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Product Description Imperial Glory ... Read more Reviews (14) 
Napoleon: Total War
First the bad news: I too had problems at the beginning - slow loading times, buggy interface, curious animation, bad scrolling, freezes, crashes, etc.The very good news: I lowered the option settings, and particularly, changed the Animation Interpolation. I also updated my NVIDIA drivers, and as a result, it is as if I have a brand new game! The difference is phenomenal - the scrolling is better and easier, the animations are alive, the loading times are practically diminished. Both the campaign game and the battle modes are fun and engaging. The troops now move normally and fluidly, instead of 'gliding' strangely across the terrain. I can play this game for hours now. Those of you who bought this game and had problems, please give it another try, it is a very nice game, although not as perfect as Rome:Total War, it is a similar experience, and an enjoyable one. I am glad I was stubborn and patient with this, considering Cossacks II was a great dissapointment for me. For Napoleonic, this game is much better.Change the 'Interpolation', and try changing the settings (it won't affect the great look of the game), and upgrade any cards and drivers you have to - it is worth it. Vive l'empereur!
Decent game, some faults.
As most of the reviewers here I immediately made comparisons to Rome: Total War which is an all-time favorite of mine that I still play.
Land Battles:
Beautiful graphics, simple controls and formations. All the areas you fight in are very well done. The terrain is interactive as well, where you can take units and place them in buildings, blockades, etc.. for increased defense and observation. There are basically three different types of units which fits well in the time period...Infantry, Calvary and Artillery. The major complaint I have with the Land Battles is the units need to be patched...badly. Very rarely have I had enemies rout or retreat.
A few things that need to happen to greatly improve Land Battles would be to increase the range of artillery dramatically to become an effective unit on the battlefield (as they historically were). Militia units need to be treated as militia units, one or two salvos from a Line Infantry unit should rout them..period. As it stand now militia units are more like very inexpensive and cheap fanatical infantry. That's one hell of a militia unit to be able to run across the map into a bunch of muskeeteers, see half your buddies die then take yer tree branch and face off against a professional soldier with a fixed bayonet. Militia will charge Artillery blasting the heck out of them, run right into a calvary charge and brave point blank musket fire. The best fights i've had, have been between armies of non-militia units where you really get a taste of Napoleanic warfare displayed on your screen. Bottomline here is the land battles would be dramatically improved if one musket salvo would rout a militia unit so the only way a bunch of club weilding peasants could defeat a professional army unit would be overwhelming numbers. As it is now, why did man invent the rifle in the first place, if they are just expensive useless toys. Just go down to your local pub and round up a bunch of drunk farmers and give them their +5 Clubs of Heroism.
Once a unit engages in melee combat there is no way to disengage them until they are done. I suppose there is some realism to this where you can't really shout orders to an entire unit when they are in hand-to-hand combat. This takes some tactics especially when fighting against militia as frenquently when they would charge into my Line Infantry i had to quickly order the rest of my units to stop firing on the militia because i'd hit my own men as well.
Calvary is a very powerful force. These are useful to crush militia and of course, the calvary will charge right towards them and the ubermensch superhuman peasants will fight to the last man against a thundering charge of trained professional Hussars (Can you tell i hate militia yet?).
Artillery as I mentioned above needs to be fixed. It's basically useless right now unless you want to shoot up a house to get Infantry out of, but as you approach any building they tend to come out on their own anyway. I still create them in my armies because....well, just because I like having armies with cannons *shrug*.
Navy Battles:
Personally I enjoyed these. The battles are simple, but I imagine things could get very complicated if battles consisted of like...5 ships fighting 5 ships. This will pretty much never happen tho as each country minus Britain seems to be complacent with having one ship to count for their Navy *yawn*.
Strategic Map:
This is where you conduct all your research, diplomacy, troop movements etc. No real big complaints here. Different countries will have different challenges. As mentioned by another reviewer England will rarely see Land Battles unless they choose to, so if you don't want to go to war that much and diplomat most of the game then England is a good choice. Playing a power like Prussia however is pretty difficult as they are going to be at war pretty much from the beginning and fighting..a LOT.
As mentioned by other reviewers here it is very time consuming and requires a lot of your country's resources to build advanced infrastructure and trade routes. Building Armies is NOT fast at all, takes a lot of time and a lot of resources especially since you are also using those resources tobuild your trade and advanced infrastructure. It can take at least 2-3 years to field a viable invasion force especially since you can only build Land units in capitols. There are pros and cons to this, but the endstate is you are much more careful on where, when and with who you fight. The annihilation of a big army can set you back and squash your military ambitions.
