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.
General lessons on leadership I’m learning
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.
General similarities and differences from other wargames
Unlike Combat Mission, I don’t think incoming fire really suppresses the rate of fire of your forces, like for example your artillery. It just affects how soon they break and run. So I guess on a larger scale (brigade-division+) it kind of does if you take into account units breaking and then returning, but it’s not at the level of the individual regiment or artillery battery.
The History Channel - Civil War: The Battle of Bull Run - Take Command: 1861
This is the first game in the series, I guess the dev got the History Channel to pay for the development of the game?
You can download the game here: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-history-channel-civil-war-the-battle-of-bull-run-take-command-1861-n3x#download
Differences from TC2M
There’s only one infantry sprite per Confederate regiment whereas TC2M has four variations. I think TC2M may also have variations for the Union.
Regiments will overlap when moving along a road.
In randomized Open Play you can get assigned to command just a single artillery battery, whereas in TC2M I always seem to get a brigade / division / corps.
Artillery doesn’t have stamina, just like officers in TC2M.
No zoom button.
The terrain is smaller relative to the sprites than in TC2M.
Take Command: 2nd Manassas
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.
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.
Things they could improve / gamey aspects / unrealistic aspects
Unit-unspecific
I feel like it would be more realistic if stamina was modeled such that units that have done a lot of moving / running can’t recover to full-stamina. As it is, I can order my artillery to sprint across the battlefield and they’ll spend so much time sitting around afterwards that they’ll fully recover their stamina and I can order them to do it again in the other direction. Ditto for infantry. I know from real-world experience that there’s a limit to how much you can do in a day, you don’t just fully recover if you stand around for a few hours.
Infantry
It would be cool to have the sharpshooters capable of targeting and killing enemy officers.
IMO the game should have more-contagious routing like in Shogun: Total War.
Regiments should be smarter about recognizing when they’re in a hopeless situation and retreating early. It looks ridiculous to see a single regiment in a shootout with an entire brigade. And it’s the norm to see clueless behavior like that, so you can’t just pass it off as being some particularly-brave regiment.
The speed with which routing infantry move is ridiculous, especially if the unit is already tired. I don’t understand what the rationale for that was.
I feel like the woods may provide too much of a protection bonus.
I feel like woods should maybe slow down infantry more than it does, at least when in column formation.
Officers
Officers seem to be unrealistically protected from being killed. For example, regiments and artillery won’t shoot at them even when the officer is very close to them.
Officers seem to have infinite stamina.
Officers seem to be able to immediately reveal all enemy units within their field of view.
Unlike, for example, Combat Mission, where it can take time for all of the enemy units to be revealed.
Being unrealistically protected from being killed, having infinite stamina, and being able to immediately reveal everything about all the enemy units in their field of view make officers incredibly powerful for scouting. If you use a regiment as a picket to scout, that picket can get attacked, overwhelmed, and mauled or routed. It’s often better to keep the regiment you were going to use as a picket with the rest of your brigade and just use a brigade or artillery commander to scout.
Artillery
IMO the ability of artillery to move through woods relatively easily was a HUGE mistake both for realism and gameplay. It basically removes any need to pay attention to terrain, because you always end up with your artillery right behind your infantry when a fight starts. You can march your entire brigade / division / corps straight through the woods and not worry about it. Who wins a fight comes down to who micromanages their artillery and infantry better to keep the artillery with line-of-sight to enemy infantry regiments less than 200m away.
I think Combat Mission (e.g. CMx1) did it much better with their simulation of how slow it is to move AT guns through woods and how tanks can’t enter woods at all.
I feel like they should move like 10-20x slower or more, or even be barred entirely from entering woods, and double-time should only speed them up like maybe 10% if they’re moving through woods.
I think it could make sense to have different kinds of woods like in Combat Mission. Woods with underbrush (impassable to artillery) vs. woods with no underbrush.
Similarly, the huge disparity between how effective cannister is and how effective solid shot and shrapnel are seems to STRONGLY incentivize just keeping your artillery with your infantry and not having distant batteries.
The speed with which routing artillery units move is ridiculous.
I don't think the game models penetration, because I feel like moving your regiment in column to charge an artillery battery would be a horrible idea specifically because a cannonball could go lengthwise through the formation, hitting like 100 guys. But that doesn’t seem to ever happen in the game. You seem to suffer the same number of casualties per cannister hit whether you’re in line formation or column.
Orders
The “use couriers to give orders” system is extremely cool but also seems extremely incongruent with the ability to immediately take command of any unit and issue orders that get executed immediately. I’m finding that it generally makes more sense to take command of every brigade, at least when operating at the division or corps level. I still don’t understand the difference between issuing a brigade commander a “Hold” stance vs. taking direct command of him and just issuing an order to deploy at a particular location.
I feel like the solution here is Silent-Hunter-style fine-grained realism options.
For example, one option could be that you can only have direct command of a single unit at a time, or a certain limit of units, or maybe unit-specific limits. So, like, you can have direct command of up to 6 artillery batteries, 4 regiments, and 1 brigade commander.
