Imperial Glory why haven't I heard about this game until now

Imperial Glory why haven’t I heard about this game until now. Someone gave me the link to this site and while not scheduled until Q1/Q2 of 2005 it looks great.

It looks basically like a Total War game set in Napoleon times. Check out the streaming trailer, the downloadable ones wouldn’t work. The campaign maps looks almost like the one from M Total War.

They also have naval battles.

http://www.eidosinteractive.com/gss/legacy/imperial/screenshots.html

Its good to see game devs making more strategy games in the Total War vein.

http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10488&highlight=imperial+glory

Possibly because you didn’t see this thread? :)

Does look interesting.

As we speak of older games that are still playable I’m necro’ing a nearly 20 year old thread to announce plans of doing an AAR for a game I’ve never played that a friend of mine game me for free!

So once more into the breach dear friends!

Edit: adding info about the starting position.

July 1789
The major powers who will be vying with Great Britain for supremacy:

I chose Great Britain to avoid being immediately at war with someone in a game I’ve no familiarity with. The downside of course will be getting armies onto the mainland once that’s the plan.

The campaign begins with:

1. 2 small armies. Judging from the slots available a Captain can command 3 units. One army has 2 main line infantry and the other has just one light infantry. Plus we have two naval units, a sloop, which from the unit description is the smallest war vessel of the era.
2. Diplomacy: We begin the campaign in a defensive alliance with Hanover (with just one territory squeezed between France and Prussia I suspect they’ll not last long) and Spain.
   

The other initial decision is research. While food preservation was considered in order to increase pop growth for troop recruitment, we went with Officer Training so we could build the military academy to recruit additional armies. No idea how aggressive the AI is so it seemed prudent to get on this.

The rest of 1789 was spent first getting research done for recruitment:

And once we got the military academy finished the troops went in to save on food consumption:

And early on at least it looks like we’ve got a couple bottlenecks making for slow going on recruitment: gold and population:

To further slow things down buildings that help decrease these bottlenecks of course also use the same constrained resources to build. I’ve decided early on to take the risk of focusing on the economy to reduce bottlenecks and hope my early target of Portugal doesn’t succumb to a Spain invasion or just as worrisome recruit an army I can’t handle. I need somewhere to invade to get on the European continent.

1790

Spent the entire year recruiting officers and armies and building infrastructure.

Here’s the army:

Sadly I just checked and Portugal has 3 armies, so as expected we’ve fallen behind militarily while building out economy. Need to focus on army in prep for invasion.
Here’s what we got built out economically:

The only significant call out I see from other great power activity is France looks to be massing on the Batavia border for invasion:

The Victory point totals for end of 1790 show no great surprises as we’ve not had much time pass yet:

Final observation to wrap this post is on troop movement, which works like it did in the original Total War Shogun and Medieval. On the strategic map you have unit markers that can move during a turn only one territory much like a board game movement. I rather like this because the AI I think handles this kind of unit movement better and because it means not only do you have to plan well the enemy can see you coming from a mile away.

Take as an example how long it will take England to get to Portugal:

No surprise invasions!

Edit: Yes, aware some of the images are larger than they probably need to be. I’ll see what can be done, but I think it’s the result of the game being max 1600x1200 and when I take screenshots of it on a 27in display they end up larger than need be.

This game was a real gem. It came out around the time Empire Total War was announced, but not released - so it caught some of the pent up excitement of people waiting for that.

It wasn’t perfect, things like soldiers having no morale made battles these all or nothing slogs to the death. But it was interesting and tried new stuff that Total War has still never done - like defendable control points on maps. The diplomacy is also surprisingly deep - the system for being able to run proxy wars between other nations is a blast.

Thanks for running this! Subscribed!

I’m definitely enjoying it. Don’t know how I missed it originally. Certainly more than 5 bucks worth of fun lurking under the hood here. I bet it goes on steam sales for a dollar, haha.

Small update. It’s September 1791 and I’m kicking myself because I’m afraid I’ve missed my window with Portugal.

Spain is massing on their border. Is it a feint or is it real? In the best of all possible worlds Spain attacks Portugal and weakens them preparing the way for a Great Britain invasion.

