Horse and Musket: Great Battles of the 18th Century

DEVELOPER : Boku Strategy Games
PUBLISHER : Shrapnelgames.com 

 

Requirements: Win9x/NT4, 486/66 (!) w/16 meg RAM, 4 meg HDD.

Recommend: Recommended: Win98, Pentium 200 (especially at higher resolutions), 64 meg RAM, 20 megs HDD.

Ratings
Code Issues Graphics: 5 - relatively average graphics, +.5 for completeness of coverage, +.5 for having everything customizeable by the gamer = 6.0 Sound: 5 - horses, guns, marching. There's not a lot more one could do in the genre. Interface: 6 - everything accessible by buttons, full right-mouse support	Play Issues Solo Play: 6.5 - basically very fun, with a couple of minor issues certain to be fixed in the next patch, AI good on defense Replay: 9 - how much more replay could you get? A complete scenario editor, absolutely everything customizeable by the designer Multiplay: 8 - with a human on the other side, you wouldn't get away with as much Learning Curve: 6 - if you know the period, pretty simple to learn
Other/Notes Documentation: 6 - extensive scenario notes, good background documentation Notes: +.5 overall for being the only game of its kind, covering a forgotten era. +.1 overall for being a one-man project, +.1 for small footprint (17 meg) and no CD required to run Pros: Simply a very fun game of a period underrepresented in the computer wargame community. Cons: limited AI, command radii too effective in certain ways. The game as tested was run with patch 1.1 available. Another patch should be released shortly. Overall: 7.4

Certainly we know names like Verdun, Iwo Jima, Gettysburgh, and Stalingrad. Many of us may also know Austerlitz, Borodino, and Marengo. But what about Oudenarde? Ramilles? Poltava? The history of warfare before the Napoleonic Wars seems to have largely fallen off our radar, so to speak. The people who know anything about 18th Century warfare are relatively scarce. The people who game it are a positive rarity. Despite this, Horse and Musket was a product demanded by the consumers. After the acclaimed Dragoon (representing the battles of Frederick the Great), the wargaming public literally bombarded David Erickson (Boku) with requests for a sequel. Working from this base, Mr. Erickson has produced a game that should awaken many to the pleasures of wargaming 18th Century battles.

Warfare in the era was a matter of linear tactics. It wasn't a great step from the pike & shot armies of the 30-Years' War to the ranks of fusiliers at Malplaquet, so troops were relatively unwieldy and required a great deal of skill in their application.

This skill is exactly what you will need to win at Horse and Musket. Long battle lines are the order of the day - if you prefer your melee chaotic and your battles hit & run, you will be sorely frustrated. (And if you insist on employing such tactics, you'll usually lose!) Patience, whether to watch an attack develop or to manage the rallying of the stream of routed units there from, is crucial. In that sense, battles of the era are much more like chess - mechanical, yes. Predictable, not at all.

Horse and Musket uses a relatively simple system to great effect. Units are capable of two formations - line and column. Column is for moving, line is for fighting. Try to move a lot in line and your units will accumulate disorder, rendering them less effective (sometimes seriously so) until they spend valuable movement points reorganizing. Try to fight in column (the French attack columns at Valmy are not to occur for decades) and you will have a lot of dead soldiers. Square is also possible, but is only a formation of last-resort for isolated infantry attacked by cavalry. Boku is a firm believer that this formation was purely for emergency purposes, and thus you have to rely on the AI to implement it when you have a threatened unit. Once in square, there is a bug that sometimes prevents you from un-forming, hopefully to be fixed in the next patch. But this is not a frequent occurrence.

Cavalry units have the ability to charge at the end of their move - but it's a dangerous tactic against well organized, high morale troops. Typically, you want several turns of preparatory artillery fire and infantry fire to soften the target before charging. Commanders are defined by the command radius (their subunits which start a turn outside of this radius are not able to move, making managing this one of the key points of the game), and command rating - basically the number of times they can rally troops within their radius. Big battles are also enabled, as corps commanders are also in the game extending a general's 'reach' significantly to far-flung wings of the battlefield. (Note: as we all know, 'corps' didn't formally exist until after this period, but nonetheless, divisional and wing actions were not uncommon in the period, so 'corps' commander is more consistent term for most folks.)

