ORIGINAL: Thresh
Queeg,
If you beleive the game as it is right now is balanced....what do you think would make it unbalanced?
From my POV, the "neutral setting" should be the one that best allows the player to recreate what happened with a certain degree of historical accuracy.
Is that what the present setting accomplishes?
Thresh
The current base game is balanced in the sense that it provides a roughly equal challenge to each side. Either side can win with skill and perseverance. This setting probably provides the most game for the most people.
Is it historical? Depends on your definition. It certainly does not reflect the overwhelming advantages that the North had on paper. But, of course, those paper advantages didn't translate especially well to the battlefield once the shooting started. So the truly historical setting, from the Northern perspective, is one of enormous potential largely unrealized. That, historically, is what actually happened.
So how do you model that? One way, probably the easiest, would be just to give the North all of its overwhelming advantages and disregard the fact that, in reality, they were never completely or efficiently utilized. Then you could hide behind the claim that you made the game as "realistic" as possible. A few - very few - people would like that.
Another, more difficult, way is to try and model the factors that prevented the North from ever bringing its full weight to bear. That's a tall task, however. But, I think, the best one as a matter of both historical fidelity and game play.
The designers here have tried to do the latter. The current set up probably favors the South too heavily as a matter of history but works well in terms of balanced game play. The power settings probably can redress much of that imbalance - assuming someone ever bothers to try them.
The American Civil War fought very differently in real life than it should have on paper - a fact for which later generations of historians, authors and gamers have been eternally grateful.
