War Between the States

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

I said in my last review (for World At War: A World Divided) that I had another review of a Grigsby game coming up & that it would be for War in the Pacific ... well, I was half right.

Grigsby's War Between the States is an odd fish of a game. It's the World at War engine transplanted onto the American Civil War; while I hoped all the bugs had been ironed out of this game engine by now it turns out I was wrong about expecting that too.

Still, there  are some nice features here.

The good

In the game soldiers mostly appear as militia, and you need to train them into infantry by putting them with capable leaders.  Mounting militia and training them as cavalry is similarly elegant: click a button & send them to a cavalry leader, no fuss no muss. The militia appear where there's supply & the political support rather than being bought, and it all feels about right.  Other than the training, production works pretty much the same as it did in the WW2 games. (Just substitute states for countries).  It's all very neat and just what you'd expect, and as a bonus lacks the annoying "research" aspect of the earlier games to boot.

Combat is similarly well done, and the little combat dialogue that pops up makes for a suspenseful punctuation to the game without being too diverting (though in true Matrix-manual style the numbers aren't explained anywhere I could see). Scouting ties into not only the fog of war, but also has a direct effect on combat: sighted units are easier to hit & hit back less hard.  Having more & better horsemen finally has a point. All a nice addition to the previous rather impersonal combat mechanics.

Clinching a strategic victory at Memphis, only to have Grant wounded and out for the count for six months, while you fall a measly one point short of the thousand VP needed in addition to the victory to declare emancipation - that's what a strategic ACW game is all about. And there're no crazy Southern emancipation declarations either.

The map is nice to look at, almost exactly what  I think a wargame map should look like:  appealing to the eye, but with nothing extraneous or cluttering.  Nice work; the highlighting on occupied areas could be darker, but the underlying map is nice.  The unit graphics are a bit twee in comparison, but they're also OK.  The problems start when you sort the units out ...

The bad

In a game that's all about having lots of units, but only having a few units that can move and engage the enemy, every effort's been made here to disguise which units the lucky few are. Units that are outside of armies and can move into combat aren't highlighted on the map or on any list, you have to go through each and every stack to see if anyone's plucked up the initiative. Blah. [Fixed in patch 1.01! - updated 13 July 2008 ]

The ugly

Once you get into a stack you have to go into most units individually to see what's in them, because if there are more than a few units in an area they'll all shrink down till the individual sub-units are just a few indistinguishable pixels, and once you make a change the whole display resizes and reorders itself so you need to be very good at remembering names, or start whatever you were doing again ... again, and again ... all up: this is possibly one of the worst solutions to seeing what's in a stack of units I've ever seen. It's so close to being useful (and almost kind of neat) that it's very annoying indeed.

It's not the end of the world, but it makes the optional subordinate leaders rules unplayable for me - it's hard to think too hard about chains of command when I can't see any of their components portrayed anywhere.

With the optional rules what should be suspenseful turns into tedium, and tedium turns into frustration: the perfect sim of what it feels like to be a president whose army commanders have a case of the slows, you might say. Thank goodness for the default rules, this is one case where they're much better than the optional ones.

There are none of Grigsby's famous disappearing units that I can see, though I have had units stuck on transports for the duration, and the supply the South gets occasionally does seem to go up during a blockade, oh, and the game did crash when I was clicking through a list ...

And a final sour note:  while most things you'd expect in a civil war game are here, there are no sieges. It was probably just too hard using the WaW engine, but it's a distinct gap in a game with month long turns and this subject matter. There are siege guns, just no sieges to use them in. If you fail to assault Vicksburg, well, you're out-a-luck, assault it again. Only this time, more so.

Video killed the radio star

The addition of video tutorials is a great move; the cynic in me suspects in any other game you'd possibly not need a tutorial on how to get a unit to move, but  in any case the videos  supplement the fairly thin manual nicely. With the manual providing a backup I can quickly skim I've finally got game documentation twenty first century style.

And while I'm on matters graphical, and before I forget: this game plays in a window.  A real live Windows 95 window.  (Wow, I know, too much cutting edge stuff, someone's going to get hurt.) The dialogue's are all still non standard, but we're getting there. As someone who likes to do at least three things at the same time this is a big plus for me.

Vista issues and the occasional crash

This game won't work in Vista without running in compatibility mode -- you'll get a message that your serial number's wrong if you try, so the problem may be in the serial number code rather than the game -- but even after that I've had a crash to desktop.  That's a pretty poor showing from the third outing of a game engine. It only happened once, but really, why shouldn't I expect game software to just work?

To wait or not to wait?

If you buy this game you're taking a gamble that the bugs'll get fixed and you won't have to look forward to buying the same game again in six months time with a slightly different title:  Gary Grigsby's War Between the States: A World Divided, perhaps. That's probably the main risk you need to assess here. As it is Ageod's game's still the best Civil War game going at the moment, though this game has some merit too.

(And I will finish writing those other ACW reviews one day ...)