American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

If this has been brought up before my apologies, but the way naval combat is simulated in the HPS system seems to me to be lacking. Especially the ability to ram your enemy is missing, something the Confederates on the Mississippi attempted to do with some success (Plum Run). I remember the first scenario I played which included naval units I tried to close with my opponent in order to ram (assuming that I would have to use the melee procedure) and discovered that is not possible.

Right now ships seem to be little more than floating artillery pieces and unless you reduce the number of guns on the enemy ship, you can't sink him. Especially with the Confederate gunboats who were relatively easily sunk this seems to be something that should be tinkered with by the designers. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Brig. Gen. Jerry Butley
AOS

The naval aspect is purposely abstract and simple. The 'ships' are merely unlimbered artillery units allowed to move on water with neat graphics. They are included to provide shore bombardment only, and not intended in any other fashion to represent naval combat. Consider any boats as artillery on water, only. It will save you a migrane trying to figure it out.

MG Al "Ambushed" Amos, Commanding Officer
1st Div, I Corps, AoP, USA

Al's right - basically you are playing a land system only; with naval aspects abstracted -which is consistent with air/naval in Panzer Campaigns/Modern Campaigns, naval in the other series like EAW.

With about 3 titles left in the life of the series (per Rich Walker here and I am pretty sure I read it from Rich Hamilton elsewhere when discussing the locked OOBs -probably it was Gamesquad), I wouldn't expect something so involved to be added to the Civil War Battles series at this point in its series' life.

Hopefully someday they do a game on Civil War era naval combat though (I mean honestly a rose of a different color booted me off a board way back when I was a raw internet noob because I was naive enough to ask his company what the status of Age of Ironclads was -in my defense, that company was including it in their catalogs that they stuffed in their software -back in the day when wargames were sold in big box retail stores).

Col Stephen Trauth
AOT
XV Corps/3rd Division [1st Cavalry] 2nd Cavalry Brigade