Subject: North vs. South Impressions From: Alan Dunkin Well I got my review copy in today, and so far I'm not terribly impressed. The game has ten single battles: Antietam First Bull Run Second Bull Run Cedar Mountain Brandy Station Cedar Creek Wilderness Gettysburg Gaines Mill Five Forks It's a good sign that I-Magic included some battles rarely seen in a computer game. It's another good sign to see the scenario editor included in the package, which supposedly (haven't really given it the run-down yet) is much more stable than the GBOH crash-fest. Each of the scenarios also has at least one variation than the historical setup, so there is some replayability. The nifty fog of war system hides units far in the rear fairly well. The animations are also pretty nice. More group functions, like group restore morale and group retreat, are welcome. Ooh, then there's the campaign. This should really catch your attention. You start out at First Bull Run and then progress through a flow-chart diagram of battles till either side wins the war (which can happen two different ways -- one side gets to the other's capital or gains a five-to-one advantage in campaign victory points. The icing is that the diagram allows you to cycle back and forth between battles. In theory this isn't such a bad idea -- historically the terrain sort of siphoned battles into certain areas (or could have conceivably if certain things happened). Unfortunately in practice the theory falls flat on its face because, as far as I can tell, battle results aren't passed on from one to the next, so you'll be fighting with the exact same forces (or roughly thereof, the computer randomly picks which variation to play) no matter what happened previously. So the easy way to trigger the Endless Campaign o' Hell is to do something like this: Confederates win First Bull Run, Union wins Gaines' Mill, Confeds wins Five Forks, and hey, you can go right back to Gaines' Mill again. There's the option to go to Cedar Creek, which if the Union wins brings you back to Five Forks, or Antietam for the Confeds. If the Union wins at Antietam, you can pop back to Cedar Creek or go to the Wilderness (which makes no sense, this is the 1864 battle, which leads to Brandy Station and then Gettysburg, which was in 1863), and if the Union wins there, you get back to Five Forks. Hoo-rah. Let's not forget that we're using essentially the same engine that was used to simulate battles 2,000 years before the American Civil War ever happened. Except now cohesion is "morale", you have line/column formations, supply wagons, and cannon that reaches out and touches someone at six hexes. For some silly reason the ranged fire button is identified as "missile weapons", harkening back to the days of sling bullets and arrows. Heck, musket/rifle fire looks a lot like sling bullets arcing from one hex to the other, but that could just be my imagination. I think the GBOH system was pretty good at modeling ancients warfare. It's built around an impluse/leader system in strict formations and combat styles. Leaders had a certain command range to simulate the limits they could control their own troops given the period of time we're talking about. While it did have some problems (the group commands could have used some real work) the boardgame version was much more intuitive. I have the sinking suspicion that this system doesn't work well with modern warfare and rifled weapons. Warfare by then had evolved to the point where brigades and similar smaller formations could act with an air of independence should it so occur. Regiments weren't prone to sitting around and acting lost simply because they couldn't hear their commanding general shout orders. Terrain actually limits the command radius, and the shading color is a bit too light for my taste. Maybe if they eliminated command ranges and kept the individual order/initiative system it might be a tad bit more realistic (of course there are units and clueless commanders that would frustrate the beejeebers out of you). Some scenarios have generals with units spread halfway across the map, requiring you to do the general cha-cha in order to get them moving in any decent direction. The impulse system is a bit different though; each turn you have a certain number of generals to choose command from, then go on from there. Command can slide back and forth between each side during these phases, so there's no guarantee you can go twice. Conceivably if you could pick five times in a turn you could choose one general and his formation five times. What's worse is that the engine is still centered around melee -- the central point of any ancients-era battle -- instead of the ranged (missile) weapon. The bulk of the combat will be shoot, shoot, shoot, then close for the cold steel (usually). GBOH told you where all the battles were -- well, where the melees were after each impulse. NvS does that too, but it's the ranged attacks that you worry about, cause you won't see them happening unless you're looking right at it. The only status report is the little scrolling commentary window. If the units go into melee you'll get those nice battle reports though. The game is a bit buggy too. The impulse system can't wait for combat to finish, so it'll tell you it's your turn and then start showing you the combat that happened in the impulse before. There's a combat-sound bug that recycles itself endlessly, forcing you to quit the game to get rid of it. Another good one is in the campaign where when you advance to the next battle, the game refuses to do anything after loading it, forcing you to quit the game and come back in to play it (be sure to have auto-save turned on). Oh, and my last bone of contention -- like those comprehensive help files and background info that was in the GBoH games? Well you won't find one in NvS. For kicks, go to the about header during a battle and hit the "About this battle" button and you'll be rewarded with your default browser and an URL to the Excite search engine, looking for that particular battle. I thought you'd be impressed. So, overall, I'd like to say so far that I think NvS needs some serious work. --- Alan Dunkin