Europe · 1805–1813

Napoleonic Europe: The History Behind the Game

A single decade in which one man's army marched further, faster and more destructively across Europe than any before it — until winter, and a continent's worth of enemies, caught up with him. Era of Warlords covers the Empire from its height to its unraveling.

An emperor bids for the continent

By 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte had turned revolutionary France into an empire and its army into the most feared force in Europe. The Third Coalition — Britain, Austria, Russia and others — tried to check him and was shattered at Austerlitz, arguably his masterpiece. Over the following years, Prussia, Austria and their allies would each try again, and each time Napoleon's Grande Armée, resupplied by conquest and reorganized allied states, won the field.

By 1809, at the empire's territorial height, France directly ruled or controlled through client states most of continental Europe from Spain to the Duchy of Warsaw, leaving Britain and Russia as the only major powers still standing outside his system.

The turn

Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia was meant to force Tsar Alexander I back into the Continental System blockading Britain. Instead, the Grande Armée — over 400,000 strong at the start — was worn down by scorched-earth retreat, disease and finally the brutal Russian winter, and only a fraction returned.

The disaster emboldened Europe. In 1813 Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden and Britain united in the Sixth Coalition and defeated Napoleon decisively at Leipzig, the largest battle in European history before World War I. Forced to abdicate in 1814, Napoleon returned for a final Hundred Days campaign in 1815, ending at Waterloo — the last chapter of an era that had already, by 1813, made his fall inevitable.

88 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.