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Dear Amjayee, ElmoTheElk, Joker, Korn469, Leland and others,
I am most glad and feel flattered, that at least one person, i.e. Amjayee, liked my contribution. It is indeed also my impression that my realism factors are completely compatible with the idea of preplanned action/orders. And it would certainly contribute to reducing the advantages of large overextended empires and create a real difference between pre-industrial and modern warfare/command structures. Building and maintaining good roads, having disposal of a well-equipped merchant marine, inventing railroads and telegraphy, would truly benefit your empire!
In CivII the player seems to be not only all-powerful, but also all-knowing. I know this is just my opinion, but it didn't elevate my gaming pleasure. On the contrary, it is my belief that uncertainty, some randomness, and many unpredictable elements will raise the excitement.
I also would like to make some remarks about warfare in general. Most games -and Civilization is no exception- present a completely distorted picture. The units in CivII seem to possess some 'divine' immortality. In reality most military campaigns were relatively short and armies disintegrated as quickly as they were recruited.
'Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of diseases for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth-century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvements over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations. At any given time a substantial proportion of men in a regiment might be on the sicklist. Disease reduced the size of most regiments from their initial complement of a thousand men to about half that number before the regiment ever went to battle.(!)
Sickness hit soldiers hardest in their first year. The crowding together of thousands of men from various backgrounds into a new and highly contagious disease environment had predictable results. Men (especially those from rural areas) who had never before been exposed to measles, mumps, or tonsilitis promptly came down with these childhood maladies. Though rarely fatal, these illnesses could cripple units for weeks at a time. More deadly were smallpox and erysipelas, which went through some rural regiments like a scythe. If soldiers recovered from these diseases and remained for some time at the training or base camp -where by poor sanitary practices and exposure to changeable weather they fouled their water supply, created fertile breeding grounds for bacteria, and became susceptible to deadly viruses- many of them contracted one of the three principal killer diseases of the war: diarrhea/dysentery, typhoid, or pneumonia. As they marched southward in summer campaign, many of them caught the fourth most prevalent mortal disease: malaria. A good many Union occupation troops in southern cities as well as Confederate soldiers camped near other cities -especially Richmond- experienced another soldiers' malady, venereal disease, of which there were about as many reported cases as of measles, mumps, and tonsilitis combined.
Disease disrupted several military operations. Lee's West Virginia campaigns of 1861 failed in part because illness incapacitated so many of his men. One reason for the abandonment of the first effort to capture Vicksburg in July 1862 was the sickness of more than half of the Union soldiers and sailors there. Beauregard's decision to abandon Corinth was influenced by illness of epidemic proportions that put more than a third of his army on the sicklist. By the time Halleck's Union army had established its occupation of Corinth in early June, a third or more of the Yankee soldiers were also ill. Nearly half of the twenty-nine Union generals came down sick during the Corinth campaign and its aftermath, including Halleck himself and John Pope with what they ruefully called the "Evacuation of Corinth" (diarrhea) and Sherman with malaria. Halleck's failure after Corinth to continue his invasion into Mississippi resulted in part from fears of even greater disease morbidity among unacclimated northern soldiers in a Deep-South summer campaign.'
(source: J.M.McPherson: 'Battle Cry of Freedom',1988)
Here are some hard figures about the Thirty Years' War(1618-1648), underlining this same point:
'One might wonder why any man would freely join such a force; and indeed, many soldiers served in the ranks against their will. The troops from Sweden and Finland, for example, were recruited by a form of conscription known as the indelningsverk, which obliged a specified community to provide a certain number of soldiers. Most of them were peasants: in the voluminous (but as yet little analysed) records of the Swedish and Finnish forces serving Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter, bönde (peasant farmer) is by far the commonest entry in the enrolment lists. They came from villages like Bygdeå in northern Sweden, which provided 230 young men for service in Poland and Germany between 1621 and 1639, and saw 215 of them die there, while a further five returned home crippled. Enlistment was thus virtually a sentence of death and its demographic impact was profound. The number of adult males in Bygdeå parish steadily decreased -from 468 in 1621 to 288 in 1639- and the age of the conscripts gradually fell as more and more teenagers were taken, never to return. The social impact was also high: at first, the 'idle poor' tended to furnish most of the recruits, but after a while it became the turn of the younger sons of more prosperous families, and finally the only sons of even rich peasants were called to die away in Germany. In some smaller settlements, by the end of the 1630s, every available adult male was either on the conscription lists, already in the ranks, or too crippled too serve. Total losses in the Swedish army between 1621 and 1632 have been estimated at 50,000 to 55,000; those between 1633 and the war's end were probably twice as high. Clearly the war was causing depopulation in Sweden and Finland on an unprecedented and -ultimately- unbearable scale.
