American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="3" face="book antiqua" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">But there's also an arguement to be made for minimizing the "American Civil War with Radios" factor that is already a very large part of these games.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Very good point. It goes hand in hand with the "gods-eye" view of the battlefield. In fact, NOT having "on the move" LOS sightings helps to minimize that overall view and knowledge problem.

<b><font color="gold">Ernie Sands
LtGen, CO XXIII Corps, AoO

President, Colonial Campaigns Club
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The whole LOS issue is very tricky - and perhaps not the simplest aspect of the game to resolve. Perhaps the best solution would be to address LOS in a number of stages:

1./ Reduce maximum visibility to 40 (or at most 60 hexes) and incorporate variable "weather" visibility from the Nappy engine. This (unlike the subsequent stages, which would require a lot more coding imput from JT) could easily be done in the next ACW patch.

2./ Replace the traditional turn based gaming system with a "We-plot, we-go" simultaneous movement system. <i><b>This would be a major improvement to the game engine in its own right</b></i>. It would also mean that players would only have an approximate idea where the enemy units currently are, based on the situation at the end of the previous turn.

3./ Create an additional (it would need to be optional, because many players would hate it) level of FOW where only those units - friendly as well as enemy - currently visible to the C-in-C icon and possibly also nearby friendly units were actually visible to the player. All other forces would be handled by the computer A/I in accordance with instructions from the player. In other words, the player would send orders to leaders of subordinate formations and receive reports of the ongoing situation, but wouldn't be able to see the whole picture (until the game was over and he could watch the replay) and would only have a vague idea where all his own forces currently were and what they were up to, let alone what the enemy were doing.

There could also be a multiplayer mode, where additional players would control their own subordinate forces and, like the C-in-C, would only see what their leader icon (and perhaps also nearby troops) could actually see.

For an additional level of realism, LOS detection wouldn't be automatic even then, but would depend on various factors (see my May1 post on this thread). So a small party of cavalry might be concealed in a wood and, if remaining undetected, might ambush the enemy C-in-C as he moves up the road with his escort.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="3" face="book antiqua" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Doug Burke</i>
<br />I guess I'm in the lone dissenter here regarding "on the move" LOS. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Certainly not.

Gen. Walter, USA
AoS / War College

CWG2 had a feature that helps control the casualty count in a morerealistic manner....it also helps discourage overfighting a unit....simply put, when a unit takes an action of any kind a certain number of the men drop out of line....say you have a unit with 1,000 men and they make a long march to the scene of the fighting....if they are not rested at intervals along the way for the stragglers to catch up, you will arrive with a signifigantly smaller force....Each unit had 3 numbers of men listed...1. the number of men the unit started with 2. the number of men still uninjured 3. the number of effectives still with the unit ready for duty. If a unit fires, only the 3rd number is considered. If the unit is taken behind the lines to rest, fatigue goes down and stragglers return to the unit. The quality of the unit had a bearing on the extent to which these thing happened to the unit...being fired upon also caused a few men to run off in addition to the casaulties.....anyway, this was one of the very few places that game was superior to this system.....Hank Smith

There are a lot of great ideas in this thread that apparently have been implemented successfully in previous game engines. My personal favorite, as I mentioned in an earlier thread, was the SSI Napoleonic cavalry charge system, where you could preplot your cavalry to charge or countercharge and they would carry out their orders based on passing a morale check and having sufficient operation points (which you could increase at a cost in fatigue.) Cavalry charges would trigger countercharges and also cause infantry units to attempt to form square. Where I think it applies here is that it gave a glimpse of what could be possible with preplotted simultaneous movement. This has been around at least since Kampfgruppe (SSI) days, but it would require programming units to react reasonably while carrying out the plot, which might require an awful lot of AI. Hope I live to see it.

I like the idea of a unit breakdown capability for all three branches, but didn't like all the skirmisher units wandering around the battlefield when I used to play Talonsoft Napoleonic. If you could somehow tether them to within a couple of hexes of the parent company and move the whole as a single unit, maybe you could have a more realistic skirmisher model. But then you should also have unit density modifiers. I feel a headache coming on.

Hope we have time at the Tillercon for bull sessions on the Ultimate 19th Century Wargame. I think that would be great fun.

MG Mike Mihalik
1/III/AoMiss/CSA

There are a lot of great ideas in this thread that apparently have been implemented successfully in previous game engines. My personal favorite, as I mentioned in an earlier thread, was the SSI Napoleonic cavalry charge system, where you could preplot your cavalry to charge or countercharge and they would carry out their orders based on passing a morale check and having sufficient operation points (which you could increase at a cost in fatigue.) Cavalry charges would trigger countercharges and also cause infantry units to attempt to form square. Where I think it applies here is that it gave a glimpse of what could be possible with preplotted simultaneous movement. This has been around at least since Kampfgruppe (SSI) days, but it would require programming units to react reasonably while carrying out the plot, which might require an awful lot of AI. Hope I live to see it.

I like the idea of a unit breakdown capability for all three branches, but didn't like all the skirmisher units wandering around the battlefield when I used to play Talonsoft Napoleonic. If you could somehow tether them to within a couple of hexes of the parent company and move the whole as a single unit, maybe you could have a more realistic skirmisher model. But then you should also have unit density modifiers. I feel a headache coming on.

Hope we have time at the Tillercon for bull sessions on the Ultimate 19th Century Wargame. I think that would be great fun.

MG Mike Mihalik
1/III/AoMiss/CSA