The First Battle Lost, 1809 in Germany

We know a lot of Napoleonic gamers eagerly awaiting our next ESR Series 3 Campaign Guides. So in an effort to keep people up-to-date on progress we’ll be maintaining this post to provide progress towards milestones on our next Campaign Guide scheduled to be released: The First Battle Lost, 1809 in Germany.

We’ve been developing The First Battle Lost for some time now, on-and-off as resources allow while pushing forward the ESR Miniatures line. Our target date for release is Q3 2024.

So… here is where things are at. Please note, this is a living document that we’ll keep updating. It is not exhaustive but does cover the major milestones that we hope you will easily identify.

Progress Tracker

Project Stages

While R&D technically is always going on while there is any drafting to do… and can extend into the proofing stage, R&D generally ramps down as drafting ramps up.

Introduction (50%)

Scenarios (70%)

As in all of these progress sections, the percentage complete is effectively what is ‘as finalized as possible at this stage’, meaning that more may be done – i.e. we aren’t still researching what troops were at a scenario… but if the Order of Battle isn’t formatted and placed in its respective scenario yet, then it isn’t counted as done and counts as incomplete.

Uniform Guide (71%)

Our uniform guides are effectively created in two semi-parallel stages: line art drafting and coloring. We try to frontend load the line art drafting as much as possible during the development of scenarios, but since the units present, i.e. orders of battle, feed the uniform guide, the line art drafting can’t complete while there is flux in the orders of battle. Similarly the coloration stage effectively can’t be done in earnest until the bulk of the orders of battle are frozen as final.

Please note regarding the stats on the uniform guide that all statistics will be in-flux largely until 1809-1s3 goes through final proofing. Basically everything feeds data into the uniform section, so any change elsewhere can change the counts. All numbers provides are therefore effectively estimates.