It may be something of an understatement to say that the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon had a lot of battles in them. It also goes without saying that Shadow of the Eagles cannot put you in every single one of them.
Some of this is because of sheer physical impossibility: there’s no way a human being is going to be able to fight Ligny and Quatre-Bras at the same time because they happened on the same day (ask d’Erlon what happens when you do try to fight both battles at once). In other cases, it’s because I want to represent the player character as a human being and a soldier who actually existed during this tumultuous era. This means for every campaign, I place the player character in a particular unit, within a particular command. For example, as a junior officer in the First Italian Campaign, you’ll begin assigned to Masséna’s division of the Army of Italy. While there will be opportunities to transfer or be assigned to alternate duties for the sake of variety and player choice, most of the battles the player character fights will be the one Massena’s division fought historically.
How I choose which division to put the player character in is mostly a personal judgement of which units had the most interesting stories during a given campaign. Masséna’s division opened the First Italian Campaign at Montenotte, it fought at almost all of the “great battles” of the subsequent year, including Lodi, Castiglione, and Rivoli. It gives the player a chance to see a lot of action (contrast say, Sérurier’s division, which spent most of the campaign getting malaria besieging Mantua). This gives me a middle ground between historical authenticity and giving players an interesting game. You get to fight a lot of battles, but the list of battles you fight would be a plausible one for any actual soldier of that particular army on that particular campaign.
Of course, the player won’t always be a junior officer. Although I don’t expect players to hit really high ranks on their first playthrough (assuming they even survive), I do plan to eventually give particularly skilled or lucky player characters the chance to rise to the rank of General of Division, and appointment as Marshal of the Empire as early as Act 4 (which starts at Napoleon’s coronation and the establishment of the Marshalate in 1804). This means that eventually, they may no longer be assigned to a historical senior officer’s command, but be “attached” to a command themselves, effectively displacing a historical general officer or Marshal in their historical role. For example, a General of Division or General of Brigade may take the place of Saint-Hilaire at Austerlitz, counterattacking up the Pratzen Heights alongside the foul-mouthed, larcenous, endlessly aggressive Vandamme. That means they’ll spend the Ulm-Austerlitz campaign under Marshal Soult’s IV Corps.
There’ll also be variations based on rank and branch. For example. A player who’s chosen the cavalry at the start might storm the bridge at Klausen alongside General Dumas (a cavalry action), while an infantry officer might be alongside Napoleon himself as he tries to take the bridge at Arcole (a battle where the cavalry had a minimal role). Likewise, a player lucky enough to have made Marshal by 1806 might take Davout’s place, commanding III Corps at the Battle of Auerstedt, while a more junior officer might instead be fighting at the simultaneous battle of Jena, alongside the main body of the French Army.
This process is essentially the first step of planning out a battle as it appears in Shadow of the Eagles: by following the specific unit which a player character is assigned to, I can determine what battles they’re actually going to be fighting.
A good chunk of these battles (maybe 75-80%) will be what I call “minor” battles. These are the engagements that generally only show up as a footnote in any history books less exhaustive than a full campaign study. These are the ones even most enthusiasts will have barely even heard of: Mondovi, Cerea, Peschiera, and San Giorgio are a few which appear in Act 2 with the First Italian Campaign. That isn’t to say that these battles were all minor skirmishes or unimportant, merely that I only have so much time and so many resources, so these battles are often relegated to single decisions, or randomised battle events (at least, before you hit the general ranks).
The remaining battles are the ones which people remember, and these are the ones which get special attention: The Siege of Toulon and the Battle of Fleurus in Act 1. Lodi, Arcole, and Rivoli in Act 2. Shubra Khit and the Pyramids (so far) in Act 3. To this list, I will no doubt add Mount Tabor and Abukir, Austerlitz, Auerstedt, Eylau, Friedland, Borodino, Leipzig, Salamanca, and Vitoria as well. The final act will basically consist of nothing but these major battles: Quatre-Bras, Ligny, Wavre, and of course, Waterloo. I want the player to experience at least one (and preferably two) of these battles in every act in any given path, and I want to make them memorable – which is why each one is getting special attention from me, with multiple paths and multiple scenarios dependent on rank and branch and other variables.
