at the double quick and into rough terrain. Movement effects can be ameliorated or heightened by formations. Unit morale is portrayed as a measure of blocks with better quality troops having more blocks. The worst of the five quality levels is poor with two blocks while the elite have six. Morale blocks can be extended with friendly units to the flank and rear, protective terrain and commanders within range. Thus, a Guard formation with support and its division, corps and army commanders near could have ten morale blocks. Morale drops through casualties and combat situations. As morale drops, the morale blocks change from yellow to red, like a thermometer. When all blocks are red, the unit routs.
Overlying all this is battle stress, portrayed by a colored bar. Battle stress indicates more psychological matters and degenerates from green to orange to red. Cohesion problems show as breaks in the battle stress bar. Although overlap exists, the cohesion bar, the stress bar and morale blocks may reflect different stimuli but, when any slip, it’s time to send that unit to the rear. The unit’s flag shows the unit’s condition; a drooping banner is a bad sign. Giving troops a rest and having commanders rally can regain cohesion and morale. Commanders also have different qualities reflected in the range their rally value can reach.
Movement of so many units can soak up your time and attention. Fortunately, fire combat happens automatically in this system with you selecting targets if you wish. You must order shock combat. Therefore, those fringes of smoke emanating from your units are signs that you may need to take an interest in the proceedings.
Breakaway elaborated greatly on this system. They provided more formations than just line, skirmish and maneuver column. They introduced the square, two and three-rank line, the attack column and the rarely used “ordre mixte”. Also, infantry goes into a 360-degree formation when occupying buildings, The various Allied nationalities are given their own morale levels so that Nassauers’ quality is relative to the French and British standards. More importantly, they have introduced the concept of army morale. If certain positions are taken or lost, or if the tide of battle turns, morale blocks for the entire army can change. A crash in army morale can lead to wide-scale routs as happened in fact when the Old Guard fell back.
The designers have also distinguished between formation types more thoroughly than in the American Civil War games. A Dutch square will not form as quickly or be as effective as a British one. These distinctions become all important in cavalry units. Heavy cuirassiers will sweep through numerically superior light infantry and lancers spear infantry like pigs but are very vulnerable to formed regular cavalry. These nuances are necessary not only for flavor but to simulate the battle.
Natlly dressed British Guard cavalry eye approaching French horsemen and may deign to attack.
The design goal is to create the combined arms tactics necessary for success in Napoleonic battles. Artillery pounds the enemy to open the ball. Infantry then advances with cavalry hovering. If the defenders waiver, the infantry charges in line or column with the cavalry or other infantry following up. If the attacking infantry stands, feigned cavalry moves make them form square and the artillery slaughters them some more. Defenders are far from passive. Infantry reserves and cavalry counter-charges can make an apparent success a disaster. Witness the fate of D’Erlon’s attack at Waterloo in the early afternoon. Timing and coordination is everything. On a small scale, Breakaway has come within a whisker of achieving total success in representing this deadly dance.
French infantry exchange volleys with British riflemen in the Sandpit. The yellow Battle Stress bar indicates they're getting the worse of the exchange.
Prussian cavalry find the French squares should be avoided. Note the solid row of red morale blocks.
Beautiful Slaughter
Waterloo’s other achievement is a great improvement in graphics. Spurred by renowned illustrator Keith Rocco, uniforms, equipment and horses are exquisitely done. Osprey books could not have done a better panorama of the multitude of kit present at Waterloo. Combat animation and sound flesh out the attempt at an immersive feel. Commands are in the native language; my French has improved to the point where I may go to Quebec. Terrain is richer not only in depth of color and type but also in the display of the buildings so important to the battle. Hougomont is shown as a miniaturist’s dream. The four different zoom levels can give a feel for the broad scope or an individual soldier’s view.
French artillery soften up the farmhouse of Hougomont.
This splendor comes at a price. Animation is jerky at any but the fastest speeds. The real-time aspect of the game makes playing at speedier levels risky. It’s a pity when game play conflicts with aesthetics but, in this case, game play wins out handily. You’ll accept some aggravating animation in order to give the right order at the right time.
