Seleukos of Olympia

I think a Spanish campaign heavily featuring the Gulf Coast campaign in the American Revolution would be interesting too. People all too often forget that Spain wasn't perpetually in decline in that period, and their conquest of West Florida was a pretty neat feat. The scale of operations there and the combination of land and naval action could make it suitable for this game as a DLC.

The guns show up when you're given the choice to keep it, but once you do they're all gone. It does feel a bit like something nice is pettily taken away from me.

I noticed today that when you keep a prize ship you no longer get to keep its cannons. Is this working as intended or a bug?

This is a problem that I noticed in the defence of Savannah a few days ago, so I don't know whether the latest patch took care of it. After deploying my land troops, there were too many unit icons at the bottom of the screen to all show up properly. I noticed that I could scroll through them, but the initial ones for ships would disappear, as you can see in the attacked image. Out of six ships only two show up. This made it impossible for me to unload some sailors to help out when the battle wasn't going too well. At another instance, when I refought that battle and could select one of the other ships, its icon was underneath the ship's crew information, so I couldn't select its row boat. I suppose this wouldn't be a problem for higher resolution screens (mine is 1366x768) but, then again, with enough units it might.

I've been having a blast with this game, but there's one thing that's always had me scratching my head. Is there a point to having marines, apart from flavour? The appear to have a bit more morale than fusiliers and a bit less melee, but there's no other apparent difference. Are they any better at boarding operations? Is there some hidden bonus?

I agree about diversity of playable options being a good thing. I'm just pointing out that in a character-centric game it's better to discuss possible admirals than possible nations. Latouche-Tréville looks like a good option - a contemporary of the existing two but representing France, with a career spanning multiple wars with lots of documented battles. Who would represent Spain in the same way? (I don't mean this negatively in any way. My knowledge of naval history of that time is rudimentary.)

The historical setup of this game appears to be character-centric - that is, it follows the careers of two particular naval heroes, one British (Nelson) and one American (John Paul Jones). Since the latter didn't only fight for the US I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some Russo-Ottoman action in the later part of his career. Which particular Spanish or French naval heroes would you like to play as, that would afford a similarly exciting game as the other two? That's the question we should be discussing, unlike whether all of the Spanish Empire can be included.

This looks great! I have a question about the Spanish flag in the screenshots, though. This looks like 1780 and it's my understanding that the red-yellow-red flag was only adopted in 1785.

Even on Brigadier General, when I was playing as the Union the Confederates had so many Tyler Texas that I would equip several brigades from the ones I got as loot.

Some large battles give you the option of visiting the camp between stages, and there you can add green recruits to your brigades, assuming that you have enough manpower. I've only tried it once, in Cold Harbor as the Union, but what I noticed was that in the next stage those brigades that had received reinforcements had their losses reset to zero, and that carried over to the statistics at the end of the battle. It was only a minor annoyance for me, but I'm worried that it can function as an exploit, for battles where you have to lose no more than a certain percentage of your army for some victory conditions.

The problem with expanding the scope of the game to allow battles anywhere is that it would require either procedurally generated battlefields or the painstacking drawing of all possible battlefields. The first approach would require a big change in the graphical design of the game and a different approach to programming it than they have now, while the second would (I imagine) be prohibitively time-consuming. I agree though, it would be pretty neat.

Support for more than two players in certain battles would be a fun addition. Shiloh, for instance, starts out with two parts of the battlefield fought out in separate actions with about equally sized armies. Those could be fought simultaneously by two players on each side, who continue to command their initial units once the map is expanded and the two sections are linked.

Thanks for the reply, in any case.

Surrendering units would be a most welcome addition. It could be as simple as determining whether a shattered unit's immediate line of retreat is blocked, and if so having them surrender. The top review on Steam right now (not mine) focuses a lot of rage on the facet of retreating units slipping through the player's lines and then regrouping behind them. Of course, I don't know what kind of programming is involved for this, but it seems simpler than most other suggestions. I'd also welcome some moddability, as an old RTW modder, but would not insist on it.

The thing is, though, we've ran four Windows-Linux tests, and all four times the game got disconnected after about a minute (we didn't think to time it), while out of three Windows-Windows games I've played this only happened once, when the battle was nearly over. Unless the server is affected by distance. I live in north-west Canada and my Windows-using friend lives in Maryland while my Linux-using friend lives in Crete. My Linux-using friend got this message from Skype's shell after our last attempt: Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-close.c: 811: _dl_close: Assertion `map->l_init_called' failed! At least he's not having any trouble running it in SP mode. It's a real gem of a game, by the way. It makes me uncomfortable to see how I've only focused on one of its problems so far, when I'm so excited about it.

I've also played it in MP mode with another friend, who runs it on Windows, with (mostly) no problem. Although, our last battle seemed to abruptly end in overtime, proclaiming us both winners even though I had the most victory points (as the Confederates I had taken the Union positions in 'Ewell Advances', but had gotten careless with my rear and some of his regrouping units had slipped through my lines and taken my HQ. I was in the process of recapturing it when the game ended).

I tried playing a couple of multiplayer battles on Windows, with a friend of mine who runs it on Linux, and in both cases (I was hosting in the first case, he was hosting in the second one) the battle abruptly ended after about a minute, proclaiming me the winner. Is this a known cross-platform issue, or do you think there's something more specialized at fault? We both bought the game within the past ten days, so we're both running the latest version.

How about the Siege of Sevastopol, in the Crimean War? It could be broken down into segments corresponding to its actual battles (lasting several months, rather than a few days), with various strategic alternatives for the player; or the focus could be on just one of those. This is the scene of the Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade; it's close enough to the ACW that technology shouldn't be drastically different (1854-1855), it's famous enough that we have a wealth of information on it, the units involved, and their geographical goals, and it's even somewhat topical due to the unfortunate recent events in Ukraine.