What am I missing?

[LoneRunner]

Don't feel bad about your post steevodeevo. I don't think your post is negative at all. You're just pointing out a major issue with the game.

I too love the Strategic Command series. I think I got over a 1,000 hours into WaW. And I still learn something new every time I play it. And the developers of the Strategic Command series are awesome. I've never seen such incredible support for a series of games.

The Blue & Gray 1861 scenario does have a serious problem. Both Union and CSA are forced by victory conditions into a set strategy. Yeah, there's the fun Missouri scramble and invasions along the coast but the real battles in Virginia and Kentucky/Tennessee follow a similar routine, game after game. CSA may try to capture Washington or Cairo. But against a good player, that's not going to happen. So, CSA pushes the Union back to the Potomac, maybe advances to Bowling Green. Then the main battlefields settle down to sitzkreig while the Union builds up to corps level. And then proceeds to crush the South. Yeah, kind of boring.

I haven't tried the other scenarios, hope they are better.

Anyway, I think the problem is victory conditions. The North has little incentive to launch a major attack before 1863. In' fact, the North is better off not attacking before they've built every unit available. ACW does not have the urgency that you see in WaW where Germany races to conquer France and Russia before the war turns against him or where the USA struggles to launch a second front while only half prepared because Russia is hanging on by her fingernails.

[stockwellpete]

I like the game, but it has one drawback. Too many units spawn in the Richmond and Washington area. Within a few turns there's a continuous line from the Shenandoah Valley to the coast. In that area it becomes like playing SC WWI. There's no room to maneuver like there was in history. Perhaps fewer units could spawn leaving more room to maneuver?

I do agree with this. I feel like the most "fun" theaters are the Missouri and Kentucky theaters because there is a lot more ebb and flow and less "Western Front 1916" feel which does tend to be what the Northern Virginia from feels like. There is clearly really no sense that there is a "Northern Virginia" front and a "Shenandoah Valley" front. This is just a contiguous mess and it definately plays massively into the Union strengths of grinding/attritional warfare.

Yes, this is what I feel too. Everything else in the game works OK, apart from the Washington-Richmond area, which gets too cluttered and feels like WW1.

One notion that has come to me is to introduce the idea of "Army Reorganisation". I am reading John Keegan's book on the ACW and, according to his narrative anyway, such reorganisations were quite commonplace. So, linking such army reorganisations to the "Corps Organisation" research option, maybe a player could merge existing Brigades and Divisions into new Corps once a certain level of Corps research has been achieved (maybe level 2)? Maybe it would take 2-3 turns. This would reduce the clutter somewhat. Whether it would be enough to solve the problem that some of us are concerned about, I am not sure. And I don't know either whether the game engine could actually do this.

I think players would mostly avail themselves of this option in the Virginia area, whereas further west you would probably not always want to concentrate your forces in this way as there are relatively few units operating in a much bigger geographical area.

Any thoughts on this?

[Tanaka]

I like the game, but it has one drawback. Too many units spawn in the Richmond and Washington area. Within a few turns there's a continuous line from the Shenandoah Valley to the coast. In that area it becomes like playing SC WWI. There's no room to maneuver like there was in history. Perhaps fewer units could spawn leaving more room to maneuver?

I do agree with this. I feel like the most "fun" theaters are the Missouri and Kentucky theaters because there is a lot more ebb and flow and less "Western Front 1916" feel which does tend to be what the Northern Virginia from feels like. There is clearly really no sense that there is a "Northern Virginia" front and a "Shenandoah Valley" front. This is just a contiguous mess and it definately plays massively into the Union strengths of grinding/attritional warfare.

Yes, this is what I feel too. Everything else in the game works OK, apart from the Washington-Richmond area, which gets too cluttered and feels like WW1.

One notion that has come to me is to introduce the idea of "Army Reorganisation". I am reading John Keegan's book on the ACW and, according to his narrative anyway, such reorganisations were quite commonplace. So, linking such army reorganisations to the "Corps Organisation" research option, maybe a player could merge existing Brigades and Divisions into new Corps once a certain level of Corps research has been achieved (maybe level 2)? Maybe it would take 2-3 turns. This would reduce the clutter somewhat. Whether it would be enough to solve the problem that some of us are concerned about, I am not sure. And I don't know either whether the game engine could actually do this.

I think players would mostly avail themselves of this option in the Virginia area, whereas further west you would probably not always want to concentrate your forces in this way as there are relatively few units operating in a much bigger geographical area.

Any thoughts on this?

That is a neat idea. It would also give strategic choice. Do I want to use regiments, brigades, and divisions to cover all of the different areas of the map or do I want to focus one powerful corps on a specific part of the map.

