Crown of Glory

We know it��s been just three months since we last played a turn-based historical war game, but as part of our continuing effort to woo the rest of Bill Trotter��s former readers away from PC Gamer, we��re playing another one this month, Crown of Glory. In the 1805 scenario, Bruce is playing as France, Tom is playing as Russia, and everyone else is the A.I. The first player to amass 1,000 glory wins.

1805

Tom: You might have thought that Napoleonics is the study of short people. So imagine your embarrassment when Bruce suggests a Napoleonics game and you call dibs on the hobbits, or the Oompa Loompas if Electronic Arts has an exclusive deal with the hobbit franchise. Imagine, then, your disappointment upon discovering that Napoleonics is actually the study of men who wear bad hats and line up in neat formations to shoot at each other. I��m not necessarily saying this happened to me. But I do want to make it clear that a lesser magazine would take this opportunity to make all sorts of jokes about Bruce being a cheese-eating surrender monkey because he��s playing as France. I like to think we��re above that sort of thing.

Bruce: Crown of Glory is a war game about the Napoleonic era, with a complex strategic layer that makes Rome: Total War look like Riskus Romanus. The 1805 scenario doesn��t involve a lot of economic management since the main countries are already developed and primed for war. However, Crown of Glory��s two-player game has some serious issues that Tom and I will have to fight through. Pun totally intended.

There are two key stats in this game: national morale and glory. These come from fighting battles, surrendering, controlling designated ��political goal�� provinces, and having avant-garde plays and poetry readings, which are represented by your culture score. A game that glorifies intellectual foppery��that has to be a first.

Tom: The best parts of Crown of Glory play a bit like Frog City��s Imperialism games. Unfortunately, these same parts also play a bit like Quicksilver��s Master of Orion III. Welcome to the sometimes cool/usually stupid strategic layer! While we��re doing some nifty 19th-century wheeling and dealing to lay a latticework of diplomatic interactions over Europe, we also have to futz with inscrutable slider bars and wonder why we have so many textiles sitting around in our warehouses. No joke. This game has textiles like you wouldn��t believe. Need a bolt of cloth? Come on down to Crown of Glory!

Bruce: Remember how I said the two-player game has some issues? One of them is the totally goofy A.I. To wit: Since the A.I. controls Prussia, offering the Prussians ��free passage�� through my territories is enough to get them to declare war on Russia��a completely idiotic move, especially considering that free passage through my territories is totally useless to them. But in exchange for nonexclusive vacation rights in Languedoc (which is also a kind of cheese), the Prussians are totally willing to freeze their asses off in Russia. Sounds good to me!

While my diplomats are engaged in these machinations, I need to get my war machine in motion. At the beginning of the game, France is the only nation that can move corps independently, which is a serious historical simulation of Napoleon being, like, a total genius. I need to redeploy my troops to the south and whip the Austrians before they can link up with the reinforcements that Tom will eventually send from Mother Russia.

Tom: You know how someone in Battlefield 2 will rush ahead in a dune buggy instead of waiting for his teammates to get in with him? From now on, I��m going to call this move ��pulling an Austria,�� because that��s exactly what Austria has done. Those lone-wolfing idiots decided to have their own battle in Bavaria instead of waiting for me to link up with them, which I was totally on my way to do.

Bruce: The first big battle happens in Bavaria, with 100,000 Austrians taking on 90,000 French. We��re resolving battles by quick combat rather than in the tactical war game mode so that this game doesn��t take two years to finish. This means that, given French leadership advantages, it��s going to take a lot of Austrians to slow down my steamroller. Eight wonderful glory to the French.

Tom: I��m being attacked by some place called Prussia. If you want to find out how smart Prussia is, go look for it on a map. Go ahead, I��ll wait. Are you back yet? You couldn��t find it, could you? You know why? Because it��s gone. That��s what happens to countries clueless enough to take orders from France and attack another country that��s not even bothering them. Not that the Prussians pose any great threat to me. By prematurely building a string of depots to its destination, the A.I. does a great job of telling me exactly what it��s going to do long before it does it. So the geniuses running Prussia kindly draw the 19th-century equivalent of a neon arrow to Moscow using a line of expensive and unnecessary depots. To which I respond by easily knocking out the first one, in Grodno, rendering the rest of them useless.

