ModAAR: American Front, a CSA v USA WIP mod

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: Bufo

Hi again! Great to see the addition of Michigan. I live in the UP so I had one or two things to suggest about the area.

1. Since the mid 1850s, Marquette had acted as a major shipping center in Northern Michigan and may warrant the inclusion of some minor port.

Done.

2. The area between Munising and Newberry (today regarded as the Seney Stretch) is mostly cedar swamp.

Ditto.

3. In the first half of the 20th century the UP was a key supplier of both copper and iron for the US war efforts (both WWI and WWII). Here is a small snippet from an article by the National Parks Service:
"The journal was right. By 1914, copper had become an essential component of every weapon, vehicle, and piece of equipment used on the battlefield. Its ability to conduct electricity, withstand water, and transmit heat made it ideal for many different applications, as did its malleability and durability. Engineers used copper to improve weapons and develop machines that were far more deadly than those used in previous conflicts, including armored tanks and airplanes. Submarines had increased capacity and range; rifles and machine guns were more accurate than ever before.

At the time, Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula was one of the most important copper mining regions in the United States.2 Although it was no longer the country’s leading producer—that distinction shifted to Montana and Arizona mines in the 1880s—Keweenaw copper was highly prized because it was nearly pure, elemental copper, which gave it exceptional conductive qualities. Actively mined over thousands of years by early American Indians, industrial-scale operations began in 1845, and the Keweenaw quickly became the most important copper mining district in the world. Many different companies operated along the mineral range, but they were led by two giants: the Quincy Mining Company (1846), and the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (merged 1871). Their innovative and unique mining history is commemorated at Keweenaw National Historical Park."

I do not know what this would do for balancing but the presence of Iron Mountain alone doesn't quite capture this spirit IMO.


4. The UP has a strange shape that is difficult to capture in these sort of editors. That being said, the Keweenaw Peninsula (the area right above Houghton) could be extended a bit more. The peninsula itself is actually an island (Copper Island) parted from the main by a river which Houghton is built to the south of (the Keweenaw Waterway was dredged in the 1860s to make Houghton a more important port/reduce travel time through the lake).

It took a LONG time to do, and I'm still not very happy with the shape I got int the end, but I've extended the Keweenaw peninsula and added Copper Harbor at the end of it as well as the Mohawk Copper Mine.

The main issue with coastline making is there's a limited number of potential coastline hexes (albeit, with 600+ hexes total, not a small number) and choosing one shape for one hex has a knock-on effect on neighbouring ones.

5. Is Isle Royale on the map? It is a major feature of Lake Superior. It may very well have been in a different screenshot that I missed, just wondering as I see other smaller islands.

See screenshot.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 40 - Indiana

Hi All. Here we are in Indiana, with its major centre of coal mining near Terre Haute and its urban centre at Indianapolis. Also important for its crossings over the Ohio river. Next stop Illinois. All comments and criticism welcome.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 41 - Illinois

Illinois next, and the last big city in this map build. Chicago is a major transport hub and centre of industry, and as such is represented by multiple city-hexes and a major port. The Illinois coal mining industry is represented by the Peabody mines at Pawnee just south of Springfield, IL (as an aside, just how many "Springfields" does the US have?) - Peabody No. 10 mine was at one stage one of the largest coal mines in the world.

In terms of geology Illinois appears to be rather flat except in the far north and south, and along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Any feedback on geological features I've missed would be very welcome.

[eightroomofelixir]

On Illinois I would suggest put Cairo (Little Egypt) in, they were strategically important in both IRL Civil War and in TL-191's Great War. Southern IL also has some swamps and wetlands due to Mississippi River and Ohio River.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: eightroomofelixir

On Illinois I would suggest put Cairo (Little Egypt) in, they were strategically important in both IRL Civil War and in TL-191's Great War. Southern IL also has some swamps and wetlands due to Mississippi River and Ohio River.

Hi eightroomofelixir! I've updated the map per your suggestions and added the Cache River in.

[vonspee]

Wow! This is looking great so far. I rather enjoyed this timeline in Turtledove's writing. Looking forward to further updates.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: vonspee

Wow! This is looking great so far. I rather enjoyed this timeline in Turtledove's writing. Looking forward to further updates.

Many thanks!. Hopefully I'm still on track to complete the map by the end of August (or at least in September) and then get to work on the OOBs, events, and AI scripting.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 42 - Wisconsin

Hello again. This time we're in Wisconsin and close to finishing up the Great Lakes region. Wisconsin has a largish city in Milwaukee, and is also home to a major iron-ore mining complex (as those familiar with the fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald will know), as well as crossings over the Mississippi. I actually tried to identify what mine the ore carried by the Fitzgerald came from but couldn't identify it, so instead I've represented the most productive of Wisconsin's taconite mines: the mines at Iron County on the border with Michigan, the largest of which was the Cary Mine.

