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[RebBugler]

Almost forgot, also Welcome Aboard phoenix

I think you'll find this slow paced musket wars game quite satisfying. The main thing that turned me off to modern warfare stuff were those WMD's. Set up that perfect positioning, with your best strategies, then along come those Bombers...KA BOOM to the nth power...and all those brilliant efforts are blown away, literally.

[Little Powell]

Seems to be scaled back by about two thirds, the entire game - am I right? If you're told you have 300 men in a brigade then - with sprites set to 0 - you will have about 100 in the game. The map seems to be, correspondingly, about one third of the size of reality, if you check with google earth, for example. I played the Buford scenario a few times now, so feel I know that road out past the Seminary a bit. You can check it against google earth where it's all on street view, so you can just slide down to street level and track along the road (it seems to be called the Lincoln Highway, these days)where the entire battle started with Buford's cavalry stand, just down the hill from the seminary. It seems to be about 3 times larger in reality. Am I right, anyone?

You are right. The scale is larger than real life in the game to make up for the scale of the troop numbers. When the sprite level is set to default, one troop sprite represents three men. So this must be translated to the map scale for accurate measurements of distance etc.

[Garnier]

I thought the default sprite ratio was 1 to 4.

[Little Powell]

I thought the default sprite ratio was 1 to 4.

Yeah you're probably right. I always get it mixed up between 3 and 4.

[Ingles of the 57th]

Hi Phoenix

Welcome from another Brit ... albeit one languishing in the erstwhile colonies in darkest Zimbabwe. Make sure you update your profile and find a good patriotic (British Patriotic !!) picture to grace your posts.

Enjoy the game ..... it is more addictive than crack.

Geoff Laver Late of Her Britannic Najesty's 57th Regiment of Foot

[phoenix]

Thanks for the welcome.

Little Powell - or anyone else in the know - does that (the scaling) mean that engagement distances are also scaled up (or scaled down - depending on how you look at it)? I mean, they seem to me to be very often standing between about 30 and 100ft apart and just lining up taking shots. It seems VERY close, suicidally close. Was it REALLY like that? Or does the scaling affect that, so that, when they're about 50ft away from each other, for example, in real life that represents about 150ft?

[Jonah]

Rifle range in the game is 160m so assuming you have marched your troops into range and they have line of sight then they can engage sometimes on heavy woodland they can be unsighted until 90m from the opposing force.

So I guess the effect of the scaling used would make 90 m appear very close in game but that would equate to 300 ft in reality.

[Marching Thru Georgia]

Scaling just affects the number of soldiers represented by a sprite. Nothing else is changed. 150 yd. distance is the same no matter what sprite ratio is chosen.

Phoenix wrote:

It seems VERY close, suicidally close. Was it REALLY like that?

Yup. There are numerous accounts of fire fights taking place from 10 - 50 yd.

[RebBugler]

Yeah, for me the map scaling process with the game is the most striking unrealistic aspect. I was a marching band director for years. I have a Keen eye for 100 yard distances...length of a football field. So it really bugs me when troops are 100 yards apart by the game numbers, but in appearance, it's more like 30-40 yards.

This effects historic scenario reenactments greatly. Burnside Bridge is a prime example. From the heights on the Reb side where the rifle pits were dug, Yank troops on the other side of Antietam Creek were out of range by this game's numbers. Historically, that's where the Union casualties occurred. This scenario was a tough build for this reason, if it indeed represented historical accuracies.

Eventually I'll hopefully find time to venture into the map making side of things...there's gotta be solutions, and that's what I do...find and build solutions. Regardless, for future engines, I'll see that this is looked at and hopefully addressed, cuz, IT REALLY BUGS ME.

I know the rationale behind this now, the sprites are 14 feet tall so that skews the scaling and everything must be adjusted accordingly. Maybe just flatly the technology isn't there yet. Still, I ask why...there's gotta be other ways to make this right, or at least better.

[phoenix]

I agree absolutely, Rebbugler. It's a great shame it isn't to scale, that you can't, as it were, see it how it actually was. I'm surprised, with such an active community, that there hasn't been a 1:1 mod!! Joke. I'm sure that's a tough thing to do. But it would be great if it could be done, if the maps could be to scale (I mean 1:1 scale) and the sprites also. I'm not sure why it would be technically out of bounds, considering other games that are out there, that model 1:1 very well. Massive numbers, of course. But the sprites don't work as individuals even as it is. The brigade seems to be the 'individual' (though the graphic seems to include movement of individual soldiers I'm not sure that's an AI thing, with an individual soldier falling due to an individually modelled ball hitting it - I assume not). Which is fine. But why can't a brigade contain a graphic with 350 or 500 'animated' soldiers, instead of 120 or so? And then the maps could aslo be to scale, to match, no?

That's true, MTG, that the sprite ratio doesn't change the maps, but the point is that the maps are about two thirds smaller than the real life battlegrounds because of the sprite ratio thing (because each sprite is three to four times 'larger' than a real soldier). If you were to mod it somehow to put a graphic of 350 to 500 odd sprites in a brigade that wouldn't by itself make it more 'real', because the maps would still be too small (might make it less real, beacause of that).

It's still a great game though. Everything is an abstraction of sorts, in all games, but the less abstraction there is, I feel (with this type of historical game), the more interesting it would be.

Amazing though, MTG, that there were engagements in RL at such distances!