NAPOLEON: RULE OF IRON - 1:1 scale Napoleonic RTS

[Asid]

1:1 scale brings Napoleon Bonaparte's most legendary battles to life in this tactical real-time strategy game. Experience a story-driven campaign where you'll command 33 massive engagements like Waterloo with 200.000 or Leipzig with 500.000 soldiers.


Steam


Single-player


NAPOLEON RULE OF IRON Reveal Trailer




About

NAPOLEON: RULE OF IRON is a tactical real-time strategy game where you can command Napoleon Bonaparte's most epic historical battles in 1:1 scale. At the battle of Borodino you will see 300.000 actual soldier models on screen engaging in vicious ranged and melee combat. At the battle of Leipzig even up to 500.000. Of course this depends on how well you do in the campaign.


Charge of the french cavalry.


The Campaign
The Campaign follows the story of Napoleon Bonaparte and his largest battles from Toulon to Waterloo: Fight in Italy, Egypt, Europe, Spain and Russia. This doesn't mean that the outcome is clear: there are three alternate endings, two of which are fictitious. Between battles you can manage your Grand Arm?e: buy supplies, recruit and disband infantry, cavalry and artillery and organize them into Corps. Units can gain experience over the course of the campaign and become your Old Guard. One of them can even bear an imperial eagle standard that inspires nearby soldiers - but be careful. Once it is lost to the enemy it is lost forever. Before each battle there is an immersive briefing and Napoleon will hold a speech infront of your army. The real-time battles give you full tactical control over historical formations like infantry and cavalry divisions and artillery batteries (up to 5000 rendered soldiers or 50 guns each). The maps were carefully reconstructed using NASA satellite data and historical records.

These are the 33 battles you can fight in NAPOLEON: RULE OF IRON:

  - Siege of Toulon, 1793

  - Mondovi, 1796

  - Lodi, 1796

  - Castiglione, 1796

  - Arcole, 1796

  - Rivoli, 1797

  - Pyramids, 1798

  - Abukir, 1799

  - Montebello, 1800

  - Marengo, 1800

  - Austerlitz, 1805

  - Jena, 1806

  - Auerstedt, 1806

  - Eylau, 1807

  - Friedland, 1807

  - Coruna, 1809

  - Aspern-Essling, 1809

  - Wagram, 1809

  - Salamanca, 1812

  - Witebsk, 1812

  - Smolensk, 1812

  - Borodino, 1812

  - Beresina, 1812

  - Vitoria, 1813

  - L?tzen, 1813

  - Bautzen, 1813

  - Leipzig, 1813

  - Montmirail, 1814

  - Vauchamps, 1814

  - Montereau, 1814

  - Paris, 1814

  - Ligny, 1815

  - Waterloo, 1815

And two secret fictitious battles


The AI
The AI will throughout this present a formidable challenge. Innovative mechanics allow it for example to intelligently evade flanking maneuvers or countercharge when charged.  The AI employs a Corps System to utilize or defend against strategies like defeat in detail, distraction attacks, defense in depth etc... On lower difficulties these behaviours are tuned down or removed. The AI has no cheat bonuses or maluses on any difficulty level.


The AI evades a flanking maneuver by the player.


Epic sound effects and visual effects
Epic sound effects and visual effects have been implemented to match the soldier numbers. Among these are: super powerful marching drums, huge plumes of smoke, artillery impacts, fires and much more. If your units has a marching band attachement you can order it to play authentic march music and inspire nearby soldiers. Unlike in other games of this genre fallen soldiers never despawn so the field will soon be strewn with the dead (Blood can be disabled in the settings).


The price of taking a fortified position.

The combat is tactical: Morale, stamina, unit weight, speed and terrain height are just some of the factors that influence combat. Terrain cover like trees or villages play a large role. Ammunition travels at the physically accurate speed. Soldiers will step to the side to make way for friendly units trying to pass through them. In melee brawls realistic clusters form. During rain muskets don?t function. Blizzards make your soldiers tire out faster.


Soldiers step to the side to let a friendly elite unit through to the front.

The fate of France hangs in the balance. Take command of the legendary Grande Arm?e, shape the destiny of Europe and experience the ultimate Napoleonic simulation.


Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

This game shows violence within a historical setting (war). Blood can be disabled in the settings.

[Asid]

[Asid]

Combat System
Mon, June 9, 2025



Hey guys,

I wanted to go a bit more in depth of the combat system. Nobody has ever done a tactical rts game like this with up to 500.000 soldiers on screen so I had to pioneer many things. It turns out that this poses unique challenges.

