ColinWright
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Joined: 10/13/2005
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It can be done -- and there are those who will argue that it can be done well.
I disagree. Briefly, TOAW fails in each of the following areas.
1. Inappropriate command and control/intelligence. In TOAW, you always know where all your own troops are.
2. Inappropriate supply. Supply is mostly a function of how good your communications to the rear are. It has little to do with the fertility or the resources of the country you are in. When battle didn't threaten, your average nineteenth century army would tend to disperse over the countryside so as to take advantage of food stores, etc. Your TOAW troops will want to gather along roads and rail lines.
3. Inappropriate combat dynamics. Spread out and surround -- and never, never concentrate in one stack. It's just the opposite of supply. Where nineteenth century armies would march to the sound of the guns and concentrate as densely as possible for that big battle, it will behoove TOAW-Lee at Gettysburg to hold that ridge with that first division and order everyone else to envelope the Union army. Of course, the Union army wouldn't obligingly mass 90,000 men along a five mile ridge, so no particular advantage would ensue -- but the resulting battle won't bear even a faint resemblance to Gettysburg.
4. Fantastic gaps between the scale of battles and the scale of theaters. TOAW puts it all one map -- and with the large armies and low combat densities of modern warfare, this works. The combat area of the Battle of Kursk occupies 10% or so of the total frontage of the Eastern Front. The battle area of Gettysburg covers about 2% of the total campaign distance from Harrisburg to Richmond -- and that's hardly the most extreme example. You can't satisfactorily get both the distances involved in strategic maneuver and the details of the actual combat onto the same map.
As I say, others will disagree -- and I will grant that there are workarounds and special situations that make it possible for TOAW to sometimes produce limited and partially satisfactory simulations of some pre-modern campaigns.
But you're working with the wrong engine. It'll be like trying to eat dinner with a screw driver and a pair of pliers. Possible, but...
< Message edited by ColinWright -- 9/16/2008 9:38:29 PM >
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I am not Charlie Hebdo
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Mid 1900's battle simmulation in TOAW - 
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