(NB.: Since the population of Sweden in 1600 is estimated at only well over one million these were unbearable losses indeed; Finland had only about 200,000 inhabitants)
Of course, there were many other causes of military losses unconnected with fighting. When Christian IV's headquarters were at Tangermünde on the Elbe, in 1625, "the stink of the camp got up one's nose" (in the words of a chronicler) and, before long, disease had reduced the Danish forces substantially. The Imperialists quartered in Hesse-Darmstadt during the winter of 1634-35, after their victory at Nördlingen, were forced to sleep ten and twenty to a house; it was therefore not long before illnesses due to overcrowding took their toll. In the Scots Brigade serving in Germany between 1626 and 1633, some 10 per cent of the regiments were sick at any one moment, with epidemics increasing the rate dramatically from time to time. For example, the Scots who garrisoned the lower Oder in 1631 lost 200 men a week from plague, and more still from camp fever (typhus) and the other illnesses common among early modern armies.'
Wastage rates in selected regiments:
4 English regiments:
1627 June: 4,913
1627 Oct.: 3,764
1628 Apr.: 1,882
1628 May : 1,630
4 Scots regiments:
1630 Jan.: 1,900
1632 Mar.: 1,300
1634 Oct.: 200
3 Swedish regiments:
1631 Sept: 2,577
1632 Mar.: 1,212
1632 Dec.: 828
(source: G.Parker: 'The Thirty Years' War',1997)
Parker arrives at a monthly loss of lives ranging from 2 to 20%.
And here is an example of an army that almost literally melted away:
'Meanwhile, Napoleon's Grande Armée was shambling across the Russian plain. It was a long, hot summer and thousands of soldiers succumbed to heat exhaustion before it was decided to march only at night. Discipline had degenerated. Supplies were short. Evidently, Napoleon's quartermasters had counted on scavenging to meet a large part of their daily requirements, but the retreating Russians left behind them little that was edible. Most successes that were achieved in foraging were made by the more experienced French soldiers and this, added to the stingy paternalism of the French quartermasters when distributing supplies to the contingents of their allies, intensified the hostility of the non-French towards the French. The horses suffered even more from the supply shortage; many of the died from bad feeding, while others were themselves eaten by the soldiers. By the end of August many of the non-French troops were barefoot and their dust-caked uniforms little better that rags. Stragglers were numbered in the thousands; some of these were merely ill, for typhus and dysentery were spreading, but the majority were lagging behind voluntarily as a tactical preliminary to desertion and return home. Above all, water was short. The few good sources were usually tainted; occasionally a corpse or an amputated limb would be found in a spring or pond, deposited by the retreating Russians and perhaps recalling to the French soldiers Napoleon's utterance at Smolensk: "how sweet smells the corpse of an enemy!"
Thus, despite the legend of the subsequent retreat from Moscow, it was the advance which caused most damage to the invaders. There was never any need for the Russian army to fight a set-piece battle, for Napoleon's forces were disintegrating day by day. However Kutuzov was persuaded by public opinion, pressure from St.Petersburg, and the enthusiasm of his junior officers, to make one stand before Moscow. So in early September the Russian army stopped retreating and formed up in a defensive position on high grounds near the village of Borodino, commanding the Smolensk-Moscow highway about seventy miles west of Moscow. The Russian forces numbered about 120,000, of whom 10,000 were hastly raised and half-trained militia sent out from Moscow.
By this time the French army had shrunk from the half-million, with which it had begun the campaign, to a mere 130,000, and was already slightly inferior to the Russians in artillery. Napoleon decided to make a frontal attack on the opposing positions, probably fearing that otherwise the Russians would be tempted to retreat once more and deny him his long-desired victory. At the end of a hard-fought day, in which positions changed hands time after time, the Russians began a slow and orderly withdrawal. Although the French had won the battlefield they had not won the war, for they had not destroyed the opposing army. At Borodino, which Napoleon later adjudged his most expensive and terrible battle, the French suffered 30,000 casualties and the Russians 40,000 (some Russian historians give the French casualties as 68,000; some French historians give the Russian casualties as 60,000). Bagration was mortally wounded and died some weeks later at his country estate. Barclay, as though conscious of his recent unpopularity, deliberately exposed himself in the battle, emerging a hero and uninjured.
