Overview

Imperial Glory is a strategy game in the vein of the Total War series, with a turn-based strategic campaign mode and a 3D tactical battle mode. Unlike the Total War games, however, Imperial Glory takes place during the relatively recent age of the Napoleonic Wars. In an interesting coincidence, the most popular mod for Medieval: Total War was the Napoleonic mod.

Obviously, combat with artillery and muskets is going to be different from knights and bowmen going at it, but due to the technical limitations of Napoleonic era weaponry, the ranges involved are not actually that much greater. Fortunately for the gaming world, troops still fought wars from formations not unlike those of centuries and even millenia past, meaning that control of the game involves only moving around groups of men, rather than individuals. This permits the scale of battles to be significantly larger than they would be if we were dealing with modern individuals and platoons. Of course, this is not so fortunate for the men who actually had to fight this way; standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellows in tight formations, firing once per minute, maintaining ranks in the face of simultaneous volleys of hundreds of 1" thick lead balls... it's almost enough to make a man say "stiff upper lip there, old chap".

The familiar RTS dynamics remain, however. Cavalry are vulnerable to infantry fire and prepared infantry formations, but excel at hitting from the flanks and are perfect for cutting down artillery. Artillery have amazing firepower and range, but are helpless in close combat. Infantry are more powerful than cavalry, but slower and more vulnerable to artillery fire.

To make matters more interesting, the game distinguishes between various kinds of infantry. Whether or not these distinctions are accurate is beyond my ability to say, but in terms of gameplay, there's a great deal of difference between sending cheap, regular Line Infantry in and the deadly Black Watch highlander regiments. There are also multiple types of cavalry, from lancers through hussars to dragoons, each more adept at one task than another.


Typically, units have their stats displayed in terms of armor, melee and ranged combat ability. These aren't very clear, unfortunately, and one is never quite sure what difference armor makes in the game, or how tough the morale of a particular unit type is. Presumably these are the kind of differences that are more apparent in the strategic map, which is not playable in this demo.