Civil War

Empire Interactive

Review By Graham Empson

Well here I am again with a review of a game set in my favorite period, the one and only ACW (who said I was biased). This game was designed and developed by Dagger Interactive who brought you Fields of Glory set in the Napoleonic era. By way of a change I thought I would get the painful bits over first before I wax lyrical in the review, so here goes. The game only comes on CD-ROM and has a price of £36.95, but as always shop around for the best price.

The machine specification for playing the game is a minimum of a 20386/DX33 processor (the book says likely to be very slow - practical experiment proved 'has the machine died or what?') so recommended 20486 processor, 4 megabytes of memory but 8 megabytes is better, between 2 megabytes and 45 megabytes of hard disk space depending on install option, SVGA graphics, sound card, and CD-ROM drive. Now if you are still interested here is the review.

This is not so much a program but more a games package. The features include individual battles (2 tutorial and 4 historical), or a full blooded campaign; a two player mode option via modem; on-line database with 60,000 words, actual photographs, songs and music, biographies, weapons animations; a free book by Paddy Griffiths 'Battle in the Civil War'; menu driven system, oh and a map of the major battles. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine takes account of the realism levels set extremely well, and seems to calculate battle results reasonably well in that it does not appear to be biased in its own favor.

Now let's deal with the real meat of the game - the full blown campaign. When you select to play a campaign from the main menu, the next menu is where you decide the level of realism you wish to play. The level can be set by rank which sets all the factors to the same level, or you can set individual levels for each factor in turn. There are nine major factors presented: resources, supply, unit types, facilities, command and control, fatigue, terrain effects, morale, and victory conditions. As you progress up the difficulty level the complexity of each factor increases. So for example, unit types at the simplest level are, on land: infantry, artillery, cavalry - on sea: one ship type. However, at expert level, you construct your brigades from 14 unit types and naval units from five types of vessel.

Campaign

The campaign will start on 12 April 1861 at 8:00 p.m. which, as everyone knows, was the evening before war commenced. The game proceeds day by day until you win / lose, or 8th November 1864 arrives, when the most victory points wins. Why this date (presidential election day for the Union) and not 9 April 1865 (Lee surrendered at Appomattox) I don't know. You have two map resolutions, game score display and a toggle between troop (armies in the field are highlighted by the mouse) mode or city (city is highlighted with associated resources) mode. Now we come to what I think is the best bit - the game time clock. You get the night, from 8:00pm to dawn for 'orders phase', to issue movement orders, restructure your armies, start building facilities, recruit regiments etc.

During the next day or 'movement phase' the actual movements occur, you bump into the enemy and battles happen, you can opt to fight it out by switching to battlefield mode, or calculate the result, hospitals get built bit by bit (national health syndrome?), weapons get made, ships move, supplies move, trains move and so on. Now the clock runs by equating game time to real time so at the simplest level, one hour passes in game time every real time minute. At the most complex its one game hour passes every real time 12 seconds. So now decide the overall strategy, decide your building plans, monitor progress, move your forces, counter threats and do it all daily, in say 144 seconds - here is where we sort out the men from the boys, or revert to quill and parchment so we don't forget what we are doing.

The historical battle option takes you into battlefield mode and again you set the level of realism but with an obviously restricted set of factors. The battlefield is represented as an isometric view of the field which can be rotated, time can be speeded up or slowed down, and troops ordered by 9 order types. There are five magnification levels, and you can of course surrender (white flag job - "never" they cried). Whilst the battlefield terrain is very good, I must say that the troop representations are not as good as Impressions Blue and Gray, but, conversely the terrain representaion is much better (just ask the editor).

So what is my overall opinion. This game is very highly recommended for the novice up to the ACW devotee who has a powerful enough PC, and a lot of time. It is very close to becoming addictive. I have even created a Civil War Folder, where I make myself notes on such things as when and where new regiments will become available, where supply depots are being built etc. I review these before a session. In a way, I suppose, I am only doing what the staff officers did at the time, quill and parchment, but it does bring home the problems the commanders faced, and probably explains why so many of the battles were indecisive. Anyway, I am applying strict rationing, otherwise you may never get another review (only kidding Kenn).

[Seems to me a Diary or Notebook should be available on screen in order to assist the player in keeping track of his many and varied forces. Had a brief go on Chris Constable's, who rates it, but not enough of a game to judge it. Kenn]

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