I really loved the concept of this game, and the scale and autonomy of everything and how it was all implemented -- nice job with this one :-)
By the way I made a short video of the gameplay you might enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZNIEtacLfU
Thank you, I enjoyed the video! It is always so instructive to see people play something for the first time.
My only serious pain point was that I failed to make clear you can move the telescope even when zoomed in - this lets you frame those big battles so you see both halves, rather than jumping in & out. (The musket range is actually adjusted to ensure you can see both sides :>)
I very much enjoyed your reaction to regiment 7's decision to charge the foe. That is very much the thesis of this entire game.
You are correct it is entirely turn based at heart. Their is a turn-by-turn order and square-by-square movement. But I'd actually disagree strongly that turn based has anything to do with being a roguelike. It is more like how perma-death appears a roguelike feature; not because it is a feature, but because a more essential requirement almost forces that decision.
"Permanent Consequences", or "No Save and Continue" are the cause of Permadeath and Random environment. If you let people screw up permanently, you have to put then out of the misery and restart. And if you keep restarting, you need the start to be interesting,
Tactical game play is what induces the Turn-based, Grid-based, and Non-modal characteristics. It is very hard to focus on tactics with free movement or real time. War of 1812 aggressively removes all tactics from the equation as your level of control is too coarse, leaving it with only strategy. (And how much strategy there is can be debated. My interpretation of Tolstoy's argument in War & Peace is that there is no actual strategy in the Napoleonic wars)
Totally agree about the UI complaints. So much of my 7DRL time is spent on polishing UX, and there is always so many more things I could have done!
Oh wow, can't believe I missed the zoomed in telescope thing, that sounds great! I admittedly wasn't paying very close attention to some of the messages and instructions in the bottom-right after I felt like I had a good feel of the game ':-)
I may have described it poorly but I actually don't consider turn-based gameplay a requirement of the traditional roguelike either (although I don't think I've played any yet that aren't turn-based). It's subjective, but 1812 falls short of that definition for me more because it plays like a large-scale battle simulator than a roguelike. And that's just in its current form, I could see a game like this becoming something that I'd personally consider a tradtional roguelike if it were expanded somewhat. But that's all semantics to me anyways and I don't find it very interesting arguing about definitions -- all I know is that War of 1812 is a very neat game and I'm happy I got to play it!
I like that insight about removing the tactics from the game. 1812 definitely accomplishes that. I didn't consciously pick up on that while playing, but it's certainly an interesting lens to view the gameplay experience through.