American Civil War?

[Sam Smith]

Hello!

I've been playing BFTB for a little while now and I'm still trying to wrap my head around the way the game works. I have no modding experience but I'm trying to learn so that I can adapt the game to work with American Civil War formations and battles. Unfortunately, whenever I try to load up an estab the game crashes. That's not the point of this post, as I'm sure that I'm making some kind of rookie mistake somewhere along the way. My real question is: will it be possible, eventually, to make this work? Do you have any ideas as to challenges that I will face, or shortcuts I could use?

Thanks,
Sam

[Lieste]

Probably a new Estab, where you have one of a number of elements missing or malformed?

I don't *know* for sure, but my experience with problems with new Estabs leads me to the following conclusions:

You need two sides, with at least one "Nationality" and "Army" on each side.
Each "Side" seems to need at least one line unit, one base, one support unit and two HQ echelons (eg for Coy units, Bn & Rgt HQ).
Each "Side" "Nationality" and "Army" should have the two 'flags' as actual designated images (they can all be blank &/or the same), *null* while a valid type seems to cause problems in one Estab that I have tested before (not confirmed, but an easy one to avoid discovering the hard and obscure way).
Every unit must have at least one weapon. Unarmed units are not allowable, the weapon must be 'effective' but it can be of trivial usefulness.
Every weapon must have at least one ammunition nature assigned (most to APers), and there needs to be at least one entry in the range/effectiveness table, there are a maximum of 6 entries, although it will appear to take more it won't be valid.
Supply units must exceed a minimum strength in personnel, and have suitable transport (waggon or pack-mules/packs). IIRC this minimum strength is around 20 men, but it might be higher.

Hope some of this helps, but it is tricky setting up a new Estab, and there are lots of pitfalls ~ this is a bit beyond what the tools are really 'released for' - they are somewhat unpolished 'internal' tools intended to allow the community to do a bit more than 'just' change the map and participating units, and to add new elements to the existing DB..

On the plus side, the tool is easy to use once you have a working DB for adding and changing details.

Not sure how well the system will work for the last of the 'Napoleonic Wars' with modern weapons... but I watch with interest.

[Arjuna]

Thanks for the good advice David.

Sam,

I wish you well in your endeavour. My advice is to start small and simple. Better to get something up and running even if it is only a battalion versing a company. Start with just infantry. Cavalry will be an issue. It's one we're facing with the East Front game where the Soviets still used a lot of cavalry. We're hoping to address this with the new mounted ops code that we will be working on. Having said that you can model cav like we did in COTA - ie as fast foot units, with faster deploy times. This means that they use the same move table as infantry but do move quicker. It's not ideal but it is a work around.

[rfrizz]

What about the AI? On one hand, tactical and operational approaches have changed over the past 150-odd years, but on the flip side, the modern view is more consistent.

I know nothing about the AI for CO, but I bet that it does not change if it is German or Allies. Not a complaint, but more of an issue of practicality. Obviously, CO, as with all games, is an abstraction of war.

On that note, even field wargames between real Army units have to be abstracted to a far-less-limited extent. Ditto for air combat training such as that at Top Gun (which is also a wargame in my opinion) is abstracted. As an example, having a 10,000ft(3050 metres) floor is an abstraction, no?.

[Werezak]

ORIGINAL: Lieste

Probably a new Estab, where you have one of a number of elements missing or malformed?

I don't *know* for sure, but my experience with problems with new Estabs leads me to the following conclusions:

You need two sides, with at least one "Nationality" and "Army" on each side.
Each "Side" seems to need at least one line unit, one base, one support unit and two HQ echelons (eg for Coy units, Bn & Rgt HQ).
Each "Side" "Nationality" and "Army" should have the two 'flags' as actual designated images (they can all be blank &/or the same), *null* while a valid type seems to cause problems in one Estab that I have tested before (not confirmed, but an easy one to avoid discovering the hard and obscure way).
Every unit must have at least one weapon. Unarmed units are not allowable, the weapon must be 'effective' but it can be of trivial usefulness.
Every weapon must have at least one ammunition nature assigned (most to APers), and there needs to be at least one entry in the range/effectiveness table, there are a maximum of 6 entries, although it will appear to take more it won't be valid.
Supply units must exceed a minimum strength in personnel, and have suitable transport (waggon or pack-mules/packs). IIRC this minimum strength is around 20 men, but it might be higher.

I remember having some frustration with this as well. I ended up copying a working estab and adding to it, as a workaround. Maybe this should be stickied in a common place? I think anyone trying to create a new estab for the first time will inevitably run into this issue with the editor crashing and come looking for a solution.