The "Up/Down" Problem

The "Up/Down" Problem (Full Version)

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Cyrano -> The "Up/Down" Problem (6/29/2005 8:47:13 PM)
So, as we while away the hours until release... @ the BETA team: The story goes that Sid Meier's "Gettysburg" was originally going to be "Sid Meier's Civil War". I remember seeing screenshots of the splash screen back in the day and the very thought makes me weep. He shrunk his scope, however, again according to legend, because he found it too difficult to connect the tactical battles with the strategic map. Not just in terms of numbers and of technology but in terms of game flow and time allowed. He said he found players would build elaborate strategic plans and, when drawn down to the tactical map, would come back up (after a long battle) having all but forgotten what they were trying to in the overall war. I think RTW got around this with dinky battles. For those with long enough memories, I thought Conquest of the New World had a nice balance between a clever tactical game and the strategic side of things, but the tactical engine was a clever abstraction a la chess and not a real simulation. The battles in CoG, though, look pretty involved. And therefore the question: In CoG, how goes the flow? Is there a good connection between the strategic and tactical (I suppose grand tactical) side of things? Does the time feel well allocated? Sort of a Zen thing, I realize, but it strikes me as one of the great challenges with games of this type. Responses always appreciated, Regards, Jim "Cyrano" :/7)

Maj. Aaron -> RE: The "Up/Down" Problem (6/29/2005 9:23:42 PM)
Having read those juicy details about Gettysburg, I wish that he had kept the strategic element as well. I though Gettysburg was a fairly good game with a good tactical interface. The drawback was that it was only one battle on one map with only so many troops. It needed a strategic map where you could form larger armies and send them into battles. The way the game turned out, you could mod unit names and quality, but your army could only be as large as it was historically (about 85,000 as the Union and 75,000 as the south). To be able to fight a battle on the scale of Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville, where the Union army numbered 130,000 would have been interesting, although more one-sided. Different battle maps would have been interesting. The CoG interface would work somewhat well with the American civil war, but it would need changes. One of the flaws I see with CoG in my opinion is that the naval battles can only be resolved in quick battle and naval units cannot be involved in land battles (on the coast). In the civil war, land forces were often supported by naval forces, especially on rivers. Sid Meier might have been able to solve the problem by having shorter battles with only slightly less unit detail. The terrain and map detail should be left alone though. Frank Hunter's Civil War game was one that I felt needed a tactical interface. I am very excited about CoG because its a game that finally has a good balance between the tactical and strategic.

Hertston -> RE: The "Up/Down" Problem (6/30/2005 12:04:24 AM)
It would have been a very different game. There's no reason why the engine couldn't be used in a more general fashion, I guess, but "Gettysburg" as such would have gone out the window, which would have been a shame. The game makes a big and generally successful attempt to really create a "feel" for that particular battle, with the briefings and such. I don't get the point about numbers at all. Unlike the later Breakaway Napoleonic games using the engine, you couldn't even fight the whole battle in Gettysburg, it was just a series of brigade/division scale scenarios. It worked well enough like that, but at that scale why does it matter what the army size is? Personally I'm not a huge fan of trying to combine both strategic and tactical layers. I'm struggling to think of a wargame (rather thah a strategy game, like the TW games) where it ever really worked, and the only ones I can come up with are where a more innovative approach was taken to the strategic level as in CC2 or even the "game-book" approach of the recent Tiller Civil War games. Give me a game that does one or the other well any day - although I sure hope CoG will be the exception that proves the rule!

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