Peaceful Annexation in it's current state is pretty much FUBAR. The computer is much more apt to peacefully annex another country and I seriously have no idea how they do this so quickly. For example, I eventually peacefully annexed Portugal playing as England but in order to do this it took a ton of resources building consulates, newspaper offices, etc. I even tried Improved Relations Diplomacy option and threw 5,000 gold at them, they rejected it and my relations with them went down! This part of the game needs to be patched to decrease the ease of which the computer can peacefully annex another country and alter the bonuses and penalties of dealing with other countries.
What also needs to be fixed is the zerg of other powers offering you their surplus of government cheese for gold AND when you reject them your relations decrease. So if you are working on peacefully annexing a country you basically HAVE to take whatever they are offering unless you want to lose relation points. Of course, there is a way around this and that's to say screw diplomacy and just build your infrastructure and trade enough to build some armies and start to conquest.
If a patch is released that fixes range on Artillery, nerfs Militia and the Relations to other countries this game will be a 4-5 star game imo. As it stands now, it's a decent game to pick up if you like the Turn-Based Strategy Game with a RTS spin on it (Like Total War). On the Campaign game it takes awhile for the game to get going, but once you do it's fairly enjoyable. I'm still playing it as i love this type of gaming genre despite it's faults. Hoping for a patch soon.
Big disappointment!
This could have been such a beautiful game but for some reason the developers decided to hamper it to the point of being nothing more than an exercise in frustration.The battles are really fun, and the graphics are great, but you must play for three hours of "next turn" just to build up enough resources to have a minor skirmish which lasts 5 minutes and then... you start all over again!Also, for some reason which totally escapes me, they decided to place certain restrictions on each empire.I started out as England but never had enough population to build armies.Then, I tried Russia - plenty of people but never enough food.The games kept disbanding my armies due to the "severe food shortage".The number of troops in a unit is arbitrarily set to 60 max - the number of units in a command by a captain or general is arbitrarily set to a small number - the number of armies you can have in a province is arbitrarily set to 3 max.Everywhere you look in this game you find restrictions which rob it of its potential for greatness and of your chance to have some fun - isn't having fun what these games are for?
I will never understand why the developers took such a beautiful gaming engine and decided to force the game's progress to such a snail's pace.You spend most of your time clicking through the months (one month is a turn) desparately trying to build armies to have a little fun - but it never comes!
This game could have been great, but some ridiculous decisions at project management level have killed it.They should have pre-released it to a bunch of 14 year old gamers and LISTENED to their advice.Then we might have had something approaching a fun experience.As it is, you have nothing but frustration and limitation everywhere you turn with Imperial Glory.
Very attractive - but not without flaws
I had tracked this game for a very long time, basically since it was first announced and I was pleasantly surprised to find it in my local gaming store. I immediately handed over the $40 hoping it was worth that amount. After about a week of gaming I can safely review this after playing all the aspects.
Imperial Glory is really made up of three parts, which are each extensively covered in helpful tutorials. A lot of games seem to lack a helpful tutorial but luckily the designers for Imperial Glory were kind enough to add in THREE tutorials to help get you started.
--- The first part of the game is the land battle maps. The 3-D graphics are simply superb and the troops are very attractive as they march, charge and especially when firing volleys. The land battle controls are easy to use and quite simple. The interface makes sense and there is little to no clutter. My favorite part of the game is where you can actually create your own battles between any of the five playable empires (France, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Great Britain) in any of the provinces and you just duke it out with whomever your opponent is until you win. These are mainly fun but I have a few problems with the land battle aspect of them game.
- The "total victory" option means your enemy always fights to the death. That may be "glorious" in a sense, but it's pretty unrealistic and causes you many casualties. The enemy never seems to retreat and will always fight to the last man.
- The artillery range is pretty ridiculous. There is hardly a point to having artillery because the range is so small. You seem to be less than three hundred yards away when your cannons and howitzers finally come into range and the enemy always targets those expensive weapons first. The high ground for the artillery is hardly an issue because despite whatever altitude you're at, the range is still pitifully small.
- The maps are always the same in the provinces. And I mean always. It is always winter in some places, always summer in others. I personally don't have a big problem with this, but some may be peeved when they fight in July in Poland and see snow.
