Three Moves Ahead 400 - Dream Daddy Civil War

[Rob Zacny]

Three Moves Ahead 400:

Dream Daddy Civil War
Forgive us. The title was Rowan's fault. Rob and Rowan have been playing Ultimate General: Civil War and Gettysburg: The Tide Turns, and those games have got them thinking about what they really, truly want from a Civil War wargame. Rowan talks about how he wants to feel like a commander in the field, dealing with the same uncertainty and dynamics that Civil War generals faced. Rob agrees, but also wants a game that feels roughly true to the historical record, yet also wants the capacity to be surprised. In other words, we want it all. Rowan also proposes that Sid Meier's Gettysburg, at this point, casts too long a shadow and its influence is stifling other approaches to tactical wargame design.

Gettysburg: The Tide Turns, Ultimate General: Civil War, John Tiller's Battleground Civil War, Take Command, Scourge of War, Sid Meier's Gettysburg

 

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[silburnl]

An interesting listen, I agree that the shadow of Sid's Gettysburg game stretches very long.

 

Regarding 'wanting it all' it sounds like you are both after is an operational game covering the Gettysburg campaign (ie the 2nd invasion), where 'the battle' (when/if it happens) can take place anywhere in the swathe of Maryland and Pennsylvania that that the armies ranged around during that summer - with the game capable of zooming in to handle the tactical clashes when the various Corps concentrate and battle is joined.

 

Of course to do such a thing properly would need a really detailed map, but given how congested the fighting was in the eastern theater if you could get the map good enough it would serve for a bunch of other operational scenarios also.

[panzeh]

I don't really think civil war battles make sense if someone spells them out and says "this is the battle of gettysburg" or "this is the battle of chancellorsville".  Honestly, if you're going to do games at this level, I think i'd prefer randomly generated battles, which would more effectively lay out the uncertainty involved in ACW battles than randomizing a couple things in a battle called Gettysburg.

 

Guns of Gettysburg is a pretty interesting take on Gettysburg because the US and CS reinforcements are totally random.  It has a counterfactor, though- the objective points begin very far forward(McPherson's rige, I think), and then every turn the Union has fewer units than the Confederacy, they can move the objectives back one space, allowing for the game to stay balanced.

[sclpls]

I'm going to be very disappointed if the Wizard Jam community doesn't take advantage of this gift of a title.

[Jake]

6 minutes ago, sclpls said:

I'm going to be very disappointed if the Wizard Jam community doesn't take advantage of this gift of a title.

fact

[enmalkm]

Great podcast as usual—I always like it when discussions range a bit from the game ostensibly being discussed. I listened last week so I might be remembering, but I think Rob asked whether Take Command - 2nd Manassas is still available. It's actually on Steam! I picked it up at the last sale, but unfortunately wasn't able to resolve the DirectX 9 runtime error that kept it from working on my WIndows 10 machine.

 

I've also been wondering if anyone's had luck getting Sid Meier's Gettysburg to work on modern machines. Since it doesn't seem available through digital distribution, I tried obtaining an iso through, uh, more dubious means, but was never able to get it running on Windows 10. I'd love to be able to check it out—when it originally came out I wasn't playing strategy games that didn't have "Civilization" or "Alpha Centauri" in the title, and it still doesn't seem to have been fully supplanted.

[cornchip]

The challenge to escape the influence of Gettysburg! while still making a good game has stuck with me since I listened to the episode. I think the most promising avenue is to restrict the view of the player to one character on the field and only allow control through that character's speech and writing. The result would be more like living in the 1993 movie and the tactical view feelies would have to be gotten by looking at in-game maps, I suppose. Something like this has been attempted before, right?

 

At any rate, it seems like a solvable design challenge, unlike portraying a single historical battle without allowing hindsight benefit/knowledge of the inputs.