Initial corps starting area for the battles

[antiochus]

 Sorry if this has been asked or I'm not getting it.

 I've played Wagram,Borodino and Eylau and the historical placement of the corps are all wrong. Is this a feature of the game ie. letting you try you shot with different setups? Is there a way to get historical setups before battle and I've missed it? Thanks.

[Count von Csollich]

If you want to get it definetely right, just take command of both sides...  ...All will be happening according to "your" plan...lot's of fun too...

[CBR]

It would be nice if a scenario designer had the option of creating locked starting positions. Something useful for campaigns.


CBR

[foxed]

Hi
Have you tried Ai v Ai as a scenario then click on one corps to take them over are they in historical  settings then or not.
Get crash to desk top some times.

[Hook]

You can get the game to set up your forces the way you want, useful for historical battles.  Start the game and play both sides and set up the forces where you want them.  Once you have both sides set up the way you want, left click on the 2D map to bring up the menu, select System and click on Save Initial Deployments.  There's also a Save OoB option.

After you do this, the forces will always set up the same way when you start the game.

Hook

[antiochus]

Ok so I'm not nuts or my brain misfired. I didn't realize that their are no " historical" setups in the battles.

When I looked at the Borodino map and all the French corps were setup across the river I thought I was having a senior moment.

[Hook]

Ok so I'm not nuts or my brain misfired. I didn't realize that their are no " historical" setups in the battles.

Yeah, sorry.  I didn't get a chance to look at most of the battles myself.  I don't think anyone would mind if someone familiar with a battle made correct deployment OoBs for people to download... I don't think the demo can use them.

Hook

[FinnN]

Yep that would be great, maybe an option could be added to lock/unlock the AI from changing the initial deployments. For the purposes of tutorials/set pieces it might also be nice to have an option to lock the initial AI battle plan too.

Have fun
Finn

[Marschal Ney]

Gentlemen,i was looking for hist war since the very beginning of the project,and after years i could finally get my copy of the game.
but to be honest i was disappointed about the so called historical battles as well,when i started austerlitz and other battles i could sadly see unrealistic positions,now i understand as someone posted before that we can manually fix this by ourself,but still i have disappointment about this,after all this is a gran tactical game,like the old taloonsoft games.
i truly hope that there will be some patch that will fix this issue,i would love to play maps with historical numbers and mens position.
regards.

[JFG]

I do agree with Marschal Ney (except the way he managed French cavalry at Waterloo ). It is a bit disappointing when you discover initial OOB that are not realistic ones. In the same kind of idea, I made a remark on "Montebello" battle used for Demo 1 that corresponds to our brother in arms so called "Montebello" in that forum but not to the actual battle.

I do agree too on the fact that we can change the initial position as we want (and it is a great possibility) but why not changing these positions on the basis of the true ones ?

And if every player has to move the regiments to put them a the right place, it could be better to do it one time rather than 600 times (approximatively the number of pre sales).

If  for people who have a look on this game for several months ore years, it is only a detail, I think (but may be I'm wrong) that for new customers, it could be very disturbing (specially using a demo) and they could consider LG is not so historical as it is exactly the contrary.

[dieseltaylor]

An issue?  

Seems to me that the game is bigger than  battle lines and commences with your dispositions before battle commences. I actually think it is wise of JM and his team to get people to start the battle from the beginning.

I am very much afraid that people tend to be lazy like me  and would simply go for the easy option of playing the "historical" battle without the preliminary thinking. I have no doubt that several people will actually do the historical set-up ... whether they will agree with each other is another matter : )

After all the dispositions at 9.30 am may be different from 10.oo or 9.35 so depending on your sources you may end up with several potentially accurate set-ups ......

In fact it would be an interesting challenge to find a single battle where there is no disagreement where all the forces where at a particular point in time. I suppose if one were picky one might discuss how with GPS coordinates any battlefield map is in Napoleonic times. How easy is it to displace a a corps by the odd half-mile or have it in the wrong formation from what it was actually in?

So anyone want to commence "historical battlefield challenge" - a prize for the person who finds the most divergent maps - and I suspect they will come from the opposite sides : )

[Marschal Ney]

well,with all the respect i partly disagree with the last poster   in my opinion is not the point to be lazy or not,or to be good with the editor.
i do agree that is a great thing to have the option to start a battle on the same historical battlefield (for example montebello)
with the same armie's composition and so on,and to have the free to make your own tactical deployment.
but i still feel that there should be the historical battle as well,if you gentlemen remember the taloonsoft and the HPS games like eggmuhl.
it gave you the change at one side to fight the realistic and historical battle,at the other these games gave you the opportunity to play a what-if....so with different starting positions,reinforcement and so on,i always remember that at borodino my favourite what-if battle was to use the old guard freely,the historical battle had the guard fixed in his position as historically napoleon didn't want to send them during the battle.
so in this way les grognards is even better,becouse i can deploy my army as i wish,but then again,it's like fighting a what if...
regards

[dieseltaylor]

Thinking about it a little further I can see some good coming from this situation:

a] some players will provide the historical - which may be slightly different
b] Marshal Ney and dieseltaylor may offer their optimum set-ups
c] we may have diffferent start times to play with even with agreed positions

I understand what you are saying and from the point of view of diving into a battle perhaps one could have been provided already set-up ....... : )

[antiochus]

 It would make more sense if say the Borodino map was larger. But looking at the landmarks you really don't have too much room to manuever. As in trying to do a long sweep around the Russian left flank as Davout wanted to do.

It's possible because of my years as a boardgamer that this is causing me some confusion.

There is really no argument in almost all of Napoleon's battles as to where corps where at the start of the battle. There is some arguing about individual unit placement but certainly not the corps themselves.

[Franciscus]

My 2 cents 

I agree that the option to have "historical" (or near historical) initial deployments would be very good. Otherwise, I am beginning to get a feeling of all the maps being more a sandbox than an actual representation of the historical battles - "historical" meaning not only accurate maps and OOB but also battlelines . As it is, they seem to be not much better than a couple of random maps, really. At least the option to have fixed "historical" initial deployments would be a good addition.

Of course some folks could argue endlessly about what are the historical initial deployments. Probably also about the OOB and even maps, for sure we will get disagreements in the future. But for the "average" gamer (me  ), the objective of playing this game is to have some minutes of fun and immersion in what could have been the reality of a Napoleonic battle. Trying to replicate and/or do best than the real commanders (even loosing in the process) is part of the fun.

Regards