CCS/Ken Wright
£12.95

From the creator of Overlord, Yankee and Napoleon At War comes Wellington At Waterloo, but this time history is in your hands. Following the battles of Borodino, Auerstadt and Quatre Bas, Napoleon met with Wellington on June 18 1815 for his last and most famous battle of all.

In Wellington At Waterloo you are in charge of the eponymous character's combined Anglo/Dutch forces along with Prussian reinforcements (which appear after turn ten). Both sides' objective is to reduce the other to less than 30.000 men. It may sound a lot but Wellington allows you to lose up to 700 men in one onslaught.

Via the smooth-scrolling map, attack/retreat/reorganise orders are issued to infantry, artillery, cavalry and later on the Prussians. The command structure involves selecting a destination, the unit then moves there as last as terrain, enemy units and own speed will allow.

Routs are possible, ranged lire follows line-of-sight rules and the effectiveness of a unit is based around its morale with routs (quite cleverly) leading to a domino-effect mass rout if you're not careful. Three skill levels are provided with the morale of the French increasing with the higher levels and the Prussians taking longer to arrive.

Sadly Wellington At Waterloo is something of a disappointment following the excellent Ancient Battles and Ken Wright's own Napoleon At War - the commands are limited and with this comes a loss of flexibility. As Wellington is based around one conflict, the scope of the game is also limited. A pity as the execution of the game is of high quality - a great shame potential has been missed to recreate one massive conflict or a series of famous Wellington battles.

ROBIN HOGG

CCS
£12.95 cass
Reviewer: Richard Blaine

...Waterloo is... a) A large railway station serving the south and south west? b)The title of Abba's Eurovision Song Contest winner and their first big hit? c) A small village in Belgium where Wellington defeated Napoleon for the last time and put an end to his imperial ambitions?

If you answered c), then you got A half right - 'cos as you will discover from the historical notes of CCS's latest wargame, the British view of history suffers from being somewhat Anglocentric. Wellington had more than a little help in beating the wily Corsican from the Dutch and the Prussians, plus assorted other allies. In fact, the Germans believe that Blucher won the battle of Waterloo.

Anyway, CCS's Wellington At Waterloo gives you the chance to play Wellington (or Blucher, if you're that way inclined) and have a bash at fighting Napoleon yourself. The computer is Napoleon, so you have your work cut out for you.

Ken Wright has written a number of games for CCS now, and, almost without exception, they have been fine quality products. Waterloo is no different - in fact, it is so similar in construction to some of his other games for CCS that it seems that he must have written a basic battle authoring system, to which he has added different historical details to make new battles. Nothing wrong with that - it's how most games writers work, if they plan on writing more than one program.

For those who haven't played one of Ken's efforts before, here's a brief run down. The screen shows you part of a map of the terrain around the village of Waterloo. You can scroll the screen around a total area which is roughly four screens wide by three beep. On this map are arrayed the French and Allied armies (except the Prussians, who turn up later). Each unit is represented by a square 'counter', with a national marking on it and an indication of which division it belongs to and whether it is infantry, cavalry or artillery.

To move, you use the menu to access a particular division. Then you move the cursor to where you want each of the units of that division to go and they should follow. I say should, because sometimes they have a habit of taking odd routes to get where you've told them to go, hence taking a bit longer than you might have planned for. This could be either a rough edge in the program, or a deliberate attempt to simulate the 'fog of war' and Murphy's law.

Each unit has a certain number of men in it, and a certain morale level. The more men and the better the morale, the better it will fight. Allow a unit to lose too many troops in fighting, or to become demoralised, and you run the risk of it routing from the field of battle.

Unfortunately, Ken Wright doesn't make it easy for you 'cos he's included hidden movement in the game. After the initial view of the battlefield, all the French units which are more than a certain distance away from one of your units disappear. You can get a vague idea of where they are from the location of their headquarters' flags, but you really don't know how many units they have or where exactly they are on the map. Neat - and vicious.