A week after leaving Moscow there was a heavy engagement with Kutuzov, resulting in both sides retiring to lick their wounds. Napoleon was forced to retreat along the road by which he had advanced, via Borodino with its still-unburied corpses. Although Kutuzov, to the disgust of the British general who was attached to his headquarters, avoided close engagement with his retiring opponent, Cossacks and partisans were quick to bring a bestial death to stragglers or lagging detachments. The first snow fell in the first week of November. Neither the cavalry nor the artillery had been supplied with winter horseshoes and it was not long before most of the army's horses disappeared. Without horse transport the supply situation became catastrophic and more men dropped out by the roadside. At the end of November the Russians were outmanoeuvred for a few precious hours, enabling most of the army to cross the river Berezina, but thousands of stragglers and camp followers were killed at this point, drowned, trampled underfoot by their comrades, or massacred by Russian guns. It was not until early December that the really cold weather set in. Contrary to the impression given by Napoleon's apologists, there was no early winter that year and the French were not defeated by the cold. The cold, when it came, only finished the job. In the final count probably four-fifths of the half million men who followed Napoleon into Russia were lost, and only a few of these died from cold.'
(source: J.N.Westwood: 'Endurance and Endeavour, Russian History 1812-1992',1993)
So in the end Napoleon -who is generally considered a fairly good general- was defeated by an efficient use of scorched earth policy, inadequate supplies, weather conditions (summer heat and winter cold), diseases and mass desertions.
Finally I would like to remark that it seems to me rather premature to condemn a game system not yet existing as inevitably boring, because it could incude an element one doesn't like, whether preplanned turns or realistic delay of information/command dissemination. By far the most exciting and demanding game I have ever played is the board game Diplomacy, which has preplanned turns, but no information lag. Yet I do not doubt there also exists some boring game with preplanned turns! In the end tastes differ.
Sincere regards,
S.Kroeze
I am most glad and feel flattered, that at least one person, i.e. Amjayee, liked my contribution. It is indeed also my impression that my realism factors are completely compatible with the idea of preplanned action/orders. And it would certainly contribute to reducing the advantages of large overextended empires and create a real difference between pre-industrial and modern warfare/command structures. Building and maintaining good roads, having disposal of a well-equipped merchant marine, inventing railroads and telegraphy, would truly benefit your empire!
In CivII the player seems to be not only all-powerful, but also all-knowing. I know this is just my opinion, but it didn't elevate my gaming pleasure. On the contrary, it is my belief that uncertainty, some randomness, and many unpredictable elements will raise the excitement.
I also would like to make some remarks about warfare in general. Most games -and Civilization is no exception- present a completely distorted picture. The units in CivII seem to possess some 'divine' immortality. In reality most military campaigns were relatively short and armies disintegrated as quickly as they were recruited.
'Disease was a greater threat to the health of Civil War soldiers than enemy weapons. This had been true of every army in history. Civil War armies actually suffered comparatively less disease mortality than any previous army. While two Union or Confederate soldiers died of diseases for each one killed in combat, the ratio for British soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars had been eight to one and four to one. For the American army in the Mexican War it had been seven to one. Only by twentieth-century standards was Civil War disease mortality high. Nevertheless, despite improvements over previous wars in this respect, disease was a crippling factor in Civil War military operations. At any given time a substantial proportion of men in a regiment might be on the sicklist. Disease reduced the size of most regiments from their initial complement of a thousand men to about half that number before the regiment ever went to battle.(!)
Sickness hit soldiers hardest in their first year. The crowding together of thousands of men from various backgrounds into a new and highly contagious disease environment had predictable results. Men (especially those from rural areas) who had never before been exposed to measles, mumps, or tonsilitis promptly came down with these childhood maladies. Though rarely fatal, these illnesses could cripple units for weeks at a time. More deadly were smallpox and erysipelas, which went through some rural regiments like a scythe. If soldiers recovered from these diseases and remained for some time at the training or base camp -where by poor sanitary practices and exposure to changeable weather they fouled their water supply, created fertile breeding grounds for bacteria, and became susceptible to deadly viruses- many of them contracted one of the three principal killer diseases of the war: diarrhea/dysentery, typhoid, or pneumonia. As they marched southward in summer campaign, many of them caught the fourth most prevalent mortal disease: malaria. A good many Union occupation troops in southern cities as well as Confederate soldiers camped near other cities -especially Richmond- experienced another soldiers' malady, venereal disease, of which there were about as many reported cases as of measles, mumps, and tonsilitis combined.
