Did I Miss Something?

[SpharV2]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

The northern side should have enough money to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to do it. The north during the entire conflict never had a single resource shortage or money shortage.

The rest of your post I agree with, but this is just false. Salmon P. Chase (US Treasury Secretary) had to get very very "creative" to keep financing the war. Including the introduction of fiat money, the first income tax, and bonds at ridiculous rates. The South wasn't the only side that faced rampant inflation, it was just worse for them. The south should definitely have more money issues, but the Yankees didn't exactly have an unlimited supply.

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: SpharV2
The rest of your post I agree with, but this is just false. Salmon P. Chase (US Treasury Secretary) had to get very very "creative" to keep financing the war. Including the introduction of fiat money, the first income tax, and bonds at ridiculous rates. The South wasn't the only side that faced rampant inflation, it was just worse for them. The south should definitely have more money issues, but the Yankees didn't exactly have an unlimited supply.

You are, of course, basically correct..., but I think he was speaking in "comparitive" terms. BOTH side's "paper money" wound up being traded at a "discount" for gold or silver. But for the North it was between 5-25% (depending on the most recent battle results as often as not). For the South, the "discount" was over 95% by 1863, and basically "no takers" after that. Plus the Union DID HAVE "hard specie" coming in throughout the war, while the South had no access to any once the initial supply (about 1 million) had been spent (to buy arms and equipment from Europe). It's more a matter of "degree"..., The Union had to "strain"; but the Confederacy just simply "went to pieces".

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: SpharV2

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

The northern side should have enough money to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to do it. The north during the entire conflict never had a single resource shortage or money shortage.

The rest of your post I agree with, but this is just false. Salmon P. Chase (US Treasury Secretary) had to get very very "creative" to keep financing the war. Including the introduction of fiat money, the first income tax, and bonds at ridiculous rates. The South wasn't the only side that faced rampant inflation, it was just worse for them. The south should definitely have more money issues, but the Yankees didn't exactly have an unlimited supply.

The US did have to borrow alot of money.
This is also something else the game does not let you do, borrow money or run your economy in debt.
This is how most goverments pay for wars by running in the red for almost the entire conflict.

As I said, if the US wanted something. It got it.
By 1865 it had the most powerful military force on earth by a fairly large margain.
Compare that to the outbreak of conflict when the regular army had less than 15,000 men in all brances including the Navy. In just 4 years it had the money and resourced to increase its size 25 times over and supply them, give them brand new high quality rifles, build and equip over 2000 pieces of rifled and smoothbore artillary of all sizes. Mount and equip almost 100,000 calvarymen and increase the size of its navy 10 fold while modernizing it to iron and steam standerds.
Try doing this in the game...
Its impossible. You have to pick and choose what aspect you want to improve, and it is impossible to do even half of what I detailed above.

[Fallschirmjager]

I know this is not the thread for it but in an atempt to support the developing team I went ahead and purchased the game.

As I said before, alot of good stuff exists. But unfortunatly it is crippled by some fundanmental flaws.

The biggest thing is a trap that all games of this genre fall into.
Giving the gamer too much to do and being too slow about doing it.

The war progesses at a snails pace and makes it very difficult to mimic the pace of the real war.
Most of this stems from a crippling lack of resources on both sides and the secondary problem of taking too much time to build buildings and equip armies.
I played two games where I controlled both sides and did not do any fighting. I focused on building and equiping armies.
I got to 1863 in one game and 1864 in another and try and I might I could not match the real war with either side in terms of size and content of my armies.

Take to example building a realistic army.
You have your infantry
Cavlary
artillary
engineers
special units

In the game you have to build each of these at different locations around the country and then assemble them wherever.
Due to lack of resources and taking forever, it could be 6 months to assemble a army of 75,000 men with 150 guns and 15,000 cavlary and the enginering and logistic capacity of the basic civil war army.
Why does it have to be this way?
My idea is to simplify the entire process.