[stockwellpete]

That is a neat idea. It would also give strategic choice. Do I want to use regiments, brigades, and divisions to cover all of the different areas of the map or do I want to focus one powerful corps on a specific part of the map.

Yes, it would. I am not sure of the relative sizes of "Regiments" - "Brigades" - "Divisions" - "Corps" in the game at the moment. Maybe 3 divisions makes up a Corps, does it? Not sure how many brigades make up a division, but maybe at "Corp Organisation" research level 1 a player could merge brigades into divisions as well? If a player quickly puts 2 research chits into Corp Organisation they can get to level 1 before the end of 1861.

On the SP game I started, by December 1861, my Unionist front line in Maryland has 10 brigades and 5 divisions in it (only 3 HQ's, which raises another point that I will talk about later on) and they are stretched out in a continuous line like they would be in the WW1 game. An army "reorganisation" (brigades into divisions) in this situation could reduce those 15 units between Washington and Cumberland by at least a third - leaving some gaps (and room for manoeuvre) between the armies grouped around the 3 HQ's.

There is a lot more to say about all this and my ideas are very provisional, but it would be interesting to know from the developers if the merging of units is a possibility with the current engine. If it is, maybe someone who can mod might like to have a look at the idea in the near future?

[BiteNibbleChomp]

One notion that has come to me is to introduce the idea of "Army Reorganisation". I am reading John Keegan's book on the ACW and, according to his narrative anyway, such reorganisations were quite commonplace. So, linking such army reorganisations to the "Corps Organisation" research option, maybe a player could merge existing Brigades and Divisions into new Corps once a certain level of Corps research has been achieved (maybe level 2)? Maybe it would take 2-3 turns. This would reduce the clutter somewhat. Whether it would be enough to solve the problem that some of us are concerned about, I am not sure. And I don't know either whether the game engine could actually do this.

I think players would mostly avail themselves of this option in the Virginia area, whereas further west you would probably not always want to concentrate your forces in this way as there are relatively few units operating in a much bigger geographical area.

Any thoughts on this?

It's funny that you mention this, because this was actually the original idea I had for how this aspect of the game would play out. Corps Organisation was one of the first techs I coded into the game, originally planned to be "+4 Corps build limit, -4 Division build limit" and brigades wouldn't be buildable at all - the idea being that the smaller, weaker units would get killed off over time and not be able to be replaced, which would keep total unit counts to about where they normally are in 1862 in the final game. Setting aside the fact that some of this either wasn't possible in the engine then, or still isn't (remembering that I'm talking about a game very early in development at this point - if the engine needs to be changed, it was much more a possibility at that point than it would be now), there's quite a few pitfalls with this approach.

Probably the most glaring issue I found comes from the idea of killing off the weaker units. In practice, this just doesn't work, at least not to the extent it would need to to build a game mechanic around.
The game measures two stats for counting losses, MPPs and units killed. In a game between two evenly matched opponents, or between the AI playing against itself, the total losses under both measures will tend to be about equal in the absence of complicating factors (eg units starting understrength). No problems there. But in a game where the opponents are not evenly matched, the losses as a ratio of units killed will tend to increase at a far greater rate than the MPP losses will. It's not too hard for an expert player against the base AI (with no experience boni &c) to rack up a 10:1 kill count, but still only achieve perhaps 2:1 or even less in MPP advantage.
What this usually translates to is the AI damaging some units, so our expert player has to go back and reinforce them, which still slows his offensive down, while the AI's units get killed - the player then can advance into the gap left behind, until those units get rebuilt.

However, if we now suppose that the AI can't rebuild those units, that gap is going to widen a lot more quickly. If both sides have 20 Corps and 20 (old) Divisions, and the player's Divisions get repaired while the AI's get killed, very quickly you're looking at a situation where the player has 20 Corps and 18 Divisions, while the AI has just the 20 Corps (of which half are still in the build queue). Even a small difference in skill is going to skew the result of the game much more quickly, and once a player has the advantage, it becomes a lot harder to reverse that advantage later on. I also note that while I've used "AI" in this example, the game goes for MP games too.

