From: Richard Gassan <gassan@HISTORY.UMASS.EDU>
Subject:      Sid Meier's Gettysburg! (short review)

I hesitate to mention computer games here... but:

I recently bought Gettysburg! (why do so many things have !'s after them?
sigh)... and I have to say that it's one of the best Civil War computer
games I've played. If I only had that 4' x 6' monitor, it would approach the
best of the computer games.

The main thing I've liked about the game is that the A.I. is not stupid --
not by a long shot. In other games, I've seen things like leaders suicidally
run alone into guns, troops sit stupidly, refusing to respond, lame-brained
strategies.  In the "Battleground" series, for example, the A.I. so often
chooses an idiotic strategy; the difficulty levels merely increase the
number of casualties or the difficulty in rallying, rather than actually
improving the level of play.

On the other hand, though, Gettysburg! actually has a canny and very devious
A.I., which you can set in differing types of strategy (indirect and
cautious, for example, or direct and aggressive, or indirect and aggressive,
or combinations -- three types of approaches, and three types of
aggressiveness), plus four levels of play, from simplest to R.E. Lee.

I've got a couple Civil War games that look great, and so Gettysburg! isn't
unique in that; however, it does look great, probably the best I've seen,
with each of the figures on the field animated, and with realistic audio
effects (for example: a regiment standing in line, when selected, will tell
you how they're doing: "How long are we going to stand here?" is one;
"They're flanking us!" or the like). It's a game that actually uses the
audio to give you battle information.

The game is real-time, so you have to scramble to get things together.

Now...the drawback. The grand battle game is a set of scenarios strung
together... not one big game (which, frankly, I'm not sure I could handle;
the size of the grand battle would be huge). On the other hand, there's a
fine random scenario generator, along with about 20 different set-piece
scenarios; about 5 historical, and about 15 hypothetical.

If you buy the game, get the patch from the company's web site, because the
game as shipped had one extremely annoying and disconcerting 'feature': the
terrain texture would disappear every time you moved the map. I think they
did that for speed, but on my P-133 (64megs), once the patch was installed,
the map shift was reasonable, if not instantenous.

But it's probably the best strategy game I've seen this year.

Richard.