ericbabe
Posts: 11927
Joined: 3/23/2005 Status: offline
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Whether or not the player is limited to levels of troop strength that are below the historical numbers I believe depends on which difficulty setting the player is using. It's true that because of the levels of Men in each province you can't build new units to get a level of strength that corresponds to historical levels, but I believe you can build a number of brigades that corresponds roughly to historical levels (again, this depends heavily on the difficulty settings and game options players are using). With reinforcements from Camps, players can get strength equal to or surpassing historical numbers -- on other threads, players were complaining that they were getting too many men from Camps compared to historical numbers...but again, this is really heavily dependent on the game options/difficulty levels that players choose. I haven't been able to find comprehensive statistical tables that give disease rates by month, but have only been able to reconstruct partial data based on records for particular regiments, and some aggregate stats from the Sanitary Commission. I have found good evidence that regiments could often go for months without material losses due to disease but then have several months in which losses were extremely high: for instance, perhaps the most dramatic example I could find, the 6th Vermonth in the winter of 1861 had 278 cases of typhoid fever, 330 of measles, 90 of diphtheria and 180 of mumps -- all in one regiment, an infection rate of 60%+. I've read a report from the U.S. Sanitary Commission that estimated that in the AoP, from July to Dec of 1861, fully 30% of the troops were too sick to participate in battle. The AoP 8,000 cases of disease in July of 1861, and this rose to 35,000 cases in Dec of 1861 -- during this time the rate of infection among the troops varied between 45% and 23%, with the aforementioned average of about 30%. FoF has a disease rate of (random(15)+random(15))%, so the 30% rate of infection in the AoP is at the upper limit of what FOF would allow. The AoP could have marched on Virginia in fall of 1861, but if it had it would have left a significant portion of its men behind languishing in camp hospitals. If anyone knows where I can find more comprehensive statistics, please pass along the references: I've looked all over but haven't found anything like a monthly table of disease losses and infection rates. Admittedly outbreaks of disease seemed to have happened over several months rather than in a single two-week period, but I rather just think of this as a simplification necessary for ease of game-play -- I'd hate to have players wade through disease losses for every single brigade on every single turn of play: that would just be information overload, IMO. Similarly, some troops did recover from their disesases and were able to return (though this did not happen in a majority of cases, 2/3 of the casualties in the Civil War were due to disease and 3/5 of the deaths were due to disease, so in most cases men lost to disease weren't coming back to fight another day), however, since FOF rates of disease are about half of the average reported by the Sanitary Commission, it's reasonable to say that those men are modeled in our lower rate of disease. Also I've noticed that while some diseases were caused by poor conditions in camps or proximity to swamps (typhoid, malaria, smallpox are about 1/3rd of the cause of disease casualties), there were some classifications of disease that were exacerbated when armies were on the march: food poisoning, heatstroke, frostbite. We could do disease twice per turn at half the current rate, but I'm not sure this would change the behavior of the statistics that much -- large stacks would become even more likely to be hit by disease, since the behavior in this case would deviate less from expectation (and the expectation is that large stacks are going to be hit). The Sanitary Commission seemed to think that new recruits were vulnerable to disease because many new recruits were simply recruited in poor health and so were more vulnerable, but they also seemed to confirm that troops that survived longer had better personal hygiene and were able to avoid the very prevalent intestinal diseases, so adding something like the aforementioned "disease flag" might be a way to modify the disease rules in a way that doesn't overburden the player with information or cause the numbers to deviate too much from their historical levels. Also, the Sanitary Commission points out that new recruits were much more likely not to take their quinine than veteran troops and so were more susceptible to malaria.
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