I also found very early on that the SC engine has something of a minimum density of units, below which the game just doesn't function very well on an open map. I say "open map" because of places like the Ozarks, or still-neutral Kentucky, which are difficult to move through and thus effectively restrict the number of units needed in an area to it when said area is not being made a priority - 1846 works as a campaign despite having fewer units on the map than even early-game ACW, because there are a finite number of places where those units can go - primarily, the mountain passes - and that's only after I lock off significant parts of the map as "Indian country" and impassable.
That minimum density comes into play right from the beginning in the East. I've tried several versions of the game with fewer units on the map (considering just 1861 for the moment), what happens is either neither side is strong enough to do anything (which is boring), or one side has an advantage and can encircle enemy units very easily (obviously not ideal either). Historically that sort of thing didn't matter, because armies could react to each others' movements in real time - but that's not possible in a turn based game (yes, I could have made ACW as a RTS, but at that point we're not talking about SC at all, but rather a totally different game).
Why the map appears to crowd up in the East is very simple from here: if you're playing the game right, you will have more units in the late game than the early game (industrial tech and captured towns giving more MPPs, and hopefully not losing more units than you can afford to rebuild), and because the East is the most important part of the map, units are only going to be moved away from it on a very rare occasion.
Whether a crowded East is necessarily a bad thing, I definitely understand the argument there, but I'm not exactly convinced by it either. Except for the weeks leading up to Gettysburg, the AOTP and AONV basically paced around the same few dozen square kms trying to force a favourable battle and avoid being caught in an unfavourable one, until the Wilderness battles in 1864. The actual territory "occupied" by each side didn't change all that much (similar to WWI), and any time either army moved more than a couple hexes' distance (a hex being ~15km), the other would respond with a major battle usually the result. If you think about how often units get swapped around, destroyed and replaced in the East, I think it's fair to say there's a lot of movement back and forth over that small area, with lots of battles of varying importance being the result.

There is a lot more to say about all this and my ideas are very provisional, but it would be interesting to know from the developers if the merging of units is a possibility with the current engine. If it is, maybe someone who can mod might like to have a look at the idea in the near future?

Stacking is something else we put a lot of thought into. The short version of that story is that we never came up with a system that we thought would work (keep in mind, suppose you stack two units, how do you combine their stats in the stacked unit? What if their base stats are different? How do upgrades factor into it? &c &c), and when we built the game without it, we found it wasn't really needed either.

Merging units is not currently possible with the engine and probably won't ever be. Unit deletions are possible via scripts now, so with some elaborate code it might be possible to say have a hex where you place a unit, have it automatically delete and be replaced with another (better) unit.

I am not sure of the relative sizes of "Regiments" - "Brigades" - "Divisions" - "Corps" in the game at the moment. Maybe 3 divisions makes up a Corps, does it? Not sure how many brigades make up a division.

During the war, this wasn't fixed. Usually 2 or 3 of one level made up the next, but on some occasions that number could be as high as 5. The game is vague about this intentionally as a result, I've just used what I felt played out the best in each given circumstance.

- BNC

[stockwellpete]

Merging units is not currently possible with the engine and probably won't ever be. Unit deletions are possible via scripts now, so with some elaborate code it might be possible to say have a hex where you place a unit, have it automatically delete and be replaced with another (better) unit.

Thanks very much for the detailed reply.

Just to make sure I understand this particular point fully - are you talking about the possibility of having just one hex per side as an "army reorganisation" point? Maybe Washington and Richmond? Or could there be two or three different hexes in other important cities per side? And so you would move, say, a division to the army reorganisation point and upgrade it to a Corps, for a certain cost of MPP? Presumably, the new unit would have a low "readiness" rating to start with to reflect the reorganisation? It sounds OK to me as a basic mechanism. I am not sure what impact this would have on gameplay, but I guess in MP it would work just fine.

I need to think about your other points for a bit and it is probably better to confine my posts to a single point so it is easier to follow the discussion.

[stockwellpete]

Is there any chance of getting rid of the toilet bowls/sinks currently masquerading as forts in the game? They make the map look ugly, in my opinion.

[BiteNibbleChomp]

Just to make sure I understand this particular point fully - are you talking about the possibility of having just one hex per side as an "army reorganisation" point? Maybe Washington and Richmond? Or could there be two or three different hexes in other important cities per side? And so you would move, say, a division to the army reorganisation point and upgrade it to a Corps, for a certain cost of MPP? Presumably, the new unit would have a low "readiness" rating to start with to reflect the reorganisation? It sounds OK to me as a basic mechanism. I am not sure what impact this would have on gameplay, but I guess in MP it would work just fine.

I'm saying that the engine is able to delete units now via scripts, and that it can spawn new ones in. I'm not sure how (or even if) the AI can handle it, or the specifics of how the code would work, but if an enterprising modder wants to take a crack at it, then I think it is a possibility.

Is there any chance of getting rid of the toilet bowls/sinks currently masquerading as forts in the game? They make the map look ugly, in my opinion.