One of the most interesting features of H&M is the initiative movement system. Instead of the simplistic "side one moves, side one fires" followed by "side two moves and fires", H&M commanders have an imitative rating that determines where they act in the turn, *independently* of the side they are on. As the turn progresses, commanders with the highest initiative move first or are also allowed to defer action until later, if the player chooses. Commanders outside of their overall commander are allowed to try to activate in their turn, but have a chance of failure.

So the games inevitably end up a dramatic seesaw, as leaders across the field activate, deploy, and fight while the player desperately measures the chances of getting that crucial activation and being able to hurl units into the enemy's weak point. The scenarios are designed to support this, carefully tested and balanced to make them as close as possible. More interestingly, H&M continues Dragoon's neat feature of taking 'slices' from larger battles and simulating these important parts of the battles in higher detail, such as the Prussian right wing in intense combat at Gross-Jagersdorf. More than 20 individual scenarios are included, from the Great Northern War (Sweden vs. Russia, 1700-1721) to the war of the American Revolution. I liked especially that David used some editorial judgment, and instead of including every OOB'd unit in the area for a battle, he has wisely omitted units that due to incompetence or other reason played no part in the battle. And, if these scenarios aren't enough, Boku has included a fantastic scenario editor. Everything is customizable, from the in-game music to the various units, to even the casualty sprites for these units! The only thing I would have added would be an (optional) victory point value for leaders killed. It's hard indeed to be winning as the British at Brandywine, and have killed George Washington, only to be handed a "draw" since you have the same number of victory locations held. I think the loss of Washington (or similarly Marlborough at Malplaquet, or Tsar Peter I at Poltava) would have given the win to the other side, almost regardless of other outcome. Aside from this, almost anything is possible, and the editor is stable - a notable exception to some of the games I've reviewed.

That's not to say there aren't some things that couldn't be fixed - I'm a reviewer, not a marketer. The first thing the player notices is that the graphics are, well, not spectacular. The game runs in 24 bit color, so it's possible graphically to have beautiful units (ala Sid Meier's Antietam!) - and in fact some of the work on the flags is particularly striking (such as the flag of a Hessian unit in British service). At some point, however, recognition must be made that Boku is a one-man operation, working at this as a labor of love. (If you doubt this, check out the sales figures for such a broad-market major company success as Talonsoft's West Front; nobody is serving the hardcore wargamer market to get rich!) Therefore, the unit icons are in one resolution only, and get severely jaggy as you zoom in. But graphics aren't really the point.

Less excusable is the implementation of command radii, specifically that enemy units seem to have no effect on same. So it's possible (and has happened to me) that you have the enemy in a confused mess of a melee. You surround (mostly) and trash several of his best units, which promptly run out of the battle the only open avenue - toward your edge of the board (i.e. behind your lines, through a gap). Unfortunately, he has a general with a good command radius, and he can rally these troops and within about 2 turns, have them slamming into your line from behind. But this is a relatively uncommon occurrence, and against a human you can just agree not to do such things.

Other quirks include units occasionally rallying after engaging in combat - the human can't do that; and severely routed formations still managing to rally when their commander appears to have 0 rally points. But these are all just warts, probably on the "to be fixed list", and none detract substantially from the entertainment value of the game. The interface is good, with clear iconized buttons for every function. Right clicks bring up unit or terrain info. Double clicks would be nice in the unit selection dialog box, as would a "all units us remaining MP to reduce disruption" button, but maybe that is asking too much.

Solo gameplay is basically fun, but even the manual acknowledges (in the design section) that the AI is not stellar on offense. In setpiece defenses, the AI allocates fire very well, but an aggressive or unorthodox attack will throw it into a bit of a tizzy. The answer of course is to play against a human, something Boku has admirably anticipated with live TCP/IP play (yay, no email turns!) and hotseat also supported. I personally love playing humans, and will always do so when the opportunity presents itself - no AI is as devious, scheming, or downright difficult as a human, nor is any AI as satisfying to beat (nor can the AI buy you a beer after a humiliating defeat).

The game's an easy one to learn, although a tutorial would have been nice for those unfamiliar with the system. Sometimes you have to be careful, there are so many options settable by the player that mis-setting them can cause a great deal of confusion (of course at the worst time).

The manual is complete and concise, explaining the details of how units move and fire, movement effects, and the consequences of lost leaders (albeit limited, see above).

Horse and Musket is a worthy addition to any serious wargamer's library. It's educational and it's quite fun. Like the requisite Napoleonics wargame and Civil War wargame that are library prerequisites of the 'serious' military gamer, I hope H&M becomes the same for its time.

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Reviewed by Steve Lieb