Victory and History

[GraniteStater]

First, let me state that this is not a short post. After reading some discussion on Victory in this game, I felt moved to write. My background? I'm a veteran of the infantry, I was a medic in a rifle company. I've been playing this game for about a month or so. Some of what follows is my opinion, but, I hope, well informed opinion. My mastery of AACW is adequate now, where I feel like I can form a rational plan. Have played nothing but the Union, mostly from April 61, but am now playing a July 61 Campaign and a 62 Campaign. Started one April 61 game as the CSA, just to take a peek. The July 61 and 62 games are definitely different from the April start.

Now - victory, victory and history. IIRC, the North won. The attempt to obviate the election results of November 1861 and rebel against the lawful authority of the United States was suppressed. An amendment to the Federal Constitution was passed in 1865 outlawing the primary social cause of the conflict. The organization styling itself the Confederate States of America was extinguished.

When you look at these events in detail, the most amazing thing is not that the CSA lost, but that they actually lasted as long as they did. IIRC, the game models troop numbers at about 3 to 2. In actuality, it was closer to 2 to 1. It was roughly 22 million total population for the North and about 9 million for the South. Just trying to recall figures off the top of my head, I would hazard that the South, on its best day, had no more than about 600,000 under arms, this figure including everyone who reported to any kind of officer or authority. IIRC, the North, by 1865, was supporting about a million men under arms.

In the modern world, the rule of thumb is that a nation can field about 1% of its population for its military. In the ACW, as is obvious, it was closer to 5%. The disparity arises from the fact that a modern army has logistical
and technological needs that dwarf the requirements of the 19th century. Keep in mind that the participants in WW2 did end up with closer to 10% in uniform, but the vast majority were "clerks" doing work that could've been done out of uniform, i. e., the logistical tail is much, much bigger in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The South was severely outnumbered.

I need not remind you that the North had an overwhelming advantage in industrial prowess. Unfortunately for the South, they were attempting their rebellion in 1861 and not 1761. Cannonballs don't care about valor.

Now, although the ACW has been referred to as the first modern war, that is a trifle misleading. It demonstrated certain things and foreshadowed what was to come in the European conflicts of the next fifty years, but the pattern of fighting, for instance, is totally unlike that of the experience of a modern infantryman. It is useful to note that the term "shell-shock" was not coined until WWI. Why? It was because soldiers had not been asked to expose themselves to combat constantly, unremittingly, until the 20th century. Units in the US Army in the ETO in WWII landed in France in June of 1944 and did not stop until eleven months later. Some soldiers experienced as much as 180 days of continuous front line duty.

This did not obtain in 1861-1865. They drilled, they trained, they pulled picket duty. Then they fought a battle - not a skirmish, not a raid, a set piece battle. The longest one lasted three days. Then they disengaged, recouped, and waited for the commanders to plan the next move. More drilling, camp duties, picket duties, patrols, etc. But they didn't have to worry about a 155mm howitzer planting a round in their beans from ten miles away. OTOH, the casualty rates they suffered when in battle are stupefying from a modern perspective. In another thread, take a look at the table so kindly provided of some percentage losses. Leading the list is the 1st Minnesota, which happened at Gettysburg. That 80% casualties suffered was in half an hour - unbelievable. To this day, it remains the highest rate suffered by a single unit in a single action in the history of the US Army.

What's the point? The point is, particularly in Virginia, a Union general would march south, encounter the ANV, get beat, and march back to DC. After the Wilderness, it is recorded that the columns of the Army of the Potomac were approaching a certain crossroads - they expected to turn to the northeast, but, as they passed, they turned to the southwest, and, as they did, a short man in a general officer's coat was sitting on a horse as they marched by. They cheered and cheered, although a great many knew thay might not live to see the summer; at last they had a leader who knew how to win - to not let go of Lee. Grant invented modern warfare in 1864 - continuous contact, not to be relinquished until a decision was achieved. In his case, such a state of affairs could only end but favorably for him.

The Union, as Shelby Foote has observed, fought that war with one arm tied behind its back. In Ageod's game, why should the South win? Take a look at R. E. Lee, a good, cold hard look - his entire reputation rests on one calendar year, really. Tactician? None better. Chancellorsville? Audacious and brilliant - "He will take more chances, and take them quicker, than any officer in the US Army" (prewar comment). Unfortunately for him, though, once Grant took a hold of him, he was finished. No matter how clever the fox, he can't do much trapped in a hole, and Petersburg was that hole.

The only hope for the South was a political solution or intervention by the European powers. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the war was a moral struggle as well as a political one and any hope of the UK or France helping the slaveowners was nil. That left November 1864 and after Atlanta...well, it was hopeless.

McClellan wired Lincoln after Antietam that "the invader has been driven from our soil." That was the last straw - George Brinton truly didn't understand that they were all the United States, it was all our soil. It wasn't a struggle for territory, it was an effort to put an end to rebellion and defiance, to make the South surrender. The occupation of territory was incidental to the end, not the primary goal.

