...
A good leader sees issues coming sooner / from further away than a bad leader. That allows them to react sooner.
In this game, it would be things like seeing enemy brigades moving around as if they’re going to attack a particular position, and moving your forces to deal with that possibility.
It could also mean allocating a sufficient amount of your force to scouting or acting as messengers to have a clear picture of what is going on. I feel like the generals maybe should’ve allocated more of their cavalry to act as messengers to make sure the different corps had crystal-clear pictures of what was going on.
This isn’t covered in the game, but from learning about Civil War armies, a big part of generalship is training your forces.
In the game you have to manage your subordinates, knowing when to give them the authority to act on their own vs. having them wait for you to direct their forces.
Something I noticed when studying the real history is that you might not get a chance to be exposed at-length to leadership at a certain level before you’re tapped for that level. Like, Pope was commanding a smaller force and then tapped to lead an army. So you may run into issues that you have no experience with and need to make decisions very rapidly. And presumably the most intelligent way to deal with them is to learn about other people’s experiences via reading, but you have to do that beforehand because you just won’t have time when you’re actually in charge because of the rate at which you’ll have to make decisions.
When you’re in a leadership position you have certain ‘levers’ you can pull:
you can order a formation to move to a particular place, face a particular direction, move at a particular speed, etc.
When you’re in a leadership position it’s important to understand what levers you have available to you. Like, really write them all out and have them in front of you.
What distinguishes a ‘better’ leader from a ‘worse’ leader is in how they pull on those different levers; it’s knowing what levers to pull and when.
It can be hard to know how well a person has done in a leadership position because there are so many confounding factors.
If a person is thrust into a losing situation, it may be that nothing they could do could save the situation.
You want to have people be in a position where they can watch and learn before taking command, and/or can command smaller-sized forces before commanding larger forces. So, like, have someone command a small force, if they perform well have them work on the staff of a higher-level officer for a bit to learn the ropes of that level of command from someone with more experience (like, just the general workflow of command), then give them a command at that higher level.
You can end up in a situation where a lot of stuff is happening at once, and it’s important to be able to rapidly check on all of your subordinate units and make sure they’re all 1) being productive (not just standing around doing nothing), 2) not being overwhelmed. This is the ‘micro-ing’ you see in competitive RTSes like Starcraft/AoE/Total War. A ‘bad’ leader won’t recognize they’re in a situation like that, won’t know what their subordinates should be doing, etc.
Learning often comes from trying things and seeing what happens, and then coming up with a ‘best practice’ / ‘standard operating procedure’ based on that, but a single person may not have the luxury of being able to get enough experience that way, and so it’s crucial to be able to learn from the experiences of others. So, like, studying what happened and thinking about what best-practices / SOPs you should follow based on that. And then it’s just a matter of making sure you’re actually doing those things when you’re doing it for real and are under pressure.
When you’re in charge of multiple people / regiments / brigades / divisions / Corps you may find yourself (often?) in situations where one of them is “engaged” and could benefit from your full attention/micromanagement, while the others are not engaged / maneuvering into position / guarding some flank. So just be aware that this happens and be willing to give 99%+ of your attention to just one unit of your force with the occasional look at the others to check in on them, and even be willing to detach forces from your other units to reinforce the unit that is currently engaged.
Coordinateing your men is complicated, especially coordinating your artillery positions with your infantry. I feel like that's a big reason why it's better to be on the defense: you have more time to coordinate where everyone should be so that when the fighting starts, you have as many guns firing as possible. Versus being on the attack and having the attacks be piecemeal.
I’m learning to attend to the morale of my men and to understand that I am limited to what I can do by their current morale, their ability to withstand morale-depleting shocks, etc. and to not blame the men for it. This carried over to the real world when I was trying to get myself to work on my side projects and got hit with a wave of anxiety: I realized I had kind-of “routed” and needed to focus on rallying myself, getting the anxiety to go away completely, and then making changes to how I was managing myself to get rid of whatever was causing the anxiety. I ended up changing my plans to “go in a different direction” for the day.
General similarities and differences from other wargames
...