The odds by my calculation do not favor Spain so I don’t know if the AI is foolhardy enough to attack where the odds don’t favor them? Guess we’ll find out soon enough:

I probably should have gone sooner because now Portugal has 4 armies to my 3 damn it. But I felt like I needed a 3rd ship to carry a 3rd army.

I bee-lined research to get military harbors to build a 3rd sloop so I could land all three armies at the same time, seemed like the only way I stood a chance. We’re almost there too:

Here’s hoping Spain is feeling a tad suicidal or feels the quality and mix of their army favors them.

Made another call that’s somewhat questionable. Instead of building a military harbor, I sat on my hands for the better part of a year accumulating the gold and population needed to complete the quest ruler of the seas. It just didn’t seem right for anyone else other than Great Britain to get this. And Spain sadly had moved off the Portugal border, so the delay didn’t seem like it mattered.

The reward was just too enticing not to go for it despite the delay it introduced:

One nice diplomatic development while we waited was a defensive alliance offer from Spain we accepted. If we can’t get their help invading Portugal at least for 12 turns we can keep them safely out of our hair:

We’re in final stages of prep for our Portugal invasion Nov 1792:

My main concern besides being outnumbered is their melee units closing in on my line infantry and mobbing them. My guess is we’re going to take more casualties than we should due to Great Britain’s lack of a melee unit.

While navigating the reinforcements closer to the front we closed out 1792:

The time is finally upon us for our first engagement in earnest. Now we find out what tactical battles are like in this game:

Ooof. There’s no pause and issue commands in this one. Not being particularly great at RTS, things get messy quickly. I lose 2/3’s of my forces in two successive engagements (no option to pull in reinforcements from offshore):

The good news, I won both. Bad news, bit of a Pyrrhic victory as I’ve now got 3 armies whittled down to 1/3 their original strength. I couldn’t tell which units had the commander in them so I couldn’t take special care to keep them alive, fortunately all 3 survived anyway. You’d think there would be some special designation for that?!

Next I moved the reinforcements offshore to engage the garrison and begin siege of their capital (turned out there was only one unit in the garrison, we made quick work of them:

June 1793
The siege counter starts at 13%. If I had more units I could make quicker work of this, but since I don’t I’m guessing this will take the rest of the year to complete. So be it, there’s no army opposing me now so it’s just a question of time as long as we don’t get a rebellion.

Great Britain has made landfall on the European continent! I anticipate a change in diplomatic relations with Spain in the near future.

@easytarget are you doing anything special to run this? Well it runs ok for me but if I alt-tab out I can not get back in to it at all, which is a dealbreaker.

Edit: I’ve played around with compatibility settings but no dice.

I’ve run it a couple ways.

If you want to maximize the size you just run it at the max allowable in the game settings, which randomly enough is 1600x1200. And then pop open the nvidia control panel under “adjust desktop size and position” and select Full-Screen.

I suspect though what you’re after is what I’m using to make the AAR which is the window’d version. To get that to work just navigate to the steam install folder for the game and open up config.sb, the first setting you’ll come across is for FULLSCREEN, it defaults to true, just set it to false and save.

And you’re right, if you run the game w/o the above adjustment alt-tab craters the game.

I remember liking aspects of this game a lot back in the day but the lack of pause and give orders kind of killed it for me.

Yeah, the lack of pause does make it more challenging. I’ve decided my strategy to overcome that is to focus on economics as much as possible so as to fund either more armies and/or better quality armies.

And then just proceed to lose a decent chunk of them in battle and see where it gets me, haha.

I got to say, so far though I’m quite enjoying this one.

Thanks I was after the first fix you mentioned. Unfortunately it still doesn’t work. Hmm…

Yeah, running window mode where you set it to false for fullscreen is the only way to get the alt-tab to work as far as I can make out.

I’ve basically got it running as just one of many windows on the desktop in this mode and it works fine.

Sorry to hear no worky on your end.

Ok thanks. Yes I can get it going in windowed mode. Thanks for the help.

I had only just bought this last week - I did play it when it was released - so your AAR is most timely!

July 1793

Training camps completed. This is near the end of the research tree for the first era and matters because all officers are promoted to Colonels allowing them to lead 4 units rather than just 3.

Every engagement has a limitation of 3 armies per side so this means for as long as we’ve got this upgrade and other nations don’t we’re fielding 12 units against their 9!

It pays to stay out in front on research!

