Game Balance & Historical Accuracy

[histgamer]

Chris if your trying to say that there were an equal number of bad leaders on each side, then somhow all the bad union ones took command at the start of the war in the east. Dosnt make much sense.

The Union if they had commanders as good as you seam to sugest they should have won the war by late 1862.

The fact is on the whole the south had better generals.

[Twotribes]

In 2 weeks I lost nearly 200000 troops to disease, half the available army, simply because I moved into Fredricksburg, something I HAVE to do if I ever plan to win. Fredricksburg sits right next to 2 of my many Hospitals to no avail because of Code.

Be so kind as to provide an historical precedent from the war where half of an invading army died simply by moving a few miles into enemy territory from disease.

I suggest that disease plays a bigger role then it should and is specifically designed to hamstring the person on offense. all fine and dandy IF the game also werent designed in manila form to permanently remove these troops forever ( same as dieing) and prevent any reasonably close number of troops to be raised by either side that actually fought in the war.

More to the point, when I did this move I had researched and available all the hospital techs I know of EXCEPT the one for detailed battles ( I did not fight a detailed battle).

Furthermore with 3 or four forts to reduce to capture said province it is a continueing drain as I reduce each fort ( didnt attack all 4 at once because I was afraid the crash would get me) with the size of forces there it is easy enough to take the forts, but out west it takes several turns to reduce a single fort which means I spend MANY turns subject to random lose ( of 28 percent?) of all forces engaged even though Hospitals are available but code wont let them effect "enemy" territory.

Which begs the question, how does a couple brigades of enemy troops bottled up in forts or cities prevent medical staff with the invading armies from doing their jobs?

[chris0827]

ORIGINAL: flanyboy

Chris if your trying to say that there were an equal number of bad leaders on each side, then somhow all the bad union ones took command at the start of the war in the east. Dosnt make much sense.

The Union if they had commanders as good as you seam to sugest they should have won the war by late 1862.

The fact is on the whole the south had better generals.

Try reading what I said. I'll say it again for the third time. The south had better generals in the east and the generals in the west were about the same. How else do you explain the south winning most battles in the east while losing most battles in the west? The south was also usually outnumbered by more in the east than in the west. The only major battle won by the confederates in the west was the one where they outnumbered the union.

[Twotribes]

My Take is that in the West it was harder for a general to gain the eye of Lincoln due to the nature of the battles and campaigns through 1863. It was easier for a higher commander to be noticed out west and to not realize his subordinates not he were the reason for victories due to the distance involved and again the nature of personalities and reporting.

The process made for the problem early on. In the case of the South they brought their best to Virginia quick or they happened to be there already AND again the nature of the war meant they were more noticable then the Generals in the west. So not so great Generals stayed in the West and the good ones got sent to Virginia or were not released from Virginia.

Overall the South had the intial bulk of "good" generals. They also had less wiggle room to tolerate the mediocre or poor ones.

[Mike Scholl]

I'd say it's more like the South had Robert E. Lee..., who was blessed to find two very capable subordinates and develope a number of others. Everywhere else they suffered with the same mediocracy that bedeviled the Union in the Eastern Theatre. In the West the average Union quality was superior (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas) to what the South could supply (BraGg, Pemberton, Johnson & Johnston) in the main. And of course the Union had Farragut and Porter, for which the South had no real reply at all.

[chris0827]

Lee had the pull to send generals he didn't want west. That's how rejects like Holmes and Huger ended up there. I think he was mistaken about Magruder. Magruder didn't do any worse than Jackson at the seven days and did well in Texas.

[keystone]

The South had some great leaders in the West, they were just never elevated to higher command positions. Polk and Bragg were Davis favorites, Breckinridge was a threat politically to Davis. Cleburne and others were threats because if allowed ind. command they might unseat him, or so he thought, if they were successfull. Bragg had severe mental problems that hindered not only battlefield decisions but other commanders also. But I believe the main factor in the West was the troops, I think the men that came from the Mid-West were just as tough and resilient as any the South had to offer. And given decent leadership these men could beat Bragg any day of the week, especially with Cheatham(a raging drunk) as his favorite div. commander.