1806

Bruce: Fouch�� is my spy in the east, and right now he shows a Prussian army sitting in Smolensk in the middle of a snowstorm. That can��t be good for Prussian supply. More importantly, the Austrians concentrated forward and tried moving into Switzerland. My advance guard lost a couple small battles, but the later large ones were never in doubt. I won a particularly big battle against both Austria and Russia, which gained me 32 glory.

Tom: As sure as you��ll get the message ��dumbass666 [LAW] anygivenplayer�� after dumbass666 runs off in his dune buggy in Battlefield 2, I get the following message about Austria: ��Your ally Austria has surrendered to France.��

Bruce: Peace terms are crucial here. I take the provinces of Tyrolia and Carniola, which are French political objectives and will gain me two extra glory per turn. Over a 40-turn game, that��s 80 glory. I also got the Austrians to give me 20 percent of their income for a whole year and to agree not to attack me for a few months. I actually want them to attack me again at some point, because that means I will be able to make them surrender, netting me another 120 glory. Maybe I can farm the Austrians for glory.

Tom: Now to get the Prussians to surrender. I force them into a few sizable battles and grind their armies down. Based on my decisive victories, I��ve determined that the Prussians are probably lazy, stupid, shiftless, bad at math, and unable to drive worth a damn. Since there��s no longer any such thing as a Prussian, I can safely say this without offending anyone.

Bruce: While I was taking down Austria, Britain landed an expeditionary force in Brittany and actually captured Brest! That did wonders for my national morale (-150 for a captured city). Plus, they reinforced with more troops, and with Austria out of the way, Napoleon came back and forced pretty much the whole force to surrender. It was like a rehearsal for Dunkirk, but without the part where they��re valiantly ferried across the Channel. It��s going to take Britain a long time to get those troops back because it��ll have to build divisions from scratch.

Tom: Like Richard Simmons, the Prussians are easy enough to hold back but hard to beat into submission. I just found out that they have a whole other army. Apparently, the Prussians researched ��reserves.�� So I make peace with them by paying them off. Too bad they won��t accept textiles, because I��m sitting on a ton of the stuff. I promise not to attack them for a year, which lets me convince them that they should try their luck beating up on Bruce.

Bruce: After a year as my ally, Prussia has cancelled our alliance and declared war on me, apparently at Russia��s behest (according to the treaty report). That��s actually great, because now I can invade Prussia.

1807

Bruce: When you��re playing as France, invading Prussia is trivially easy because Batavia (the Netherlands) is your protectorate. Drop a small depot chain in there and you can operate in full supply as long as you can afford it. I cranked my military readiness down a bit after defeating Austria and shutting down the British invasion, so I��ve built up a nice pile of cash. Two huge battles in Brandenburg net me almost 50 glory. A few turns besieging Berlin drops the Prussian morale enough to force a surrender. My glory is over 600.

Tom: Apparently, I managed to weaken the Prussians enough so that Bruce could quickly convince them to surrender. It��s like those times you try to open a jar of jelly that��s been sitting in the fridge. You grunt and struggle to no avail, only to have your girlfriend easily pop the lid off because you loosened it first.

Bruce: The Prussian surrender puts me in an interesting position. There are no provinces that gain me any political objectives, so I need to decide if I��m going to invade Russia. If I re-create the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, I get a protectorate where I can start my depot supply chain. That costs me a lot of points (to get Prussia to cede five provinces!), so I can��t get other things out of this, such as money or enforced peace.

Tom: Time to get me some glory. Bruce created a protectorate out of Poland, and I��m about to unprotect it. Cue the montage of battle scenes with me in the background looking noble and determined!

