Antietam OOB

[Saddletank]

Even if "playability" issues have to be met, A historical OOB should be presented.

Why, if a game has no use for it in the intent of the designers?

Personal interperatations have no place in a product that can boast the detail and sofistication this system offers. As far as Statistics on different units go, a 0-9 scale is too wide a range to rate units.

Well, personal interpretation is most of how games are designed, what features and functions are considered relevant to ACW tactical warfare and which are not. You state that personal interpretation has no place and in the following sentence state exactly that when expressing your opinion about troop quality ratings.

I have a perfectly sound need for 0 quality troops thank you very much and I'm designing a scenario now based around that rating.

All units should be rated 4 with variations of + or - 2. Because each battle is different. Let the player beat an equal, not an inferior unit.

Again, personal interpretation. I disagree. A wide range of unit qualities is needed by scenario designers.

Modders also need a wide range of possibles extremes when using the base game for other periods. There is no way that French National Guards of 1815 were +2 or -2 distant in quality from the Old Guard of about 1809.

Likewise I consider that there's a case within ACW tactical simulations for allowing the player to beat poor troops with good ones or to try and hold a position with poor ones against good ones. History shows us many instances where different units displayed different qualities from elite to execrable and its a central function of game design whether or not to accomodate such features. Again, personal interpretation is what it is all about.

I agree that there are rough edges to some of the SoW maps, but with 100s of hours of work needed to create one and the law of diminishing returns stating that the last few small details will be the most time consuming to attain, and having constructed 3D landscapes myself in different disciplines (railway simulations) I can relate to a developer who draws the line at a certain point. Its not perfect but if it was I doubt the game would get published because development costs would grow too close to sales income.

[MarkT]

Saddletank,
You are correct in many ways. My observation on unit ability is my opinion and not necessarily representative of any needed change. This is what I do. Most troops were equal, but were governed by good or bad fortune. There ARE good and Bad units. Stannards troops were raw / green (a 0 rating). But they fought well so in order for me to use them in the scenario, I had to raise the numbers up. My point was, the values DO NOT necessarily reflect how good a unit performed.

Maps
They take great pains to create acurate 2d maps and excellent modeling. They fall short on elevation calculations. You finding this acceptable is your opinion and OK.. By the way, I work in civil engineering as a map maker that is how I know how the elevations are off AND why. Not to mention a visit to the battlefields point to glaring issues. As far as the time spent... It is NOT from lack of effort, it is from lack of knowledge how to do it. It takes very little time to complete the step. As I said, All is evolving. And maps are not the point of this thread....

"Personal Interperatation" I was refering to was directly related to creating an OOB and ommiting units that fought there, and then calling it historical. I have stated that repeatedly. If it is not historical, don't call it so. I do not have a firm opinion of the other calculations and weapon types. That is hard info to trace. I give them credit. I could easily agree to an OOB if they would make it complete.

Don't you think it is Odd that you have to make a MOD to complete a historical OOB in a game that goes to such wonderful extremes to compile data. :dry: And irritating that someone ommited a fighting unit, and reorganized others because.(....)? You fill it in. They felt like it?, or they didn't care?, or We are the experts, so we don't have to. The missing units have NO reason to be omitted. And NO-ONE can say I am wrong for there is nothing in the scenarios or the OOB format that would prevent their presence. Don't call it historical. In a game that prides itself on being historical.

It seems you will care enough about the Imperial Guard not being between a + or - 2, But how would you feel if they left it out of the OOB entirely. Would you still say you didn't care?

As far as the Imperial Guard of 1815 and 1809, there is not much difference. You must give the edge to 1809. But where is the guage. They rarely fought. At Waterloo, the French army was virtually all well trained professional soldiers. The best fielded (but not led) since 1812.

The big deal people put on the Guard "retreating" at Waterloo is a hard pill to swallow. The few battalions that went foward alone, were doomed from the start. Their few numbers are spectulative, while attacking a well prepared line of unkown hidden position, of about 15-20,000. It was a last ditch, desperate gamble.

Good conversation.

[Saddletank]

There ARE good and Bad units. Stannards troops were raw / green (a 0 rating). But they fought well so in order for me to use them in the scenario, I had to raise the numbers up. My point was, the values DO NOT necessarily reflect how good a unit performed.