[chris0827]

ORIGINAL: keystone

The South had some great leaders in the West, they were just never elevated to higher command positions. Polk and Bragg were Davis favorites, Breckinridge was a threat politically to Davis. Cleburne and others were threats because if allowed ind. command they might unseat him, or so he thought, if they were successfull. Bragg had severe mental problems that hindered not only battlefield decisions but other commanders also. But I believe the main factor in the West was the troops, I think the men that came from the Mid-West were just as tough and resilient as any the South had to offer. And given decent leadership these men could beat Bragg any day of the week, especially with Cheatham(a raging drunk) as his favorite div. commander.

Cleburne suggested freeing slaves to fight. That's why he never rose above division command. He was probably the best division commander of the war. It would've been interesting to see what he could've done with a corps.

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: keystone

The South had some great leaders in the West, they were just never elevated to higher command positions. Polk and Bragg were Davis favorites, Breckinridge was a threat politically to Davis. Cleburne and others were threats because if allowed ind. command they might unseat him, or so he thought, if they were successfull. Bragg had severe mental problems that hindered not only battlefield decisions but other commanders also. But I believe the main factor in the West was the troops, I think the men that came from the Mid-West were just as tough and resilient as any the South had to offer. And given decent leadership these men could beat Bragg any day of the week, especially with Cheatham(a raging drunk) as his favorite div. commander.

The problem with this arguement is exactly that..., They were never elevated to higher command. Hood, Meade, and Sheridan had all been excellent Division Commanders. Given an Army, one was a disaster, one mearly adequate, and one did well. All we know for sure about Patrick Cleburne is that "he was an excellent Division Commander".

[Steely Glint]

ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
Baloney! Just what "usual collection of clowns" were fighting in the West?

Baloney yourself. The collection of clowns running the Union Western Theater before the rise of Grant and Sherman were led by such notable losers as Henry Halleck, Don Carlos Buell, David Hunter, John Fremont, and Ben "Spoons" Butler. After Grant and Sherman rose to prominence, yes, things changed. But prior to that rise the CSA leadership in the West was dramtically superior to the Union leadership (with Braxton Bragg, a classic example of what goes wrong when you appoint generals for political/personal reasons, being the significant exception). Given the tremendous disparity of forces and resources you only have to look at how little that the Union was able to accomplish with such vastly superior numbers, weapons, equipment, logistics, support, money, not to mention a far superior railway system and control of the rivers and the sea before the rise of Grant and Sherman and their proteges (and outside of them afterwards) compared to what they should have been able to accomplish and you get a picture of just how totally, awfully, woefully bad the Union leadership in the West really was.

And if you want a clear picture of just how bad Union leadership in the West was outside of the Grant-Sherman clique and their proteges, take a hard look at the Red River campaign. Militarily, a five to one advantage in troops and a vast superiority in armaments, equipment and logistics should guarantee a victory even given just marginally competent leadership. Even just plain bad leadership should be able to accomplish at least something with that kind of force disparity. Yet the Union leadership in the West was so incredibly bad that the Union forces failed to accomplish even a single one of their objectives in this campaign. Yes, not even one.

There are numerous - far, far too many - other examples.

Even very late in the war, the Union leadership in the West was simply abominable. Look up the operations of CSA Colonel John "Rip" Ford and his legendary Cavalry of the West in South Texas, in which his ad hoc militia collection of mounted Texan "children and old men" - local underage and overage volunteers judged unfit for CSA service even in 1865 who were mounted on whatever they could scrounge and who lived off whatever they could find - crushed and routed vastly larger Union regular forces at such places as Brownsville and Palmito Hill through nothing more than superior leadership. Or look up the repulse of the superior Union forces at Laredo in 1864 by the 33rd Texas Cavalry (the Benavides Regiment), where Colonel Santos Benavides routed Union forces despite being visibly outnumbered on the field of battle by the Union forces by - you guessed it - five to one. Do I even have to mention such well-known figures as Forrest, or any of his battles such as Bryce's Crossroads, where he beat a far larger, far better supplied, far better armed Union force like a dog through nothing at all but vastly superior leadership? It's easy to win when you have not only overwhelming numbers on your side but also far better weapons, equipment, logistics, support, far more money, a much better railway system and control of the rivers and the sea. It takes bad leadership at an epic level to overcome such huge advantages and get whipped repeatedly by dramatically inferior forces, short of weapons, horses, supplies, you name it, but the Union managed this feat over and over again.

