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If you want to play the Civil War games/DLCs in chronological order, do it like this: CWBR (July 1861), Take Command: 2nd Manassas (August 1862), Antietam (September), Chancellorsville (May 1863), Brandy Station (June), Gettysburg (July), Pipe Creek (a “What If” alternate history to Gettysburg).
I’d say the biggest takeaway from playing this so far is that this game feels WAY more like Shogun: Total War than I thought it would:
One reason is that you want to be doing a lot of micromanagement, way more than I thought there would be. I’d say this feels like a sequel to Shogun: Total War in the sense that it adds the ability to delegate to subordinates, but they often seem to be either incompetent or unaware of my larger tactical vision, and so it ends up making sense to take direct command a lot of the time, to the point where I feel just like when I’m playing Shogun: Total War and micromanging lots of different units at once. Before I started playing these games I thought the experience of playing them would be very different, with all orders being delivered via courier.
I think it would be interesting to have the game let the player require all orders to be delivered via courier unless the player’s avatar is within a certain range of the formation (20 yards?), and to also have a realistically-limited number of couriers.
I also think it would be interesting to have all information you have about other formations be limited to what you can see with your own eyes (which you already get if you play HITS) or via courier (which I guess could show up on the map?).
Another reason is that it seems you really want / need to be taking an “eye in the sky” perspective to command effectively, because the user interface just doesn’t allow for the kinds of nuanced orders you could give in the real world when dictating out orders in plain text. I see multiplayer games that are “Headquarters in the Saddle”, but in those it seems each player is controlling a single brigade. I don’t see (so far) how you could control a larger formation if you can’t give destination orders via the map, for example. But there are also things like “I want you to be positioned so that you can see and fire on this position” that don’t have a dedicated order in the current UI and therefore require micromanagement to achieve.
The first game in the series also came out just a few years after Shogun: Total War, so it seems likely to have been directly inspired by it.
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The first game covered the first battle of Bull Run (aka “1st Manassas”), this game covers the second battle of Bull Run (“2nd Manassas”).
TODO:
I want to try Open Play scenarios.
I want to try the higher difficulty settings to see how they are / if they require different tactics.
I want to try the community patch and other battles in it.
I want to challenge myself to try scenarios where I don’t micromanage but instead use the courier system.
Thoughts on the game
I love how most scenarios have you as just one small part of a much larger battle. That’s very unusual for a game at this scale but I wish it was more common.
It’s not clear to me how the scale of the battlefield works, because if each soldier icon in the game represents 10 soldiers in real life, does that mean that the battlefield is also 10 times smaller than in the real world? But then wouldn’t that mean soldiers could move across the battlefield 10 times faster? So then is the battlefield accurate-to-life in size but with just less width and/or depth to the regimental formations?
A: the terrain is smaller relative to the size of the units/buildings/trees than in the real world. And yes, units do move across the terrain faster than in the real world. The whole experience of the battles is compressed time-wise to make battles that might play out over 6 hours in the real world playable in maybe an hour or two. The ranges (and ballistics?) of the weapons are calibrated to the terrain rather than the size of the units, so you see men and artillery appearing to engage each other at ranges far shorter than they would in the real world. It’s not clear to me exactly how much the battlefield is shrunk but I’d estimate maybe around 5 times.
I had tried learning Waterloo and Gettysburg before but had kind of bounced off them, and I think starting with this game was actually a much better idea because it seems to have far more small-sized scenarios.
I think I picked the best way to go about learning this game, which is: go through the tutorials and then go through the scenarios in the order of the size of the force under your command, so, going through all the brigade-level scenarios, then the division-level scenarios, then the corps-level scenarios, and ending with the Army-level scenarios.
I think it’s a good idea to aim to do at least one but at most maybe two scenarios per day, similar to how I play DCS by playing one mission per day. It keeps it fresh in your memory so you don’t forget how to play.
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Infantry regiment
I almost always order regiments to move in column formation.
You want to keep an eye on your regiments and order them to fall back or retreat before they route, because you lose a lot of points for routed regiments.
