Game Classification

Decisive Battles of the American Civil War, Vol. 1 lets you take the place of commanding generals in six battles of the American Civil War. In that role, you not only issue orders, but sleep and choose your level of personal participation in the battle. You also experience the inverse relationship of responsibility to control. Orders can only be issued to brigades near your mobile command center, and objectives set only at the division level, with some variation per historic orders of battle. Subordinates, who are rated by leadership and experience, will then adapt your orders to their view of the battle, to the point of doing something quite different. Once they're out of communications range, you can only hope for sound judgement or miraculous foresight.

The result is a fast-paced simulation (one hour per turn) of crucial moments in Civil War history. In some battles, you have just one or two opportunities to issue orders to a significant portion of your army. At a distance, the enemy is invisible, and intelligence on enemy units prior to engagement is limited to formation. Upon engagement, casualty counts and morale steal your attention. You may override subordinate orders to pull nearby brigades into reserve, but one turn's hesitation can demonstrate how quickly a cohesive resource of men and artillery can become useless on the battlefield.

Two-thirds of the play screen are devoted to a scrollable map, supplemented by a printed map sheet showing all the battlefields. The other third of the screen gives terrain and unit descriptions, battle reports, and terse command menus. Victory is determined by a tally of casualties and controlled objectives. Difficulty can be varied in a number of ways, most notably by toggling full communication and invisible movement. Two players may face-off in hot-seat mode, or a single player may face the computer or just observe the computer controlling both sides. The game manual describes in detail how combat effectiveness and other key calculations are made. Two design utilities allow what-if modifications of the included scenarios as well as creation of entirely new ones on custom maps and terrain. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : Apple II - Commodore 64

Links

• http://www.mobygames.com/game/decisive-battles-of-the-american-ci [...]