As predicted it did in fact take us the rest of the year to siege down Portugal, we did see the benefit in the points total end of year:

The first thing that catches my eye now that I have control of Portugal is it gives me visibility to Morocco. I ran a sloop over there to see if that would give me visibility and it did not. I’m guessing then you need a border to establish this.

As you can see everyone is pretty even on sympathy. I’m going to build a consulate and test out soft power annexation. Because as I’ve just discovered in conquering Portugal by force every single development burns to the ground and forces you to rebuild from scratch. Not to mention I lost 2/3’s of my army doing it.

What if instead you spend some money and population (it’s 1,000 so it’s not nothing) to build a consulate in a diplomatic equivalent of a fire and forget and circle back in 6 months and see how easy it is to simply annex a minor nation?!

So what prompted this? Well, my keeping an eye on what those dastardly French are up to. And here’s what caught my eye:

The competing major powers are making use of consulates on minors in what I expect will surely lead to an annexation. In fact France is at 100% in Hanover so I assume it’s only a question of a month or so before they make it part of France.

Great Britain needs in on this game!

Oct 1794

France completes their Hanover cultural annexation:

And if that weren’t bad enough they’re working now on Batavia:

Britain decides to go all in on this and begins focusing research on buildings that when built in a target country increase sympathy:

The glory point summary tells the tale, France is getting away from us a bit with this peaceful annexation business:

The only good news in the last year is Prussia decided they weren’t any crazier about France grabbing Hanover than we were and they invaded!

Now France promptly brought armies in and decimated the Prussian forces. But it’s still a nice distraction and the Prussians during the course of 1795 did it a couple more times. Lovely to see because it whittled down French forces that were well beyond Britain’s qualitatively and quantitatively. When combined with our diplomatic relations tanking with France it eased our minds a bit someone other than us took’em down a peg.

As we close out 1795 the French are reveling in the glory of peacefully annexing two territories:

Which begs the question, what exactly have the British been doing for the last year or so. And the answer not surprisingly is figuring out how this whole cultural influence thing works with a test case. And while not economically important, Morocco is off the coast of Portugal and for some reason the French took a fancy to the place and really drilled into trying to annex it at the same time we were.

So, we leaned in, hard:

This was March 1796. And we’ve now committed a lot of money and manpower into peacefully taking this place. We built 3 buildings to accomplish it, the French formed repeated alliances with them and some trade, so it was cheap for them to hassle us over it.

Just before July when we finally succeed the French pushed their sympathy to 96% and we pushed even harder to seal the deal and threw 1,000 gold at the Moroccans thru “improve relations” and closed the deal:

Lessons learned: While it’s nice annexing a country and not being forced to rebuild everything, it’s definitely not cheap, not quick, and can be easily harassed by another major (which we’ll need to do more of in the future).

We did get 14 units of what I’ll generously refer to as militia trash. ;) But hey, you can always zerg a neighbor potentially with them. Plus we have 6 buildings we don’t have to build again.

The British command must now contemplate what is being called the Spanish question: Hug them with love or squeeze the life out of them?

We’ve tried both and there’s something to be said for each, perhaps we’ll choose both at the same time!:

End of year 1796

We’ve closed the gap a bit on the French with the annexation of Morocco. Gains in territories conquered, a little in military power and some from economic power.

But the devilishly clever plan I concocted previously about simultaneously annexing Spain peacefully and annexing Tunisia militarily hit an immediate snag:

Turns out Tunisia is currently in an alliance with Spain. Start a war with one and you’ve started a war with both.

Looks like we’ll need to bide our time, alliances have a way of ending. We’ll keep checking the news for it ending. Meanwhile we’ve added a newspaper office to Spain to increase sympathy to Britain.

While waiting out a diplomatic change we decided better intelligence on Europe would be nice and despite being unclear what exactly a Department of Information did, we built it and completed it July 1797 to find out:

Turns out to be pretty handy and probably something we should have built when it was first available. We now have eyes on much of Europe. Not Russia yet.

We close out 1797 in the lead, not based on anything Britain did but because France lost units in an ongoing war with Prussia:

Meh, we’ll take it! Meanwhile the alliance between Spain and Tunisia still hasn’t ended, sigh.

