Messages

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General Discussion / Re: The Fort From Glory

« on: August 26, 2014, 06:19:40 pm »

Your knowledge from seeing a bad movie has benefited us all, thank you. 5 star post here.

Actually, while Glory does have many historical inaccuracies, the Second Battle of Fort Wagner is not really one of them. The description of the ground over which the 54th led the assault is accurate (even though the direction of the attack is wrong due to lighting requirements), as are the defences (if you look at surviving photographs you will see).

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: August 06, 2014, 12:45:32 am »

Im not so concerned for melee as much as i love it. What I'm concerned about is if i have say 25 men in a line with me which i might add is what the average regiment size has and we form line that we will get gunned down in 10 secs and have to wait for 500 other people to die till the next round. Many a people might ask why form line thus destroying the very name of a line battle because the guns are too accurate.

This is probably the biggest problem faced, not just by this, but by any game of it's kind...numbers. As I'm sure you know, most 'shooters' rely on cover to keep the player alive, but apart from skirmishing, that is not really an option if players fight in line.

If the weapons are as accurate at the ranges they should be, then it's going to need regiments to be a lot bigger than twenty for it to be viable, & if they have an answer to this problem, then they're obviously not saying. One obvious system would be a mix of NPC's & players...but is that viable?

Added to this is that it's not just the accuracy of the small arms, artillery too had taken leaps forwards, game wise to include guns like Rodmans & Parrots just increases the casualties.

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: August 05, 2014, 10:19:08 pm »

By the time of the American Civil War, the rifled musket had a significant advantage over the smooth bore. With it's round ball, the smooth bore had an effective range of up to seventy five yards, the advent of it's rifled cousin & the conical minie' ball, had increased effective range to three hundred yards (even more in the hands of a trained marksman). Quite a few details need to be brought to mind however when talking about the 'accuracy' of these weapons on the civil war battlefield.

First of all there was the 'charge' of powder in the cartridge, the bigger that charge of powder the more the weapon recoils, too small a charge and the range is drastically reduced, faulty percussion caps, a fixed bayonet, and under certain conditions the clouds of black powder smoke. Then there was the 'quality' of the men doing the firing, combat veteran regiments often did a lot more damage than much larger 'green' regiments, as reported time and again during the war, greener troops tended to fire too high.

Hardly any of these effects however, are useful in the clinical 'game' environment.

In my opinion, if they make the rifled weapons as accurate as they really were, then it's doubtful if you'd have a viable game unless large numbers of players are involved. On the other hand, making guns as inaccurate as they are in NW, would be a mistake...in my opinion.

Someone said earlier in this thread that it's 'how people play the game' that matters the most & I would agree with that, however.....If the Devs are going to include even a modicum of historical accuracy then a charge against a solid body of enemy troops with loaded weapons should result in very high casualties for the attacker. Some charges during the war undoubtedly did work, but when they worked it was rarely, if ever, against an enemy that was fully prepared for it. Charging an enemy during the Civil War, who were ready to meet that attack, with loaded weapons, was to invite disaster.

On the other hand, a well timed bayonet charge should still be possible. Against an enemy that has just fired a volley for example, or against an opponent who has suffered many casualties, or are on the move etc. But to 'move with the times' so to speak, to represent the advances in weaponry from NW, then the days of the 'rambo' charge should be well and truly over. In this game, the gun should rule the bayonet, no question about it.

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: May 23, 2014, 06:06:58 pm »

but wasn't there in percentage better shooters in the confederate army since many of them came from a hunting background and such. Didn't that play a role

At the start of the war yes, in the same way that gained the South an advantage on horseback, many southerners were better shots because of their rural backgrounds, but as the war went on that balanced out.

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: May 23, 2014, 05:43:53 pm »

then I wonder how the south killed twice as many and how so many died when the accuracy was so bad? I am not very informed on the accuracy part in the CW so I am just asking

The simple answer is, the south did not kill twice as many, in fact the casualties were quite close, around 23 percent for the North and around 24 percent for the South (of numbers enlisted). Union casualties in battles were normally higher because they were usually attacking, and because they had more men. The North had twice as many 'wounded', not total casualties.

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General Discussion / Re: [Suggestion] Realism/Arcade Game Types

« on: May 23, 2014, 05:30:33 pm »

If you look at games such as 'World War Two Online Battlefield Europe' then there are arguments for realism in games. At the other end of the scale you have games like Call of Duty which are just shoot em ups. The 'arcade' type games sell by the truckload, but they have a very limited shelf life, due to the fact that they don't take much in the way of concentration to play them. In other words they're not exactly 'thinking men's' games.

I think there is definitely a niche' for a 'realistic' ACW game that's based on the real battles. The shelf life of this game will depend on the re-playability factor, and I think that will come from the players themselves, in games like these no two times you play them should be exactly the same, & with big enough maps, and enough players, that will happen.

Games like WW2 Online utilize things like 'wounds' & 'ballistics' without compromising playability, that's what this game will need to do.

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: May 23, 2014, 05:07:03 pm »

depends what the range was 
but the accuracy of the troops was not like that thru out the whole war?

For the most part, yes it was.

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General Discussion / Re: [Suggestion]Musket Misfires

« on: May 23, 2014, 12:46:52 pm »

And trust me, this would add a new degree of interest into the game. I mean I always loved in whenever modern-military games add weapon jams as a factor, and that's also fairly rare if you maintenance your weapon properly.

Well many infantrymen also closed their eyes when firing, or loaded their weapon time after time without firing at all but that does not mean it would be good to put that in a game. Remember, they're not building a simulator here, getting killed because you made a mistake yourself is one thing, but getting killed by the game is another thing entirely. You yourself cannot be responsible for a misfire in a game, it would purely be a random mechanic, and that would lead to a lot of frustration.

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General Discussion / Re: A concern on Rifle accuracy changing game play

« on: May 23, 2014, 01:48:34 am »

The smooth boards had also good use in battles since many users put several smaller thing with the normal sized ball so it became sort of a shotgun and was super effective.

The Irish Brigade were actually notorious for this, in fact most of the 69th New York kept the smooth bore because they prefered it over the rifle for close quarter combat.

The OP quotes the infamous '2% of all wounds during the war were caused by the bayonet' statistic which is misleading because, as Bruce Catton (among others) rightly points out, if you stick a seventeen inch triangular blade through a man then he's most likely going to die, not become a wound statistic. However, it is also true that American soldiers are notoriously shy about using the bayonet (up to and including World War Two) & the Civil War soldier prefered to use his musket 'clubbed'.

As to weapon accuracy, casualties in Napoleonic era combat & Civil War era combat were on a par, simply because the average infantryman in the Civil War era did not use his weapon correctly, very few of them 'sighted' their rifles and so shot high, more often than not, over the enemies head.

In a game of course, that's not going to happen, so casualties in line battles will be massive 'IF' weapons are represented correctly.

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General Discussion / Re: [Suggestion]Musket Misfires

« on: May 23, 2014, 01:16:42 am »

I have to say that during re-enactments misfires were rare, actually very rare. I used the 1853 Enfield Rifled Musket ( I was in the 32nd Virginia Infantry) and when they did occur it was always due to a faulty percussion cap. In the war of course other causes such as damp/wet powder or, if fired for prolonged periods, a blocked/fouled nipple or barrel could be responsible.

As most people know, it was possible for a well drilled infantryman to fire three rounds per minute, so the rate of fire wasn't actually that slow. I'm not sure misfires would bring anything to the table in this game, as the re-load time/rate of fire already presents a step away from the normal FPS type scenarios. Adding a further hindrance would, in my opinion, be a mistake.