Scourge of War Boards

Hello everyone.

I am the proud owner of the SOWWL boxed edition and want to give my first impressions. In a word, the game is BRILLIANT!

I have been deeply into the horse and musket era (especially Napoleonics) for decades, both studying and gaming everything I can get my hands on. I played the first Take Command game to death both un-modded and modded but the engine couldn't do justice to European battles. Skipped Gettysburg because I'm not interested in ACW.

This game is unique in its' treatment of C&C and in using individual cavalry squadrons -- not even miniatures rules do this. Could the game be improved? Yup. There are a few decisions I question: columns of division should be able to fire as should some cavalry and units should be able to melee buildings for starters, but these are minor quibbles that, hopefully can be fixed.

One feature I would like to see is the ability to create ad-hoc battle groups. Commanders of the Napoleonic period often formed combined arms units for specific tasks. For example, a battalion of infantry might have a cavalry squadron attached plus a gun section to defend a village. Would be cool to create and take command of one of these.

The game seems pretty stable for me except for one problem: some times my screen will go black and I have to restart my computer. I can hear the sounds of battle but no visuals. This isn't related to battle size or a given scenario. I have a 1 gig NVIDIA card but I can't use the latest drivers because I'm still running XP. Any thoughts?

Thanks for reading,

Deeter