First of all it is necessary to limit the amount of units. To have a fun gaming experience in a real-time game like this I consider the absolute maximum to be 60 units for each player. Another thing is that you have to limit how broad these formations of up to 5000 men get. Otherwise a single unit would stretch across the whole map and be completely impractical to move around. So I basically put all units into a column formation. Now every unit represents what was historically a division. Also concerning bridges - because funneling a 50000 men army across a bridge took hours or days historically and this is not very fun to do in a game I removed them. I find this a bit unimmersive too but please understand that you always have to strike a balance between game mechanics and realism.

I have laid great importance on realism whereever else i could. Morale is the most important factor in battles and it includes chain routs. That means a routing unit affects the morale of nearby friendly units. That way you don't have individual units routing and coming back repeatedly but at some point a breaking point is reached and an entire Corps routs. The whole AI army can retreat too if it thinks it has no chance anymore and it would be better to preserve its forces. Another thing is that I modeled the musket and cannon damage in accordance with historic accuracy curves.

Cover is another very important aspect in the battles. You get a great advantage if your unit is standing in a town or a forest (this is reduced in winter due to the lower amount of leaves). The downside is that your troops move more slowly. A special cover is earthworks. They are special because they can be destroyed by artillery fire over time. This way you can wear the enemy?s defences down before attacking as long as you have enough gun ammo.

Another thing is unit abilities. I think that implementing unit abilities that give magical bonuses like +10% charge bonus or something similar isn?t a good design decision. But what I implemented was to play marching music. It makes sense to me that soldiers would be invigorated by marching music so they get a morale bonus when it is played. You can in the campaign menu attach marching bands to your units which gives them this ability. The music played is based on historical music like La Victoire est a nous. Every major nation has a unique song to play. These are the other songs you will be able to hear that will make the battles much more epic:

  - Austria: Yorkscher Marsch by Beethoven

  - Prussia: Dessauer Marsch

  - Russia: Preobrazhensky March

  - United Kingdom: The British Grenadiers

On top of that there are eagles. Historically the French army had these as an imitation of the Roman eagle. A unit that bears an eagle gives a morale bonus to nearby units because they get inspired by its presence. The cool thing is the eagle can be stolen in battle by the enemy. If you can?t take it back in the same battle it is lost for the rest of the campaign. Only France has eagles.

Finally for immersion it was important to me to have speeches before the battles. Note that because of the army sizes in reality Napoleon didn?t hold speeches. He rather gave out notes for his officers to read. These are the sources I based the speeches on. For the sake of cinematics I made Napoleon hold these speeches himself.

In the following posts I will talk more about the campaign and AI. Also you might be wondering when the game will be released and I am happy to say that having started the development in February I am almost finished. You can expect a release quite soon!

This is all for now. Thank you!
 

[Asid]

Campaign, AI & Release Date
Tue, July 15, 2025



Hey guys,

I have been hard at work the past few weeks with finalising the campaign. The key feature of the campaign is that you can buy infantry, cavalry and artillery units inbetween battles with the rewards you gain from the battles. The ressources you need to recruit units are: soldiers, horses and gold. You can attach these units to Corps (groups) that get unlocked automatically as you progress. Depending on how many kills your units make during the battle the more experience they gain. At a certain level they get upgraded to a unit of the same type but with better stats.

The unit subtypes are:

Infantry: Line Infantry, Grenadier, Guard

Cavalry: Hussars, Cuirassiers

Artillery: 6 Pounder, 12 Pounder

When your units get upgraded they also get marching band and eagle attachments automatically.

You must also buy musketballs and cannonballs so your troops can keep up ranged combat. Then there is a brief discussion between Napoleon and a Marshal before the battle. You can see an example in the video I posted earlier showing the first gameplay footage of the battle of Austerlitz. You can then distribute your corps so they spawn in certain areas of the battle. Some battles in the campaign must be won and some not depending on the history.

Your losses carry over of course from battle to battle. Note that there is no dynamic difficulty scaling, meaning the game doesn?t adjust the number of enemy troops to how well you do. I believe this is important so the player can have an influence on the world and doesn?t feel like it is pointless to play. The idea behind these systems is that that way the game is guaranteed to stay interesting and the players will not notice anyway. But they are definitely smart enough to notice! Of course the downside of not having scaling is that the game might become boring or too hard, but that?s what the difficulty setting at the start is for. If you are a good player, you just choose the hard difficulty.

Speaking of which, what I am very proud of is that I managed to make the difficulty almost entirely dependent on AI behavior (the only other factor is how many rewards you receive from battles). Here is a table of the key behavioral modifications of the AI depending on the difficulty. This list is not complete and I have some more ideas I might implement until launch.

   
Easy
Infantry : Doesn't charge. Doesn't countercharge when charged. Doesn't react to being flanked.
Cavalry: Low chance of charging.