Seeing as those counters are based on Fort Sumter, arguably the most famous fort of the entire war, I'd think not. Though I'd have to say, if my fort icons must be criticised, please do what one good beta tester once did and label them as "empty pools" - your own descriptors are rather less pleasant



- BNC

[stockwellpete]

I'm saying that the engine is able to delete units now via scripts, and that it can spawn new ones in. I'm not sure how (or even if) the AI can handle it, or the specifics of how the code would work, but if an enterprising modder wants to take a crack at it, then I think it is a possibility.

OK. It's a longshot, I know, but lets see there is anyone interested in the idea. There is obviously a constituency of people who feel the eastern part of the campaign is a bit too WW1-like. Not sure what percentage of players that this represents.

[Tanaka]

One notion that has come to me is to introduce the idea of "Army Reorganisation". I am reading John Keegan's book on the ACW and, according to his narrative anyway, such reorganisations were quite commonplace. So, linking such army reorganisations to the "Corps Organisation" research option, maybe a player could merge existing Brigades and Divisions into new Corps once a certain level of Corps research has been achieved (maybe level 2)? Maybe it would take 2-3 turns. This would reduce the clutter somewhat. Whether it would be enough to solve the problem that some of us are concerned about, I am not sure. And I don't know either whether the game engine could actually do this.

I think players would mostly avail themselves of this option in the Virginia area, whereas further west you would probably not always want to concentrate your forces in this way as there are relatively few units operating in a much bigger geographical area.

Any thoughts on this?

It's funny that you mention this, because this was actually the original idea I had for how this aspect of the game would play out. Corps Organisation was one of the first techs I coded into the game, originally planned to be "+4 Corps build limit, -4 Division build limit" and brigades wouldn't be buildable at all - the idea being that the smaller, weaker units would get killed off over time and not be able to be replaced, which would keep total unit counts to about where they normally are in 1862 in the final game. Setting aside the fact that some of this either wasn't possible in the engine then, or still isn't (remembering that I'm talking about a game very early in development at this point - if the engine needs to be changed, it was much more a possibility at that point than it would be now), there's quite a few pitfalls with this approach.

Probably the most glaring issue I found comes from the idea of killing off the weaker units. In practice, this just doesn't work, at least not to the extent it would need to to build a game mechanic around.
The game measures two stats for counting losses, MPPs and units killed. In a game between two evenly matched opponents, or between the AI playing against itself, the total losses under both measures will tend to be about equal in the absence of complicating factors (eg units starting understrength). No problems there. But in a game where the opponents are not evenly matched, the losses as a ratio of units killed will tend to increase at a far greater rate than the MPP losses will. It's not too hard for an expert player against the base AI (with no experience boni &c) to rack up a 10:1 kill count, but still only achieve perhaps 2:1 or even less in MPP advantage.
What this usually translates to is the AI damaging some units, so our expert player has to go back and reinforce them, which still slows his offensive down, while the AI's units get killed - the player then can advance into the gap left behind, until those units get rebuilt.

However, if we now suppose that the AI can't rebuild those units, that gap is going to widen a lot more quickly. If both sides have 20 Corps and 20 (old) Divisions, and the player's Divisions get repaired while the AI's get killed, very quickly you're looking at a situation where the player has 20 Corps and 18 Divisions, while the AI has just the 20 Corps (of which half are still in the build queue). Even a small difference in skill is going to skew the result of the game much more quickly, and once a player has the advantage, it becomes a lot harder to reverse that advantage later on. I also note that while I've used "AI" in this example, the game goes for MP games too.

I also found very early on that the SC engine has something of a minimum density of units, below which the game just doesn't function very well on an open map. I say "open map" because of places like the Ozarks, or still-neutral Kentucky, which are difficult to move through and thus effectively restrict the number of units needed in an area to it when said area is not being made a priority - 1846 works as a campaign despite having fewer units on the map than even early-game ACW, because there are a finite number of places where those units can go - primarily, the mountain passes - and that's only after I lock off significant parts of the map as "Indian country" and impassable.
That minimum density comes into play right from the beginning in the East. I've tried several versions of the game with fewer units on the map (considering just 1861 for the moment), what happens is either neither side is strong enough to do anything (which is boring), or one side has an advantage and can encircle enemy units very easily (obviously not ideal either). Historically that sort of thing didn't matter, because armies could react to each others' movements in real time - but that's not possible in a turn based game (yes, I could have made ACW as a RTS, but at that point we're not talking about SC at all, but rather a totally different game).
Why the map appears to crowd up in the East is very simple from here: if you're playing the game right, you will have more units in the late game than the early game (industrial tech and captured towns giving more MPPs, and hopefully not losing more units than you can afford to rebuild), and because the East is the most important part of the map, units are only going to be moved away from it on a very rare occasion.
Whether a crowded East is necessarily a bad thing, I definitely understand the argument there, but I'm not exactly convinced by it either. Except for the weeks leading up to Gettysburg, the AOTP and AONV basically paced around the same few dozen square kms trying to force a favourable battle and avoid being caught in an unfavourable one, until the Wilderness battles in 1864. The actual territory "occupied" by each side didn't change all that much (similar to WWI), and any time either army moved more than a couple hexes' distance (a hex being ~15km), the other would respond with a major battle usually the result. If you think about how often units get swapped around, destroyed and replaced in the East, I think it's fair to say there's a lot of movement back and forth over that small area, with lots of battles of varying importance being the result.

