American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

For added realism, stragglers too might be lost along the march ...

In fact the concept of stragglers could also be used to reduce combat losses to more historical levels, for instance the feature might work something like this:-

A percentage of losses (ideally set in the pdt, so that the right level can be playtested) should in fact be stragglers rather than just killed and wounded. These stragglers will only return to the unit when it is stationary for that turn and out of enemy LOS and/or at least 5 hexes away from any enemy unit and not under artillery fire that turn. Forced marching and nocturnal movement would also result in losing stragglers. This feature would encourage players to withdraw battered units from the firing line to rest and to reduce losses to more historical levels (without reducing fire factors to ineffectual levels, which would just encourage players to resort to more melees),

The Panzer Campaign series already have unit replacements during the course of a game, so fluctuating unit strengths due to stragglers should be a fairly easy feature to port over.

For the old SSI games I think you also need the Mo'Slo utility to slow down the computer. There was Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Gettysburg. Terrible graphics (it was 1986) but the gameplay was pretty good.

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Brigadier General Dale Lastowicka
2nd Brigade
Hindman's Division
Stewart's Corps
Army of Tennessee
Confederate Army

Hi, Dale,

What you say is true, and the point I was trying to make is that SSI had some pretty neat ideas they were able to implement back in computer stone age days that were never picked up by Talonsoft or HPS.

Probably the neatest idea was in their Napoleon game where you could pre-plot cavalry for charge or countercharge. If the cavalry passed the morale check, it charged. If not, it sat there. If the enemy cavalry passed their morale check, they countercharged, and the melee took place where they met. I think the charging cavalry had to pass within four hexes of the enemy cavalry to trigger the countercharge.

As the cavalry charge approached an infantry unit, it would attempt to form square. If it failed its morale check, it could disrupt or even rout. If it did give way, the cavalry would continue their charge to the pre-plotted hex.

At the end of the charge, the charging cavalry became disordered and fell back a couple of hexes.

This was pretty heady stuff twenty-five years ago on a 64k computer!

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MG Mike Mihalik
Forrest's Cavalry Corps
AoWest/CSA

I think fatigue for movement has some merit, particularly in larger games where some units might march for a couple of hours towards the action. As mentioned in an above post, if night fatigue is possible, day fatigue should be possible albeit at lower rates. I would also argue that a 'forced march' option should be available. In other words, a unit might have 14 or 15 points to move rather than 12. However, in using the higher rates a unit would gain much greater fatigue. This would require a program tweek no doubt but would give players the realistic choice of trading time for fatigue. It would also be impossible for a player to predict how fast an opposing sides reinforcements might be arriving at a battle (especially those battles that can become predictable)... Further, this came to my mind a few days ago. Can a Max Fatigue unit march as fast as a fresh unit with 0 fatigue??? I suppose the question might turn on whether we think of physical fatigue as the same thing as battle fatigue, but still, I find it hard to believe that a max fatigue regiment could march as fast and easily as a unit that has simply been guarding the crossroads all day.

I also support the notion of units loosing stragglers although I'm not quite certain what changes would have to occur in the game engine to make it work. I would expect that high morale units would have fewer stragglers than low morale units and that units moving long periods of time would lose more than units moving very short distances. Of course one of the problems with stragglers is that most of the serious straggling occurred during campaign marches (Confederate Army before Antietam - Union Army Prairie Grove) and were not a great problem in many of the game situations we are presented with. Or at least the straggling has already been accounted for in some ways. Further, a straggler recovery function would have to exist for the stragglers to ultimately 'catch up' with their units.

Another thought regarding fatigue and stragglers might involve weather. Marching regiments hard in 90 degree high humidity day would logically take a greater toll on unit cohesion than the same march on a pleasant 70 degree day with a cool breeze (interesting twist on the weather function already available). Units moving forward in rain and mud would in all likelihood also suffer greater losses in manpower and fatigue than units moving across lovely dry ground. These possibilities seem both logical and probable and would definately force players to account for the weather which I reckon commanders actually had to do in the real world.

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MG R.Virts
Cast Iron Division
VI Corps, AofS