Another cool option would be to have it that even regiments must receive orders by courier if the brigade commander is outside a certain radius (like 20 yards).
Immersion
I feel like this game does a great job of giving you a Total-War-style birds-eye view of how these battles worked, but at the expense of the immersion you’d get from implementing it like an OFP-style experience. And it isn’t possible to give units orders like you could in the real world, so you’re kind of forced to micromanage unless you give yourself a self-imposed constraint and understand you won’t get as-good a result.
It would be extremely cool to have an option to play with realistic terrain sizes, with every soldier shown, realistic battle lengths, with you restricted to a first-person perspective.
I want to be able to look around while the camera is stuck to / following a unit.
Graphics
Allow for an arbitrary number of sprites for each unit type. For example, instead of just having one or two sprites for the infantryman sprite, have 20 stock variations and let modders have as many or as few as they want.
The game mechanics strongly incentivize you to keep the trees turned off at all times while playing to aid your situational awareness. This is very similar to CMx1 where you’re incentivized to turn the trees off and increase the size of the models to an unrealistically-large size. This results in you not really getting to enjoy the full beauty of the game and also hurts immersion.
Sound
Allow for an arbitrary number of clips for every sound. For example, instead of just having one cannon sound, have 20, and let modders have as many or as few as they want.
Have higher-quality sounds that really crack. Post Scriptum set the bar here.
Multiplayer
There’s no multiplayer! That’s pretty crazy for a game like this, it’s a real shame.
Victory conditions / scoring
The way the VPs give points needs to be made more accurate. 10,000 points for a VP in an Open Play battle between two Corps is saying that VP is worth as much as 100,000 men, even though each Corps may have only around 20,000 men. So it’s saying you could hold that position for the designated amount of time, then let the other side kill all your guys without killing any of his, and you’d have won by a huge margin. I feel like for a Corps-level battle, 200 points makes more sense (so you could lose 2,000 men more than the enemy and be considered even for holding that ground). Obviously the appropriate points value depends on the larger strategic picture but a 10,000 point VP sounds like it’s saying the whole war depends on holding that VP.
Scenarios
I feel like the game could benefit from having a small scenario where you command just a single artillery battery in the woods, positioned behind a friendly infantry brigade, where success depends on your ability to micromanage your guns to see in between your friendly infantry regiments. The artillery tutorial is OK but doesn’t force you to learn proper micromanagement and the importance of cannister.
Advice
Play just one scenario per day! This is how I played DCS and I think it’s a great way to avoid burning out.
It’s important to get a sense of when to order units to “double-time” and when to let them move at normal speed. You don’t want to exhaust them as I think it affects their morale, making them more likely to route.
After you play through the “normal” game, you can download a community patch that adds a bunch more battles and battlefields.
The "speed up time" feature is most useful in Open Play (random battles) because there's a part at the beginning where both forces are maneuvering towards each other.
Unit-specific advice
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.
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
Process when starting a scenario
Briefing:
At the division/corps level, I note how many brigades and artillery batteries I have so I don’t forget about any of them once in-game, as sometimes some of them will start far away from you.
In-game:
Immediately pause the game with 'P'.
This is so I can take my time getting situated and giving initial orders.
Note where all of your units are.
This is important because often you will have units that start some distance from you and can be easy to not notice.
“Use the arrow keys to navigate your command. If you Go To Me, then arrow down to get to your first subordinate command and arrow left/right to cycle through your subordinate commanders. This helps you find your brigades quickly. Arrow up/down goes up/down the OOB.”
You can also look at the map and look for the units that have a gold outline.
Formulate a plan.
On the attack:
Choose which VPs you will actually make an attempt to capture and which you will ignore.
Decide on your avenue of approach for the infantry.
Decide where you will deploy your artillery to best support your infantry attack.
On the defense:
Choose which VPs you will attempt to defend and which you will abandon/ignore, if any.
Decide where you’ll set up your infantry in defense of the VPs you’ll be defending (opposing the most-likely avenues of approach of the attackers).
Decide where you’ll deploy your artillery in support (oftentimes mixed in with the infantry, one cannon in between each pair of regiments).
Give initial orders.
I select a given unit (often a brigade or artillery battery), move the camera to where I want to issue the order, and then quickly unpause, give the order, and re-pause so I can take my time thinking about the next unit’s order.
This is important because oftentimes there will either be a bit of a race to some key ground or you will be in a race against the time limit of the scenario to earn the necessary number of points to get a victory.
Scourge of War: Gettysburg
I’m finding this to be a laggier experience than Take Command: 2nd Manassas. The trees and grass in particular really seem to make the framerate drop. 2nd Manassas will sometimes lag for a few seconds at the very beginning of large battles but after that my memory is that it runs very smoothly.
Antietam DLC
Chancellorsville DLC
Brandy Station DLC
Pipe Creek DLC
This is a ‘What If’ alternate history to Gettysburg.