Playtesting "The River War v4 beta (for ToT)"

[Allard HS]

A quick reply:

It ís indeed possible to accomplish the complete conquest within the time limit. It helps to know where the cities are, but I can just manage it in time.

Warning: this might spoil your game..!

Do not to lose too much time with Dongola and Merowe. Leaving that to the gunboats and the cavalry, which are not needed anyway at Abu Hamed to Atbara. Connect Suakin and its army as soon as possible.

From Atbara, send a steamer and a few units to Kassala and occupy it, then move south with those, while returning the steamer to Atbara.

Move the whole army over at Metemma, or march on the east side, and occupy the west bank cities with loaded steamers and gunboats. Occupy Omdurman from the Nile, while fortifying your army in the fortresses to await the Khalifa.

What happans afterwards, I shall not yet tell. All I can say, that the strategy of loaded steamers work best to occupy cities along the Nile, while you should move all of your faster units to Darfur.

[AGRICOLA]

Just 2 questions:

1. When did you take Omdurman?
2. Were you playing with CC and Cav at D=1?

[Allard HS]

Hehe, you don't believe me, do you

Ok, I must admit that the last game I finished was played using the first playtest version, the beta1, when I could still use cc and cavalry as defenses.
The second beta I did not finish. I stopped just before Atbara.
There, I had occupied Berber in April 1897, and my RR could finish the RR to Suakin (82,42) that turn, allowing the Suakin Field Force to cross over.

I switched the cavalry and CC's back to 2d, by the way. I don't want them to have a higher defense. After all, my sources indicate many instances where almost the complete cavalry squadron/camel corps company was annihilated (21st Lancers' charge, Camel Corps at Omdurman), while infantry losses were mostly minimal unless confronted by rifle fire such as Ahmed Fedil's troops. Therefore, I really want to use especially Cavalry as shock troops instead of Mtd Inf. units.

[AGRICOLA]

Hehe, you don't believe me, do you

Let's just say that I was making sure that we are not comparing apples and oranges.

Regarding beta1, the Cav had A/D's of 6/3 (Brit) and 5/2 (Eg) while all CC had 5/4. The latest update has them at 6/2, 5/2 and 4/2. My few tests suggest that the Cav may be OK but the CC have a more difficult time with entrenched Inf in cities and take a bad beating at Rosaires which has city walls. I tried this on all inland cities with the result that 3 were razed.

Your time line for the second beta is impressive. I captured Berber and Atabra camp in June '97 but the RR to Suakin didn't get finished until October.

I spent too much engineer time building RR's to Kerma and Marowe and building RR's around Dongola, Kerma, Marowe and elsewhere to improve the science rate and minimize the monthly tax deficit. Considering the generous bonuses for capturing cities, there was no reason to worry about cash, so science could have been maxed out to 80% and fewer RR's built. The engineers would definitely have been better used to build a RR to Abu Hamed.

As you suggest, I spent too much effort not only at Dongola and Marowe but, in retrospect, also at Metemma and Wad Hamed. I overstocked the initial garrisons out of concern about possible Dervish counterattacks on the west bank of the Nile. These backwater towns were definitely too high on my priority list of places to be captured.

I'll change the CC and Cav D's to 2 and keep plugging along.

BTW, what you mean by "It helps to know where the cities are"?

[Allard HS]

BTW, what you mean by "It helps to know where the cities are"?

It means I shall make them visible from the start

In the very first River War version, I had much more turns, but then Xin Yu beat me every time again and again, and so I had to make the amount of turns fewer to keep it a challenge, as I found out it was indeed too easy otherwise.
Now, however, many things have changed, so it might not be as accurate anymore. However, it is the very last variable to be fine-tuned, together with the technology stats, so don't worry too much about the turns, we'll see...

[Boco]

I'll try to continue my playtest on the weekend. On what turn should I 'withdraw' units. Which ones?

[Allard HS]

I had another complete testplay today with the newest version. I was quite satisfied with the new a/d values for cavalry and camel corps. They now work as shock troops quite well, and definately make the best troops. The horse artillery is nice too. Overall I was quite satisfied with all the changes made so far.

I decided to lenghten the game by one year, because it is indeed very hard if not impossible to capture Darfur without building a RR there. So you can play 12 more turns in your games .

Now then, I would say to remove half of the 21st Lancers as well as half of the british "regulars" (which should recieve better names) in september/october 1899. I haven't actually thought up of a clever trick yet to sabotage the clever players who rehome their units due to England... So for the moment, that'll be a house rule.

