«HistWar : Les Grognards» comes with ten historical battles, including some of the best known engagements from the period of 1805-1814. All maps have been created with the same map generation tool provided to the player. This editor allows to the player to create countless new battles, historical or fictional.
«HistWar : Les Grognards» maps come in four possible sizes : 6 x 4.5 km (approx. 3.7 x 2.8 miles), 10 x 7.5 km (approx. 6.2 x 4.6 miles), 15 x 11 km (approx. 9.3 x 6.8 miles) or 30 x 22.5 km (approx. 18.6 x 14.1 miles). This corresponds to the dimensions of the historical sites where hundreds of thousands of soldiers clashed.
The first three sizes are dedicaced to the battles. The zones of deployments define a narrow "no man's land" causing the beginning of hostilities without delay. Conversly, the biggest size map is useful for a mini-campaign mode, where the armies are placed on the edges of the map at the beginning of operations. It is necessary to recon and scout the battleground to discover the enemy, before engaging in battle.
The map editor is simple to use to quickly generate new battlegrounds.The easiest way to make a new map is to simply create it randomly. The editor is capable of creating complete random maps using nearly all map elements available in the game (rivers, lakes or marshes, woodlands, hills, various types of buildings, roads...). However, redoubts and brooks are not randomly generated. The player is able to add them very easily by hand though.
A second random mode limits the map generator to the map topography only. In this way it is very easy to create an initial topographic map, onto which the player is then able to place various map objects and elements.
The editor allows you to choose the characteristics of the ground and battles: size, time of day when the battle begins and duration of the fighting, weather effects, deployments zones of both armies. You can also define the initial map: reference (blank), topographic or complete. You can then add various map elements such as rivers, hills, vegetation, buildings, lakes, cities, villages, windmills, redoubts, stone and pontoniier bridges and more.