The Wargamer

Introduction

Talk to Eric Babe, the head of Western-Civilization, about the resurgence of Napoleonic era strategy games and he'll offer two explanations: the first is the romantic one, in which game developers and publishers are recognizing the 200 year anniversary of the famous battles at Austerlitz and Trafalgar.  The second is more practical; gamers have long desired all-encompassing strategic play in a Napoleonic game, something which had previously been quite difficult to accomplish.  Crown of Glory is the creation of Babe's long obsession with game design, and its ambitious design and gameplay elements explain why such games are so difficult to complete.  

As Crown of Glory prepares for release this week, we spoke to Babe in-depth about his new game.

The Interview

The Wargamer (WG): Crown of Glory doesn’t strike us as a first attempt. Can you tell us about your professional background in the game industry? How did you get started designing games?

Eric Babe (EB): It isn’t my first attempt, but it is my first successfully published game. I wrote two game engines when I was in high school for the Commodore 64: an empire-builder game called Origins in which the player was the chief of a tribal copper-age village, and a post-holocaust adventure game with mutants and robots and what all else, for which I still have a box with a foot-high stack of hand-written notes and printouts. These two projects very much gave me a thirst for game design: I found particularly appealing the interplay between the creative aspect of the work and technical implementation.

My first attempt to get something published was an adventure game in 1993 – Ronin. It was the year after I graduated from the University of Michigan, and I posted flyers around campus looking for people interested in working as partners on a computer game. This is how I met Jason Barish, our Art Director, who did a superb job with the graphics for Crown of Glory. Our game Ronin obtained some interest from Strategic Simulations and Sir Tech, but I think they were reluctant to commit to such a big project as we had envisioned without our having any sort of track record in the industry. Ronin was written for DOS and it wasn’t too long before the engine was technologically obsolete. In 1997 I wrote several new game engines: some puzzle games, a real-time strategy engine, two very different science fiction strategy games, and an engine for a World War II strategy game. We sent the World War II engine to TalonSoft and got an offer immediately...with the provision that we change the game design to model the Napoleonic era. TalonSoft went bankrupt in the middle of our project, and I continued to work on the Napoleonic engine part-time without a publisher until we signed with Matrix Games in the Fall of 2004.

WG: There’s recently been a resurgence in historical games covering the Napoleonic era. Why did you choose this era for Crown of Glory, and why do you suppose the era has suddenly become so popular?

EB: Crown of Glory combines a robust strategic-level empire-builder game with a very comprehensive operational strategy game to resolve battles. The Napoleonic era works very well in this game model. The importance of trade in the early 19th century, the machinations of legendary diplomats, the enormous social changes brought about by the French Revolution, and the sweeping changes in military doctrine all work together to form the foundation of a great empire-builder game. At the operational level, the limited nature of Napoleonic warfare and the decisiveness of the great Napoleonic battles also naturally give rise to the sort of bold and dramatic military actions that make a good game.

I would like to think that the resurgence of games that cover this era has to do with the fact that the year 2005 is the bicentennial of great battles like Austerlitz and of the naval action at Trafalgar. That’s the romantic explanation. More mundanely, a simpler explanation may be that for years there’s been an unfulfilled demand for campaign-level Napoleonics, and every year it became more and more likely for developers to try to fulfill this demand. There’s also been an increase in Napoleonic themed products in the popular culture: a Napoleonic mini-series, the Master and Commander movie; this trend may have something to do with the rise of Napoleonic products in the strategy game genre.

WG: Can you give us a basic rundown of Crown of Glory? What sorts of games are similar to Crown of Glory?

EB: As I mentioned, Crown of Glory is an empire-builder wedded to an operational-strategy battlefield game. I’ve tried to design it so that the two levels are well-integrated, so that choices a player makes at one level have an effect on the game at the other level. In controlling his nation the player has four major areas of concern each turn: military movement and production, economic allocations and trade, provincial labor and development, and diplomatic treaties and actions. These areas are very interwoven, so that diplomatic actions will affect military capabilities, military maneuvering will affect trade routes, and so forth.

It is similar in the union of strategic and operational levels to the older KOEI Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, and similar in scope to Paradox’ Europa Universalis and its sequels.