[Boco]

Any chance you'll have a new version for playtesting by Sunday?

[Allard HS]

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do much work on this the last week, so I do not have a lot of updated stuff ready to show off.

Right now, I'm leaving for a two weeks' holiday, after which I'll be gone for another week, so I am quite afraid that this project has halted for a week or three. Fortunately, afterwards, there is still a week or two left for me to finish it.

So, I'll see you guys in a week or three...

[AGRICOLA]

Have a nice vacation.

When you resume, would you possibly consider keeping the hidden cities? With the extra 12 turns, there is lots of time to build Native Scouts and to send them exploring. I found this aspect of the game both interesting and fun, especially when it came to trying to get the scouts through and around the Dervishes in the Darfur.

[fairline]

Hope your holiday was enjoyable Allard

I've revamped the units - all of them are changed bar your Amir icons, and most have grown a couple of pixels in height. I've been as geeky as possible in sticking to accurate representations; most of the Mahdists wear the 'uniform' of the Khalifa's followers - a white 'jibbeh' patched in a variety of colours, the 'inna' turban or skullcap and loose white trousers. By the second Sudan War this uniform was universal (it was even churned out in clothing factories in the major towns), but I've left a couple of the Mahdists in the traditional dress of the Beja (Kipling's 'Fuzzy-Wuzzies with the elaborate afro hairdo). This is a little anachronistic but adds colour. The Amir's also wore a more elaborate version of this dress, and I'll draw some if you like, although I think your versions of Erwan's African leaders are excellent. The dervish rifleman is dressed in the uniform of the Mulazimiyya with a red inna and blue-patched jibbeh, rather than the khaki you had selected.

I've changed a couple of the horsemen to camel-riders if that's OK. The Mahdists used camels frequently, so I've made the raider camel-borne. I've also made the British scout a mounted Egyptian Camel Corps bloke, as these boys were the recce arm of Kitchener's force; I guess the distinction between this fella and the other dismounted CC men could be scale; the scout could represent a scout section or platoon and the CC unit a full company dismounted to fight. I've also changed the native scout to Beja dress rather than the Mahdist uniform you used - there are pics of friendly Beja in traditional dress as part of Kitchener's force.

The boats are based on the Melik screw-driven gunboat, and models of a stern-wheeler Nile gunboat and transport craft. I don't think side-wheel paddle steamers were used in the expedition.

Enough geeky rambling - let me know if you want anything changing.

I've finally had a chance to run through the game BTW. It's a brilliant scenario, as were it's MGE/FW predecessors and I love the new features. It seems much harder to achieve a victory now, which is no bad thing, but I struggled to receive Brit reinforcements in time for Omdurman. I also managed to miss the Omdurman trigger by taking the northerly coastal route used by Kitchener; I had already taken Omdurman before stumbling on the trigger. Do you have enough remaining events space to make Omdurman a bigger deal BTW? It would be nice if there were more Mahdists generated to give the Brits a tougher time on triggering the Omdurman events.

[fairline]

I've had a re-play after reading some of agri's and boco's helpful comments; maxing out research is obviously the way to go and I had enough time to research everything plus a couple of the 'no more research' extra techs. The number of turns was more than adequate to capture every objective, and I found that rush-buying rail engineers helped. I played ball with following the 'right' route to Omdurman this time and hit the trigger before taking Omdurman. I would still suggest beefing up the defenses to make it a little less anticlimactic though.

On the down-side I demolished 3 of the pop 2 cities on the way to El Fasher which buggered my objective score. I also agree with Agri's comments about the CC; even at def 2 they are useless in an independant role without infantry backup, which kind of negates their movement ability. Personally I'd up their defence to 3. I would also suggest giving the Brit scout the view two square flag, and either give him more movement or the alpine flag.

Fantastic work on the conversion

[Allard HS]

Wow, gareth, what can I say? This is spectacular! Amazing to see such a combination of historical accuracy and artistic talent!

I just returned from quite a tiring 160-km walk around Nijmegen, during four days, and my feet are hurting a bit, as is the rest of my body, because it's not easy to walk for 11 hours a day with army boots and 15 kg on my back . So, before resuming work on this scenario, first I'll have to lick my wounds and heal my blisters on my feet . If anybody's interested here's the link to the event: http://www.landmacht.nl/vierdaagse/ .

[Boco]

Ouch! Sadly, the 'Missies' link didn't show what I hoped to see.

[Allard HS]

That's in the same category as when we passed a village called "Beers". It took me a while before I realized why all British and American detachments were making group photographs in front of the traffic sign with the city name on it.