Let me say this again: with the exception of the Grant/Sherman crowd, the Union leadership in the West, even in 1864 and 1865, still looked like nothing so much as a clown show.

Leadership, leadership, leadership. The CSA had it in spades; the USA with a very few notable exceptions (Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, Hancock and a few others) simply never had it and the Union political hierarchy had trouble identifying what scarce talent it actually did have. It took Lincoln until 1863 to recognize that the members of the Grant/Sherman crowd (including Sheridan and Thomas) were at least, unlike other Union generals, willing to fight and that - even better - they were willing to engage not only in a style of war that involved not only planned and ordered atrocities against civilians (see Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and Shermans's March to the Sea) but also in a bloodbath war of attrition that canceled out the South's advanatge in leadership the only way that it could be canceled out - through a blood-based attritional combat style based on brute force and massive ignorance (see the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, etc.)

Take away the Grant/Sherman crowd , the atrocity campaigns and the final bloody war of attrition and the Union was so badly outgeneraled that it could never have won the war anywhere but in its dreams.

[Steely Glint]

ORIGINAL: flanyboy

Just a note Grant was no lee either. (and im a northerner at heart)

Ah, the lucky Sam Grant. At Shiloh he bivouacked with his back to the river - a major mistake - and his forces would have been completely rolled up and annihilated had Grant not had the amazing good luck to have Sidney Johnston, who had forgotten more about war than Grant would ever know, inexplicably choose to bleed to death in the saddle. After Shiloh, Grant was disgraced by being relieved of all duties by Halleck and given a ceremonial post. Only after Halleck went to Washington as general-in-chief - another huge break for Grant - did Grant get back into command, at which point Rosecrans (admittedly rather unjustly) received almost all of the credit for the next two battles with positive outcomes, Iuka and Corinth. At the end of 1862, Sam Grant was very near to being relieved, as his campaign against Vicksburg had failed when Union forces were defeated at Chickasaw Bayou and Holly Springs.

But Grant was lucky again and escaped relief, and finally Lincoln and the War Department realized that Grant was the best of a bad lot (as he was one of the very few Union generals there were who actually would fight) and promoted him. Fortunately for both Grant and the Union, Grant had managed to hang on just long enough - and luck had an awful lot to do with it - for his bulldog/butcher nature to become apparent. Otherwise he would have gone down in history just as he was thought of before the war when he variously was forced to resign from the Army in disgrace because of drunkenness, was a failed farmer, was a failed real estate salesman, was a losing political candidate, was a failed customhouse agent, and, as late as 1860, was nothing more than a clerk in his family's leather goods store: Sam Grant, a not-very-bright failure.

Always remember that Grant was viewed by his pre-war contemporaries, who knew him well, as such an untalented lump that while Bobby Lee was serving as the engineering officer for General Winfield Scott in the Mexican War and earning such praise from Scott as "the very best soldier in the field" and "the greatest military genius in America," Sam Grant was serving as a quartermaster. Also remember that when Grant was forced to resign from the Army no one of any importance shed a tear, yet when Bobby Lee was deciding whether or not to leave the U.S. Army, the commander-in-chief of the Army himself begged Lee not to leave and even offered Lee command of all Union forces.

This is not to say that Grant was without positive features as a general. While not very smart, Grant was brave, Sherman used to say that Grant never, ever worried about what the enemy was doing but only what Grant as doing, Grant certainly had the tenacity of a bulldog and no quit in him at all, and the spilling of vast amounts of blood didn't seem to bother him one bit.

