New member introduction

[Deeter]

Hello everyone.

I am the proud owner of the SOWWL boxed edition and want to give my first impressions. In a word, the game is BRILLIANT!

I have been deeply into the horse and musket era (especially Napoleonics) for decades, both studying and gaming everything I can get my hands on. I played the first Take Command game to death both un-modded and modded but the engine couldn't do justice to European battles. Skipped Gettysburg because I'm not interested in ACW.

This game is unique in its' treatment of C&C and in using individual cavalry squadrons -- not even miniatures rules do this. Could the game be improved? Yup. There are a few decisions I question: columns of division should be able to fire as should some cavalry and units should be able to melee buildings for starters, but these are minor quibbles that, hopefully can be fixed.

One feature I would like to see is the ability to create ad-hoc battle groups. Commanders of the Napoleonic period often formed combined arms units for specific tasks. For example, a battalion of infantry might have a cavalry squadron attached plus a gun section to defend a village. Would be cool to create and take command of one of these.

The game seems pretty stable for me except for one problem: some times my screen will go black and I have to restart my computer. I can hear the sounds of battle but no visuals. This isn't related to battle size or a given scenario. I have a 1 gig NVIDIA card but I can't use the latest drivers because I'm still running XP. Any thoughts?

Thanks for reading,

Deeter

[Volunteer]

Welcome, Deeter; you appear to be a veteran wargamer!

[Saddletank]

Hi Deeter, and welcome.

If you'd like to try MP games in as realistic a mode as SoWWL can give, please join our Kreigspiel group as we have as much fog of war as the game can generate. Link in my sig.

[gunship24]

Hello and welcome

[con20or]

Welcome Deeter - have you tried running the game with 'full screen' turned off? It is in your options menu, and lets you alt-tab out easily, it may have caused what you see with the black screen.

For the combined arms - the smallest combined unit we use is the brigade/battery, etc but you can certainly detach smaller units and position them near other units.

[Saddletank]

You can also make up new OOBs so for example make yourself a division and allocate it one infantry brigade with about 2 battalions, one cavalry brigade with 2 squadrons and 1 battery with 2 guns. That might provide close to what you are looking for.

[RebBugler]

Nice post, welcome to the community...

columns of division should be able to fire

Regarding the quibbles you mentioned, this one probably won't work because if 'Column by Division' formations 'Can Fight' then units would never form battle lines, they'd begin and stick in that column formation while engaged.

[Deeter]

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. I'll try to take them in reverse order:

Regarding columns by division shooting and not forming battle lines, that might be a good thing as the lines seems to point all over the place which looks weird. One third of the line's firepower from a column is no small thing, plus the grenadier company would often form up on the flank for supporting power and the skirmish company would often fall back to the gaps and fire as well = 2/3s of a line's firepower. You cold still TC the unit into line I suppose.

Regarding battle groups, yeah there are workarounds like new OOBs, etc. I was just thinking since there's a button to detach units. it would be nice to reattach them into a new formation.

I tired windowed mode once, but it didn't come close to filling my screen so I turned it off.

I would to do multi-player once I get up to speed and will join the KS group. I have all the mods but have not spent much time with them yet. I don't do HITS yet either.

I guess I'm a veteran. My first Napoleonic army with in the novel 25 mm scale. It was the complete Bavarian army at 1-20 scale back in the Seventies.

Finally, a question: is there any way to re-size the command map? I feel its way too small to be of much use.

Thanks again,

Deeter

[con20or]

If you pick the same resolution as your monitor then running the game in 'full screen' and 'windowed' should both look the same and fill your monitor.

[Saddletank]

The KS mod uses a bigger command map. Your screen resolution needs to be at least 1024 pixels vertically however.