Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 01:33:57 -0500 From: Rob Koester Subject: COMP: No Greater Glory Review No Greater Glory is a computer game from SSI covering the Civil War on a strategic/grand strategic level. NGG puts you in the presidential spot (either side) and confronts you with a series of decisions. In addition to shuffling armies around, you have to repeatedly set one of four policies on emancipation (None, De Facto, Partial, Full), peace terms (Independence, Reconciliation, Reconstruction, Conquest), public order (Non-intervention, Censorship, Suspension of Habeus Corpus, Martial Law), recruitment (Solicit Volunteers, Mobilize Militia, Limited Draft, Total Draft), overtures to Britain and/or France (Entice, Bribe, Coerce, Threaten), as well as deciding how to pay (bonds, taxes, or paper money), which leaders to promote or demote, whether to recruit blacks (both sides can, with predictably different effects), how much to spend of supplies, ships, forts, etc. etc. etc. Mostly it works pretty well, I thought. I've never played another wargame that gave me the feeling of running a republican government (Congress is constantly looking over your shoulder, as are the governors of the several states). Every action has political consequences. Demote Butler and watch your support in Massachusetts disappear. Free the slaves and watch each region react according to its predominant opinion. Recruit blacks early in the war and listen to the people howl. Don't recruit blacks later in the war and they howl just as loud. As you might expect, this detracts from the attention given to combat. The game has almost NO tactical feel (there is no terrain which affects combat, for example). You send X many men to fight in Y territory (each is about half a medium sized state), tell them to fight really hard, not so hard, or to run away at the sound of a gunshot, and whether to pillage or not, assign a general, and your part is done. The general decides whether to follow your orders, even to the extent of deciding that his army is to inexperienced to move at all (MacClellan, of course, can always be counted on for this). Your most important military function is thus getting recruits, feeding them, and delivering them to the generals. You set a recruitment level (subject to Congressional approval) and raw recruits appear in each of your territories where you have support (there is recruitment resistance somewhere just about every turn). You then rail, river, or ship them along, along with supplies. Supplies are very big in this game. You really get an insight into the logistics of the ACW. The game forces you (especially as Lincoln) to trade off between how many troops you want to send out and how far you can send them, since supplying an army that has advanced twice as far along a railroad uses up rolling stock twice as fast. On the con side, the game definitely has its dreary parts. For one thing, it has the not unreasonable rule that your highest ranked general wants the biggest command, second highest the second biggest, and so on. Unfortunately, there is no automated way to just give out the commands in rank order, so you have to check the list of generals, assign one, check again, assign another, and so on. God forbid you should change your mind about how big an army is going to be, because you then have to reassign its commander and all others who are now offended at not be given a better army. And you can't ignore these rules, either. Defying rank order can be vital once or twice a game (sending Forrest instead of Hood to Atlanta can mean the war) but the generals have friends back home. Loud friends. Another problem is that the supply and troop transport takes a LONG time. It's fascinating, but also sometimes tedious. There is a built-in AI that will do some of the work for you, but I've never gotten enough of a handle on it to trust it. Other than these, I'd say that the game is almost perfect at what it tries to do. It doesn't let you turn flanks and bombard and rally and all those cool things (tactically, anyway), but that's not what the game is about. One the other hand, the two activities mentioned above (transporting troops and supplies and assigning commanders to armies) take up about 60-80% of the game, so they are not minor problems. All in all, a unique flawed masterpiece, with special things to say about the interaction of war and politics and of movement and supply (one could almost believe that the whole game was set up to demonstrate B. H. Liddell Hart's thesis that mid/late-19th century armies were so well supplied that they were helpless). Anyone else care to chip in?