JW: Yeah, it was actually a mod from Take Command Second Manassas that a guy on the forums made and the response was pretty positive.
And then I pulled out the manual and read about the feature and thought that’s brilliant, they’ve managed to make the game accessible to general players while solving the age old “desktop general” battlefield intelligence issue, all while folded into the same game engine. I installed the game, loaded it up, saw the difficulty settings, you know, easy, normal, veteran, grognard, and thought “well grog, of course.” So I click grog and launch a battle…bear in mind I haven’t read the manual yet…and then I’m sitting there on the back of the horse, wondering if the camera’s broken or I accidentally zoomed in or something. We’re still feeling our way around what else we could do to tweak the interface to make it more practical to play when you’re tethered to the level of the general’s head. It was designed for the general 200 feet up, who can see the ground from that privileged decidedly unhistorical aerial point of view. We’re still pinging back and forth about that mode, because the interface wasn’t originally designed with it in mind. JW: Yeah, from the player’s perspective, that’s the hardest mode to play in, that pure historical mode where everything goes out by courier. You know, stick the game in grognard mode. GO: You’d think that would be the primary draw for Civil War buffs, to be able to go in and almost role-play the battle.
I’m not sure how many people get into it at that level of detail, but the capability and functionality are in there. We’re thinking to be really good at this game, you want to look at your generals and know who would be a better defender or attacker. And if somebody else was really aggressive and you put him on defend, chances are he’s still not going to stay there and he’ll go out and attack anyway. We designed it to read in the personality characteristics of the various generals, from the OOB files, so that this will tend to…if a given general was historically not very aggressive, that’s the way we want him to act as sort of his base, around which behavior will oscillate with a degree of randomness.
You had to know how to go from one formation to any other formation, and how to get there without ending up in a big rugby scrum in the middle of the field, which certainly happened a lot with green units. That’s how you win battles, being drilled to that level of being able to do it without thinking about it, because you’ve got enough to do with loading and firing and filling in the gaps as casualties are taken. When the colonel says wheel left, the feet need to do it without thinking. It had to be learned to the point of being spinal reflex, because you had to do it on the battlefield when all hell’s breaking loose around you and artillery’s going off and people are getting shot and there’s noise and smoke and chaos. JW: The average infantry unit would drill, weather permitting, four hours a day, every day, because the drill was so complex. Did these guys back in the day really have all that stuff down pat? I mean, you’ve got three hundred pages devoted exclusively to complex formation drilling. GO: I picked one up at First Manassas and thumbed through it. GO: When you’re modeling the different regiments and their how they interact, how do you model and calculate the formation physics? Does the computer see big blocky rows of guys, or discrete bodies? Are the gun ballistics modeled individually, or is it more of an abstract firepower aggregate? Although he was probably less polite than that.
So I can understand where Jackson would be saying, on the march, you know, get down and walk. But they had the horses to spare where the Confederates didn’t.
The Confederate artillery teams almost exclusively had four horse hitches, whereas the Union artillery had six, which gave them a little better mobility and speed over the ground. And the Confederates, being short of horses, had to take care of them to the greatest extent that they could. But on the march, they would walk, because it reduced the load on the horses. JW: Well, it would depend…on the battlefield, riding on the limbers, they could get where they were going in a hurry. So I was playing around with the artillery in Scourge of War, and I see three guys get up and sit on the limber as I’m moving it around, and was wondering if the Jackson story was apocryphal, or is that a level of detail you’re not as concerned with modeling here?