Jon Gautier  - Aug 27, 2005 7:58 pm (#10622 Total: 10625)  
Alison Wines in the beautiful Hudson Valley. Check out our new 
website and buy some wine, dammit! www.alisonwines.com 	
 
I had a chance to play the award-winning DTP games Louisiana Tigers from
BSO while on vacation this past week (hmmmm . . . with no computer
around I wind up actually playing games during my free time instead of
just reading about them on CSW). I wasn’t sure what to expect from this
game, which has been called a sort of ASL for the Civil War (25 yard
hexes, company units, one minute turns). Unlike ASL, however, the focus
of LaT is command and control, transmitting orders to your company units
and hoping that they carry them out. Within that orders framework there
is room for trying different tactics to see what works. 

The system certainly offered up some interesting possibilities for the
battle depicted. Not a battle, really, but the opening moments of Bull
Run, featuring a meeting engagement pitting two green US regiments and a
battery of James Rifles against a green rebel regiment and a veteran
(rated so for game purposes) rebel regiment. At one minute turns and
with company sized units, a large Civil War battle might not be much fun
with this system, even for hardcore monster gamers, so the system
focuses on small engagements or easily defined actions with larger
battles. 

Although I had no expectations for what the game would or should be
like, I came away feeling that perhaps company-level ACW is not my cup
of tea. My reading of the Nosworthy book (on which LaT partially relies)
is that individual companies weren’t super important as maneuver or fire
elements. The comparison to ASL is interesting in this regard. One of
the reasons ASL works is that squads are significant maneuver and fire
elements in modern warfare. But individual companies within an ACW
regiment? 

The game seems to recognize this because in general orders are given not
to individual companies, but to the regiment as a whole, which either
“accepts” the order or does not accept the order (the factors for order
acceptance include unit experience, casualties, smoke, noise, leader
presence, type of order). The whole order acceptance thing seems fine,
but if the regiment is going to accept it or reject it as a whole, why
bother pushing all those companies around? After all, what takes over 30
unit counters, 25-plus turns and scores if not hundreds of die rolls in
LaT would take 5 counters, two turns and about 20 die rolls in Richard’s
Great Battles of the American Civil War series. 

The answer, of course, is that combat breaks the regiment up and
individual companies start doing their own things. As enemy contact
increases, regimental cohesion goes out the window and command and
control become quite difficult. These companies over here are still
marching as they were told to do, but this one over here is lying down,
while this one is a disordered mess, and that one is charging ahead to
take the enemy on in a haze of blood lust. The regimental commander (ie,
the player) will only be able to retain control over a portion of the
regiment at this point (maybe two to five companies). Now orders are
given to a regimental rump while the rest of the boys are pretty much
out of the action, possibly to fall prey to fresh enemy troops. All this
happens in well under ten turns, ie, ten minutes. 

While this all seems right at first glance—battles are confusing and
chaotic, after all—I started wondering whether commanders lost control
of their regiments in that fashion, ie, by company, and with companies
having the propensity to do such wildly different things from the
companies immediately next to them. Did ACW companies really fall apart
like that? Does company A press forward while company B lies down and
company C stops and fires? And here the lack of a morale system in which
one unit can effect the morale of other units (something to be found in
the regimental level ACW games) is felt. 

And the speed at which things derail is alarming and not entirely in
keeping with regimental level ACW games, in which units might stay and
fight toe to toe for a couple of turns (ie, 30 LaT turns). Regiments are
very brittle in LaT and seem to dissolve in ten turns of contact or
less. Brittle enough to the point where very soon both sides will find
themselves with companies just staring at each other from one hex away
but not doing anything because out of command and not under the right
orders. At that point either the side with fresh troops comes in and
cleans up, or it becomes a race of the leaders running around trying to
activate individual units or small groups of units. 