There is a lot more to say about all this and my ideas are very provisional, but it would be interesting to know from the developers if the merging of units is a possibility with the current engine. If it is, maybe someone who can mod might like to have a look at the idea in the near future?

Stacking is something else we put a lot of thought into. The short version of that story is that we never came up with a system that we thought would work (keep in mind, suppose you stack two units, how do you combine their stats in the stacked unit? What if their base stats are different? How do upgrades factor into it? &c &c), and when we built the game without it, we found it wasn't really needed either.

Merging units is not currently possible with the engine and probably won't ever be. Unit deletions are possible via scripts now, so with some elaborate code it might be possible to say have a hex where you place a unit, have it automatically delete and be replaced with another (better) unit.

I am not sure of the relative sizes of "Regiments" - "Brigades" - "Divisions" - "Corps" in the game at the moment. Maybe 3 divisions makes up a Corps, does it? Not sure how many brigades make up a division.

During the war, this wasn't fixed. Usually 2 or 3 of one level made up the next, but on some occasions that number could be as high as 5. The game is vague about this intentionally as a result, I've just used what I felt played out the best in each given circumstance.

- BNC

Really great explanation thanks for taking the time to go into detail. Also maybe if the forts were not so bright white looking and were a darker color like a brown they would not look like toilet bowls

[stockwellpete]

In the SP game that I have started, playing as the Union, by the end of 1862 I have 30 Brigade units in my army. 15 around Washington/Cumberland and 15 further out West. I didn't build any of them myself. In the absence of a "merge" function, the only way that I could reduce these brigades as a proportion of my overall forces is to "disband" some of them. However, you only get around 30MPP's back for disbanding a full strength brigade unit. This makes disbanding prohibitive. If you were to get, say, between 75/100 MPP's back then it would be more viable. You could disband a couple of brigades and use the 150/200 MPP's towards the purchase of a new Division. I would do this in my current game if I could - and maybe I would keep 5/6 brigades in the Washington/Cumberland area to secure the key locations.

Also, new Brigades are introduced into the game via Events during 1862 when you get the option to raise forces quickly when Confederate armies penetrate north. You seem to get a Division, a Brigade and a Cavalry unit. Maybe just give 2 Divisions and a Cavalry unit instead and reduce the starting strength of these Division units?

[BillRunacre]

You wouldn't have 30 Brigades left if you were playing against me!

[stockwellpete]

You wouldn't have 30 Brigades left if you were playing against me!

Ha-ha! I am not very good at this game. The AI is set on Intermediate (with a few bonuses) and I am gradually losing ground, plus the European powers are threatening to join the Confederacy. This game system doesn't quite work for me with the ACW, to be honest, whereas it works exceptionally well for WW1 and WW2. I think I will go back to them after I have finished this campaign.

[Tanaka]

You wouldn't have 30 Brigades left if you were playing against me!

Ha-ha! I am not very good at this game. The AI is set on Intermediate (with a few bonuses) and I am gradually losing ground, plus the European powers are threatening to join the Confederacy. This game system doesn't quite work for me with the ACW, to be honest, whereas it works exceptionally well for WW1 and WW2. I think I will go back to them after I have finished this campaign.

I think they did about the best you could with the way the engine works. Also think of it in another way:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... db0ab0997e

[havoc1371]

I don't think your missing much. SC: ACW is an okay game from a game perspective, but it missing the mark as a wargame about the American Civil War. Just the wrong engine for it. You could fit the entire Army of the Potomac in one hex of this map. So in trying to shoe horn this into the Strategic Command system, you end up with nothing remotely resembling the Eastern battles and campaigns of the war, with static battlelines developing almost instantly between Washington and Richmond. So if you want to enjoy the game as a competition between you and the AI (or human opponent) turn a blind eye to historical reference and just play.