American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

Ernie: That's pretty much the way the old "World at War" series worked and I think it was the best system yet. The simultanious movement worked great. It would work well for ACW combat.

I'll have to try Combat Mission sometime. Played a lot of ASL in years gone by.

Doug

- <i>"the purely mechanical problems of such a system. Like how to replay the battle?"</i> (<i>BG. Kennon Whitehead </i>)

...................

I don't think this need be a problem. The game engine could combine the two players' pre-plotted moves and then process this in a series of sub-phases. Then, within each sub-phase, it would resolve movement, firing, etc on a unit by unit basis, with units being selected at random. Of course that might mean one unit advances, gets shot at and then panics and routs, which might then impact nearby units and cause them to either halt, fall back or even join the rout. I can imagine a lot of green Yankees routing away like this and thus compensating for their numerical superiority at Antietam and elsewhere.

Perhaps this system wouldn't be strictly speaking "simultaneous", but it would seem pretty much simultaneous when the players watched the replay. Perhaps for convenience, the movement sequence of each sub-turn would be resolved sector by sector rather than having it resolved totally randomly across the entire battlefield, as this would probably be too confusing to follow.

Col. Rich White
3 Brig. Phantom Cav Div
III Corps ANV

At Tillercon I had the opportunity to check out the Panzer Campaigns system that HPS produces and found features that I thought might be applicable to ACW. One of these is an operation point concept where moving or firing uses up points. You can usually fire up to three times, move and fire, fire and melee or move and melee. But you don't have enough points to move, fire and melee (unless maybe the unit is a tank.) Another is the handling of isolation. Instead of the severe penalties suffered in the ACW system, the unit morale is reduced by 1, and if a unit is unable to retreat when defeated in melee, it pays a penalty in prisoners on top of regular melee losses. Also, disrupted units defend at half strength and broken (routed) units defend at quarter strength in melees. I'm sure there were other features of interest, but time was limited.

MG Mike Mihalik
1/III/AoMiss/CSA

General Mihalik,

What is your current email address?? I have mailed you several times but have gotten no response.

Thanks in advance,
Humbly,



Fld Lt D.H. Smith
3/1/III Corps,AotM,CSA

http://users.adelphia.net/~sapper99/index.htm

And there is night fatigue, and weather (with appropriate ground graphics) and a supply system and many other things. The Panzer Campaign games are really a decade ahead of the horse-and-musket-era games.

Gen. Walter, USA
AoS / War College