Platoonist wrote: ↑Thu Oct 24, 2024 12:21 am
gamer78 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 8:52 pm
Why little interest in pbem. Cheers.
Might be the subject matter. The ACW might do well among Americans, but I don't how great the interest level in the conflict is in the wider world. If there was a game out on the far bloodier and longer Taiping Rebellion which took place about the same time, I'd be like...meh. Don't know enough about it to buy it.
Yeah I got the SGS Taipings game a while back and still have not played it yet for the same reason...same with the Russian civil war games and several other European wars in the Ageod series...meanwhile the ACW happened everywhere around me in the South...I actually wrote about this on another forum let me look it up...
https://www.grogheads.com/forums/index. ... c=27234.60
#69
July 20, 2024, 02:12:24 PM
Quote from: Destraex on July 13, 2024, 11:56:09 PM
I have to ask all of you civil war fans in this thread. Have you seen the blu ray version of waterloo?
What gets me about Napoleonic vs Civil War is the rock paper scissors, chess like balance of infantry, cavalry, artillery. In civil war battles it's infantry supported by artillery with cavalry more in a mounted infantry role.
Napoleonic to me is also much more colourful as a spectacle. Napoleonic also offers much more diversity of Nations and theirfore tactics. Which equates to more armies with differing doctrines and tactics and even types of weapons. Something I have heard USA folks argue is just as diverse for the ACW.
The reason I am stating all of this is that I think a lot of ACW fans that do not like Napoleonic are really missing out.
For myself, I love the ACW for wargaming but I think Napoleonic is a lot more interesting. Both are good. But why are ACW fans so much less happy to go with napoleonic? They are not mutually exclusive. I mean if we could get more USA based software devs behind the napoleonic period it would be amazing. As it is Napoleonic games seem to mostly come from the east and in far inferior numbers of games than from the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_(1970_film)
Quote from: JasonPratt on July 14, 2024, 12:46:09 PM
I actually own Bonderchunk's Waterloo (and just recently finished showing Mom a version of his War and Peace that I edited down to only 5 hours. {g})
There is a special tragedy to a civil war that always colors ACW games, brothers vs brothers. Also while in one sense the warfare seems to have regressed concerning the cavalry, the artillery and other factors advanced almost to the point of WW1 during that fearsome crucible; which games like Forge of Freedom (for example) sometimes are able to emulate (also Ultimate General:CW in somewhat different ways). That's part of why despite my admiration for Napoleonic warfare in its World War Zero ways, I have always had trouble getting into the much larger and more expansive Nappy version of the same engine as FoF: it just seems more primitive. (Also the game engine was a little more primitive, even in its Emperor's edition, despite being naturally much more expanded than FoF ever was or topically could have been.)
As someone who has lived in Tennessee all his life (mostly and currently central West TN) the past reality and present effects of the ACW are still very much alive for us. The Napoleon wars were/are something that happened all-around-over there somewhere, so have their own esoteric (exoteric?) attraction -- but they aren't the home fires. My Mom's ancestors (on either side of her parents) helped settle this area; and I have extra-great-grand-cousins who fought on each side of the war, Union and Confederate. I can drive ten minutes north to a graveyard where a civil war memorial tomb shows the graves of my ancestors who fought in that war; some to defend their homes from invasion and murder, the others to free people from the hell of slavery (granting their best motives either way).
Many people in the United States can't really care about the ACW, and I understand that. But those of us with roots in the countrysides of the states who fought: we know those people when we see them portrayed in games and films and TV shows and books, for better and for worse.
For better and for worse, those are our people; our heroes, our villains, our families, not someone else's. Not other people's people (for better and for worse), but ours -- who should have been brothers.
The Napoleonic Wars have a massive number of worthwhile stories in their histories, but those stories are about other people fighting people who, mostly, weren't 'their' people, even though all sides at least nominally granted that all people everywhere are fellow children together under God. The ACW is about our people who really knew we were and should be 'our' people, wherever we originally came from, and the cutting tragedies (and sometimes chivalry) of knowing that. Thus explaining the wonder of the world that such bitter foes should become such good friends, at least among their fighting men, soon thereafter, against governmental forces mostly dedicated to exploiting our war against each other. But Abraham Lincoln, and some of those who fought (like Grant), knew better. Thank God.
Apply to some recent American news, understandably not to be mentioned directly, as appropriate."
Nicely written. I have always been much more into the ACW games than the Napoleon games for the same reasons. Being from Alabama I feel this. You grow up with the past and present all around you. There are still confederate flags everywhere. The histories and monuments and cemeteries are everywhere. You grow up hearing the stories and about the relatives. About the battles and the generals. You visit the battlefields. Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Stone Mountain, Nashville, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Richmond...you see and visit these places hands on growing up. You feel and touch these places vs the Napoleon battlefields so far away. The cultural differences and the aversion to the north is still prevalent. My Dad still calls them Yankees haha. Things have come a long way since then and the sixties though...but yes the removal of Confederate names and monuments is of course very controversial in these places...