Opponent for Waterloo 007

[Philippe]

A few years back I started messing around with making a mod for Campaign Eckmuhl. I became obsessed with accuracy, and ended up creating an elaborate Units.bmp that was about twice as long as the plain vanilla version. I also ended up rewriting all of the Eckmuhl OOB files, correcting and cleaning up the spelling of names and what have you.

I eventually realized that if I ever published that monster I would be condemned to re-making the mod (as in going through all of the oob files line by line) every time a patch got issued. And after some beating over the head by Bill Peters it finally began to sink in that no one, myself included, would ever really know what was in that scenario if they came on it cold.

So that is why I eventually abandoned hand-tailored scenarios and decided to stick to a style of modding that only changes the graphics. And I'm a bit reluctant to download (and especially to install) any scenario that messes with the internal mechanics of the game, even though there's a lot that goes on in the plain vanilla engine that I don't happen to agree with.

I remember the experience of pulling PTW out of the shrink wrap when I got it home from J&R many, many moons ago. I was especially excited when I started reading the program notes by an English historian who was talking about things in his discussion of Napoleon's return that I had never seen discussed before, e.g. Napoleon manipulating France's credit with the German bankers by the way in which he issued bills of exchange (or were they promissory notes -- like the lamented Nora Ephron I remember nothing). That particular passage really made an impression on me because at the time I just happened to be a promissory note and bill of exchange trader, so it was pretty exciting to have an aspect of my daily life in common with something that Napoleon had done during the Hundred Days. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to a different decade in a different century, and I was trolling Napoleonic history sites one night and stumbled on a series of threads attacking a certain British historian who loved to write about the Napoleonic wars. He knew his stuff well enough, but had a medieval attitude towards fabricating evidence to support his point of view. It seems that more than ten percent of what he'd done might have been spun out of whole cloth.

I realized, of course, that this was probably the same historian who had written the shatteringly dramatic analysis of the background of the Waterloo campaign. The problem, of course, is that after you encounter an accusation like that (and it was being made by heavy weights) you then either throw up your hands in despair (which is what I did) or become a specialist yourself tracking down every nasty little detail.

So when it comes to spending increasingly scarce money on one of these games, what is it you're really spending it on? The research, of course. You go for a ride with someone you trust to at least get the basics right, and you're willing to spend real money and put up with a lot of imperfections just to be sure you're getting that one thing.

Warren, I really, really want to see your vision of a historical version of Waterloo (the battle *and* the whole campaign) made flesh in a universally acceptable way [translation -- patch material]. Is there any chance that in your spare moments when you aren't working on your other projects you could put together a watered down version of your scenarios? And it's really important to make the scenarios work with the plain vanilla version of the game, not because I'm in the process of reviving my Waterloo mod, but so that more than a handful of people will get a chance to see things the right way. And I'm specifically addressing this to you because I know the kind of meticulous research you do, and you're one of the few that I would really trust on a project like this.

There's a serious problem with Quellenforschungen here. I'm not a specalist in the period, but I get the impression that a lot of people had a lot of axes to grind in their accounts of the campaign, so you can't even wholly trust 'eyewitness' accounts, let alone secondary historians.

And whatever you do, don't mention the Prussians.