France Underpowered in Napoleonic Europe

MidnightRambler

MidnightRambler

The Streetwalkin Cheetah
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i dont know alot about the early 19th century in europe, but i was under the impression that napoleon conquered damn near the entire continent.
It seems that in the napoleonic europe conquest, especially on the harder difficulties, you can capture, at most, a handful of cities; and even that only comes through shrewed diplomacy and strategy.
am i missing something here, or is france seriously and inacuratly underpowered.
 
That's not the impression I got. France has the best production and the best units, plus they start with two leaders and a tech nobody else has. Yeah, you can't just use your starting units to conquer multiple nations, but there's plenty of opportunity to research and build before time runs out. Of course if you play on deity or something, everyone else has better production, but that's no surprise.

I don't see what the problem is. France starts with cavalry and infantry that are both better than what everyone else has. If you do some research, grand batteries and guard infantry are pretty unstoppable, too. You're locked at war with 3 nations, but one is seperated by water, and the other two are pretty pathetic.
 
Even if Napolean did conquer the majority of Europe... there has to be a transition from his assention into power and his rallies for a grand army.
 
When I first played Napoleonic Europe as Britain I was surprised to see the Dutch survive the first interturn! One city with a locked war against the most powerful nation, who just so happens to be their neighbor? LOL

Anyway, on topic, the AI does terribly as France. It doesn't know how to handle War Weariness and so AI France always collapses midgame, at least from what I've seen.
 
Britain is probably the easiest nation to play as since they have equivalently powerful units which an AI France has difficulty defending against and its reasonably easy to get other nations to fight France as well. France is reasonably easy to play as but if Britain is also a human player then it suddenly becomes much more of a challenge...
 
The problem is that the english have the Man-o-wars, they OWN the sea, to bad the french have to cross it at risk of letting the Man-o-wars multiply :lol:
 
ok so maybe it takes a while to build up an army capable of taking over europe, but in the meantime every counrty in the game declares war on you through mutual protection.
 
Moblize early in the war. The Neutral nations will declare war on you from time to time and you can steal or buy tech. Also, that extra cash can go to cash rushing improvements when peace is made.

Grandbatteries so rock.
 
norwegianviking said:
The problem is that the english have the Man-o-wars, they OWN the sea, to bad the french have to cross it at risk of letting the Man-o-wars multiply :lol:
Click to expand...

Once you take London then you can set up a one turn transportation network where you transports always end the turn in a harbour and since the computer doesn't understand blockades then your ships are pretty safe.
 
We didn't find France to be underpowered at Sid. No, we didn't capture all of Europe, but it was just a matter of time. On DG or lower, a player should be able to win domination fairly easily as France.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=96501

Arathorn
 
Minor correction, Arathorn: Already at Demigod, it's very likely to win by VPs before reaching the domination level ;)

Russia overpowered? Honestly, no. Aside from the historical accuracy in this conquest, with Russia clearly deserving the #3 here, they are not that strong from the start.

* Corruption kills them. If that didn't happen to you, you either played Regent or below, or benefitted from the recently discovered map size bug. Before the FP is up (~turn 30), Russia has about 5 productive cities.
* The Russian cities are almost empty. They have a total of 2 Banks and 2 Universities (and one of those unis in 60% corrupt Kiev), even a couple of cities without Markets.
* They start with less money.

Sure, they get nice units, and a gigantic late game production. But France and Britain are a lot stronger.
 
France didn't conquer half of Europe because it had a large Army, but because it had a great and daring military leader in Napoleon who also was an efficient head of a nation. In turn he had skilled generals who served him.
 
Correct. While some other nations mostly had stone-old veterans, stuck with 18th century tactics (especially Prussia was a shadow of its former power EDIT: Do you say that in English, " a shadow of former power"? ) And on top of that, he used a lot of alliances - there were more Polish then French troops (and even more casualities among them) in the Russian campaign. Not entirely sure, but IIRC there were even more Bavarians in Russia...
 
EDIT: Do you say that in English, " a shadow of former power"?
Click to expand...

You can say that :) More common usage might be "Prussia was a shadow of it's former self", but power works nicely in this context.

I haven't played this conquest yet, but need to get to that one.
 
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