So, I think I may have painted myself into a corner when it comes to designing battle events here. There are two really obvious answers on how I should do battles, and neither of them really work because they clash with the core design pillars.
The first obvious answer is to use some kind of tactical combat minigame, like what A Legionary’s Life does – or even like what Suzerain’s Rizia DLC does: that gives me the ability to randomise outcomes and setups by procedurally generating conditions, and the ability to scale for multiple battles simply by changing parameters like enemy statistics. It’s what I’d do if Shadow of the Eagles were a conventional RPG or even a gamebook style adventure.
The problem is, Shadow of the Eagles is neither of those things. It’s a life simulator which is intended to take you from the most junior of junior officers to Marshal of the Empire. There is no way a single tactical combat model can encompass the experience of being second in command of a company and the experience of commanding an army corps within the same ruleset. The scale is different, the considerations are different, the stakes are different. It’d I’d basically have to make up like, four different combat minigames. Even worse, it’d mean the player would have to learn four different combat minigames, and risk failing to understand one of them – and while officers getting promoted beyond their competence and screwing up at a level of command they’re not suited for is a depressingly common occurrence, it isn’t fun to experience.
So that leaves me with the second obvious answer, where I write out bespoke narrative events for each battle. That would let me tightly control the experience of fighting through each part of the story. The player would be able to have as a historically authentic and narratively satisfying experience as I can give them – just as I’ve done in my previous work. On the face, that sounds great. I’d be able to adjust for scale, difficulty, and everything else.
The main problem is that while this works for a relatively linear and fixed narrative where you’re supposed to hit certain stations of the plot at certain times (the “Delayed Branching” structure which basically serves as the foundation of anything made in Choicescript), it doesn’t work when there are too many major variables in play at any given time. If I were writing a more linear experience where the player character has to be a Colonel at Austerlitz, then I could do this, I could write Austerlitz from the perspective of a Colonel. But in a game where I have to write the same battle from the perspective of a Sous-Lieutenant, Capitaine, Chef d’Escadron, or a General de Division, then the amount of work I have to do suddenly balloons. I’m not writing one Austerliz, but four or five, and given the sheer number of battles I want to include, that’s going to mean more work than any single human could conceivably complete in one lifetime.
Another problem is the fact that having these bespoke designed battles also makes gameplay predictable. While maybe a player might not find an optimal strategy on the first or second playthroughs, they might on the third, or the fourth, or the fifth. This leads to the player making the same choices through the same content over and over again, which is not necessarily a dealbreaker – this is a problem basically every fixed-narrative game has – but it is something I want to avoid. I want Shadow of the Eagles to be open-ended, and to hand the player new challenges and new rewards every time they go through it.
So, what do I do?
I compromise, I combine, and I kludge together something which is replayable, scalable, and won’t take sixty years to finish – though not without its own drawbacks.
So, what happens when your player character goes into battle?
First of all, you’ll get a bit which summarises where you are, why you’re there, who you’re fighting, and why. In many cases, this could be as simple as more or less a summary of how the campaign you’re in has progressed since the last battle. In others, you could be treated to some special event reflecting the unique circumstances of a battle. Napoleon famously toured his army on the night before Austerlitz. Stuff like that is going in to Shadow of the Eagles for sure.
After that, there’s the battle itself. There’ll be a brief description of how the fight opens, and how it proceeds. In most circumstances, when the climax of the battle approaches, the game will randomly select a battle event which will be presented to the player, one which will give them a chance to win glory or reputation or wealth or all three, at the risk of personal injury, demoralisation, or worse.
These events will be selected from various “decks” based on the player character’s rank, branch of service, whether the historical battle was a victory or a defeat, and their progress in the campaign (you’re not going to get an event about rescuing a regiment’s Eagle before Napoleon becomes Emperor). I plan on writing about two to three hundred of these events – and given the final campaign should take you through forty to fifty battles, that means each campaign playthrough should provide different experiences at different times.
However, this approach also causes two problems, ones which I’ve tried to solve with some workarounds. The first is that randomised events work for more junior officers with smaller commands, but can risk breaking historicity when dealing with larger formations. If you’re playing a corps commander at Borodino, and you draw an event which has nothing to do with attacking fixed defences, some people are going to notice.
As a result, I plan on writing bespoke battle events for players who’ve made it to very senior ranks, at least for very major battles. This gives them the chance to feel like they are participating as a senior commander in a historically significant battle, as opposed to being an overranked version of the character they’ve been playing since 1792, dealing with the same randomised events, and making no impact on history.
In addition, there’s going to be battles which a lot of people know about: Aboukir, Marengo, Austerlitz, Eylau, Borodino, and of course, Waterloo. For these particular battles, I plan on writing more extended event trees, which both impress upon the player the significance of these battles, and give them a chance to alter or relive history in more authentic detail. Some of these event chains will be for high ranking officers: taking Davout’s place at Auerstedt – or Augereau’s at Eylau. But some of them will also be for more junior officers, based on the anecdotes of men like Marbot or Blaze.
I’m still worried that this range of events might not be enough, that the end result might still feel too generic, or too shallow. I know that compared to the in-depth battles I’ve written before, Shadow of the Eagles won’t offer quite as much detail or depth – but I also know that it’s a sacrifice I may have to be willing to make, if I want to cover the whole time period in a timely manner.
What do you think? Was this what you were hoping for? Or do you think it could be improved somehow? With full-scale development still a few months off, I have time to tweak this model, and none of this is fixed in stone quite yet.
Paul Wang 