Disease disrupted several military operations. Lee's West Virginia campaigns of 1861 failed in part because illness incapacitated so many of his men. One reason for the abandonment of the first effort to capture Vicksburg in July 1862 was the sickness of more than half of the Union soldiers and sailors there. Beauregard's decision to abandon Corinth was influenced by illness of epidemic proportions that put more than a third of his army on the sicklist. By the time Halleck's Union army had established its occupation of Corinth in early June, a third or more of the Yankee soldiers were also ill. Nearly half of the twenty-nine Union generals came down sick during the Corinth campaign and its aftermath, including Halleck himself and John Pope with what they ruefully called the "Evacuation of Corinth" (diarrhea) and Sherman with malaria. Halleck's failure after Corinth to continue his invasion into Mississippi resulted in part from fears of even greater disease morbidity among unacclimated northern soldiers in a Deep-South summer campaign.'
(source: J.M.McPherson: 'Battle Cry of Freedom',1988)
Here are some hard figures about the Thirty Years' War(1618-1648), underlining this same point:
'One might wonder why any man would freely join such a force; and indeed, many soldiers served in the ranks against their will. The troops from Sweden and Finland, for example, were recruited by a form of conscription known as the indelningsverk, which obliged a specified community to provide a certain number of soldiers. Most of them were peasants: in the voluminous (but as yet little analysed) records of the Swedish and Finnish forces serving Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter, bönde (peasant farmer) is by far the commonest entry in the enrolment lists. They came from villages like Bygdeå in northern Sweden, which provided 230 young men for service in Poland and Germany between 1621 and 1639, and saw 215 of them die there, while a further five returned home crippled. Enlistment was thus virtually a sentence of death and its demographic impact was profound. The number of adult males in Bygdeå parish steadily decreased -from 468 in 1621 to 288 in 1639- and the age of the conscripts gradually fell as more and more teenagers were taken, never to return. The social impact was also high: at first, the 'idle poor' tended to furnish most of the recruits, but after a while it became the turn of the younger sons of more prosperous families, and finally the only sons of even rich peasants were called to die away in Germany. In some smaller settlements, by the end of the 1630s, every available adult male was either on the conscription lists, already in the ranks, or too crippled too serve. Total losses in the Swedish army between 1621 and 1632 have been estimated at 50,000 to 55,000; those between 1633 and the war's end were probably twice as high. Clearly the war was causing depopulation in Sweden and Finland on an unprecedented and -ultimately- unbearable scale.
(NB.: Since the population of Sweden in 1600 is estimated at only well over one million these were unbearable losses indeed; Finland had only about 200,000 inhabitants)
Of course, there were many other causes of military losses unconnected with fighting. When Christian IV's headquarters were at Tangermünde on the Elbe, in 1625, "the stink of the camp got up one's nose" (in the words of a chronicler) and, before long, disease had reduced the Danish forces substantially. The Imperialists quartered in Hesse-Darmstadt during the winter of 1634-35, after their victory at Nördlingen, were forced to sleep ten and twenty to a house; it was therefore not long before illnesses due to overcrowding took their toll. In the Scots Brigade serving in Germany between 1626 and 1633, some 10 per cent of the regiments were sick at any one moment, with epidemics increasing the rate dramatically from time to time. For example, the Scots who garrisoned the lower Oder in 1631 lost 200 men a week from plague, and more still from camp fever (typhus) and the other illnesses common among early modern armies.'
Wastage rates in selected regiments:
4 English regiments:
1627 June: 4,913
1627 Oct.: 3,764
1628 Apr.: 1,882
1628 May : 1,630
4 Scots regiments:
1630 Jan.: 1,900
1632 Mar.: 1,300
1634 Oct.: 200
3 Swedish regiments:
1631 Sept: 2,577
1632 Mar.: 1,212
1632 Dec.: 828
(source: G.Parker: 'The Thirty Years' War',1997)
Parker arrives at a monthly loss of lives ranging from 2 to 20%.