That is difficult to model in a game. The NM system is pretty good, along with the Objectives, but...

set your own Victory conditions. Personally, my experience witht the Union is that Ageod has done a good job - playing the US from 61 is frustrating, and, to some degree, tedious. Heck, I advance into FOW with inactive Leaders 'cuz I gotta - half of all my generals, or more, many more, are inactive on any given turn! By June of 1862 the North controlled Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans and was threatening Richmond. That's a tall order in AACW. I lose battles constantly, doing the very best I can, but the tide does turn. The troop numbers begin to tell, the amount of artillery begins to tell, the blockade becomes more effective, the Union starts to win, and there's nothing the South can do to stop it.

I suspect my first real CSA game is going to be an awful experience, because no matter how I bob and weave, those Northern columns will crush me. Personally, I'll probably go for the 'capture DC' route and see what happens. If I can do that, or isolate DC and starve it (keep in mind that no major army was 'wiped out' in a battle, with the exception of Franklin) for a couple of months, that's a win.

Well, just wanted to ramble. Sincerely hope that this doesn't come across as provocative.

Read Grant's Memoirs. Invaluable. As a professional writer, I agree with the statement that they are the "greatest work of expository prose at length by an American in the nineteenth century." So clear, you don't even need the maps.

My rock bottom opinion? As Grant wrote of Appomatox [close paraphrase] - "Never did I feel less like exulting at the defeat of a foe who had fought so gallantly and so long against such odds; who, however, had fought for one of the worst causes, and with the least excuse."

May they all rest in peace.

[tc237]

Good stuff GraniteStater,

Against a competently led United States, the CSA will never win, wether in reality or in any game.

But let's step away from the historical debate, because that will always breakdown into an unhelpful argument.

Let's take this debate back to the age old wargmaing debate, a debate I've been reading about on forums and magazines going back 25 years now (wow):
Game Balance, Playability vs Historical Accuracy, Simulation

These debates have been going on for more than 40 years now in the wargaming community. It is the first choice a Game Designer must make.

Some wars, campaigns, battles, are perfectly balanced and do not need many special rules or special victory conditions.
Usually in these battles, one side wins because they made a good move or a mistake by the other side.

Other wars, campaigns, battles, are not well balanced, usually in those cases one side is so clearly superior that, only complete incompetence will cause defeat.
Longtime wargaming examples are WW2 Pacific Theater and the ACW.
Many wargames covering those battles have special rules, born out of hindsight, to somehow balance the game.
An example of a special rules in some ACW games is forcing the United States to use sub-par Generals, when the player knows through hindsight that there are better Generals available.
There are endless debates wether special rules are for Game Balance & Playability or Historically Accuracy.

James Dunnigan, one of the grandfathers of wargaming, wrote about this and about Victory Conditions in The Complete Wargames Handbook.

At this point, it is important to consider some basic laws of game playing.
In most historical games, the object is to provide at least a modicum of historicity.

In other words, the thing that makes most wargames different from an abstract game such as Monopoly is that they do go out of their way to pay attention to what actually happened historically.

This means that since most battles were the result of one side or the other underestimating the other side's strength, there was often a disparity in the strengths and abilities of the two armies.
In other words, one side usually has a tough row to hoe.
They're outnumbered. They're outclassed. They're going to have to work very hard in order to win the game.

Sometimes the victory conditions in the game reflect this.

The potentially losing side would be granted a "game victory" if they did not lose as badly as they did historically.

But devices such as this still do not change the fact that one side is going to be constantly reacting to the activity of the superior side, and ultimately losing most of the time.

What Dunnigan is talking about here is Better than History Victory Conditions.
Did the inferior side do better than what happened historically?
Most well done ACW games have Better than History conditions for the CSA, AACW does as well.

The problem comes when players want the game to be perfectly balanced and for both sides to have an equal chance to win every game.
Sometimes that just can't happen and trying to force special rules to perfectly balance the game just doesn't work.

Playability vs Historical Accuracy: (that age old debate again), players of a game should decide which one they want.
If they want perfect historical accuracy than they must sacrifice some balance.
If they want Playability then they sacrifice accuracy.

Can a game achieve both? Yes, AACW comes very close to that and is getting better all the time.

Sometimes players just have to accept that they are playing a war that has "Better than History" victory conditions.
That as the CSA, just surviving for 5 long, hard years is enough to scratch out a minor victory.
Historically the CSA was not going to win once the USA got's it act together and put all of it's resources into the war.

My point in this ramble is that Playability vs Historical Accuracy can be a "slippery slope" to either side.
Too much of one can spoil the game for a segment of players. (and vise versa)
Sometimes the joy of playing the inferior side in any game is simply to try and do the impossible, to win, or hold out, against all the odds.

