Napoleonic Battles 4.08.1 Updates

Greetings fellow grognards, today we bring you the culmination of months of work on this series. As we covered in the post two weeks ago, this round brings all the games in the series up to the same "level" on multiple fronts:

• All games now have 15 minute version scenarios in both the stand alone & campaign formats.
• For games that previously had 10 minute versions, they have been retained.
• All games now have the "Standardization Project" implemented on them. You can read more about that in this post, but also a document is included with each game providing more details.
• All games now have their scenario descriptions formatted for easier reading. In many cases they have been expanded and play style suggestions have been included.
• The Napoleonic Introduction series that started as blog posts has been expanded and packaged in PDF format and included with each game now.

We did find a couple of small problems after Waterloo and the Demo went out, so we have migrated all titles to 4.08.1 with this release. We also made some further refinements to the AI.

• Campaign Waterloo & the Demo have small "updates" that can be applied - IF you already had 4.08 installed. You can get those from the Updates page.
• All other games require a clean install. 

**Special Note** - We recommend that you finish ongoing games before migrating to this new version. There are PDT changes (for all games in this series) and when that happens the chance of file corruption goes way up. So, better to be safe than sorry. This does not apply to Waterloo 4.08 however. If you downloaded that already and started a new game you can apply the 4.08.1 update and keep playing.

You can skip the following section if you understand the clean install details.

** A completely Clean Install is required to obtain this update. You can grab a new copy of the installers from your Store Account. The only exceptions are Waterloo & the Demo, since they already were on 4.08. For those two you can grab the small update off the Napoleonic Support page. However, if you did not do a clean install with those two titles you will need to grab full installers as well.

We will be doing this for every game series we publish, in time - if all goes well during the course of 2024. Once the new "base line" is established we will begin to offer incremental updates again on the site. These will only include files changed since that new baseline for that series. With that said, you can ALWAYS do a clean install at any time, and the installer linked in your Store Account is the most recent version.

So, again, how do you get these new versions? 

You must go and login to your Store Account to download new full installers. 

Notes regarding Store Accounts.

1. If you go to login using one of the above links and it tells you "no account found" - don't worry! - just send us an email at the Help Desk and we will locate your records. It's just a matter of completing the account setup process.
2. When you login you will see all your orders listed there. Under each order number is the word (Downloads). If you click that it will take you to a page where you can do a new download of the game and it will also display your serial number. Again, each of the installers is fully up-to date with the latest patches already included. 

This isn't going to be a real long blog post, as we covered the vast majority of the changes in the 4.08 post, but there are a couple of points worth noting.

We made some tweaks to the graphics as we got a few complaints that all the structures looked the same. So they have been tweaked, with different colored roofs for each type.

And we aren't so naïve to think that everyone will love every change we make! So we have included older files in the installs so that you can revert if you wish. This pertains to not only graphics, but also data files. Both PDT and Scenario files.

Using Campaign Bautzen as an example, below is a picture of the file structure - with an arrow pointing to folders that contain older elements.

Further, one of the beauties of the games is you can make all sorts of changes yourself, as the PDTs, OOBs, Scenarios and most of the graphical elements are all moddable... 

We do have a new video series to roll out on our YouTube channel, which was planned today - but I ran out of time. Will get that released in the not so distant future!

Ok, as I said, short and sweet ... you have an immense amount of content to pour through in these releases today. Time to head on over to your Store Account and download your installers. Or, maybe you are interested in picking up one or more titles in this series... you can visit this page to see the whole collection.

We hope you enjoy them!