This does bring up an important point about commands—they can be given
at any time to individual companies. The sacrifice is that if a player
takes a turn to give one company a specific command, he must leave the
rest of the regiment to continue doing what they were told. This can be
a big deal if the enemy is closing at 50 yards, because the game often
seems to be a race to see which player can give the right orders at the
right time to his regiment (this is because many important orders, like
“Fire,” require a sequence of one or more preliminary orders; each order
takes one turn, assuming acceptance, of course). Anyway, the ability to
give individual companies commands seems on its face reasonable. And in
part it answers the question about why we should have a company-level
ACW game. But it also seems to partly undermine the premise that command
and control should be difficult, because it enables a player to divide
his companies up and send them off to do different things—something
which also seems not quite right. 

Again, the comparison with ASL is interesting because ASL, for all the
knocks it sometimes takes, “feels” right to people. You play it and, if
it doesn’t feel like a WWII battlefield, at least it feels like the
battlefield in a WWII movie. And maybe that’s my issue with LaT: it
doesn’t feel like anything, but it also isn’t telling me what it should
feel like (or it is and I’m too dense to get it). There are lots of
options in LaT, but none of them made me feel much like a regimental
commander. Nor did the game force me into making the choice that a
regimental commander might have had to make. Good games can give you
many options but punish you for choosing the wrong ones. LaT just didn’t
have that feel. 

Partly, I think that feel may be impossible to obtain, since—at least
according to Nosworthy—ACW battles were fought in different ways and
with different formations. And there is disagreement about what units
did when they got near each other, at what range they usually exchanged
fire, for how long, and with what effect. Part of the disagreement is
because different commanders chose different courses and part of it is
because the facts are not always clear. 

In any case, it did not work for me in the macro sense. I did have some
specific problems with the game. The skirmisher rules, for example, need
much more thought, development and testing, which they will apparently
get in the next installment of this series, to be published by MMP. But
even getting the skirmishers right will not solve for me the issue of
whether it makes sense to simulate ACW actions at the company level. 

Richard H. Berg  - Aug 29, 2005 2:30 pm (#10643 Total: 10647)  
"I'll try to be nicer, if you try to be smarter" 	 
I
nteresting precis from Jon G on LOUISANA TIGERS.

I did not design the game as a spot-on, spotlight simulation of
company/regimental tactics from a microcsomic view. Ultimately, the game
has to be Fun, and, to do that, it has to move along right smartly . .
.so things happen rather quicker than in Real Life, if only to make sure
the gamers aren't sitting there all night. In LA TIGERS, specifically,
they tend to happen a lot faster because 3 of the 4 units involved are
Green, and these folks tend to do very strange things when confronting
the elephant. (And the "veteran' unit, the eponimous [sp?] Louisia
Tigers, Jon, WAS a veteran unit . . . of a recent past seeped in
filibustorial activities to the south. They have their own website.) 

Everything that cocurs in the game i took from the various sources -
mostly Nosworthy (with whom I also spoke about the game and various
mechanics) and Griffith . . . e.g., having an entire unit fall prone and
stay there, as used as an example of Jon, happened often; cf.
Fredericksburg. I left a great deal out - it was an introductory game
for the system - and much has now been added in (and changed . . .such
as some of the artillery rules) for the system that will be in MMP's
CRUCIBLE OF COURAGE. 

But, again, the primary purpose is for the game to be Fun, and,
tangentially to get a feel for some of the difficulties involved in
commanding at that level. That it doesn't feel "right' to some is to be
expected: not everyone has the same view, or wants the same things,
of/from any game. The scenarios for CRUCIBLE are quite different, and
rather more involved . . . from a mountain assault (South Mountain), to
two wild meeting engagements on James Island (right on my home turf), to
street-fighting with militia (and logs hollowed out for cannons),in
Athens Missouri . . . and, the piece de guerre, Little Round Top. 

Again, the purpose of the Civil War Tactical System (you can now use the
melifluous acronynm, CWTS, pronounced "quits") is to have Fun -
obviously a fairly large group of gamers thought so, expressing their
enjoyment with the best game award, and I don't have any illusions on
its being deeply insightful . . . much the same feeligng I have about
ANY game in this hobby. (Reality does not play out well on a two
dimensional surface.) However, if the game/system does become popular -
and much like happened with the original SQUAD LEADER , et al. - we can
build on that popularity to add layers and deeper levels of detail . .
.and complexity. 

Depends on what the shekel-laden public wants to see . . . and play. 

RHB