American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

Hello. I know that I've just joined this server but I might as well get the ball rolling.

I diagnose myself with some high tier disorder which makes me obsess over OOBs and troop strengths and such. And so, for the last 3 years, I have been trying to write up and organize a bunch of OOBs for battles and Campaigns like Atlanta, the Overland, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga, and Franklin-Nashville. I've taken some of the stuff I have garnered from these years of buying books, frequenting more avid individuals on CWT, and have made some OOB edits on the JT games I have, particularly on the Overland and the Atlanta games.

Since I've joined (and am currently enrolled for the eastern armies), I decided to put my efforts into writing up an OOB with more accurate regimental strengths for the various units on both sides. And so, I've written that up today.

For the rebels, my primary source was Alfred C. Young III's "Lee's Army During The Overland Campaign: A Numerical Study", which breaks down the strength of Confederate infantry down to the brigade level, and casualties to the regimental level. With these (and other sources mentioning specific units), I have managed to give approximate strengths for the entire rebel Army of Northern Virginia (and Beauregard's command) all equaling up to the brigade totals. There are a few instances where I got more specific. For example: On CWT, a friend named Hanover posted regimental strengths for Pickett's Division (or the brigades of said division) as of May 9th, which I have included. For Steuart's and the Stonewall Brigade, I made an approximate estimate based on average regimental strength after casualties at Wilderness and Spotsylvania (30 for Steuart, 60 for Walker), and add back the casualties by regiment for these two battles. Young rounds most of his brigade strengths to 5s, and so these are not fully accurate, but they are close enough and quite clean I would say.

As for the Union, I had a more difficult time, as Young has yet to publish a similar work on Grant's command. However, my friend Hanover over on CWT did a thread breaking down the regimental strengths and brigade losses of 5th and 6th Corps at the Wilderness. I put in the numbers presented there as is, without rounding.

I definitely need to put more work into this, especially in the Shenandoah theater, as the numbers in game reflect William C. Davis' original numbers for the forces under Breck and Sigel rather than Charles Knight's more modern computations in his New Market book. That I am currently working on in a second version. I also hope my friend Hanover can help provide me with further information on 2nd, 9th, and Cavalry Corps, and potentially the Army of the James.

Link in zip file (created by Scott) here: https://www.wargame.ch/wc/acw/Downloads ... OOB_v1.zip

Well done and best of luck for your future research.

I note that you're looking at the Shenandoah campaign. Regretfully for me, not the 1862 campaign. If you ever get an OOB for the 1862 Valley Campaign I'd love to see it. At the moment, I'm waiting for Bradley Gottfried to issue one of his 'Maps of ...' books for it. I fear I may be waiting a while because when I asked him about Shenandoah 1862 on another forum late in 2020 he advised us: "Yes, down the road, I will cover both campaigns (in separate volumes)." Although Gottfried's book do not generally give precise numbers in his OOB listings they do provide a detailed list of all the units (and their positions at different times) as well as an exhaustive bibliography.

_________________
Paul Swanson
Lieutenant-General
First Division
First Corps
Army of Northern Virginia

[quote="Quaama"]Well done and best of luck for your future research.

I note that you're looking at the Shenandoah campaign. Regretfully for me, not the 1862 campaign. If you ever get an OOB for the 1862 Valley Campaign I'd love to see it. At the moment, I'm waiting for Bradley Gottfried to issue one of his 'Maps of ...' books for it. I fear I may be waiting a while because when I asked him about Shenandoah 1862 on another forum late in 2020 he advised us: "Yes, down the road, I will cover both campaigns (in separate volumes)." Although Gottfried's book do not generally give precise numbers in his OOB listings they do provide a detailed list of all the units (and their positions at different times) as well as an exhaustive bibliography.[/quote]

I appreciate your response. I will say that the pre-1862 stuff does not interest me as much as the later half of the conflict, as well as just the pain I recieve every time I look at something like Trimble's Brigade with four regiments from four different states (utterly uncivilized). But since most of the rest of the forces involved are mono-state brigades, like the various Virginia brigades and the Louisiana Brigade, I certainly can look into it. I'll probably get a book or two on that campaign, eventually.