We still need a mechanism, in wargames, to represent variable performance on the day, or over time. In a previous post you said that the range of 0 to 9 is not needed. Now you seem to be back-tracking on that point. Leaving it all down to player skill is not the answer in my opnion, since the player's ability does not represent the ability or leadership of the officer in charge whose mediocre (or stunning) performance would influence a unit to under or over-perform. There are elements of poor and excellent troop effectiveness I think we should represent in our games with raw number ranges (like 0 to 9) and not just call everyone average and let the players skills be the only deciding factor. That could be like taking McClellan out of an Antietam OOB and substituting Grant, in other words a bigger abortion to the historical accuracy of the simulation than any number of misplaced artillery batteries. I don't buy into the logic in that process at all, not when you're trying to create a wargame army that carries similar fighting potential to a known performance historically.

Any set of wargame rules that came out without such troop quality distinctions built in would be met with howls of complaints, even complete derision.

Maps

The vertical scale is highly exaggerated I am led to beleive because the figure scale is not 1:1. The soldiers are 12 feet tall and each represents 4 real men because of a sprite rendering issue, and hence the buildings are trees are also vertically exaggerated but the unit frontages are mostly correct. This is all because of a need to give the customer acceptable framerates and must have been a very early design decision. There are all manner of other faults with the rules however and some of the coarseness of the maps is due to the size of the polygons used in their construction (another frame rate hog - polygons). You can see this coarseness in the creek beds and sunken lanes. I am used to dealing with these kinds of problems in railway simulator terrain construction which has to balance accurate terrain with game stability and playability. I didn't say I found it acceptable, I said I could understand why it was done that way - mainly because of time and cost. Generally though, on balance, I think the SoW battlefields are extremely good. Compared to the crud churned out by the likes of Creative Arts, it's wargaming accuracy Nirvana.

"Personal Interperatation" I was refering to was directly related to creating an OOB and ommiting units that fought there, and then calling it historical. I have stated that repeatedly. If it is not historical, don't call it so.

I hold a more relaxed view. To me a historically accurate OOB is one that is good enough to allow the game to render the functions and manouvers of the wargame armies in a way that lets the game parallel reality. The game's combat mechanics are not accurate so I wouldn't expect every single aspect of an OOB to be, yet to me it's still historically accurate to a sufficient degree. Its all shades of grey. What's more critical to me is the csv structure; limitations of OOBs with their demand for side-army-corps-division-brigade hierarchies into which every unit must fit. That rigidity makes scenario creation a little frustrating.

It seems you will care enough about the Imperial Guard not being between a + or - 2, But how would you feel if they left it out of the OOB entirely. Would you still say you didn't care?

If the entire Guard was missing from an OOB of Waterloo, yes I'd care but that is a wholly different degree of inaccuracy to what we're discussing here. There are no entire corps missing on either side from any NSD OOBs. Now if a few of Reille's batteries were shown attached to Jerome's Division in II Corps instead of at Corps level... well that wouldn't be a problem for me if it didn't really affect gameplay and to me that would not be a sufficiently big error for me to scream and rant at the developers and use upper case fonts a lot saying their claims of historical accuracy were unreasonable.

(Rest of Imperial Guard section snipped. Interesting but off topic.)

[MarkT]

Saddletank,
Exceptional post.
Missing corps.... Yes the Guard would kind of stand out. (or not as the case may be.)

But two Battalions of Artillery is missing (8 batteries.)
The rebs hav 33000, the Yanks 77,000 8 batteries is a lot.... for the Rebs....

Do you play historic miniatures?

[MarkT]

Saddletank,
Ongoing unit rating is ideal.. Ebb and flow as the battle rages, not refered to as a crutch (or shackles. Great point. very important..

[KG_Soldier]

I guess it depends on what you're looking for. Me. . . multiplayer excellence. I don't play the game to reenact battles (although we players on the GCM did and still would try the big Antietam MP battle which never worked. We did try, 24 or so guys), almost never play single player. But I know a lot of players only play single player and are looking to recreate the battles. So for them, there should be a historical oob. But must it be perfect? I think not. I mean. . . if you have issues with the compromises NSD made to make the game play better, make your own oobs.

As far as unit ratings go. . . well. . . I must toot the GCM horn here a bit. Every player's division is different. New players start with much better divisions than earlier iterations of the GCM. And veteran players can have their divisions very strong at times, but a couple of tough fights and you'll get a bunch of recruits and your experience levels fall quite a bit, and every turn each regiment has a chance of rotating out of your division (hurts bad to lose a 450 man level 4 or 5) and being replaced with a new regiment (random, but often a 500 man level 1 or 2 which must be fought into shape). So you have variations in size and strength which move back and forth depending on random luck and how well you play and how often you find yourself in a bloody mess (happens to everyone).

The beauty of the GCM is the battle generator: when the host creates a battle, players in the battle queue are randomly put on one side or the other. Then the battle generator looks to see which side has the higher average experience and gives the lower side more troops.