[GraniteStater]

Yeah, I think you get closer to what I was trying to say. I think the actual playout from the Union side is pretty tough - my experience with both 61 starts is that trying to duplicate the Union progress by spring of 62 is a challenge (partly that has to do with Island 10 - yeah, you can slip by and take Memphis, but can you supply it? You gotta take 10 and there's no historical equivalent in the game to what really happened - a 'lucky break' for the Union).

OTOH, I find that a determined campaign against Richmond will succeed before 1863 - granted my experience is limited, but it seems that the weight of numbers starts to tell. It's very difficult to model the fact that in Sept 62 and July 63 there was no determined 'pursuit' after two major battles. Halftracks don't tire - horses do. What are you going to do, tell the Union player, 'can't go there'?

All in all, I find the Union side to be quite reflective of the frustration Lincoln must have felt. Heck, I play on Normal, and I have my hands full with the CSA - takes months and months just to stabilize and secure the Ohio and other frontiers. It takes a while for your Industry/WS to kick in (that's another topic - I just Light Industrialize and it seems to be more than enough after two years). If you want a large Navy, that's another consideration.

AGEOD deserves major kudos for what they've designed. The Victory is really up to the player.

[kwhitehead]

Actually a "Political Victory" was a definite possibility even after the twin victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The taking of Atlanta was a god send to Lincoln pulling the rug from under the McClellan's presidential campaign.

As to the odds, 3 to 2 is probably very close to historic. The reason was the South fielded a higher ratio of their white population. The 1860 census showed 19 million whites in the North versus 8 million whites and 4 million blacks in the South. Since the South could use those 4 million to support the 8 allowing more to be drafted, the ration of manpower isn't as bad as it initially looks. Where the South really hurt was in industrialization.

The other interesting thing is how the less than 5% who owned slaves convinced the other 95% to go fight and die so they could keep them.

[bburns9]

The other interesting thing is how the less than 5% who owned slaves convinced the other 95% to go fight and die so they could keep them.

From what I've read a majority of the other 95% didn't care one way or the other about the slavery issue. They took up arms in support of the South to assert state rights over federal intervention in what they perceived as a state decision. You can see this situation (state vs. federal authority) in the US today with the issue of gay marriage. Though in this situation the Federal government has been of the opinion that it is a "state" matter.

BB

[TheDoctorKing]

A very significant segment of poorer whites in the south (including some slave owners, especially those with only one or two slaves) were opposed to the Confederacy by late 1862. The post-war Lost Cause mythos taught southern whites that they were united during the war, and playing along with the legend gave poor whites during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era significant benefits, but the truth is that support for the Confederacy was very much class-linked, and the temporary burst of enthusiasm around the time of secession in spring 1861 was completely gone within a year or so. Middle and upper class whites supported the Confederacy quite enthusiastically (the more so if they owned 20 slaves or more and were thus not subject to the draft), but many poor whites, and, of course, almost all blacks, were opposed.

In my home town of Luray, Virginia (in the Page, VA region), there is a monument put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1890s (I think) with the names of all the Page County boys who died in the War of Northern Aggression. On that monument is the name of Jesse Weakley, who is buried on our land. What the monument doesn't mention is that Jesse Weakley was a corporal in the 4th West Virginia Infantry, a United States Army outfit. Like at least a third of Page County men who fought in the war, Weakley wore a blue uniform, even though Page County was controlled by the Confederate government until the late summer of 1864, and any potential Union recruits had to dodge CSA Army patrols for 40 miles or more to get to the nearest USA recruiting office. Like a lot of places in the mountain South, Page County is divided between a fairly prosperous farming area along the river valley and some quite impoverished hollows and hilltop farming areas. The people from the hollows, like Pine Grove Hollow that is my home, never trusted the people from down below very much, and they mostly were on different sides in the issues of the 1860s. Things have gotten a little better now since people in the hollows have cars and paid jobs in the outside world -indeed every since the CCC came in in the 1940s and taught a lot of those boys from the hollows (my father's generation) trades - but a recent political scandal having to do with siting the county dump and accepting garbage shipments from east coast cities has revealed the old fault lines still alive and well.

Throughout the South, especially in mountainous areas, counties had their own mini Civil Wars. Southern Unionists weren't fighting about slavery, but instead about how they themselves were exploited by wealthier whites.

[kwhitehead]

From what I've read a majority of the other 95% didn't care one way or the other about the slavery issue. They took up arms in support of the South to assert state rights over federal intervention in what they perceived as a state decision. You can see this situation (state vs. federal authority) in the US today with the issue of gay marriage. Though in this situation the Federal government has been of the opinion that it is a "state" matter.

BB

That is the amazing part. The 5% convinced the 95% that the US Government was taking away some right. And that right was worth dying for when it provide no benefit to those doing the dying. And the more amazing part is the government hadn't done it. They convinced them that they would do it since Lincoln got elected.

I had two great grandfathers in Pickett's Charge. I usually play the Confederate side but it still amazes me that they allowed that to happen to themselves. But the I am in Texas and our governor says we ought to succeed. Amazing.