Disclaimer- have had a OOB coding experience in a project with Musket and Pike (involved testing the engine change to up the amount of armies allowed in a scenario) -it's basically identical in a conceptual sense.

I am going to have to plug this into Overland a bit later and see what happens, although I suspect it might produce a load error or all of the armies show as being on the same side, as there doesn't appear to be an End tag for the Union side - the one that is there, would be an End tag for that last listed unit.

I do most of my editing in Notepad++ (and I know that some of the guys over doing this for projects at WDS (technically my experience predates WDS, so it was JTS for this) were using UltraEdit -however that give a brief trial period before you have to pay either a subscription or for a license and I was, er, too cheap (well, so far - but you never know your luck I guess).

The files (PDT works this way as well)- can work a little like HTML - in that you can leave breaks between lines and be ok, and I make some liberal use of tabbing to keep track of Begin, End tags - because they can add up quickly -- looking at your work, I imagine I would be preaching to the choir . That is a massive job, to be sure .

-One thing I recall that happened in Seven Years War (and I don't think it ever got addressed), is that the unit captions -only so much of it will fit in the box -and you cannot simply expand the size of the box. Meaning there is a defacto character limit (this includes spaces as well); it looks like some of the longer captions might be impacted by this sort of thing.

Mind you that doesn't mean that wasn't that way in Overland before (so for all I know it was in there before).

> Now I have to find out just where exactly Butler's Brigade was during the early part of the Overland Campaign - I know he joined up Hampton later on in it, and when Stuart was killed, Hampton was promoted, and Butler (Matthew Calbraith Butler) took over as division commander. I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't an isolated incident (the units that might have been available type of thing). Now I have to find out ...

Will find out about the file though first ... make sure it loads or report back if not, and what I got. I remember my inherited project with a PDT that didn't load -and it turned out was a comma that the person originally creating the file must have thought it was a period or something like that -that just jacked it up royally- as I think comma was the code for go on to the next section (or vice versa -it was awhile ago).


-Edited: and I stand corrected - it opened nicely. Nice work.

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~Retired~

After testing that out - a couple of things.

1) It's really interesting to learn the differences between engines in OOB structures - so will be really interested in the results, and no doubt learn something new.
2) Name length is an issue in some instances- 1 I recall noting -is Maj Gen Pickett (I think it might have been under George Pickett) - but it cut off the M and the last tt's. That's about the character limit before it starts cutting out.

Butler's Brigade (from Southern Hero: Matthew Calbraith Butler - Confederate General, Hampton Red Shirt, and US Senator - by S J MARTIN.) The below a summary from pages 86-87.

1st of May Butler was with his wife who was having a difficult child birth. His units within his brigade were still in South Carolina. Looks like the regiments were loosely under Hampton (Wade) directly, 5th SC and about half of the 4th SC (this being around 27 May). Armed with long range Enfields- (assuming meaning regular Enfields as opposed to carbines -and these were an object of ridicule within the other cavalry units). Lee did send the above regiments into the field, although Butler was still enroute. They were inexperienced so were used (alongwith Rosser's and Wickham's men in a recon -SE along the Pamunkey River.
Butler, himself arrived the night of May 28, 1864.

Now also part of the reason Butler was in South Carolina for an extended period of time was because he was wounded at Brandy Station the year before, and had lost a foot (iirc to an artillery shell).

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~Retired~

[quote="S_Trauth"]After testing that out - a couple of things.
...
2) Name length is an issue in some instances- 1 I recall noting -is Maj Gen Pickett (I think it might have been under George Pickett) - but it cut off the M and the last tt's. That's about the character limit before it starts cutting out.

....[/quote]
Something I found in playing around with the OOB files that I included in my oob explained page at the Engineering site I maintained:

"The one limitation I have found is that the name should not contain more than 19
characters. This is because the name is displayed centered in the unit display box and it
has 19 spaces. If you exceed 19 characters both ends of the name will be cut off making it
difficult to read."

