Game Saves & Other Items

[Stauffenberg]

My first post here, and a tad more long-winded than I originally intended. First off, apologies in advance if I have missed posts elsewhere that deal with the issues I raise here. More than likely I have.

I'm a scenario designer from way back (TOAW mostly, as a historical researcher and not a programmer), and I have to say this is an outstanding piece of ongoing work. Finally, a Civil War tour de force! The historical detail is fabulous--tons and tons of chrome for the most demanding grognard, a meshing of tactical, strategic, and super-strategic that is intuitive and inspired. Bravo!

I have no problems whatsoever with battles themselves being handled "abstractly"--it is clearly the price to be paid in realistically covering a war that saw most troops, most of the time, dying of disease more than bullets in their muddy camps. The linking of commanding generals to politics solves the second part of the conundrum your typical wargamer faces with this war: the troops can't move and attack because they are commanded by Gen. Deadbeat, fine, but why can't I just fire him? Ans, Deadbeat has friends in high places back in Richmond or Washington. And even if your troops are pretty much pinned around in the winter in many ways, or strangely apathetic under Deadbeat in the summer, there is always much to be done in the hinterland, raising troops, training them, forming divisions, managing the economy, trade, military supplies, naval assets, forts, printing money...

The game is demanding and will reward those who know their history... and punish those who don't with overwhelming detail. Even knowing my Civil War history rather well, it is a meshing of a number of different types of simulations here, and your mind has to be able to shift gears from strategic movement, combat stance, army formations, to managing an economy, handling the political dimension at home and abroad, as well as being supply and ordinance Quartermaster General. Trying to do all this and turn on a dime doing it, and you are going to get some hard dizzying falls. You usually realize that one monumental oversight you made, a few seconds after you hit end turn.

As a veteran gamer I found this game to be very intuitively put together in many ways, easing the grasp of how it all works and comes together; however, there is this tendency for "the ground to open up under you" at other junctures, as some counter-intuitive functions and dynamics seem to confound one's grasp. After awhile, I came to suspect that I had a whole raft of wargaming reflexes from thousands of hours of IGO/UGO gaming that had to be deconstructed. I seem to recall that many WEGO games I have played were fairly simple in their scope: with this monster I had finally stumbled into a WEGO simulation that resides within a massive number-crunching matrix. You simply can't "wing-it" with this baby, you've got to get under the hood and I admit I have just begun to do that.

I had a situation yesterday where I started the '62 Campaign game and turn 1 had J.E. Johnston and two Corps moving to cover Fredricksburg. I had spent ages reorganizing his Army of N Va to get the maximum responsiveness out of the beast and it seemed to have paid off as I dealt McClellan a stunning and surely humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg, with the Yanks losing over 8000 men to my 5000. However, as the electric news had Richmond dancing in the streets, there came troubling reports that McClellan seemed to have shaken off this crushing defeat, and had pushed the Army of N Va aside and was moving on towards Richmond itself, even with an entire CSA division holed up in Fredericksburg itself. How could this be?

Well the answer to this surely has to be my mucking up the combat stance of the CSA Corps I sent into action there (not actively seeking to attack enemy units); that and Fredericksburg not being fortified, and you have a ZOC the bluebellies could dance on through. I had wanted to check into this but as of earlier today I have been unable to locate the carefully saved end turn I made before nervously hitting the end turn button (see below). Even so, this has me wondering about how an army with its morale surely shattered by a major defeat could move anywhere other than back down its supply lines towards home. More study of gameplay needed, in particular the outstanding AAR by Banks I have just begun reading with great enjoyment.

After finally starting to get a handle on how zones of control are ever-fluctuating fields of static that units swirl through or get pinned within, and said units being also connected to elastic supply lines that are either stretching forward or backwards, depending upon depots and lift, and as well as beginning to appreciate the nuances of the combat stances of units, and essentially what we traditionally think of as "reserve movement" with respect to supporting corps able to march to the sound of the guns in a major battle... I am still having to deconstruct many reflexes that have been entrenched in my head by decades of wargaming. As someone else aptly pointed out in another thread, this is not the Ostfront where the CC in Berlin or Moscow orders such and such army to attack and, lo, it always does--here we have the fog of war and simultaneous movement creating a strange sense of vertigo every time you finally end the turn and wait to see what the hell is going to happen. It's rarely as planned, no matter how hard one attempts to micro-manage the future. Beautiful. This is a simulation that will take a long time to not just master--but to even play adequately well against an opponent.

A few nits in that regard: surely a tutorial on working out an actual supply grid, and one demonstrating effective ZOC management could be put together. Again, my apologies if I missed it. Also an overlay filter on the map that would show the actual pulsing supply net itself, colour-coded to show its size and effectiveness in terms of lift, right to cities and units and wagons. This would be a godsend. And another filter more dynamically showing probable ZOC "density" behind the front line.

And now to my main problem. I am having a very difficult time with the save game function on this--as I indicated above I wanted to look at my last turn just before I ended it, and have been unable to find the file at all. Items:

--First off, the save files cannot be located on my HD to delete. One is left with a huge plethora of saved files that I would dearly love to remove. Why no delete turn function on the list of saved turns? Could this be patched in?

--Saved files apparently cannot be listed out chronologically but seem to simply appear on the list "willy nilly." This in conjunction with the fact that the titles are listed in a tiny window on the page, with gray or blue size 6 or 8 font size (at a rough guess) against a wood grain background, and you have a really difficult function to even read well. A chronological file list button patched in possibly?

--Thirdly, it seems that if you attempt to create a new backup save of your turn, and you use a title that has already been used, the program will not save the file at all and you will only have the original, first file time wise to use that name, which will not be over-written. I must be missing something here.

--Finally, I am not sure about this, but the original file name given to you will be the autosave name from that point on; however it seems that every time I try to simply create my own additional save file, that this will switch the autosave to THAT title, defeating the purpose of trying to have my own separate list of saved files... Perhaps this is a no cheat feature for pbem?

I must be missing a number of things with that, and it really is just an irksome side issue, not a comment on the simulation's superb achievements in modeling history. Obviously.

Thanks in advance!

Stauf

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Stauffenberg]

Thanks Lensman.

I wasn't *blaming* anybody really, just noting things as they appear on this end.

Thanks again for the info.

PS I use Win 7 Ultimate and I've never had lost sav files in any program before (they aren't in the Sav directory). Had me perplexed. I'll try reinstall and change the directory.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Gray_Lensman]

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[Stauffenberg]

Forget the blame part... I was just emphasizing that this issue is NOT caused by AGEOD but they could mitigate it somewhat by replacing /Program Files with /AGEOD in their newer games not released yet. You're just one of many many similar "save game" posts over the last several years.

Sure that's fine, appreciate the info. )

Stauf