As usual, I lost the first game I played. Overconfident as ever, I basically charged the French army head on. I was enjoying my little successes, right up until the point the computer (rather smugly, I thought) told me I had lost. Oh well, it wasn't the end of the war - I just loaded up again. And took a little longer to lose. Eventually I'm going to beat this damn Corsican computer.

GOING TO BATTLE

War simulations are becoming ever more popular Tom Courtenay examines some of the best.

War games have come a long way from the time H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars at the turn of the century. He wrote it as a result of trying to regulate the battles on the Kitchen table against his friends involving a handful of pained tin soldiers. These days, war-gamers revel in the complexity and realism of their simulations - ify ou call it playing soldiers they would be very upset. Any game worth its salt will involve tape measures, dice, sets of tables, vast numbers of troops, or even cardboard counters representing regiments or divisions.

So it is scarcely surprising that the home computer was welcomed by the war-gaming lobby with open arms. Two approaches were taken: either the computer could be used to referee a traditional war game fought on a table-top in traditional manner, or the whole thing could be transferred to the computer.

The pioneer of the latter approach was Lothlorien, which began to produce war games written in Basic on the Spectrum. Obviously they look primitive by today's standards but they attempted to be accurate representations of historical events. To the mainstream games enthusiast, they played slowly and you could not kill anything.

The first truly modern game was Nato Commander from Microprose. It takes place in northern Europe and features that almost constant American obsession, the Reds pouring over the border and trying to take over Europe. The game covers the most critical period, between the initial invasion and the U.S. getting huge reinforcements to the front. Thus, the Nato commander is severely outnumbered and is fighting a delaying action, trying to hold on to as much ground as possible, and possibly inflicting significant losses on the Soviets.

However distasteful you may find the scenario, it is a very good game. Success depends on falling back in stages, each rearguard action allowing time for the forces to the rear to dig in, then fall back, and so on. In that way, the steam is taken out of the Soviet advance. Any Soviet forces not in contact with friendly forces may disappear from the map, depending on how many aircraft are flying reconnaissance missions.

Aircraft can also run air superiority or ground attack missions. It is important to keep open supply lines and make the best possible use of terrain. The computer opponent is fairly intelligent, although by following particularly outrageous tactics it might be very confused.

Microprose recently followed this with Decision in the Desert and Crusade in Europe. They are a real tour de force. Covering two famous campaigns in WWII, they are about as near to a board game on a computer as you are likely to see. Almost everything is there, the different strengths and weaknesses of units, use of terrain, supply - in both strategic and tactical senses - fog of war, and a two-player option.

Again, the computer could be a little lacking in the old grey matter, especially when called on to defend, but the two-player option is what the game was about. Both games feature several different scenarios which portray different battles within the campaign. Although the games can be long, the speed of play can be varied to slow things when things become difficult. Orders are made in real time - the battle does not stop while you input orders. Tactics are very subtle. All-out effort rarely works; you will just run out of supplies and exhaust your troops. It is all about probing for weaknesses and then exploiting them quickly. The games are on C64, Atari and Apple.

Microprose recently capped even that success with its chart-topping Silent Service, in the same three formats, with ST, Amstrad and Spectrum versions promised. It is a superb simulation of submarine warfare in the Pacific. Almost without being aware of it, the player is subject to many rules about sighting, detection, firing and hidden movement. It knocks spots off all the board games devoted to the same subject - and you can shoot things.

You command one submarine on patrol in the Pacific. After a convoy is detected, a quick squint through the periscope to see whether its worth the risk - how heavy is the escort? Then check the time. Should you wait until dusk? Check the speed and course of the convoy. What is the best attack course to evade detection? A little on the slow side for the shoot-'em-up fraternity but a superb and exciting simulation which will take some beating.

That is not to say British programmers are not starting to get their acts together. Particularly Robert Smith, who has produced two fine simulations, Arnhem and Desert Rats, published by CCS on the Spectrum and Amstrad.

Another company specialising in this field is PSS. It has attempted to popularise the genre by including an arcade element in most of its games. Unfortunately that tends to mean the realism of the game suffers - precious memory and development time is lavished on a rather tedious shoot-'em-up.