You should be able to create armies with all these components coming online and forming all at once.
NO army in the civil war went into battle without everything I listed above.
None
You will never read an account of even the smallest battle without reading that the army had some guns and at least a regiment of cavlary.
That was the doctrine at the time and every army everywhere followed it.
You should create divisions at a time and it should come with a pre determined amount of artillery and cavlary raised from the same location.
It should be automatic.
Instead by necessity many times you send armies into battle with no guns and no cavlary at all.
This is not right and degrades the quality of the game and its historical nature.
Every army once raised should be created at the same time with a user selected amount of guns and cavlary and engineers.
Every army in the ACW had these and should should armies in the game.

Secondly equiping armies with guns is tedious.
Every unit starts life with 'improvised weapons'
I am not sure if this is correct or not, but in the game this is depicted as a sabre and pistol.
Umm...show me an entire infantry brigrade in the ACW who collected 2000 farm boys who brought their own pistol and sabre from home...
The south had state militias and Union armoures to pull weapons from.
At minumum they should come in with a random chance of having muskets and a random chances or what they bring from home, which should be a mix of muskets, flintlocks, rifled muskets done at home, old fowling pieces and shotguns.
Not very good but realistic and definitly not a sabre and pistol.
The north also had state militas and state armouries.
They had a decent supply of US model 1822 and 1842 muskets. A handful of Sprifields and then whatever was brought from home.
There should be a random chance of newly created units having all of these.

Once either side reaches a certain technology and manufactoring point the level of what new units bring into the game should change.
For the North by 1863 or so every new unit should come into exsistence with a Enfield or Springfield
By 1864 a improved springfield or a rare chance at a repeating rifle.

For the South by 1863 it should be a mixture of what was gleaed from the North or purchased for Europe or manufactored
A random chance should be in place for either Springfields, Enfields, Richmond rifles and Lorenzs

By Gettysburg no unit of regiment size of greater was carrying muskets any longer.
In the west muskets were getting rarer.

Yet in the game even in 1864 of 1865 there is a good chance of finding entire armies equiped with weapons that historicaly had not been used in a year or two besides by militias and garrison troops hundreds of miles away from the front lines.
By 1865 when Grant expanded the size of the AOP by bringing in coastal artillery regiments and rear line garrison trooops, even these were equiped with rifled guns of good quality.

So to sum it up, as each side hits certain technoglogical and manufactoring points the base level of guns should increase.

Artillary in the same way.
By Gettysburg 65% of the almost 300 guns brought into battle by the North were rifled.
The smoothbores were either 12 lb, 24 lb or Napoleons of good quality.

The south had 40% of its guns rifled and the smoothbores were also of good quality.
Very few were old 12 lb howitzers of 6 lb guns.

But in the game each artillary units is created with 6 lb guns.
After late 1862 or so this should not be the case.
You should have a choice of either rifled or smoothbore units and then a random chance of the unit being created with a higher quality gun.
You can upgrade it from their.


Im going to wrap up this long post and play some more and see what else comes to me.
Overall, like I said. I like the game and some good stuff does exsist. But some flaws do exsist that keep this from becoming a long term highly replayable game.

[Ironclad]

I have just finished re-reading Albert Castel's superb study of the 1864 campaign for Atlanta "Decision in the West' which I highly recommend. In it he describes the Army of the Tennessee's infantry weapons in April 1864:

"Slightly over half of the infantry are equipped with either Enfield or Springfield rifle muskets. Except for a comparative few manufactured in Southern factories, the Enfields come from England via blockade runners, whereas the Springfields are Yankee made and usually have been captured.......Most of the Army of Tennessee's remaining infantry are armed either with a .54 calibre Mississippi rifle or, to a lesser extent, a .69 calibre musket that has been converted into a rifle; some regiments have smoothbores".

Interesting that even as late as this one of the two major field armies of the Confederacy had still not been fully armed with rifle muskets.

The army was equipped with about 100 Whitworth sniper rifles but he suggests that the reason for their issue was to compensate in part for the artillery's weakness (ie used by a crack marksman they could match the range of all but the most powerful artillery).

Given the disparity in equipment throughout the war (within as well as between each side) I would want the game to replicate this - as it seems to do - through the purchasing options/limitations available. Plus its far more fun choosing each units weapon upgrades! Although clearly the North should have a marked and increasing advantage on the industrial/technological front as the conflict continues.