Use your more-experienced troops ('Good' and ‘Veteran’) if you need to charge artillery batteries because they can take more casualties without breaking and running (this is just like Combat Mission, where you want to use your best units to assault because they’re less likely to hit the dirt in the open once they get shot at and thereby take much worse casualties).
Be aggressive about moving up regiments in column formation to flank enemy regiments that are already engaged with one of your other regiments.
Bigger regiments can take more casualties before breaking than smaller regiments. So bigger regiments are more useful further forward and in the middle where they’re more likely to be engaged, while smaller regiments may be more useful a bit pulled back and on the flanks and used for flanking.
When your regiment is at like 20% casualties and its Morale is Wavering you should pull it back if you can and rotate in another regiment. Have the first regiment positioned on the flank and a bit pulled back so it can still shoot but won’t get shot at. This is very similar to Combat Mission where you should have your greener troops pulled back further so they can still shoot but are less likely to get shot at (which can quickly suppress or break them).
Regiments seem to be much more protected in the woods, so try to be in the woods while the enemy is in the open if you can.
I’ll order regiments to double-time if it’s going to be like 100-150 yards in the open or like 50-100 yards in woods, if it’s going to have a big impact on casualties either for them, a friendly unit, or an enemy unit. So, like, charging an enemy artillery battery, flanking an enemy regiment, moving up to relieve a wavering friendly regiment, moving a wavering unit back from a forward position. I almost(?) always have the infantry move in column formation when I order them to double-time.
Infantry brigade
At least at the division and corps level, I find it usually smarter to ‘Take Command’ of every single brigade commander to prevent them from making stupid decisions like attacking when they shouldn’t or moving regiments out of the cover of the woods when they don’t need to. The main reason I’ll release command is if they’re already engaged and I want the brigade commander to ride around to the different regiments to keep their morale high.
Your brigade commanders make excellent scouts. They don’t have stamina to worry about and they aren’t targeted by enemy infantry or artillery as far as I can tell.
I almost always give movement orders as column-formation orders, especially through woods, because I find that otherwise the regiments will switch to line formation too early and take longer to get to their destination. I could be wrong about that though.
It’s faster to move a brigade in column formation across open ground than having the brigade use a road to move that same distance.
Infantry division
It’s important to have some understanding of the frontage that each of your brigades will take up when in line formation (which is determined by how many men are in it) if you want to both manually control each brigade to prevent stupid behavior (like attacking when they shouldn’t) and also have them spaced out in a line formation without any huge gaps in it.
Artillery
Cannister is absolutely devastating to infantry. Outside of cannister range, artillery only seems to make a difference if you have a lot of it shooting at one target, and it seems to mainly make a morale difference (makes the infantry more likely to route). So you really want to try to get your artillery close enough to use cannister.
Infantry rifle fire can relatively quickly kill artillerymen and cause them to route, so you want to be very careful to not let your artillery get shot at.
It seems cannister can be used at up to 200 yards, while infantry rifles can be used at up to 160 yards, so it seems there’s a 40 yard sweet spot where you can use cannister against enemy infantry but have them too far away to shoot at you.
An easier way to protect your artillery seems to be to keep it just behind your infantry. If you have infantry regiments in front of your artillery, it seems the enemy infantry will tend to choose to shoot at the enemy infantry, even though it would be smarter for them to shoot at the artillery (in terms of reducing your DPS--damage-per-second--as quickly as possible). You can fit one, sometimes two cannons between each pair of regiments in a brigade line formation, and two or more cannons between different brigades (it’s up to how you position the brigades).
I think artillery may actually be able to fire cannister between narrow gaps of regiments. It feels like the game may just do a single ray (line) check of line-of-sight to the enemy unit rather than checking a cone when firing cannister to make sure no friendly units could get hit. If that’s true, it seems unrealistic, but you could keep your artillery further back behind the regiments of a brigade and still have it do devastating damage.
Cavalry
For cavalry I’ll order double-time if it’s likely to affect their ability to get into the position I want them to be in and their ability to either inflict casualties on the enemy (if the enemy is on the move) or support friendly infantry (i.e. hopefully causing morale of the enemy to drop and have them retreat sooner). I haven’t yet seen that the horses drawing the artillery can get tired, so it may be OK to just always order them to double-time.
Corps
Army
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