I've started a whole bunch of games until now. Most of them I abandoned because of making capital errors from not understanding the game so well. I've played three games to the end, and each one ended with me taking Richmond. The last one, the longest, ended in March '64. In it I even took a lot of time to capture Richmond because I wanted to give the CSA the chance to realize that they had no chance of holding Richmond and move it so that the game would continue and I could play-out the other theaters to their fullest.
The main reason that the CSA played so poorly this time, was a quirk. They didn't manage to capture Ft Sumter at the beginning and I reinforced it. In the end I held it with a corp with two full divisions -yes, I sent McDowell as commander of the Army of NorthEastern Virginia down to Fr Sumter just to form that corp after having formed the Army of the Potomac with Meade and giving him all of the AoNEV corps- and they constantly had 2 to three corps running up against it to absolutely no avail. The last year of the game I had 9 breaches and was taking 10 hits per turn. But each time I looked at Hooker's corp in Ft Sumter, it had no troop loses and cohesion was full. They never even scratched it.
Does the CSA ever actually move Richmond? Does the game ever continue beyond capturing it? Once the original 'march on Richmond' even has fired, are there others along those lines later forcing you to attack Richmond?
I know that it has to do with the CSA's loss of NM, but until now, by the time I've gotten so far, they'd already lost a lot of NM from all of the fighting until then. In the last game I'd only taken Memphis and Little Rock at the end '63 and hadn't even moved toward New Orleans.
I know that I could just leave Richmond more-or-less alone and work on the other regions, but having the front so close to Washington is a PITA and in the end it's little fun just putting up defenses to hold the CSA off Washington while working on the other theaters. Besides, Athena is a master at finding and exploiting holes in defenses. I'd rather not try to put up a line of impenetrable defenses along the Washington-Strassburg-Grafton line because it would cost so much to do that, that I'd have few resources to fight the other theaters too.
Anybody have an idea?