Neither is the company a stranger to controversy. Its titles include Theatre Europe, all about the jolly little subject of a European war escalating into a thermonuclear holocaust. The scenario is much the same as Nato Commander but the addition of a complex air war, the arcade sequences and the thermonuclear option has left in its wake a rather dull land game.

The game falls between four stools. Falklands '82 was another landmark of good taste. It features the Argentinians and the British locked in a struggle to save their respective governments from the wrath of the electorates. The game stayed mainly with the land campaign, and it aroused much anger as it demonstrated the possibility of the British losing - something fairly obvious to anyone of even a semi-rational disposition.

Possibly the company's best game to date is Battle of Midway, about the decisive carrier battle in the central Pacific in the middle of 1942 which effectively ended Japanese chances of winning the war. The player controls the American task forces in an attempt to seek and destroy the Japanese aircraft carriers protecting an invasion of the American base at Midway island.

Although the tactics employed would make most military historians turn pale, it is not a bad game. The player has to find, identify and then shadow the enemy task force as, his strike aircraft close in from his carriers. Naturally, the enemy is trying to do the same, or even get to grips with his surface units. The player must plan his raids, try to evade the enemy, and control the strikes, making sure they find their targets and have sufficient fuel to return to their carriers.

The same system was developed further in the PSS Battle of Britain. It covers the Luftwaffe attempt to destroy the RAF in the summer of 1940. The main pre-occupation of the player is to preserve his fighters, taking on the Germans only if he can do so on favourable terms. There are problems; after each interception the fighters must land, re-fuel and re-arm. The nightmare is that a German raid will catch the fighters on the ground. The campaign is fought through several turns, with the British meeting raiders as their losses permit. It is a long game, of slightly dubious accuracy, but a fascinating struggle.

On the same subject, Their Finest Hour from Hutchinson is a flawed attempt to be a real simulation of the battle. Although highly-detailed, some of the mistakes are almost laughable. First, defensive flak can zip from target to target as if on wheels; ME109s have huge fuel tanks, along with the Spitfires which also have inexhaustible ammunition. Time and again, a squadron can shoot down 200 aircraft and usually the Luftwaffe is defeated on the first day. It is a pity, because it had the makings of a fine game.

The most recent PSS game returns to the Western Desert, Tobruk, on the Amstrad, features an exceptional network option where two Amstrads are connected using the joystick ports so that two players can battle with highly-realistic Fog of War. Neither can see each other's pieces. The game design is a little artificial, with the British having fixed supply dumps and the Germans being able to zip around at will but it is a fine game which is great fun to play.

Most of the games have been set in WWII. If you crave for the age of the horse and the cannon, there is a grave shortage of quality material from that era. The Lothlorien Waterloo and Austerlitz are not bad. Although they lack detail, the games go some way to recreating the Napoleonic era, but if you are looking for dramatic cavalry charges, forget it.

Possibly the best thing Lothlorian has done to date is Jonny Reb, a semi-abstract simulation of tactics in the American Civil War, seen in retrospect as the transition from the Napoleonic to the modern era. As firepower became more formidable, so the only way to stay alive was to take cover. The infantry charge became a rather rare commodity. That is dealt with very well in this game. The Confederate army's job is to try to take a bridge from a small force of troops before a large number of Union reinforcements can arrive.

The tactic is to move up men with covering fire from artillery, then open fire with the infantry. If that does not work, send in the cavalry as a last resort - demoralised troops will tend to run rather than face a cavalry charge. Endless variations of troops and terrain can be tried with a kind of battlefield designer.

The major criticism is that such a complex game has completely inadequate instructions. The terrain is placed there with little explanation of its effects. Despite that, and the usual monumentally thick computer opponent. It is a game which will reward plenty of experimentation.

Computer war games have progressed a long way from their humble origins but they still have some way to go before they reach the level of accuracy and subtlety of most board war games. Perhaps the new generation of 68000-'based machines might just fulfil that potential.