Take, for example, the last major battle I’ve written (as of this moment, that’s the Battle of the Pyramids, which might be more accurately described as the Battle of Imbabah). The basic outline here is that Napoleon ordered the Army of the Orient to form up in large divisional squares, to weather the massed charge of the Mamluk cavalry, leading to a decisive and very lopsided French victory. Yet even a one-sided victory involves a lot of hard fighting. In particular, Desaix’s division was caught almost out of position, and had to reorganise its square quickly in the face of a sudden enemy cavalry charge. Meanwhile, on the other end of the line, Bon’s division sustained artillery fire from the town of Imbabah itself, as well as repeated Mamluk charges, before forming column and seizing the town at the very end of the battle.
In this case, the tail kind of wagged the dog. I specifically put the players in either Desaix’s division (if they are a junior officer), or Bon’s division (as a senior officer) so I could give them interesting choices for what is perhaps the most well-known battle of the Egyptian Campaign. Sometimes, I make these calls if I think it’s worth it, but I try not to do it too often. Plausibility and authenticity are important factors for me here, and I tried to make sure in turn that the assignment of the player to certain formations had consequences beyond this battle alone (for example, an officer in Desaix’s division is assigned to follow him into the Upper Egypt Campaign as well).
As for the shape of the battle itself, it gives me several points to work with. The first is that this was almost entirely an infantry fight. The Army of the Orient had landed with only a relative handful of horses, with the expectation that they would be able to acquire more in Egypt. At this point, they had mostly failed to do so. As a result, most of the cavalry was dismounted, and carrying their saddles in their packs. As a result, I have player characters in the cavalry fight as dismounted troops until they can finally mount their units in Cairo.
It also gives me some useful themes: the idea of weathering repeated charges by extremely skilled, extremely brave, foes armed with tactics from yesteryear; the terror of facing a cavalry charge, the importance of holding formation in the face of even that fear, the fact that an infantry square can defend against cavalry, but not attack or be invulnerable to artillery. All of these themes were ones I used to create little branching mini-narratives which also serve as a combination of skill checks and tactical puzzles for the players to go through. On one end of the field, the junior officers in Desaix’s division must scramble to help reorder the square as the Mamluk cavalry bears down on them. On the other end, the senior officers in Bon’s division face a similar challenge – but must also choose the right moment to break that square and go on the attack.
So, now I have two stories, telling the same battle from two different perspectives – but I also have a range of possibilities based on how lucky or skilled the player is, and the decision they make: what if a junior officer fails to reorder the square in time, and is trapped outside when the Mamluks charge home? What if a General of Brigade in Bon’s square does so well that they all-but break the enemy in front of them and see an opportunity to press the attack? Does the junior officer make it to Desaix’s square alive? Does the senior officer disobey orders and try to take Imbabah on their own initiative? These are the decision points which often determine the real character of a battle. They may not decide the final outcome, but they can still turn a hard-fought victory into a crushing one – or one in which a particular unit suffers losses more akin to that of a defeat.
And of course, the player character themselves is not immortal. The player’s decisions might win them glory, or it might get them killed, and bring their run to an end.
This is a representative example, but not necessarily a comprehensive one. I also have other ways of splitting up the paths for a battle. For example, Lodi is divided between cavalry and infantry paths, while I expect a battle like Austerlitz to have five or six paths altogether. The objective here is to provide consequences for the player’s decisions, and to make them feel at least some of what it was like to fight and survive these engagements. Even if I can’t go into the same level of detail as I might be able to if I were focusing on a single war or a single campaign, I want the player to be able to reach the end of the story, look back at the multitude of battles which they’ve fought, and have the kinds of stories which real-life Napoleonic veterans were able to tell their friends, neighbours, and families.
Even if I am only working through text, even if I am required by the limits of my resources and my time and energy to abstract some things or compress others, I want every player to know what it was like to march and fight under the shadow of the eagles.
Paul Wang 