[ericbabe]

Regarding the ironclads in the OOB, I've reviewed old e-mails pertaining to these, and I think what caused their inclusion was a problem of communications between the researchers, testers, and the scenario designer.  We shall remove the ironclads in the next patch.

[Greyshaft]

ORIGINAL: lvaces

In AU Tiger's thread called Epiphany about the level of accuracy in the game, I remember the outcome as tending toward the conclusion that it's ok for the game creators to leave out what they wish for simplicity sake, but what they chose to put in should be accurate. To see an intentional mistake like this built into a game with a 200 page manual is frustrating.

I'm not a tester here neither do I yet have the game (lotsa subtle hints going out to the wife about what I want for Christmas though [:D]) .

One thing the developers can never put into the game is historical ignorance:
* ignorance that the war won't be over by Christmas (while we know that it will be a long war)
* ignorance about the effectiveness of their weapons (while we have all the statistics at our fingertips)
* ignorance bout the effectiveness of their individual generals (ditto from last comment)

Therefore we can never have a historical simulation because all of us 21st century types know what strategies are most effective while Lincoln and Davis had to learn by trial and error. In light of this reality I tend to cut developers a bit of slack in how they balance the game. I agree with the need for a 'historical' scenario but I won't be surprised if it doesn't end historically,

[Gil R.]

Fallschirmjager,
Thanks for your post. I'm curious -- do you have concrete suggestions for what might be added to the start file? For example, Eric was considering giving the Union a siege artillery unit to start the game, instead of making them build one. (This might have made the final version of the game, for all I know.) We'd welcome ideas of this sort.

[Mike Scholl]

ORIGINAL: Gil R.

Fallschirmjager,
Thanks for your post. I'm curious -- do you have concrete suggestions for what might be added to the start file? For example, Eric was considering giving the Union a siege artillery unit to start the game, instead of making them build one. (This might have made the final version of the game, for all I know.) We'd welcome ideas of this sort.

I think research will show that both sides had heavy artillery available when the war began. The South had what was captured when they seized many coast forts, and what was captured in places like the Norfolk Navy Yard. These were the guns that armed Drewey's Bluff on the James, and Vicksburg on the Mississippi. It was the guns of the siezed Harbor Forts that did most of the bombardment at Ft. Sumpter. What they didn't have was much ability to increase the numbers of these guns, or to make them mobile to serve as siege artillery. Not that the South had much need for siege artillery in any case.

The North started with all the fortress artillery the South didn't sieze, and the heavy naval guns of the Brooklyn, Philidelphia, Boston and other Naval Yards. Plus the guns of the Union Navy itself, which were "landed" for siege work throughout the war. Not to mention all the factories that had built all of the guns both sides started with. And because they did have a need, they began puting together "siege trains" as well. McClellan had a substantial one on the Penninsula in early 1862.

[Fallschirmjager]

ORIGINAL: Gil R.

Fallschirmjager,
Thanks for your post. I'm curious -- do you have concrete suggestions for what might be added to the start file? For example, Eric was considering giving the Union a siege artillery unit to start the game, instead of making them build one. (This might have made the final version of the game, for all I know.) We'd welcome ideas of this sort.

Nothing really on the start file per say.

But I would like to have my ideas on baseline rifles and cannons reviewed and maybe added to the wish list.

My other idea would be for anytime a division is formed that it receive automatic artillery and cavlary that each division possessed.

It would also be nice if there was something like a 'create a army wizard' that let you create units acrosss the map and then have a 'rally point' at a location and get automaticaly added to a new army.
It would make creating a combined arms army alot easier.

[Airborne82nd]

ORIGINAL: Fallschirmjager

It would also be nice if there was something like a 'create a army wizard' that let you create units acrosss the map and then have a 'rally point' at a location and get automaticaly added to a new army.
It would make creating a combined arms army alot easier.

Although I haven't tried it yet, I believe there is a feature that lets you build troops and "reinforce to" a specific area, Corp, etc.