The other big difference is the recruitment process. Instead of waiting for scheduled reinforcements, you have the ability to draft your own units from those states with enough manpower to give you a helping hand. Every so often you can call for volunteers to rally to the cause or institute a draft to bring in a wave of not-so enthusiastic soldiers. The draft is of great use in a manpower crisis, but lowers national morale. Calling for volunteers is less damaging to the nation’s spirit, but also less efficient.
There’s also economic management (taxes, bonds, raiding) and rudimentary diplomacy (the chance of foreign intervention) but these strategy game trappings do little to transform the game into anything but a true wargame. You spend most of your time managing armies and their logistics, following the seasons and ripping up railroads. Anything that happens off the battlefield is specifically geared to making the war easier to fight. Peace is not an option.
There are certainly moments where the learning curve will have newcomers fleeing to the manual; all the necessary information is on screen, but is hidden in plain sight sometimes. But once you get over the hump, a deep and satisfying representation of the Civil War emerges. The battles are little more than tables of who got killed and who survived to be killed some other day, but the game does the near impossible by managing to capture both the importance of mobility in 19th century warfare and the increasing effectiveness of defensive postures. The emphasis on national morale means that you can recover from a setback if you manage popular opinion, even avoiding battle to keep some sort of force in the field. The strangulation of the Southern economy proves to be an effective strategy, as it was historically, but it’s not enough to simply wait out the war. You need to make forward progress, but not hastily.
American Civil War is, like most similar games, easier than it looks, and it does far too little to help the idly curious get into it. Even though the changes from Birth of America are few, they are significant, so there is no guarantee that people will step comfortably from one to the next. The manual is generally helpful with descriptions of cause and effect and how to do what needs to be done, but better in-game would be appreciated.
No review of this title would be complete without some words on the artwork. AGEod brings a unique aesthetic to their wargames, fusing the colors of old atlases with the functionality of intuitive design. Though you sometimes wish there were greater visual cues for local support, this game has style – a word that is usually not associated with wargames. The portraits of the generals demonstrate an attention to detail that is not just interesting for fans of the period, but actually proves useful. Even if, offhand, you don’t know what General Longstreet looks like, it becomes second nature to associate his skills with the distinctive beard, so you’ll know at a glance which officer should lead the attack on Pennsylvania.
American Civil War demonstrates that AGEod is on to something. The recently released Napoleonic Campaigns is yet another variation on the system, and each version of the engine shows that Thibaut and company understand the difference between complex and complicated, between traditional and stagnant, between innovation and apostasy. Though AGEod has said it wants to make games that aren’t like this, it would be okay if we saw another five. Maybe the Thirty Year’s War, next time?