Bruce: Tom got the jump on me and laid siege to Warsaw. But my whole army is close by, and when the French are operating in supply, they��re very tough. I taught two Russian armies the dangers of exporting Pan-Slavism west of the Dvina. Fourteen glory to me, and I��m on the road to Moscow.

Tom: Cue the montage of retreat scenes with me in the background looking surprised and baffled!

Bruce: Here is where Crown of Glory isn��t such a good Napoleonic war game: If you can just sit in an enemy��s capital, you can pretty much force him to surrender. Not to get all preachy-preach History Man on your asses, but Napoleon sat in Moscow for a month and it did him less good than Terrell Owens�� holdout. In this game, as long as you occupy the enemy capital, morale will plummet and the czar will eventually agree to pay TO whatever he wants.

Tom: My national morale is at -300, but I��m not terribly concerned with approval ratings. Let them eat borscht. I��m busy beating up on the French.

Bruce: I spend three months in Moscow watching my army melt away as Tom��s Cossacks very effectively break down my supply chain. However, he can��t manage to win a decisive battle, and his morale ends up just giving out.

1808

Tom: Bruce has forced me to surrender by basically camping his troops in Moscow while I run around and actually win battles. Who knew bivouacking was more important than actually fighting? It seems that Spain and Turkey are also really good at bivouacking, because they both have more glory than me. I hereby dub this game Nightcap of Glory.

The problem here is that you really have to cooperate to defeat France, which is something Europe doesn��t do well when it��s run by half-baked A.I., much less actual European leaders. So Bruce got to play the A.I. like the war-gaming puppet master that he is while I lurked harmlessly on the eastern edge of the map and tussled with Prussians.

Bruce: Actually, supply is (or was) probably the single most important consideration in Napoleonic combat. The problem is that this game doesn��t penalize you enough for being way, way out of supply like my troops were in Russia. Napoleon��s army disintegrated in less than a month after he left Moscow, but I��ve happily sat here for several turns with no depots, defeating every Russian army that tries to dislodge me.

Tom: Bruce is within spitting distance of the win and there are Austrians amassing for an attack, which will be followed by their surrender, which will handily tip Bruce over 1,000 glory. How can I get the A.I. to not attack? I need to quickly research the United Nations and pass a resolution for the Austrians to chill the f*** out. Unfortunately, Crown of Glory��s economics are mainly about stockpiling textiles.

Bruce: Austria hates me. Austria wants war. In fact, Austria wants war so much that it gave me a casus belli by loading all of its army into adjacent territories. This gives me an excuse to declare war with no glory loss. Here we go again! I swing my two main armies south from Flanders and force three big battles this turn. I win all three. Tom is in the unfortunate position of watching the A.I. give the game away to me.

Tom: One of the recurring problems in Tom vs. Bruce articles is that anytime we want some sort of multilateral gaming experience, either Erik Wolpaw comes in and writes stuff much funnier than ours or the A.I. serves as a spoiler. And when you consider how horrible Crown of Glory��s strategic A.I. is, I don��t consider this a loss for me so much as a win for bad A.I.

Bruce: The second Austrian surrender takes me to well over 900 glory, and a few more turns of doing nothing but collecting points for stuff that doesn��t require me to do anything will put me over the top.

Tom: The pi��ce de r��sistance here��note that I��m having to use little Frenchisms now that Napoleon Geryk has pretty much conquered the world��is that the denouement of this mise-en-sc��ne wasn��t due to Bruce��s superior esprit de corps. Mais non! Instead, the coup de grace was simply the bonne chance of the pomme de terre A.I., tromping le monde in a veritable cirque du soleil of je ne c��est pas. Que est ce que c��est. At any rate, the cheese-eating surrender monkey wins. C��est la guerre.

Last Month...

We discovered there��s someone even worse than Ryan Scott at flying helicopters in Battlefield 2. Who? That would be Bruce.

France wins in May 1808. Due to all that cheese eating, Tom and Bruce battle a severe bout of lactose intolerance.

PUBLISHER: Matrix Games DEVELOPER: Western Civilization Software GENRE: Strategy

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.