AGEOD's American Civil War 1861-1865
Review
A gem for the lovers of strategy
by Marcus Mulkins
reviewed on PC
...the Bad... (cont.)
I found that one major blind area is that when trying to optimize unit stacks, I really had no clue about which unit commanders can best coordinate the greatest number of troops. I know it has to do with the chain-of-command, but I’m not entirely certain. Why can this one-star general be declared a divisional commander and combine a half-dozen regiments while that one can only command one regiment? My gut feeling is that if you can master the command organization, it will be your best path to success.
Something else that I found annoying was that there is no simple mechanism to denote which units have moved and which have not. The game starts out with less than a dozen units able to move. The rest are “locked” at their starting locations for a number of turns. As the game progresses, most of those locked units become available. Add to those the hundreds of units that you may potentially build during the course of the Grand Campaign and it becomes quite likely that you can scroll all around the map and miss scores of units that it would be beneficial to add to the fray.
The way that combat transpires during the execution of a turn is that a “meter” pops up with a gauge indicator that ranges from green on your side to red on the opponent’s side. When a battle is playing out, the balance between green and red vacillates back and forth. First, the meter parks itself directly over where the battle is taking place on the map, so you have to guess about which units are involved. Second, nowhere could I find an explanation of what that meter is trying to tell me. Am I winning? Losing? Losing Big Time? When the battle concludes, the meter is replaced by a “report card” that tells you what region the battle took place in, and a breakdown of results in terms of casualties, prisoners, sub-units routed, etc. Once again, the placard is parked right over where the battle took place, so if your geography is weak, you probably still don’t know where on the map the clash occurred. And once you close the placard, the map scrolls to where the next action takes place. All in all, it gets annoying pretty quick.
Among some of the more trivial complaints is one concerning the audio. The period music is accurate – what there is of it – but there is no rhyme or reason as to what triggers it. The American Civil War generated a LOT of music. Music was so important that it was common for regimental bands to take a prominent (but at least somewhat sheltered) location on the battlefield and play inspirational music to help motivate their troops. It seems that AGEOD could have delved deeper into this area and included more than just the ten or so most recognizable tunes. In a related area, I have to say the combat sound effects really suck. What is being offered as volley fire sounds like a bunch of twigs being snapped. (I’m an ACW re-enactor; I know what musket fire sounds like, and, trust me, AGEOD didn’t get even close.) Furthermore, the voice actor screeching orders like “Fire!”, “Retreat!” and “Charge!” really needs to take voice lessons.
And just to be nitpicky, I’ll mention that instead of squaring off over the Internet (which nearly all human-versus-human games are these days), head-to-head games are executed as PBEM’s (Play By E-Mail). I’m wondering how difficult it would have been to design the game to utilize both approaches.
And then, just to be seriously nitpicky, let me comment about the end of the game. A full game will take days to play. Hour after hour of pushing counters all over that scrollable map. And the payoff is that I be treated to just a placard saying, “Congratulations! You’ve won!”? Not even a trumpet fanfare and jubilant music? Come on! I want a celebration of victory! I just got done sinking a significant amount of my life into this game; at least make me feel like it was worth winning!
...and the Ugly
It took awhile, but I managed to find the easiest way to make the game crash: make stacks too big for the Unit Panel to handle. You may, for instance, have a half-dozen divisional commanders present, each controlling up to 18 single-element units. But if you decide to un-stack all 6 divisional commanders for the purpose of transferring specific units to specific commanders, the Unit Panel would suddenly have more than 100 units in it – which is waaayyyy more than it can handle. There are several other things that will cause the game to crash – so Save often and save your a**.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
