Civil War: Beaten!

And thus, history was changed, but maybe not for the better...

If I'm one thing when it comes to games, it's stubborn.

Despite my discouragement with Civil War yesterday, after going away from it, I couldn't stop thinking about wanting to win. I desperately wanted to beat those battles I lost before, especially Battle 3. It was eating away at me a little bit. I hate leaving something unfinished, that's a bad habit I've had for many years.

So today I decided to come back to Civil War and give it another crack. I decided I'd experiment a bit, look into those trouble battles, and see if they had a solution. I also wanted to look at the other battles to see if there were solutions that produced better results. Then, after all that, I'd go through the game once more to see if I could win the war. As you can see, I was successful. I'll briefly talk you through how I did it.

One thing I didn't mention in the first post on Civil War (because I found this out after posting it) was that there's a formula for getting high morale in every fight. High morale is tied to your food and salary spending vs. the number of men in your army. In order to get a high morale rating, you need to spend roughly 1.44 x the number of men on food and salary. I thought inflation might affect this number, but it doesn't, so inflation is basically a meaningless stat. Once I figured this out, I could get high morale for every fight. 

To figure out the precise numbers I needed for each fight, I pulled up the handy Calculator app on my laptop and my notepad document for the game, and went through each battle, did the calculations, and noted them all down. During this time, I also experimented with the strategy options to see which choice performed the best in each battle. 

A little taste of my notes for Civil War.

There were a few trouble battles when it came to finding a solution. 11 (Chickamauga) was inconsistent. I managed to win it once in my testing, but only just. I actually lost it in my winning run using that strategy (I assume the computer chose a different strategy to the test run, wasn't paying attention.) However, there were three other battles that caused me quite a bit of grief:

• Battle 3 (Seven Days)
• Battle 12 (Chattanooga)
• Battle 14 (Atlanta)

I did quite a lot of testing with these three. Actually, I did all the testing possible. What I found immensely helpful was the option to replay with 0 (which I ironically said was redundant in the first post.) It replays the battle with the exact same stats as last time, meaning I could freely test different spending combinations. It allowing you to control the Union's strategy meant I could test each possible strategy combination to see if there were any winning combinations for me. 

As it turns out, there were no winning strategies for any of these three battles. None even came close. I got absolutely annihilated at Chattanooga, and the results at Atlanta and Seven Days didn't really come close to a win for me in any instance, but were less savage. It seems very clear that these battles were programmed to be unwinnable from the outset. However, I wonder if that was the original intent of Cram, Goodie and Hibbard, or if something got altered along the way in the revisions of Civil War that caused this to occur? I mostly wonder this because the fact that I can't win Seven Days as the Confederacy makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I did a little bit of research on this battle last night, and it was a battle that the Confederates won! So how come I can't win it in this game??? I find that an immensely frustrating oversight, if it indeed was an oversight. If it's intentional, I seriously question the teaching standards of Lexington High in 1968...

Anyway, I'll put up my notes for each battle here, so you can see exactly what I did. The ammo spending did vary from what my notes had in my winning run. Numbers I have in between asterisks indicate the best performing strategies if multiple strategies worked for a single battle.

Battle 1: 

26k food & salary

29k ammo

Win defensive with *1*, 2, 4

Lose defensive with 3

Battle 2: 

58k food & salary

68k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 2, 3

Battle 3: 

138k food & salary

        170k ammo

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

Seems to me that, historically, this was a frontal assault, but it never works in game. Makes no sense, as this was a Confederate win IRL. I question if this one's bugged.

Battle 4: 

80k food & salary

89k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 3

Battle 5:

60k food & salary

68k ammo

Win offensive with 1, 3, *4*

Lose offensive with 2

Battle 6:

110k food & salary

148k ammo

Win defensive with *1*

Battle 7: 

56k food & salary

70k ammo

Win defensive with 1, 3, *4*

Lose defensive with 2

Battle 8: 

47k food & salary

74k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Battle 9: 

73k food & salary

120k ammo

Win defensive with 4

Battle 10: 

106k food & salary

184k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Battle 11: 

97k food & salary

172k ammo

Win offensive with 4

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3

Battle 12: 

55k food & salary

87k ammo

Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

I think this is another unwinnable one, 1 seemed the least worst option.

Battle 13: 

92k food & salary

114k ammo

Win offensive with 1

Lose offensive with 2, 3, 4

Battle 14: 

96k food & salary

114k ammo

Lose defensive with 1, 2, 3, 4

Also unwinnable, I think. 4 seems least worst.

All this netted me a result of 10 wins and 4 losses, and thus the game declared me to have won the American Civil War, and with a fair bit less bloodshed than the real thing, as can be seen in my winning screenshot. Strategy 1 was the best option for most battles, with 4 as second-best. I never found 2 to work outside of the first battle, and 3 worked occasionally. Nothing's changing in my scores after this run, but I did spend about another hour all up playing and experimenting with the game. Though I suspect that score revisions will happen in the future as more games are added and my experience increases. However, I'll drop the difficulty down a point to 3/10, since it's really not that hard to figure out how to win enough battles to win the war. Though I'm not entirely sure that's how war works in reality...

There's a couple of games I'm not sure about next on the list, Chess and Go. Will need to have a look into them to see if they're not missing, and then if they're worth playing. The next landmark game after that is Hamurabi, which I'm quite looking forward to.