Yet once that occurred, the backstabbing diplomacy and sneaky strategic maneuvers gave us tons of memorable moments. In one game, the Prussian player, finding himself attacked on both sides by France and Russia, decided to simply annoy both opponents for as long as possible. He changed his army's overall strategy to use hit-and-run attacks, and on the diplomatic end refused any end to the war where he had to cede territory. Remarkably and hilariously, this actually worked—he succeeded in not giving up that much land when he negotiated his foes down, and managed to turn them against one another in the process. March of the Eagles is structured to make multiplayer events involving the players' skill at both the game and interpersonal manipulations virtually inevitable. The AI isn't terrible, but it just can't compete with that, and it can be difficult to go back to single-player after a good multiplayer match. The only problem, then, becomes finding a group of players willing to play a game that can run upwards of 10 hours.
Grand strategy games that span hundreds of years of history do many things well, but they often gloss over exactly the kind of tense political and military action that March Of The Eagles excels at as nothing more than a blip. This isn't necessarily the best example of what Paradox's grand-strategy game engine can do (relative to Crusader Kings II, for example), but a tight focus on Napoleonic Europe from 1805 to 1820 makes for an entertaining game set in an era that (apart from Napoleon: Total War) has long lacked good, accessible strategy games.
Like its Paradox-developed siblings (such as the Europa Universalis series) March of the Eagles happens in variable-speed real-time, which is a good thing because it can offer more depth of information and time for strategic choice than an RTS like StarCraft II. Being able to slow things down to see and absorb the economic information of every single one of your nation's provinces and the diplomatic connections of the dozens of nations, or plot the first complicated phases of a war, then to speed things up when rebuilding while at peace allows us to play at our own pace. My single-player campaigns generally ran between five and eight hours in length.
The most important benefit of the 15-year timeframe is that we get simple, transparent victory conditions. You can win—something not possible in Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis—by grabbing a specific set of key provinces that are unique to your chosen nation. Those objectives are placed on the map in historically interesting fashion which encourages us to take risks. A French player may wish to avoid invading Russia and repeating Napoleon's most famous failure, for example, but the number of Naval Dominance objectives in Russian territory will be a difficult temptation to resist. Objectives can also be used to give weaker nations a chance at winning—in one game the Ottoman Empire snuck up on the rest of us and very nearly won because many of its objectives were in small nations.
Other players will know which provinces you need to win, which adds an entertaining level of tension and understanding of others' strategies—you'll know exactly why France just declared war on Prussia, and you may need to jump in to stop them. Not every country gets a fair shake, though, as balancing is questionable. It tells us that eight great powers have the best chance of winning, including both historical powers like Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria, but also the relatively weak Spain, Turkey, and most bizarrely, Sweden. Those three are unlikely to ever be able to face one of the major powers directly in a war, and Sweden, sandwiched between the most powerful minor nation of Denmark and massive Russia, seems particularly out of place.
This isn't a peacetime simulation, though—most of your time will be spent either preparing for or engaging in war. As with most Paradox games, you do not have tactical control over battles, but in every other aspect of warfare March of the Eagles is more robust in its management of generals and battle tactics. That's battle tactics, not tactical battles—all the action happens off screen. But the options for controlling them—and some good flavor text about generals' skills—is what gives March of the Eagles most of its Napoleonic flavor: great generals lead glorious charges or fight desperate defenses in epic battles.
Building and reinforcing armies is more mixed. While much of March of the Eagles is streamlined and simple, the process of recruiting new brigades involves choosing from dozens of different unit types and then individually picking each city they’ll be built it. It’s needlessly overcomplicated, and it stands out in a particularly negative way when compared to the automatic process by which units with casualties receive replacements. An overall “manpower” resource allows you to see how many troops you have available as well as how many are missing, which is a simple and effective method of checking on your military’s overall health. For example, France may have 100,000 men able to replace troops lost in an invasion of Russia, and you’ll know that you’re in trouble if those replacements are drained before you’ve won the war.
One of the more fascinating and positive design decisions of March of the Eagles is that it makes losing battles necessary and beneficial. Fighting at all is how your generals learn those helpful skills, win or lose. But beyond that, losing battles gives your nation “Idea Points,” which are the research currency used to upgrade your troops, economy, and manpower. This structures each campaign in a historically accurate and interestingly-balanced fashion. France starts out superior to all its rivals militarily, but each French victory makes their enemies a little bit smarter, which will eventually allow them to match, then defeat Napoleon if he can't weaken them enough early on. The balance of power centered around the rampant French regime forms the core tension of March of the Eagles, and mechanics like this, combined with a diplomatic system that makes it easy to gang up on the game leader, ensures that campaign’s historically accurate imbalance of power is both manageable and entertaining.
That same constant shifting of power and alliances makes March of the Eagles an excellent multiplayer game despite a terrible first impression, thanks to some technical issues. The official Paradox lobby was frustrating to register for, other players couldn't join the host's game, and I hit several other minor but frustrating interface issues. Only by using the old-fashioned method of the host giving his IP address to the other players over email could we actually get a match set up.
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