From: Palmer Nicholas EXC IS CH <nicholas.palmer@CHBS.MHS.CIBA.COM>
Subject:      COM: ACW report

I've been playing American Civil War (the computer game from Interactive
Magic), and am reasonably favorably impressed. With the latest patch,
various problems reported in the past seem to have vanished, and the AI
is now reasonably frisky - as the Union, it immediately blockaded my
ports and invaded my eastern coastline at the first opportunity. I'm
still feeling my way into the game, and avoiding the sort of tricky play
which tries to exploit computers , but so far I've been given a good
game by it with just giving it a 'slight advantage' - there's a 'big
advantage' setting available if one gets too good for the lower level.
Units occasionally move a bit oddly as the computer feels its way around
the grain of the map, but basically it's quite convincing. I tried a few
starts to see if the computer always follows the same strategy: it doesn't.
(Having been surprised by an overland assault at Little Rock, I embarassed
myself in the next game by keeping a large force there unoccupied while the
war raged across Kentucky - obviously all relatives of politicians!)

The game feel is very similar to Victory Games' Civil War board game, which
has always seemed to me the most successful strategic simulation (I loved
SPI's War Between the States, but have to admit it degenerates into dumb sieges
across the map from 63 onwards). Leaders are rated for aggression, initiative,
combat skill and inspiration, and inspiring leaders who are incompetent in other
ways are hard to dismiss without political problems. Euro-intervention is possible
though I've not seen it yet (you can set the likelihood of this as a game
parameter). Supply is important; fatigue and morale very important; organization
is at army, corps and division level, from brigade building blocks. You can build
different types of weaponry, and upgrade units when you have accumulated enough
of them, e.g. from muskets to Springfields or Springfields to Sharps. Playing
on a Pentium with NT Workstation it zooms along as rapidly as one could wish,
and you can play a week in 10-15 minutes! or so. A good buy, aided by advice
from this list - thanks, fellers.

Nicky