Hi all.
Sorry for late posting and poor English here, but there go my two cents to the discussion.
Napoleon didn't have any relevant tactical victory condition defined by losses or hexes to grab on to during the Hundred Days campaign in my humble opinion.
If one considers a Waterloo scenario as an evolved state of this initial game situation, he simply had none at all.
Subordinates had, but that's not the exclusive player role in any JTS games so far.
His goals were pure strategical.
Self-defending by:
* Balance the unfavourable odds against 7th coalition.
Gain time to train his strategic reserves (national guard).
Accessing eventual, even limited, francophone belgium manpower.
Actively trying to break up the ineluctable outcomes by looking for unexpected and unpredictable events (i.e. change of admin in England).
Instil back a minimal level of national pride.
* Increasing his political and personal prestige in order to keep his throne and make a patriotic war in French soil foreseeable (nobody in France wanted it).
Taking Brusseles, win engagements better if turning into precipitous and divisive rout, etc.
Something propaganda could write on basically.
The rear line were exposed to royalist uprising that could merge with any sort of social, economical or political discontent (which were widespread).
Conscription was a cause of enormous discontent too...
He couldn't spend too much time far from Paris due to the risk of coups and Chambers plottings.
There seemed to be no money to supply a long time war too?
One shall speculate Napoleon wasn't either a perfectly rational agent in 1815 in its subjectivity and view of situation (posterity, fatalism, desperation...).
The only operational translation of this picture: strike first/hard/fast by taking the central position.
He waited the very last moment while Austrian and Russian armies were approaching the minor theatre of operations.
He couldn't refuse battle from Wellington at Waterloo and rejoin Grouchy.
Armee du Nord was a fragile and politically heterogeneous army.
Nobody would consider it exceptional at manouvring in any sense to balance the price in the coming days.
Command and logistics were lacking under several aspects.
It'd mean to throw the momentum and confidence of Ligny by marching and countermarching.
Overlooking any terrain consideration, there was simply no time for seeking a more favourable battle outline.
Any pirric outcome was an operational draw and strategical defeat, at best.
He certainly needed to preserve an operational echelon to conduct a decisive persuit.
And Wellington had one at Hal already to cover his retreat...
He accepted exhaustion battle then.
Believing in his ability to choose the exact instant to commit his (untouched by Prussians) reserves.
A minor victory was better than a full defeat.
It was something propaganda and historians could debate at least.
He didn't know how badly Prussians run off the 16th.
It was all but mathematics to understand that from a battlefield the day after.
Willingness to fight and resilience of his enemies increased in later campaigns, but still intelligence was lacking as much as his resolution and general staff quality.
He hoped for the best and one couldn't expect anything different from Napoleon and fog of war.
He was defeated on 17th ultimately while assigning decorations at Ligny.
Waterloo is a clear example of battle entirely shaped by the operational level of war.
I see the large scale of JTS Waterloo's map providing attractive opportunities under this aspect.
The biggest weaknesses that makes the series somewhat unattractive in DX12-capable GPUs era, could turn into a convenience.
Turn based, abstracted mechanics on hex-map and simple graphics would avoid very much of the optimization concerns that tear to pieces such a design for SOWWL, Histwar, NTW, ... beforehand.
Very simplified and Lua-scripted (yet non-100%-deterministic) strategical layer environment to "drive" the goals of JTS simulation.
Operational mechanics on command and control, intelligence, perception systems, etc.
And a lot of AI programming where operational world is represented as graph (nodes=towns, edges=roads) and action space modelled at an higher level (march, screen, concentrate and so on).
The map also requires rework. The early stages suffers a bit from the absence of Thuin, Lobbes, etc. as instance, imho.
Worth asking junibis.be guys if they're interested in building a GIS vector dataset of 1815 road network first...
Linearly-interpolated movements don't make much sense in their (amazing) work and would come in handy for videogaming maps as well.
Soldiers of the 5th, if anybody is able to persuade JT to start a venture on Napoleonic Campaigns along the lines of Wargame Design Studio in the next 50 years and need a C++ programmer, well... here I am!
Best regards.
P.S. I prefer Eckmuhl over Waterloo.
NWC
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