I have been playing the new Empire in Arms for the last month. I have never played the original boardgame. The game is very complex but I was able to easily start up the game and play. The download from Matrix game was smooth, quick and practically painless. My game started right up on a WIN XP machine. I won't comment on how well it mirrors the boardgame (I don't know).
My initial recommendation is to not buy the game. I have three main reasons for this judgment other than the $70 price tag.
1) No TC/IP support. You either play hot-seat or via email. Matrix plans to fix this omission shortly.
2) The AI. The game AI is set-up for the human player to play as French from what I can tell. The AI players are VERY passive, including the French, and perform very poorly on the both the strategic and tactical level even when set to hardest difficulty level. I watched the Turkish AI never move a unit in 2 years. Worse you cannot negotiate with the AI like you would with human players. For example - no way to ask a British AI for $. No way to negotiate a deal with Prussia-Austria-Russia to build Poland. Now I may have missed those options, but they are not obvious ones. Other obvious options, like a how the big powers will carve up Italy, cannot be done. As a Russian player I can't tell the AI players to leave Sweden alone and end up with a British/French controlled Swedish free state every time leading to Russia declaring war on them in March 05 just to grab Sweden (neither AI player does anything to prevent the Russian conquest of Sweden and the war lapses shortly there after). One player on the EiA Matrix boards conquered the world basically (with screenshot) as the Turks vs. AI players.
3) Saving the worst for last. PBEM can be done and is rather easy, once you figure it out, to actually mechanically accomplish. I did my last Diplomacy phase in about 10 minutes from opening my email to hitting send. BUT: Each turn (a month) has 5 phases: Diplomacy, Reinforcement, Navel, Land, and Economic (only 4 months/year). With 7 players that would be 28 or 35 emails per month. That's without any combat. No phase is skipped even if you have no Navy nor any money to actually place reinforcement Corps. I expect our first game to take a minimum of 1 real time month per turn with 7 players. This is a major mistake by Matrix. Each turn should only have 3 phases, Navel, Land, and everything else. Any player without a Navy should have his Navel Phase skipped (as should any Russian player when his fleet is frozen in). Now there are ways to speed things up. There is a PBEM fast combat option that I haven't tried. But this makes the game very, very slow.
So I cannot recommend the game until Matrix fixes these problems. Now I don't play either the BG games nor the HPS games against the AI (witch is equally atrocious) but they are very playable by PBEM.
I am looking forward to our EiA game we plan to start on the 5th and will be giving a running commentary on the EiA board. This is just my two cents for the people thinking of buying the game.
Marechal Doug Fuller
Duc de Montmorail et Comte de Hainaut
2e' Grenadiers a' Pied de la Vielle Garde
I Corp Commander
AdN