Thus, every game has a balance. Sometimes the average experience is almost even and both sides bring nearly the same amount of troops. Sometimes one side brings a few thousand more men. And you never know which side you'll be on.

Sorry if that's all a little off topic, but my point is that variety of troop experience is essential for having good games because no one wants to fight straight up, cookie cutter, exactly even battles (all 4s for instance). And it's a blast to take your recruits and work them into shape.

And holy cow the fights have been vicious: http://www.sowmp.com/gcm/battles/battle/9281

We fought that battle on one of Garnier's variants of Davinci's El Pine, almost 17,000 casualties.

This game has unlimited potential as it is. If one is really interested in a battle, he or she can make any oob he or she desires. And if multiplayer is your thing, there is Garnier's fantastic GCM. And of course if multiplayer reenactment is your thing, there are the hits and couriers guys.

Honestly, MarkT, I think the whole critique of the historical oobs is somewhat nitpicking. But since you have the ability, you should create the oob you think most historic and put it out there for people to use.

@Digby. . . Garnier's changes to the GCM haven't stopped the mass attack, but they are certainly less frequent and less effective and are rarely successful at all and are not nearly as devastating as they once were. The biggest deterrents are the increased fatigue now caused by melee and the slower movement while near the enemy and the increased hit rate -- or whatever he did that causes more casualties at close range.

[Little Powell]

Just wanted to note, as far as the research that is involved with the troop ratings of the OOBs. I joined the team after the Gettysburg OOBs were finished so I wasn't around for that research, however for Antietam, our in-house author and historian, Larry Tagg developed a system for determining ratings based on several factors. We take in account muster-in date for regiments/batteries, location of muster, education of the Colonel, battle experience, and several other factors to come up with highly accurate ratings. The same goes for the Commander ratings.

Believe me, a good portion our time is used for research on this game. We gather information from multiple sources and of course sources don't always agree. There are well documented hard facts when it comes to the Civil War, but there are also many things left up to conjecture.

We can't guarantee every little detail in our products is a 100% historically accurate (for reasons listed above and for gameplay reasons), but you can guarantee that we do our best to bring you the most historically accurate and enjoyable Civil War combat sim available today.

[Saddletank]

@Digby. . . Garnier's changes to the GCM haven't stopped the mass attack, but they are certainly less frequent and less effective and are rarely successful at all and are not nearly as devastating as they once were. The biggest deterrents are the increased fatigue now caused by melee and the slower movement while near the enemy and the increased hit rate -- or whatever he did that causes more casualties at close range.

Now I'm curious, what has been changed to increase casualty rates at close ranges versus long ranges? I thought this wasn't editable in MP?

Mark, yes, have played historic miniatures for decades.

[MarkT]

KG_Soldier,

I do not care about the stats... The team does a great job there. as best as could be expected.
I realize for playability, the scenario OOBs need tweeking.

2 Battlalions of Artillery, 8 batteries of rebel artillery missing from the OOB.
You call that nitpicking!! :ohmy:

This omission MAKE NO SENSE!!!
This Omission does NOT effect Playability!
This is not a matter of conflicting sources. I can verify with 6+ sources.
So why was it omitted? I really don't care WHY it was omitted, just that it was.
As far as creating the Mod "for the community". that may happen if I am allowed to, But that is NOT the intent of this thread. I wish to bring it to their attention, for future releases, that the OOB is wrong.

Matt,
You are corrct, the team works very hard on all aspect of the game. My hats off to them.
This is the best Historical simulation on the subject, on the market!!!!!!
But why go to all the trouble to create it, just to leave omit troops that were there.
I am NOT talking about oops! things, I am talking about omiting multiple combat organizations
that are there in multiple sources. Matter of fact, I have never seen a source without it.

So......
Everyone states that they love the game.
Everyone loves the realism.
Everyone speaks about the historical accuracy.

Yet, I am told I need to create a mod to make the OOB historical. Historical to the history books, not to personal opinion. Don't you think that is ODD?

It is understandable that some people don't care if the OOB is correct. But why not make it correct?
Matt has said multiple times that they strive for historical accuracy. As do all of them, As I do/did. And I support Matt 110%!

You must realize, again I am not attacking NSD. This system has always been based on historical accuracy, so why stop now. Whether you care or not, it should be done. That is what makes the system so great.

This subject has been beaten to death... :laugh:
Time to move on.

[KG_Soldier]

I think it has to do with changing the optimum range of rifles. But Garnier would have to answer that one. He didn't post it in the GCM forum, but perhaps it's here somewhere. I'll look. But I know he did something and it seems to me close range rifle fire is more deadly. And all cannon have howitzer canister, which rips nicely.