Waterloo Wargame Feedback

[waterloo3d]

Let me first start with the genesis of Waterloo 3D.
I have been an avid wargamer and a voracious reader. My favourite Napoleonic campaign is the Hundred Days Campaign. So many what-ifs!
Throughout the past 15 years I have played very many Napoleonic wargames and have come away with an ashen taste in my mouth.
i won't name any games in specific but when Chasseurs a Cheval bring down a farmhouse solely with the fire of their pop gun carbines, I knew I had had enough.
My technical background is in mathematical modelling and design of complex systems. I have a fair bit of background in programming and hardware design. I took the plunge and Plus Infinity Studios was born about a year and half ago.
We have a team of 20 programmers, artists, animators, designers and translators working on Waterloo 3D.
From the outset, I have set the following goals for Waterloo 3D:
*Authentic Napoleonic game tactics. The game will reward players who use proper Napoleonic style tactics. I will write a detailed post on this later.
*A solid repertoire of authentic Napoleonic formations : line, column left in front, column right in front, open column, attack column, skirmish line and square.
*Varying difficulty settings so that newbie gamers are not scared away. At the same time no mickey-mouse RTS game mechanics. The AI will never cheat.
*No hex tiles. Gosh, no! A fully 3D camera and a terrain modelled from satellite data of the battlefield (Yes, we removed the Lion Mound in the game.)
*A game that is rendered on a modern AAA quality 3D engine to exhibit the pomp and pageantry of the colourful Napoleonic uniforms. We are using Unreal's UE4 engine with lots of our own custom code.
Unreal's stock engine code is not capable of animating more than a few hundreds of animated skeletal meshes at a time. We developed a custom module called HISC ( Hardware Instanced Skeletal Mesh Code) to animate and move more than thirty thousand units at the same time and still get a decent frame rate after all the graphics settings are maximised.