In spite of what you’ve been told, PC wargames are not dead. The key element of a genre’s obsolescence is innovation; death is measured neither in sales nor in titles launched, but in stagnation. And the last three years have seen a rebirth of original design in the very small world of wargaming. It’s still niche, and it still has trouble attracting new people. But creativity and variety are back.
French developer AGEod is Exhibit A. Philippe Thibaut designed the original board game Europa Universalis and consulted on the hit Paradox adaptation. He then made two Byzantine EU-ish games, both among the most broken and impenetrable strategy games in the last decade. Then, in 2005, he must have had a religious experience or something because his next game, the first from AGEod, was Birth of America, a simple but immensely satisfying game about the American Revolution. No diplomacy, no production – just armies, terrain and reinforcement schedules.
American Civil War is the second game in this series. (It was available through the developer early last year, but now CDV US is giving the game wider distribution and proper North American retail publication.) Like most sequels, it expands on the original formula, losing a little bit of the elegance of Birth of America but adding considerable new challenges for desktop generals.
This is, once again, a two sided conflict – a death struggle between equal powers. Well, roughly equal. The North is a slow moving colossus that will – eventually – be able to bring the full might of the industrial revolution down on the head of the still largely agrarian South. But the Confederacy has an early advantage in military talent and positioning. If it can inflict enough damage on the Union before it gets rolling, it can force surrender.
Victory is earned by destroying your opponent’s national morale. Crushing wins on the battlefield and control of enemy territory contribute to this exhaustion. Nathan Bedford Forrest reduced triumph to getting there “firstest with the mostest” but there’s a lot more to consider. Where will you be fighting? And with which general? And will your supplies hold out long enough to make that siege worth it? All classic wargaming stuff.
The first big difference between American Civil War and Birth of America is how it limits the “mostest” side of the equation. Generals still have the usual range of skills and talents, but they also have command limitations. You can no longer build those killer stacks of troops and crush all who oppose you. Instead, armies need to be linked in a command structure. You have, for example, a central army command under your number one guy and subsidiary armies that are connected to it. This limits the size of your individual stacks, but gives bonuses to those forces with a coherent hierarchy. You can promote generals so that they can take on additional responsibility, too.
This takes some getting used to. Though many wargames identify units by their division or associated HQ, few encourage you to create your own command and control system. In the smaller scenarios you can muddle along without this mechanic, but in the grand campaign it becomes essential. It doesn’t help that the interface isn’t especially helpful in this area. Fortunately, there is a tutorial primarily dedicated to just this mechanic, so you can play that until you feel confident enough to take on the world.