Next up: Minnesota, Quebec, Kentucky, and Tennessee. With a bit of luck the whole of North America east of the Mississippi will be filed in before the end of the month!

As always any and all comments are welcome.

[Elessar2]

This is relevant to the scenario I've been working on [20km scale Euro map]. Your town/city density sure seems pretty high; you've got 3 towns all in a row thru Milwaukee, for example. Since settlements give defensive bonuses as well as act as supply centers, will this slow down any offensives, as they have to laboriously siege one after the other? Esp. since there are no mechanized units in your era which you can use for encirclements.

[The Land]

ORIGINAL: Elessar2

This is relevant to the scenario I've been working on [20km scale Euro map]. Your town/city density sure seems pretty high; you've got 3 towns all in a row thru Milwaukee, for example. Since settlements give defensive bonuses as well as act as supply centers, will this slow down any offensives, as they have to laboriously siege one after the other? Esp. since there are no mechanized units in your era which you can use for encirclements.

This is true, but of course it's possible to mod the defense bonus levels as well. If a smaller scale map means a "town" or 'city' is a smaller settlement, it can get less defence bonus & max entrenchment.

And regarding encirclements - one also needs to look at Action Points and unit mix in the round. In the WW1 game 4AP Corps are the main unit and 6AP Cavalry Corps are frequent. I can imagine cavalry divisions and so on being fairly common on a North America map.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: Elessar2

This is relevant to the scenario I've been working on [20km scale Euro map]. Your town/city density sure seems pretty high; you've got 3 towns all in a row thru Milwaukee, for example. Since settlements give defensive bonuses as well as act as supply centers, will this slow down any offensives, as they have to laboriously siege one after the other? Esp. since there are no mechanized units in your era which you can use for encirclements.

Basically, yes, offensives may get slowed down by the high density of the map. This is by design.

WW1 was not a war famed for its blitzkriegs. Though there were more rapid actions than is commonly known - the conquests of Romania and Serbia, Caporetto, Palestine, Poland, the Baltics all being examples - where there are enough enemy forces to cover the front you should have to blast your way through.

Moreover, one of the problems in creating this scenario is that strategic depth is lacking in many places. Theoretically if the CSA player simply advances the ~220 miles from the Ohio river to Sandusky then the USA will be split in half. Actually many of the important industrial centres of both the CSA and the USA are relatively close to their mutual border. Historically, the CSA was split twice during the civil war - once down the Mississippi valley and then again by Sherman's advance to the sea - so in modern warfare where logistical links are more important there is a risk that a lack of strategic depth may make for a short game. Making the map more dense is part of counteracting that.

However, like The Land says, if the entrenchment bonuses etc. result in an imbalanced game then this can always be tweaked.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 42 - Minnesota

Hi again. Now we're at the last of the Great Lake states - Minnesota. As this is also where we start getting to the prairies the density of the cities and infrastructure starts to decrease in this area. As the relationship between the US and Canada is antagonistic in this timeline the border area is undeveloped and crossed by only two links, both of them dirt roads: this is to make it much harder to launch an invasion of Canada.

[FOARP]

Quick update: Quebec has a lot of lakes and rivers! Hopefully should have the next bit done by the weekend.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 43 - Quebec

This took a long time to do and I'm still not that happy with it, but La Belle Province of Quebec is now done. The first thing that's obvious from the below screenshot is that the St. Lawrence River has been made impassable except in certain places. This is to make it possible for the Canadian player to stand a chance of defending the crossings of the St. Lawrence as long as they appear to have been held in the original Turtledove books (i.e., until 1917) - it really is impossible to see how they could be held that long against US forces that long otherwise. I do however plan to also release a version of the map where the St. Lawrence is just an ordinary major river.

In the world of the TL-191 series Quebec does eventually break away and become independent, and in this mod this will be reflected by events giving you (if you are playing as the US) a division of Quebec troops if you promise independence and have advanced far enough in Quebec.

Next stops: Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Sequoyah (AKA "Oklahoma").

[eightroomofelixir]

Congratulations for finally finished Quebec. I can imagine that it must take ages to make St. Lawrence feels right.

Anyway, one detail about Quebec: The city of Lévis (south of Quebec City) has a series of 3 forts built in late 1860s as a result of US Civil War, in case US invaded Canada and cut off the St. Lawrence waterway. The original plan recommended a total of 5 forts surrounded the city, but since US-Canada relationship turned into a friendly one in 1871 via Treaty of Washington, only 3 were built and all out of use shortly after.

In TL-191 where tension between USA and UK never cooled down, Lévis would probably became a fortified town with these forts, in order to protect Quebec City.

[FOARP]

ORIGINAL: eightroomofelixir

Congratulations for finally finished Quebec. I can imagine that it must take ages to make St. Lawrence feels right.

Anyway, one detail about Quebec: The city of Lévis (south of Quebec City) has a series of 3 forts built in late 1860s as a result of US Civil War, in case US invaded Canada and cut off the St. Lawrence waterway. The original plan recommended a total of 5 forts surrounded the city, but since US-Canada relationship turned into a friendly one in 1871 via Treaty of Washington, only 3 were built and all out of use shortly after.