All this glamour is played out in twenty-nine different scenarios. Twenty-two of these represents single, isolated actions such as the attack on La Haye Sainte or the charge of the British cavalry reserve. All of the nationalities such as the Dutch, Nassauers and Prussians receive their fair share of time. These twenty-two scenarios are further divided into fifteen historical, six fictional and two speculative scenarios. In turn, each scenario has a variant that has six random set-ups. Victory is decided on the basis of victory points gained through taking positions and causing enemy casualties and morale losses. Yet another variation allows historical or free activation of reserves. Activating reserves early in historical situations cost victory points. Want more variation? An editor allows you to create actions on any part of the field with the units at hand. Better opponents can be found through TCP/IP play or at Game Spy Arcade. Learning to play is easy with six tutorial scenarios and a detailed manual.
Breakaway clearly aims for a depiction of the entire battle as its pièce de résistance . They give it a good try with four massive scenarios that cover the four distinct parts of the battle and three - two speculative – scenarios encompassing all ten hours of the conflict. As will be discussed later, the designers stretched the system too far for comfort in doing so.
Of Allies, Horses and Scale
Waterloo succeeds in so many things that criticism feels like nit-picking. However, flaws there are and cannot be disputed. The odd thing is that these flaws are not game killers in the singular and only become bothersome as you progress from the enchanting small scenarios through the steps to the massive, fascinating battles
The infantry model is nearly perfect. Battalions react to terrain, enemies, leaders and support in a historical fashion. With automatic fire, you don't have to mollycoddle them. The greatest flaw is that friendly units can pass another without either losing any cohesion. In fact, maneuvering units out of each other’s way was the raison d’etre for parade ground evolutions and peace time maneuvers. Artillery itself is almost perfect and is a breeze to handle. Supply of solid shot and canister is accounted for automatically and you can stop wasteful long-range plinking. The flaw here is crew preservation. Batteries and sections were put forward of the main infantry line if no high ground was close. Most crews would fire until the enemy was close whereupon they ran for the nearest infantryman or even hid under their pieces. If the attack was repulsed and the guns were not spiked or rammers broken, they would re-man their guns and keep on fire. In this game, batteries are either destroyed or rout aimlessly in all directions. If this had happened during the battle, Ney’s unremitting charges of the afternoon would have made more sense and may have even succeeded.
The whole enchilade at extreme zoom out. The screen is represented
Like every other Napoleonic tactical game, the cavalry model is deeply flawed. Your units will not automatically counter-charge. Again, this deficit is not a bother when all action is limited to a small area but can be a tremendous problem in larger scenarios. If infantry units can fire automatically, why can’t cavalry units respond the same way? In charges, cavalry are blown at the end of the tussle but reorganize and recuperate far too fast. In 1815, cavalry was good for one full-on, full-strength charge in a four-hour period. By the same token, cavalry didn’t respond well to recalls and would often go on until they were decimated. In Waterloo, this proclivity may be reflected but, then again, the units may just be reorganizing, it’s impossible to tell. Too often, a successful charge stops where ordered. Finally, cavalry was slowed by masses of bodies on the ground; the last of Ney’s charges went in at a walk because the horses had to be coaxed over a carpet of dead. The game does not take this into consideration. In the larger scenarios, communication across these mammoth armies is too good to be realistic.
Other things can be aggravating. Routed units are impervious to attack, making pursuit unprofitable. Leaders can be killed, being replaced by a subordinate of random caliber. However, leaders seem to lead charmed lives. In an experiment, I walked an unescorted French general in front of and through a firing British line for five minutes; he emerged unscathed. On a more esoteric note, the values given to non-British Allied troops and leaders follow the traditional Silborne model. Recent research by historians such as Peter Hofschoerer has questioned this. An editor allowing us to edit these values would add another historical tool to the product.
However, Waterloo’s greatest flaw becomes apparent in the massive scenarios. Even at extreme zoom-out, the battle screen covers only a small portion of the jump map. Playing a four-hour battle even using slow speeds and the pause buttons becomes an exercise in scrolling madly or right-clicking frantically to get to hot spots. Game flow becomes disjointed and you become disoriented; how to fight defensively at Plancenoit while attacking the Sandpit creates a friction that is not at the same level as the real friction of war. Playing the entire battle solitaire would be the equivalent of a tiring weekend project. Multiple commanders in online play would cut down on the work but getting even four people together for several hours of play still is not feasible given the state of the ‘Net.
Waterloo is a game every war gamer should buy, warts and all. The individual actions are fun to play and, even with historical flaws, are fine tactical exercises. Sadly, these flaws and the regrettable exercise of putting mammoth battles into real time make attempts at playing the entire battle an exercise in frustration. This product is a compilation of delightful vignettes; the definitive simulation of Waterloo is still unwritten.