But as far as military talent went, no one would ever mistake him for the likes of Bobby Lee - or for that matter, even the likes of P.G.T Beauregard - in a dark room.

[chris0827]

You can't take away the Grant and Sherman crowd. They are part of the equation. Explain the long list of military disasters suffered by the south in the west. Explain how they were beaten in battle after battle while having a better ratio of forces than Lee did in Virginia. Explain how the south won one major battle in the west during the entire war.

[Steely Glint]

ORIGINAL: flanyboy
The Union was not victorious at Perryville.

Perryville is held, even by historians with a very strong Union bias, to be a tactical Confederate victory.

[chris0827]

I must correct myself. The south also won at Kennesaw mountain.

[chris0827]

ORIGINAL: Steely Glint

ORIGINAL: flanyboy
The Union was not victorious at Perryville.

Perryville is held, even by historians with a very strong Union bias, to be a tactical Confederate victory.

The south retreated. Their invasion of Kentucky was stopped. It's a draw at best.

[Steely Glint]

ORIGINAL: chris0827
You can't take away the Grant and Sherman crowd. They are part of the equation. Explain the long list of military disasters suffered by the south in the west. Explain how they were beaten in battle after battle while having a better ratio of forces than Lee did in Virginia. Explain how the south won one major battle in the west during the entire war.

LOL, too funny. First off, I specifically exempted Grant and Sherman at the beginning of this discussion, so we certainly are taking them away.

Your challenge is to explain how a massively superior force, with huge advantages in manpower, training, armament, supplies, money, production, transportation, and control of the rivers and sea not only still hadn't conquered the West by 1865 but was even still getting regularly beaten like a dog by dramatically outnumbered Southerners - including old men and boys - up to the very end of the war.

There's only one possible answer: massive Union leadership failure. They sent in the clowns.

[Steely Glint]

ORIGINAL: chris0827
The south retreated. Their invasion of Kentucky was stopped. It's a draw at best.

My, my, my, Yankee bias deluxe. Even Wikipedia lists Perryville as a Confederate tactical victory. Admittedly Bragg, a clown in his own right, immediately threw it away, but it was certainly a Confederate tactical victory.

[chris0827]

How did the side getting beaten like a dog win? Try actually reading about the war for a change. Look up these battles. Bentonville, Spanish Fort, Fort Blakely, West Point, Selma (Forest Defeated), Averasborough, and Wyse Fork. All union victories at a time when you claim old men and boys were beating the union like dogs. The confederates won only at Palmito Ranch. 

[chris0827]

ORIGINAL: Steely Glint

ORIGINAL: chris0827
The south retreated. Their invasion of Kentucky was stopped. It's a draw at best.

My, my, my, Yankee bias deluxe. Even Wikipedia lists Perryville as a Confederate tactical victory. Admittedly Bragg, a clown in his own right, immediately threw it away, but it was certainly a Confederate tactical victory.

You left out the part where wikipedia calls it a strategic union victory.

[histgamer]

 Chris the battle was a CSA victory; the campaign was a CSA defeat, two very different things.

Also with respect to the CSA and Union Generals.

Ill is the first to say the Union had some great commanders or good ones. Here is the list of in my opinion the best union generals overall not just strategy.

1. Sherman
2. Reynolds.
3. Winfield Scott Hancock
4. Grant
5. Thomas

The fact that union won battles in the west doesn’t make them better leaders than the south. I would argue the CSA on the whole still had better leaders out west than the Union but it was not the massive disparity that was out east so that the Union numbers were able to counter the difference in abilities.

However something that should not be left out on both sides, I believe the Union did better in the west because Lincoln didn’t interfere as much out west. Lincoln continually said one thing and did another to his commanders out east. He wouldn’t let the generals fight the way they saw fit, he would handicap them.

That’s not to say the Union would have won out east right away and I am not taking anything away from Lee (because Lee realized what Lincoln was doing and took advantage of it)

however it must be noted the Jeff Davis did the same thing to CSA forces.