Clovis wrote:AS player, I will form form infantry units without gun. They will move at a rate of 4 when cavalry moves to 3, when AI units with guns will move to 5...
Interestingly, HOOKER attempted before Chancelorsville to create a light infantry division, but this unit was rather quickly dissolved as being of few military utility...
Now iin AACW having 4 brigades of infantry whose Attack and Defense factors are ghigher than cavalry units have moving quickly to enter a region is something interesting in opportunity.
I really do understand where you are coming from Clovis. Not that I play against a computer AI.....however good they are never up to the task. Someday perhaps but I dont think in my lifetime. However given that the majority will play against the AI rather than another human opponent I can see the logic in not weakening the AI
The fundamental problem I have with your view however is that it 'dumbs down' wargaming. For thats what ACW is. A strategy wargame and a good one at that. The difficulty for me however is that if you give the AI a so called equal chance by making movement unrealistic it seems to me that you automatically kill one of the central tenants of historical accuracy in a wargame.......that different types of unit move at different speeds. If you ignore that for movement then what about ignoring it for the ranges for weapons. Why not have a musket firing as far as a 12lb artillery piece. Then we can go a step further and say lets ignore class of troops.....no more A,B,C,D,E etc or whatever names you give to them - Militia to Elite. A soldier is a soldier irrespective of whether he is a new reluctant recruit or a seasoned campaigner.
Yes I know at one level I'm going to extremes but by allowing siege artillery to be linked with cavalry and not slow the cavalry down, as was the case, is going to the same extreme.
As I think Gray Lensman said as well, the trouble is that the engine is used for other AGEOD games of the same genre so the problems probably bleed automatically into say the Campaigns of Napoleon...where light infantry brigades at least were very well established and to an extent speed of movement was everything.
Now I'm no ACW expert, I'm a Brit and although I have a love of the period I am more familiar with my own Napoleonic era. It has always seemed to me that the ACW straddled two types of conflict one being the fast moving Napoleonic era and the other being the entrenched warfare model of WWI which may be part of the problem.
To nail flags to the mast, I would have been quite happy with just making it that certain elements could not form up with others....eg seige artillery to be used on its own. I could even possibly be pursuaded to say cavalry can only be brigaded with horse artillery...though my knowledge of the period is not strong enough to say whether that was the norm but I do reckon that once it was out in the open that divisions did not move at the 'slowest' speed of their component parts that something had to be done.