In TL-191 where tension between USA and UK never cooled down, Lévis would probably became a fortified town with these forts, in order to protect Quebec City.

Good suggestion, I'll make Levis a fortress.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 44 - Kentucky

Hello again. This time construction of the map has taken us to the Bluegrass State. In TL-191 Kentucky became a Confederate state as Braxton Bragg's invasion of the state during the US civil war was a success. Now, in 1914, it is home to two major coalfields (the Eastern and Western Kentucky coalfields, represented here by the towns of Hazard and Central City) and is heavily fortified if possibly not strongly defended enough given the forces that the USA has arrayed against it. Kentucky is a salient sticking out of the Confederacy into the Union and so the Yankees are going to do their best to pinch it out!

Issues in creating this part of the map include selecting the right terrain for the Bluegrass country (should it be plains or hills, or a mixture of the two? I don't know). Also, I decided to include Lake Kentucky as I assume the dams would have been built earlier in this timeline, though again the inflexibility of coastline-selection makes it hard to squeeze in.

In terms of crossings over the Ohio:

- The bridges over the Ohio at Cairo were built in 1889

- The bridges at Paducah were begun in 1914 and finished in 1917, but I'm assuming they were built early here.

- The Henderson bridge was originally built in 1886, so is historical.

- The Owensboro bridge was finished in 1932, but I'm leaving it out here.

- The original Kentucky & Indiana bridge at Louisville was built in 1886 and upgraded in 1912, so it is historical. There was also the 14th street bridge built in 1870.

- The first bridge at Cincinnati (the John A. Roebling bridge) was finished in 1867, so it is historical. I know the books describe an assault-crossing of the Ohio here but let's assume that the bridge was blocked/dynamited.

- The bridge at Maysville wasn't built until 1931, so I'm leaving it out.

- The bridge at Kenova, WV (basically Huntingdon on the map) was built in 1913, and is historical.

Basically the goal here is to make sense out of the attack from the north (by Custer) and east (by Pershing) on Kentucky described in the books by providing good transport links in those places.

Any comments, corrections, suggestions etc. are welcome. As usual, sorry about the low image-quality, this is due to the 200kb maximum file-size on this forum.

[FOARP]

Creating the Map part 45 - Tennessee

Welcome to the Volunteer State! Here in Tennessee there are two major urban centres (Nashville and Memphis). Tennessee is also an important logistical centre, with the crossing over the Mississippi at Memphis and the Cumberland at Nashville, as well as the corridor through the Appalachian mountains at Chattanooga being an important key to defeat of the Confederacy should the Union armies seize them.

I've taken the opportunity to try to map out why the Union armies invade in the way Turtledove describes them doing so in the books. The high Cumberland mountains and three rivers (the Clinch River, and the north and south forks of the Holston River) act as a block against an invasion of the CSA from West Virginia into Tennessee except along the Roanoke valley in Virginia, making that the best place to attack outside of Kentucky east of the Mississippi. Similarly an attempt to cross the Appalachians is going to be hard going as there is only one dirt road (that via Asheville, North Carolina) across them - better to go round them, either in the south via Chatanooga or through the North along the Roanoke.

I researched mining in the area but the iron mines of Tennessee seem to have been in decline at the time, whilst the coal mines appear to be of the same coalfield as the Western Kentucky mines that have already been added. The CSA is already quite strong in terms of MPP, but I'm still happy to hear suggestions.

With Tennessee done that is the entirety of North America east of the Mississippi complete, as well as Mexico, the Caribbean, and the west coast of North America also finished. Only sixteen US states (Arkansas, Sequoyah ["Oklahoma"], Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada) and three Canadian provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta) remain to be done. Of these only Arkansas, Manitoba, Sequoyah, Utah, and maybe Alberta are likely to see substantial combat - the rest will likely each get a town and maybe 2-3 settlements each, some very sparse infrastructure, and very broad-brush terrain. To give an example, at this time historically Boise, Idaho only had a population of ~20,000 people, so there really wasn't much to fight over there.

[1775Cerberus]

On the Tennessee map. I would consider adding the Duck River in Middle Tennessee. Would run from north of Shelbyville to south of Columbia then into the Tennessee river in a mostly east / west direction. In summer the river is fordable but the banks are often steep along its course.

[eightroomofelixir]

As for the TN map, the Mobile & Ohio railway, after passing through Corinth, TN, extends north to Jackson, Humboldt, and eventually reaching Columbus, TN.

There is also another major railway - the Louisville and Nashville Railroad - that goes Memphis-Humboldt-Ft. Henry-Ft. Donelson (where Grant had fought)-Bowling Green, KY-Louisville.

(Humboldt, TN may be too small to be included on the map, I think you can use Jackson as its replacement.)