But the waiting game finally ends October 1798 when the alliance between Spain and Tunisia ends. We immediately send a defensive alliance offer to Spain, which for 500 in gold they’re willing to accept.

Tunisia has built up an army while we stalled, we’ll need to pull in reinforcements to help take’em on:

Not much changes for glory points for 1798:

To close out this report, we’ll finish where we began. With plans that initially looked like they immediately fell apart due to diplomatic issues, but waiting allowed this to sort itself out so we could pursue the original plan:

The Tunisia invasion was yet another test. This time of the auto resolve. We took the Morocco troops in and auto’d against the Tunisia troops and suffered more casualties than they did. Due partly to their quality, but I suspect also due to auto not being as friendly to the player as manual. We got the job done with the British troops brought in to the finish the job.

Tunisia falls Sept 1799:

Plus diplomatically we’re close to peacefully annexing Spain:

Glory points total closing out 1799:

Once again it took a lot longer than anticipated, in the end the Spanish could not resist the British love-fest and agree Nov 1800 to join the empire:

Great Britain sees a decent bump on glory points as we close out the century:

We thought the bump would be greater but while we’re grabbing relatively low value territory south the French are peacefully annexing more high value territory:

And just as problematic given we’ve been focused on keeping a research lead the French are hanging with us:

The forces that make short work of Tunisia do the same to Tripoli:

And we next weigh whether to embroil the empire in a war with Austria as that’s the price for taking Egypt currently as their allies:

Strategically the issue we’re facing is the independents are dwindling fast. They’ve either been invaded or peacefully annexed by the French and British. We’re now fast approaching what seems like inevitable conflict between the two empires.

If that’s inevitable perhaps the better option is to culturally sway Egypt to our side if we can and to begin the arduously slow process of moving naval units to cut off France and prep for a land invasion thru Spain.

Plus try and stay out of a war with Prussia and Austria. So after wasting some time getting forces ready for an Egyptian invasion we’ve decided on this new path. War with France.

Here’s a bit of diplomatic weirdness I just noticed. No doubt as a result of the minors getting gobbled up, everyone has partner’d up:

The sort of thing that would put a smile on Bismark’s face. Start a war with anyone and shortly everyone is involved.

And the French must have a decent spy network or it’s simply that moving troops into position for a war is pretty obvious to everyone what’s going on. We move forces into place, they respond in kind:

They’ve been busy again using soft power to annex and it shows in the latest glory points report for 1801:

April 1802, force build up by both sides continues:

We’ve got some soft power in play of our own and end of 1802 we annex Denmark which pulls us back even with France on Glory points and opens a 2nd front potential:

We both eye each other in continuing preparation for war. Great Britain has pulled away a bit on research points from France and we’ve put it to use. We completed a research that promoted all Colonels in the field to Generals. This means each commander can now field 5 units in an army. It’s doubtful France will complete this before we enter a war with them.

Plus we finally made it to military hospitals in the research tree. And this means finally gaining the ability to heal troops back to full strength!

France may have numerical advantage in military units, but we’re hopeful quality and healing will overcome that when we get down to it.

It would be nice if Prussia or Austria went to war with France as that would pull them in too many directions to handle. But right now the quirky situation with diplomacy has everyone just sitting on their hands staring at each.

We’ll see if that changes and time the offensive accordingly, at the very least we’d like to time it such that France isn’t allied with anyone when we commence.

This is a bit shorter update as I’ve found myself in what I’d describe as a bit of conundrum. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a soft lock, it does give me the impression a military solution to France is going to prove hard to come by.

So let me explain.

Austria is a sprawling empire to our east:

And they’ve just a quest in Oct 1803 that effectively upgrades and heals their entire army:

And then there’s France, the empire I’ve been preparing for war with, only they’ve not just been idly standing by waiting to be invaded:

It doesn’t look to me like the math works. And while this could be finagled a bit through diplomacy it’s trickier than it might sound. Every time alliances expire every 12 months everyone left on the map (Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and Great Britain) immediately the next turn renew alliances.

It turns into a game of musical chairs. And if anyone opts out of the game they get declared on by a 3 nation alliance (mix and match). I tried isolating France by allying with Austria, but all that happened is France allied with Prussia and Russia.

We’re in a bit of a diplomatic zugzwang.

So, closing out 1803 I’m mulling over my next move: