

  

Like the earlier mods in my Napoleonic series, the Napoleon's Russian Campaign mod preserves Ezjax's 3D units and terrain.  Most of the 3D units and terrain are his, except that my version of his mod isn't bloodless and uses light grey movement arrows. I've included Ezjax's original bloodless version as an alternative in case you prefer a less cluttered 3D battlefield. My version of his 3D terrain also uses darker colors for lower altitudes. 


The 2D terrain is essentially what was used in the summer version of my Campaign Leipzig mod, which was derived from my Panzer Campaigns mods. I've also included Ezjax's 2D terrain features as an alternative.  

The 2D unit symbols is a lightly modified version of the one I developed for my original Wagram mod.

The unit images are Volcano Man's excellent mod mounted on the appropriate national or regimental flags.   The mod also mounts cannon on artillery unit images, horses on cavalry, horses and cannon on horse artillery units, and wagons on supply units. 

The Unitbox and Leaderbox bitmaps are carried over from the Campaign Leipzig and 1814 mods, and their colors are harmonized with the colors of my 2D unit symbols. 



Installation:


The mod mimics the folder structure of the game. Start with a clean version of Napoleon's Russian Campaign and apply the latest official patch.  Paste the mod's Napoleon's Russian Campaign folder into the HPS Simulations folder.  This will overwrite many files in the original game, so be sure to back up your original first.  Always apply the mod after the patch, because if you don't the patch may overwrite part of the mod.


The mod includes a desktop icon ('Napoleon in Russia') that you can use as a shortcut on your desktop.

To use it, make a shortcut from the cpu application file, and move it to your desktop (in Windows XP move your mouse over the file, right-click, choose create shortcut from drop-down menu, partially shrink your screen by clicking on the middle of three tabs in the top right-hand corner, find the newly created 'shortcut to cpu' icon - probably the last icon in your Napoleon's Russian Campaign folder - and slide it onto your desktop). Go to your desktop and find the 'shortcut to cpu' icon and right-click.  Then click on properties and change the icon.  Remember that you'll have to navigate back to the Napoleon's Russian Campaign folder and look for the Desktop Icon.  Once you've changed the icon (and don't forget to click on 'apply'), you'll probably want to rename the file from the cryptic 'shortcut to cpu' to something a bit more transparent like 'Russian Campaign' or 'Napoleon in Russia'. 




This mod was surprisingly difficult to make and may get revisited at some point.  There are a couple of non-French units that sport French flags, but the alternative was to make a fair number of French units sport non-French flags, so I decided to go with majority rules.  The Vistula Legion flies french flags instead of Polish flags: if someone can convince me that they marched under Polish flags in 1812, I'll be happy to change them back (before 1812 they seem to have been using the red banner with teh Polish eagle).

I'm reluctant to create special oob's just to accomodate a graphics mod, but I may look into it when I've finished the other mods in the Napoleonic series. 


21 July 2012


The process continues.  The last few updates have seen improvements in the fit of the shading for non-visible hexes, and the terrain highlights now sit directly on the edge of an elevation rather than a pixel or two away from it.  I've also begun to revisit the unit images. The Polish Uhlans had been represented by a red trompette, who gave the mistaken impression that a large segment of Polish cavalry wore red uniforms.  It didn't: Polish Uhlans wore blue.  And now they do in the mod.

Russian flags continue to be a source of hair-loss.  I played around with putting several different icons behind the Cossacks, whose five flags per regiment included religious banners.  I eventually decided to stick to known official flags, even though they were less colorful.  I may change my mind in a later update, especially if I get a lot of e-mails urging me to hoist St. Nicholas, Sts. Boris and Glyeb, and the Theotokos behind the non-Muslim cossack units.

22 August 2012


I've hit on a formula that seems to work for the Cossack flags.  Except for the Lifeguard Cossacks, they now appear against a blue flag that was awarded to one of their units for bravery.  It is similar to (but different from) the flag used for the Bakshir units, so there is an internal logic to the process. 

This update is radically different from previous ones in one key respect. The Leaders have been completely redone, and almost all of them are in color.  The army, corps, and division commander portraits for both armies are accurate.  The French Brigade commander portraits are at least 70 percent accurate, and the Russian portraits are upwards of 90 percent accurate.  So what that means is that if you see some obscure unit commander that you've never heard of and look at his leader portrait, that's probably what he looked like.  This was only possible because the Hermitage has been putting Dawe's paintings from the War Gallery online.

My original intent was to change a few of the Corps commander portraits and have done with it.  But after seeing a cluster of colored portraits, one thing lead to another. Four hundred and ninety one portraits later, I'm not sure I'll try that one again on the other games, or at least not until I've finished some of the other projects I have in mind.


And if anyone sees any mistaken portaits, please call it to my attention.  I've tried to only discard available portraits when they were made much later in life, and didn't want to show a thirty-year old brigade commander with the portrait of an octogenerian.


19 September 2012



There will apparently be no further changes to the official NRC oob's.  Unfortunately there are some very apparent visual glitches in the Saxon troops in the Gorodetchna scenarios.  Since I have been unable to persuade the powers that be to make the desired corrections, I've taken matters into my own hands and made the neccessary corrections.  Along the way I noticed that a couple of cavalry units were missing their lances, and that there was an unresolvable conflict between a Polish and a Saxon cavalry unit.  The upshot is that I've made three additions and one correction to the units bitmap.  In the event that you choose to play without my adjusted oob's, you probably won't notice the difference.  But let me emphasize for the record that the only thing that has been changed in the oob's is which spot on the unit bitmap gets invoked for a few particular units. No unit strengths, types, or morales have been changed in any way.


25 March 2014

Never say never.  When I made the fix to the Saxons that effected the Gorodetchna scenario, I forgot that the new patch would include coding for dragoons in all of the oob's.  Since I had to redo everything, and now that I really don't expect any more official changes to the oob's, I've unscrambled several of the overlapping nationalities by adding a few images to the units bitmap.  At some point down the road I may revisit this, as I'm not completely satisfied with the look of some of the 3D units.  But fixing that will involve making new units and new flags, and that's a bigger project than I have time for at the moment.


2 April 2014




Philippe Divine

padivine@juno.com