Medium
Infantry : All of the above (easy) enabled. Low chance of charging.
Cavalry: Medium chance of charging.

Hard (L'Empereur)
Infantry : Medium chance of charging.
Cavalry: High chance of charging.


If you have any questions, let me know.

Also in other news, I now have a set release date: 1st of August. See you then!

[Asid]

Release
Fri, August 1, 2025



Napoleon: Rule Of Iron is now available on Steam for Windows and MacOS!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3715460/NAPOLEON_RULE_OF_IRON/
?24.99

[Asid]

Patch 1.0.1
Sat, August 2, 2025



Hello everyone!

Thank you for all your support and feedback since launch. I've been listening and am happy to release the first patch, which focuses on quality-of-life improvements, smarter AI, and bug fixes.

 

Patch 1.0.1

- Included camera instructions in guide.

- You can now move the camera instantly by clicking on the minimap

- You can now move the camera by moving the mouse to the screen corners.

- Significantly decreased the likelihood of two AI units blocking each others Line Of Sight. This involved tweaking the detection of when an overlap between two units occurs among other things.

- Increased the ability of the AI to order its line. During this it also exposes its own units less to flanking fire from the enemy.

- Made the early campaign a bit easier.

- Improved the readability of unit counts on the campaign map.

- Fixed an issue where the General's unit wasn't playing the correct marching sound.

- Slight UI tweaks.

 
I hope these changes improve your experience! Please continue to share your feedback with me.

[Asid]

Patch 1.0.2
Sun, August 3, 2025

Here's another small update.

- Fixed a bug regarding deployment zone spawning
- You can now skip the Intro by pressing ESC
- Slight UI Improvements

[Asid]

Patch 1.0.3
Mon, August 4, 2025



Hello everyone. I am mostly publishing more UI tweaks today. Sorry about this I have been laser focused on gameplay. After the recent patches the UI should be much better and clearly understandable now.

 
Patch 1.0.3

- You now always see the button to skip dialogue and speeches. Before you had to bring it up with spacebar and players weren't finding that.

- It's easier to see which difficulty you selected.

- Loading screen adjusted.

- You can now skip endings too by pressing ESC.

- Eliminated unit pop-in when moving the camera using the minimap.

- Disbanding units now refunds all soldiers/horses but no gold.

[Asid]

New Price: $19.99
Sun, August 24, 2025



Thanks for the feedback?this should make it easier to jump in. I want more people to try it now, not only during sales. If you already bought: thank you for supporting me early!

Also an update is coming soon to disable battle timers for historical battles.

[Asid]

Update 1.0.4
Mon, August 25, 2025



Hello, I'm back with a new update!

  - Small tooltip adjustments.

  - Minor main-menu UI enhancements.

  - Updated credits text.

  - Adjusted Toulon timer.

  - Added splash screen.

  - The battle timer can now be disabled for historical battles. In this mode, you can only win by elimination. I didn?t add this for the campaign because it affects battles with special conditions like Borodino. In that battle, the campaign branches depending on how much of the Russian army you destroy. If victory were based solely on elimination, this would be pointless.

  - For the campaign, the best solution I found is an option to increase or decrease the timer from −25% to +100%. That should be enough for most players. You can set this once when starting a new campaign. This is backward compatible with your existing save files, meaning they will still work.

If you want to edit your existing save files to modify the timer from now on, here?s a guide:

How to edit your save files

1. Go to the save-file folder.

Windows

  - Press Win + R, paste and press Enter:
  - %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Eisengeist Studio\Napoleon Rule of Iron\

  - You will see a list of .json files. Open the one you want to edit with a text editor.

macOS

  - In Finder: Go > Go to Folder?, then paste and open:
  - ~/Library/Application Support/Eisengeist Studio/Napoleon Rule of Iron/

  - Look for the same save files (*.json).

2. Go to the end of the file and find the block called "campaignData": { }.

3. At the very end, after "borodinoSpecialConditionMet": false, add a comma, and on a new line add: "battleTimerPercent": 0.
Instead of 0, you can enter a value between −25 and 100. It should look like this:

"borodinoSpecialConditionMet": false,

"battleTimerPercent": 50

  - },

That?s all for now. Thank you for 10 reviews by the way, this has significantly increased the visibility of the game.

[Asid]

Update 1.0.6
Wed, October 29, 2025



Hello everyone, here with another update:

    - adjusted scroll sensitivity settings to have a larger range. You might have to readjust your settings.

    - fixed a bug where when controllers were connected this was causing issues with the camera controls.

    - french guard and eaglebearer units now reload faster (20s) than grenadiers as they should

    - when the eaglebearer is not taken into battle from the campaign the eagle is not lost anymore