Newbie introduction and question

[Calhoun]

Ok, it's newbie question time. However, first let me say that I've been playing wargames for 35 years and...wait, no, that's a lie (SLAP!). I actually stopped playing them about 20 years ago and switched to videogames. I did go through a pretty heavy Steel Panthers phase back when that game was first released, but other than that, I seemed to have lost the bug. Recently, though, I began to long again for something more stimulating than the kiddie games I've been playing, so I went to Matrix Games' website, where I ran across AACW. Man, did I hit the jackpot! It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for: a strategic level game about a war I hadn't already gamed to death, with competent AI, appropriate complexity, and made by a company that takes pride in its attention to detail. Yada yada yada...I could go on, but suffice it to say I'm extremely impressed by everything I've seen in both the game and its developers so far.

That having been said by way of introduction, I have a question. The manual says something about being able to restore up to 24 turns of a saved game. However, it doesn't explicitly say how. I've tried restoring the previous turn of a saved game and then restoring the previous turn of that saved game, but it doesn't work. Now I'm clueless how to proceed. Therefore, my question: How do I do dat?

The reason I want to restore the saved games is that, after at least ten tries at the Bull Run scenario, I finally achieved victory as the CSA. I did it by taking Washington. However, the victory was so improbable, and the behavior of the Union AI so weird, that I suspect there's an AI bug at work. So I wanted to post an AAR for you guys to analyze. Can you tell me how to back up two turns, rather than one, from the end game save file, or shall I just mark this victory down to my inestimable brilliance and move on?

Thanks again! I haven't been this obsessed and pleased with a game in years!

[arsan]

Hi and welcome!

On the load game menu, put the mouse over the save and read the tooltip
Each time you press the key (its Home i think), the save will go back one turn.

Cheers!

[Calhoun]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, this is what I tried before and it didn't work. Well, I thought it didn't work until I just now restarted the game and see that it did, in fact, restore the previous turns. Rather than trying to explain what I saw in words, here is a recreation of my saved games list:

1861 -- Bull Run blah blah blah turn 5 of 6 (after 3 restores)
1861 -- Bull Run blah blah blah turn 6 of 6 (my original end of game save)

This is what I see after restarting:

1861 -- Bull Run blah blah blah turn 3 of 6

As you can see, I now have what I wanted, except for the fact that my original end of game save is now gone. I don't know if that's the proper behavior or not. In any case, there seems to be something wrong with the list updating properly (or, which is not at all beyond the realm of possibility, I'm screwing things up myself somehow).

BTW, what does the little red symbol to the left of some of the saved game files mean? It's too small for me to make out.

[Primasprit]

Beware however that you can only got backward. Once you restored an old turn this way, the newer ones are lost.

(The savegame directory is ...\AGEod's American Civil War\ACW\Saves\.
You can find there one sub-folder for every campaign you started. In these 'campaign-folders' are the saved game files for the current turn located. The previous turns are located in numbered sub-folders. You can save a copy of these files if you want to review your older turns but don't want to lose the new ones.)