Ten battles and thirteen years of Napoleon’s wars are in Veterans: Napoleonic Wars when it enters Early Access on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, Tactical Boar said on Steam. It is a Windows PC game on Steam, published by the studio itself. The price has not been announced. The developer says it will not change during or after Early Access, which it expects to last about two months.
You command one army in real time across a single battlefield. There is no base building, and the store page describes single-player battles drawn from Napoleon’s campaigns. Infantry, cavalry and artillery use the three formations of the period: line, column and square. A line spreads men wide so every musket can fire, and it is weak against cavalry. A square faces outward on four sides, which stops a cavalry charge and makes a large target for cannon. A column moves fast and fires little.
Morale, fatigue and line of sight shape each fight. Weather, mud and the smoke from cannon fire change what you can see and how fast anyone moves. The title comes from the one system that runs between battles. Troops gain experience in the battles they survive, and their losses carry over to the next one, so a regiment that bled at Arcole is thinner at Rivoli.
The ten battles in the October 28 build
The launch build has ten battles and a tutorial map. The battles are Montenotte, Arcole, Rivoli, Alexandria, Shubra Khit, the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Friedland and Wagram. Three are from Italy in 1796 and 1797, three are from Egypt in 1798, and the last four run from Marengo in 1800 to Wagram in 1809. A day-one patch shortens the time it takes to capture the redoubt in the first mission, a change the team says came from demo feedback. That demo ran during Steam Next Fest, from October 19 to 26.
The roadmap itself is an image, and the post’s text gives no dates. It promises smaller improvements and balance changes alongside larger additions, plus ongoing work on stability, performance and the AI. The store page adds more historical battles and side missions for the full version. Tactical Boar plans to get there in about two months, which in this genre counts as brisk.
The obvious neighbour is Napoleon: Total War, Creative Assembly’s 2010 game, which put similar battles inside a turn-based campaign across Europe. Veterans carries the army itself from one fight to the next, so your campaign is the roster and who in it survived Austerlitz. That makes it a game for the player who skipped the campaign map in Napoleon and fought the battles anyway.
Veterans: Napoleonic Wars opens on Wednesday, and you can wishlist it on Steam until Tactical Boar names the price.
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