This page from the site and the companion page on pdt explained were converted by me to pdf as I do not plan to continue maintaining the site past 2022.
While working on the manual updates I sent a copy to WDS and they were added to the Manuals folder in the Forgotten Campaigns and subsequent updates to the other games.
Why the limit was set at 19 I can't say. From my limited knowledge of VB6 I know you set the size and justification of the text box when it is created.
The text box must be set for center justified which would explain cutting off both ends.

_________________
Gen. Ken Miller



The McKeesport Union Guard

1/1/I
AotP

Ken's put it more succinctly than I had. I just never bothered to count them - just eyeballed them, and when it didn't work, reduce the captions ... done.

_________________
~Retired~

[quote="S_Trauth"]After testing that out - a couple of things.

1) It's really interesting to learn the differences between engines in OOB structures - so will be really interested in the results, and no doubt learn something new.
2) Name length is an issue in some instances- 1 I recall noting -is Maj Gen Pickett (I think it might have been under George Pickett) - but it cut off the M and the last tt's. That's about the character limit before it starts cutting out.

Butler's Brigade (from Southern Hero: Matthew Calbraith Butler - Confederate General, Hampton Red Shirt, and US Senator - by S J MARTIN.) The below a summary from pages 86-87.

1st of May Butler was with his wife who was having a difficult child birth. His units within his brigade were still in South Carolina. Looks like the regiments were loosely under Hampton (Wade) directly, 5th SC and about half of the 4th SC (this being around 27 May). Armed with long range Enfields- (assuming meaning regular Enfields as opposed to carbines -and these were an object of ridicule within the other cavalry units). Lee did send the above regiments into the field, although Butler was still enroute. They were inexperienced so were used (alongwith Rosser's and Wickham's men in a recon -SE along the Pamunkey River.
Butler, himself arrived the night of May 28, 1864.

Now also part of the reason Butler was in South Carolina for an extended period of time was because he was wounded at Brandy Station the year before, and had lost a foot (iirc to an artillery shell).[/quote]
Yeah, Butler's brigade doesn't really involve itself until the later half of the campaign. 5th SC was shanghai'd in Petersburg by Pickett to face Ben Butler's Bermuda Hundred expedition (which was a ripe mess of missed oppurtunities by Ben Butler and his two absurdly timid corps commanders). I've seen numbers for the 4th, 5th and 6th SC on their move to virginia being ridiculously high, numbering 3550 men according to ranger95 (though I do not know where they source the numbers). However, they experienced losses over the trip, as most went on horseback to the front rather than by the rickety rail. This men the 4th SC, which had 1350 men on the outset, arriving with Lee with 990 men...and 400 horses. I estimate that 5th SC (with 1200 men) and 6th SC with 1000 men at the start, arrived with Lee with 500 men per regiment. I believe the realistic OOB if I were to make it would be
-4th SC Cav; 400 men; Rifled Muskets; Quality C/D
-5th SC Cav; 400 men; Rifles Muskets; Quality C/D
-6th SC Cav: 500 men; Rifled Muskets; Quality C/D
-Dismounted; 590 men; Rifles Muskets; Quality C/D

[quote="S_Trauth"]

I do most of my editing in Notepad++ (and I know that some of the guys over doing this for projects at WDS (technically my experience predates WDS, so it was JTS for this) were using UltraEdit -however that give a brief trial period before you have to pay either a subscription or for a license and I was, er, too cheap (well, so far - but you never know your luck I guess).
[/quote]
Yeah, I often used basic Notepad. I do have Notepad++, but Notepad does the job usually.

One thing I wonder about is if the morale/command are where they should be - it might not just be about numbers, but possibly OOB construction and scale as well. But I mean, this is your project, so just mentioning it because it is something that I had thought about as well. The Petersburg title seems to have missed an opportunity for a wider scenario that took in a couple of battles at the end of Sept 1864 - very early October (they have the one- I think Peebles Farm -off the top of my head) but missed New Market Heights - I might have the Peebles Farm one wrong - am not looking at it.

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~Retired~