American Civil War Game Club (ACWGC)

As John has alluded to in his previous post, the PDT has its limitations relative to the base game engine. While one can construct a different movement system or a standard Weapons Effectiveness -- never understood why weapon types should differ from one scenario to the next --, a standard PDT for use across all games is not possible. While a scenario file can be changed to reference a different PDT, it must carry the same name as the one designated when the SCN was built. One must build a new copy of the scenario otherwise. There is a good description of this process at the ACWCO Engineering site maintained by Ken Miller. As was stated previously in this thread, an individual is on their own in this regard.

I have played around with the PDT files since the Battleground days. I've always taken the approach that I can't modify the game engine, but I can identify historical inaccuracies in the PDT. Changing the latter can create more Civil-war like game play. In the process I have encountered things which I thought to be program bugs, but later revealed themselves to be undocumented aspects of the game system. For example, a unit incurs a downhill movement cost which is 1/2 its uphill. I only discovered this in the process of developing a more robust system of movement -- I pitched base 12 some time back. No where will you find this documented -- it is now at Ken Miller's website. It came as a surprise to me, as it was to both Ken and John. Who knows what else lurks?

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MG Robert Frost

Regarding the "Golden Morale" units from the old Talonsoft NiR game, I think that the HPS/Tiller games have the same ability to add that extra +2. It was in the Napoleon's Russian Campaign game (there were campaign decisions that would lower the morale if, for example, you chose not to fight at Smolensk). So it could be added here too.

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~Retired~

Reading my previous post, I worded it rather poorly. The best method for incorporating new PDT values is to copy the existing SCN and edit it to point to the new PDT which one has created. This avoids the problem of modifying whatever passes as the "standard" PDT in a specific scenario. If one wishes to change the scenario in some other fashion, then the scenario editor is in order. I am wont to cut and paste parts of SCN files, but there are some things that cannot be done outside the editor for some reason.

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MG Robert Frost