Despite these setbacks, the land battles are by far the most fun and attractive part of Imperial Glory.
--- The second aspect of Imperial Glory are the naval battles. They are pretty slow moving and dull in my opinion. Unlike the land battles where the map was different for all provinces, the sea battles - like in real life - look exactly the same. The naval battles are fun due to the amount of firepower you have and the potential amount of damage you can deliver. Once again, the controls are VERY easy to use and VERY understandable. You fire port or starboard broadsides and between which broadside, there is an appropriate time to reload. You can even board the enemy ship and capture it! If you are a fan of naval warfare of the Napoleonic era, you will not be dissapointed in the gameplay here.
There is one thing that gives me a hard time in the naval section. There is a certain area in which you are allowed to fight. If you leave the area then you lose the battle. The concept is crazy...imagine if it was like that at Trafalgar: if you leave this red box, then your ship is sunk and loses the battle! Sometimes it is hard to turn the ship so you sail right out of the boundaries and automatically lose.
--- And finally the third aspect of the game: the campaign map. This is the part easily compared to Rome: Total War, the part that has caused me the most stress, anger and joy in my experience with this game. The layout is much the same as Rome: Total War although besides that the two games have nothing in common. I dislike the comments that compared a Napoleonic game to a game on Ancient Rome, two very different time periods that deserve two different layouts.
In the campaign map, you must concentrate on your resources - Gold, Raw Materials, Population and Food. These are what create your buildings and units and without them, you lose.
Each resource can be gathered in different ways and I was thanful to find that there is no micromanaging resources, like in RTS-style games. Each province has a set amount of resources that it gives your 'national treasury' but that is barely enough. You need to build buildings and forge trade routes in order to increase your raw materials/food and gold respectively. Buildings and units are very costly and by losing a battle, your economy can be severely hurt due to the amount of money and resources it takes to create these armies.
Diplomacy has a number of options that range from declaring war to offering marriage. One option is the peaceful annexation and the enemy seems to take full advantage of that. In one game, Austria had peacefully annexed the Ottomans while Britain managed to annex all of the Iberian peninsula. Each country has a number of "sympathy points" which range from 0 (when you are at war) to 100 (and only then can you peacefully annex them).
Armies are created from barracks and all armies out of their barracks intake food. It is key to have enough food to feed your armies. Each army is commanded by either a Captain, Colonel, General or Marshal and can move one province at a turn. There are hardly enough men in an army to be considered real - a maximum of 60 per infantry unit and 36 per cavalry means a maximum of maybe 300 men per army. Quite a contrast compared to the half million involved in the Battle of Leipzig!
A series of complicated building rules and research punctuate the campaign map games. Each turn is one month and the game ranges from 1789-1830, which gives you plenty of turns. Each unit, building and research take turns to complete which provides for a slow pace. Indeed, I found myself watching the TV between turns due to the slowness of the changing of the turns, but your computers may be a little more updated than my four year old Pentium 4.
The campaign map may be the least user-friendly area of the game, but it could hardly be called confusing at all. The left-click/drag way to move armies easily puzzled me at first. However it only gets easier as you get on.
In conclusion, Imperial Glory is a very fun game despite some flaws it has. I am impatient and I find the long load times to be a pain in the ass (when loading a saved game it took near 4 minutes) but the wait is really worth it when you see the game. Worth $40? Nah, but most games aren't worth their opening prices. Imperial Glory is fun, pretty and addictive and I suggest it to all people who are interested in the Napoleonic era.
Pros:
-Beautiful graphics: the troops, ships, and landscapes blew me away
-Easy to use interface provides an understandable gaming experience
-Friendly tutorials help introduce the game to you easily
-In depth research, building and diplomatic systems
Cons:
-Land battles have some fishy stuff going on (i.e. artillery range is too short)
-Ridiculously slow loading times
-Naval battles have a boundary
-AI seems to be able to peacefully annex much better than the human player
Wonderful Tactical Strategy.
Move over Rome Total War!Imperial Glory is a very good title.It really shines during the turn-based strategy game mode with a GORGEOUS map to play on, animated pieces, and deep strategy.It even has economic and diplomatic models that are very lifelike.
The tactical side of the game is good but flawed somewhat.Even so, I found it MUCH more enjoyable than Rome Total War.The battles are fast moving, exciting, and a real treat to watch.
The graphics and sound are superb.
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A big disappointment