When it came to things that they really needed to look at and work out for Napoleonics warefare very little was done. Norbsoft spent vast ammounts of time on the new GUI and other things that they didn't have to. Matrix was very involved in telling Norbsoft what THEY wanted. Matrix wanted Norbsoft to design a new interface in the game and have the game out by the anniverserary. Matrix will deny the following, but it is all very true. The Waterloo anniverserary was coming up and it would be good for sales and Matrix wanted it. After that, Norbsoft decided to move its concepts into Napoleonics. Norbsoft made a expansion for current users and a stand alone game for new users called Chancellorsville. Matrix picked them up and immediately wanted new titles that they could market. Norbsoft has a good American Civil War title. I am not affiliated with nor have I ever been a member of Norbsoft, but from what I have seen and heard(if you can believe 2nd and 3rd hand accounts) this is what happened. That being said, if you're looking for a battle with a sense of scale, it's hard to match Scourge of War, and it's a testament to how much better it is to work with real military units rather than Total War's generic approximations.Īlso interesting to me is that the experience of watching the number on a brigade go down very quickly with a devastating volley in Ultimate General is almost more satisfying to me than seeing a cavalry charge hit its mark in Total War. There's also more abstraction in that game but I think there's a very good reason strategy games tend toward a higher perspective than SoW typically allows.Īlso, I think automation is a very poor solution to dealing with the problems of the player not being able to manage the forces at his disposal- the perspective, interface, and level of abstraction can all be adjusted to make units more manageable and I think that the further they got away from Gettysburg's qualities(from TC Bull Run to Waterloo) the less manageable the game gets and the more it leans on the gimmicks. One of the reasons Sid Meier's Gettysburg was more managable than Scourge of War is that the perspective is based on old maps that were made to inform. I think, to be quite honest, the 'on the field' camera perspective is disadvantageous to the gameplay of strategy games in general.