I joined in this community late, and have been taken aback by the hostile personal comments that seem to fly. There is one silver lining: people don't get mad about things they don't care about, so one way to interpret many of these postings is that a lot of people really care about improving this g...

Grey: Nothing I said was meant to be construed in any way as critical of you or the excellent job you're doing. That you're doing it for free suggests it's a labor of love, and those of us who have benefited from it are thankful. Rather, my posting was intended as free advice on possible ways to imp...

Even if the manual contained EVERY detail that the game had to offer, new players would have just as much difficulty learning the game as they do now. This game is complicated to learn PURE and SIMPLE and the only way to get comfortable with it is to jump in and PLAY, PLAY, and PLAY AGAIN. I don't ...

I agree with Orso's general complaint. When I first loaded up the game (I bought it on a whim) I gave it up after a few tries. And then again a couple months later. Only after I found this website (and read through the PBEM game between Soundoff and Banks) did I stick with it. Even so, it took a ful...

kudos to you both. A highly entertaining, educational and readable game. Well done. Thank you for sticking with it, past the point where you were having lots of fun.

I agree that the chess vs AACW debate has reached a point of diminishing returns. More interesting: are there any "rules of thumb" that readers would suggest to either help Athena make decisions, or to help little ole me play the game better?

Saintsup stated it better than I did: AACW is harder than chess, but there aren't hundreds of years and hundreds of books helping people get better. More to the point, it doesn't really matter which game is more difficult -- I enjoy playing both. The reason it is interesting to look at chess is prec...

GraniteStater: Unfortunately, I know quite a bit of game theory. I think that some of your statements about the complexity of chess are correct, but that you underestimate the difficulty of AACW. I'll try to address your points without boring everyone else: 1) Mathematically, a full-information, lim...

I remember the days when I used to play Avalon Hill wargames in a friend's basement. We'd spread the map out over a ping-pong table, and the first day was spent organizing all the little carboard chits. We couldn't play at my house because the cat would walk across the game and screw everything up. ...

The first time I played all the way through, I experienced something similar: I literally had no cities left to conquer on the "objectives" page. I farted around for a couple turns, and the AI woke up, and eventually conceded. :w00t: Note that this ought not to be taken as a critique of the AI: cons...

Three general pieces of advice, mostly gleaned from other postings on these excellent pages, but that I've found particularly useful. I believe they apply to players playing either North or South, but . . . . 1) Use cavalry to spy out where the bad guys are. I don't know the ideal size for cavalry d...

CFC:

You've taken Atlanta, Vicksburg, Richmond -- all by 1863. Those poor rebels ought to concede -- they don't have much left to fight for.

New player here (within the past 3 months) -- I appreciate all the postings and tips in these pages. I had not thought about interior supply depots -- I never seem to have enough supply wagons, particularly as the CSA. General question: on the economics page, when you build factories in various stat...