Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

It is against the law to openly post a copy of any computer product on a website without permission of the owning person or company/organization. This includes Battleground/Matrix games that can be installed or those by HPS.

I am noting that one club has downloads of our games. I am hoping that this club will refrain from posting entire BG or HPS products on our site (and that goes for LG-HW too or any other product).

The Eckmuhl game was one of the first to be ripped off. I am not talking about modules that guys made. I am talking about the entire game, available to be downloaded from a website and then installed to a hard drive. A bogus installer was created and the game engine was compromised.

I am sorry that some of you live in Eastern European (or otherwise) where obtaining our games is difficult (due to banking conditions, etc) but that doesn't excuse you to steal computer products. How would you like to work and have your pay check given to someone else? I doubt if you would enjoy that.

Piracy happens but I am hoping that in this club we will never offer full products for download for our members as another club is doing.

I am sorry if this is a negative sounding thread and I can accept that some guy in Malaysia, Taiwan or China may be ripping off one of our products but its really bothers me that someone in the club would knowingly rip off one of our products and even more that reputable clubs are offering the products for free.

Piracy will never go away we know but clubs should be honorable in this regard. I hope we never get to the place in the NWC where we are offering free games still under copyright.

Colonel Bill Peters, 17th Dragoons, III Corps, French Army
HPS Napoleonic Scenario Designer (Eckmuhl, Wagram, Jena-Auerstaedt, Austerlitz and ... more to come)
Swiss-Swedish Army CinC, Musket and Cannon Game Club - Come over and see what we are all about!

Big time clarification on this: if the mod uses an install of Eckmuhl 1.0 I have no big gripe with this. That engine cannot be updated to the latest and greatest due to the map locking.

There are mods out there that are complete games that use a much more recent engine and in order to do that they used a hex editor to add in the maps they used.

But any mod that uses 1.0 is fine as long as it does NOT include the entire Eckmuhl game (or any of our released product files from games like Waterloo, Wagram, etc).

Go to it guys and I know that you did this to help out the clubs. Its the guys that put out copies of Eckmuhl (complete game) and so on that sort of irked me. And then offer mods using that install.

I honestly wish that mods were just the game files we create (.dat, .map, .oob, .pdt, .scn and the graphics files that the mod guys create). It would be nice if no installer is included. That way folks would have to own a copy of one of our games to use it.

Demo: do these games help us sell the games? Not sure on this. It being an older engine it actually could turn people off to the game.

Anyway, this is an old subject and I know that folks were pissed that we locked the maps. Oh well, that is water under the bridge and we are churning out more games over the coming years. The mill is working at full capacity and we probably will have three to four games out over the next couple of years. Much faster than in previous years.

Colonel Bill Peters, 17th Dragoons, III Corps, French Army
HPS Napoleonic Scenario Designer (Eckmuhl, Wagram, Jena-Auerstaedt, Austerlitz and ... more to come)
Swiss-Swedish Army CinC, Musket and Cannon Game Club - Come over and see what we are all about!

By the way everyone, it is the stated policy of the club to not support or offer any hacked/copied versions of any game.



Feldmarschall Freiherr Gary McClellan
Generalissimus Imperial Austrian Army
Portner Grenadier Bn
Allied Coalition C-in-C

Bill what brought this up? I am confused?[?]

Lieutenant General
Ed Blackburn
Commanding Second Div, II Corps, AAA
3rd Bn / 1st Regiment of Foot Guards

There is a club that sponsors mods for our games that have complete copies of the Eckmuhl game but the game files are for the mod and none of the maps for Eckmuhl or the scenarios, campaign files, etc are in the download.

Now it is just EC 1.0 and that is not as bad as some of the other downloads that include later editions of the engine (1.08 I think). I emailed with one rep from that club and I agreed that the mods they have are ok as they use the much older version of the game. And folks cant use the newer engine with the mod files so its not a huge issue.

But some sites have complete versions of Eckmuhl and Wagram (and probably Waterloo, Jena and Austerlitz eventually). That is not right.

This was just a comment that I hope we never offer those mods - the ones that have complete games, and really whether its ver 1.0 or 1.8.

Having a free download of the game engine whether its using Eckmuhl, Wagram, Leipzig, or whatever the mod is is illegal. Even if its a mod that does not have the core scenarios/maps/pdt files that I did. When it offers John's engine and its put up on a server and folks can get it its illegal.

I put up no huge fight over 1.0 but it still doesnt make it right. I just hope that EC 1.13 doesn't end up as a free game on some club site in the near future.

Colonel Bill Peters, 17th Dragoons, III Corps, French Army
HPS Napoleonic Scenario Designer (Eckmuhl, Wagram, Jena-Auerstaedt, Austerlitz and ... more to come)
Swiss-Swedish Army CinC, Musket and Cannon Game Club - Come over and see what we are all about!