Thread #12510668
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Do you have any favourite /vr/ games set during the American Civil War?
I checked the archive and pic rel has only been mentioned once ever on /vr/ (in 2014). No Greater Glory: The American Civil War, which is from 1991. It's widely called a very difficult game, but imo it's more that it's difficult to start.
I've put ~40 hours into it ever since I found out about it while looking up games from the setting just six days ago. I'm really struck by how much depth is has for a 35yo game.
>multiple ways for the game to end, including the Union player avoiding the reconstruction era
>you can feint the enemy, tricking the CPU into keeping an army fixed in place. Generals like McClennan have a very low aggression rating, but you can use it beneficially
>rudimentary but effective supply line gameplay: if you cut off the enemy's abiltiy to resupply their troops, they will have to requisition them from local areas at a cost of money and "loyalty"
>"loyalty" (its kind of a compromise term for what an administration's level of support and also what the public morale is like) can absolutely sink like a stone if you suffer defeat after defeat on the battlefield in just a single turn
>attempting to pass reforms too fast (e.g. the budget, recruitment, emancipation) without sufficient support from the moderates also sinks "loyalty"
>UK and France can intervene economically or even militarily
>attrition based on low exp troops joining a high exp army (disease) or a large army with low morale (desertion)
>"prestige" system forces realistic appointments of generals, at least in the first year or two of the conflict
For example: the Union can't just appoint Grant in charge of its largest armies right away, the prestige system for generals where the top 5 demand the largest commands or they'll complain to people in their home regions, which lowers "loyalty". But if you deliberately lose battles, you can move Grant up into the top 5.
CSA seems to be easier to play as.
I'm not American btw.
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>>12510753
It's essentially a grand strategy (I wondered if that would make it the first /gsg/ title ever made), so if you've played Europa Universalis then this game should appeal to you. Proper time sponge type game.
It was designed and co-programmed by Ed Bever, who co-created games with Sid Meier for a while.
Bever said that the game has a bug where inflation doesn't actually affect the CSA, which is probably why they aren't as hard to play as as I thought they should be, although what you can do of course is don't move your capital from Mobile to Richmond and therefore prevent the need for a constant forward defence in northern Virginia in order to protect the capital from the stream of Union troops cascading down from the northeast.
Or you can do that anyway, and focus your offences in the western theatre unlike what Lee wanted to do, and protect the Mississippi and the Confederate supply lines, and hit the Midwest where you can rapidly make the war unpopular in the North. My first CSA victory came from Lincoln losing the 1864 election.
It was designed to be an education game btw, but I don't know if it was tried in American schools or something like a Civil War version of the Oregon Trail (which even we had in the UK), but if it flopped it was probably because a single turn can take a lot of time to complete. Maybe they wanted to simulate war exhaustion in the player. But it still has value as an educational tool because while playing it I could better understand why the war was prosecuted the way it was by either side. For example, if you try the King Cotton strategy, your secretary of state will tell you that's a capital idea... but really it just strangles your own economy and you can get foreign intervention by other means instead.
Can't upload pictures because site is shitting itself, but I had a screenshot showing the CSA victory picture.
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>>12510753
You're looking at the outcomes of simple mechanics interacting with eachother. It sure looks like a lot, but it's really not. You're reading a story.
It gets easier the more you're exposed to these type of games, it's not rocket science and doesn't require much.
The payoff is that - stories. Who doesn't like them? Except these ones you were there to tell.
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>>12510668
Sid Meier's Gettysburg with its Civil War reenactor FMVs and the pre-battle voice acting is the all time coziest. Antietam was technically a better game, but it lost the production value for this stuff and it really hurts it.
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>>12510668
only ones I remember on top off my head, North and South and Battleground Gettysburg. loved the graphics of the latter, but I never played them long enough.
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>>12511141
shit wrong picture
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>>12510668
My favorite!
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>>12510889
I think its more interesting as a grand strategy because RTS games benefit from having wildly different opposing sides.
The two sides of the ACW were so similar I'm not sure there's been another major war where the opponents each had a free press.
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>>12510668
I used to play North & South on NES with my friend all the time. He was from Texas and moved up north, so he always played the Confederates and I always played the Union. It's kind of a fun simple strategy game where you play different real-time minigames to settle battles and capture points of interest.
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>>12510791
>>12511716
North & South looks a bit too... Belgian for my tastes...