Swedish PC publisher and strategy game developer Paradox Interactive just held their yearly convention, showing games planned for release by the company this year. They also revealed three two new games, and A Game of Dwarves and Napoleon´s Campaigns II, and a new expansion for the popular game Magicka entitled Magicka: The Other Side of the Coin.
Paradox is one of those companies that looms extremely large for a small subset of gamers- fans of complex historical strategy games- while being largely unheard of outside that segment. This is in keeping with the love-it-or-hate-it nature of the genre, I suppose. Not everyone’s heart quickens at the thought of playing a really complicated number-crunching-heavy game about, say, international diplomacy and economic development in 19th-century Europe, and people who don’t find the prospect intriguing tend to find it downright baffling, in my experience.
I’m a big fan of this sort of thing, myself; the genre is one of the chief reasons I’m interested in PC as well as console games. Consequently, Napoleon´s Campaigns II has caught my interest. The game allows the player to choose one of various European nations to lead in in scenarios spanning the years 1805 to 1815 controlling their chosen nation’s armies, navies, and diplomacy in the struggle for power during the tumultuous years of Napoleon’s reign as emperor of France. Paradox promises a highly detailed map of Europe as well as other important areas, such as India, North America, and Egypt.
It’s not clear yet whether players will be limited to playing as one of the great powers of the era, or if any European country is potentially playable. The latter has been the case in other Paradox historical grand strategy games like Europa Universalis and Victoria, which is something I’ve always liked. On the other hand, this game is much more focused and on a very specific period and only spans a time period of a decade, which doesn’t really allow sufficient scope for building up a minor power into a great one and creating the sort of bizarre alternate history scenarios that can arise when you have longer timescales to play with. On the other hand, leaving one of Europe’s smaller countries and just trying to retain your independence while Napoleon’s armies march across Europe and the continent’s great powers clash around you could be interesting, so I hope it’s still an option.
The game will run on the same engine that Paradox uses for Victoria II, Europa Universalis III, and Hearts of Iron III, which is real-time rather than turn-based but allows you to pause and give orders at leisure whenever you wish. It worked quite well in the aforementioned games, so it’s good to see it here; I feel like it gives a nice combination of the virtues of both real-time and turn-based gameplay.
One plus is that Paradox is promising support for dual-core processors right out of the gate, something that games like Europa Universalis III eventually became capable of thanks to a later patch released by the company but couldn’t do when released. The sheer number of variables constantly being calculated in games like this can be staggering, especially as the game goes on, and it’s always frustrating to have time in your game slowed to a crawl so that your computer can process everything it needs to, so that’s welcome news.
Napoleon´s Campaigns II is currently planned for a third-quarter release for PCs this year; nothing more precise than that has been given yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
Subscribe to our email newsletter, a recap of the stories posted to GamingandTech.com each day.
