Vastly improved diplomacy and campaign map
Picture the scene. Midway through your campaign, you face off against the Duke of Wellington – but with your inspired field tactics, you trap and decimate his army, before massacring him and his elite bodyguard with a deadly cavalry charge. Two turns later, he reappears with a brand new army and annihilates your depleted forces. Trust me: you’ll be delighted. Or perhaps a particular nation will be completely out-manoeuvred – usually France– and their generals will suffer endless defeats. Since Napoleon is invincible though, he can’t die. Instead, each defeat adds to his endless array of negative traits, until he’s the military equivalent of a cardboard fire-blanket. Not quite the image they were trying to portray, I fear.And finally, whislt I can’t bring myself to call it a feature, Napoleon’s lack of involvement with the USA and India means that vast swathes of the map from Empire are cut, and replaced with a couple of enthralling trading posts.
In my book, this game got two things right. Firstly, the campaign is varied and enjoyable. It’s not just a tutorial, the missions are genuinely challenging when you raise the difficulty, in interesting locations with well-scripted events and a range of tasks to complete.
Secondly, the diplomacy and campaign map AI is vastly improved. Protectorates were traditionally little more than buffer zones, so declaring war on the Papal States should have elicited no response. To my surprise though, the Kingdom of Italy sent two armies southwards, Naples sent one northwards, and Denmark had a vessel in the area, so landed her army on the coast, and together they captured Rome. Countries are much more proactive in diplomacy as well – smaller nations would routinely offer increasingly huge sums of money for peace as their armies were destroyed and their territory captured.
Continued overleaf...