And here is an example of an army that almost literally melted away:
'Meanwhile, Napoleon's Grande Armée was shambling across the Russian plain. It was a long, hot summer and thousands of soldiers succumbed to heat exhaustion before it was decided to march only at night. Discipline had degenerated. Supplies were short. Evidently, Napoleon's quartermasters had counted on scavenging to meet a large part of their daily requirements, but the retreating Russians left behind them little that was edible. Most successes that were achieved in foraging were made by the more experienced French soldiers and this, added to the stingy paternalism of the French quartermasters when distributing supplies to the contingents of their allies, intensified the hostility of the non-French towards the French. The horses suffered even more from the supply shortage; many of the died from bad feeding, while others were themselves eaten by the soldiers. By the end of August many of the non-French troops were barefoot and their dust-caked uniforms little better that rags. Stragglers were numbered in the thousands; some of these were merely ill, for typhus and dysentery were spreading, but the majority were lagging behind voluntarily as a tactical preliminary to desertion and return home. Above all, water was short. The few good sources were usually tainted; occasionally a corpse or an amputated limb would be found in a spring or pond, deposited by the retreating Russians and perhaps recalling to the French soldiers Napoleon's utterance at Smolensk: "how sweet smells the corpse of an enemy!"
Thus, despite the legend of the subsequent retreat from Moscow, it was the advance which caused most damage to the invaders. There was never any need for the Russian army to fight a set-piece battle, for Napoleon's forces were disintegrating day by day. However Kutuzov was persuaded by public opinion, pressure from St.Petersburg, and the enthusiasm of his junior officers, to make one stand before Moscow. So in early September the Russian army stopped retreating and formed up in a defensive position on high grounds near the village of Borodino, commanding the Smolensk-Moscow highway about seventy miles west of Moscow. The Russian forces numbered about 120,000, of whom 10,000 were hastly raised and half-trained militia sent out from Moscow.
By this time the French army had shrunk from the half-million, with which it had begun the campaign, to a mere 130,000, and was already slightly inferior to the Russians in artillery. Napoleon decided to make a frontal attack on the opposing positions, probably fearing that otherwise the Russians would be tempted to retreat once more and deny him his long-desired victory. At the end of a hard-fought day, in which positions changed hands time after time, the Russians began a slow and orderly withdrawal. Although the French had won the battlefield they had not won the war, for they had not destroyed the opposing army. At Borodino, which Napoleon later adjudged his most expensive and terrible battle, the French suffered 30,000 casualties and the Russians 40,000 (some Russian historians give the French casualties as 68,000; some French historians give the Russian casualties as 60,000). Bagration was mortally wounded and died some weeks later at his country estate. Barclay, as though conscious of his recent unpopularity, deliberately exposed himself in the battle, emerging a hero and uninjured.
A week after leaving Moscow there was a heavy engagement with Kutuzov, resulting in both sides retiring to lick their wounds. Napoleon was forced to retreat along the road by which he had advanced, via Borodino with its still-unburied corpses. Although Kutuzov, to the disgust of the British general who was attached to his headquarters, avoided close engagement with his retiring opponent, Cossacks and partisans were quick to bring a bestial death to stragglers or lagging detachments. The first snow fell in the first week of November. Neither the cavalry nor the artillery had been supplied with winter horseshoes and it was not long before most of the army's horses disappeared. Without horse transport the supply situation became catastrophic and more men dropped out by the roadside. At the end of November the Russians were outmanoeuvred for a few precious hours, enabling most of the army to cross the river Berezina, but thousands of stragglers and camp followers were killed at this point, drowned, trampled underfoot by their comrades, or massacred by Russian guns. It was not until early December that the really cold weather set in. Contrary to the impression given by Napoleon's apologists, there was no early winter that year and the French were not defeated by the cold. The cold, when it came, only finished the job. In the final count probably four-fifths of the half million men who followed Napoleon into Russia were lost, and only a few of these died from cold.'
(source: J.N.Westwood: 'Endurance and Endeavour, Russian History 1812-1992',1993)
So in the end Napoleon -who is generally considered a fairly good general- was defeated by an efficient use of scorched earth policy, inadequate supplies, weather conditions (summer heat and winter cold), diseases and mass desertions.
Finally I would like to remark that it seems to me rather premature to condemn a game system not yet existing as inevitably boring, because it could incude an element one doesn't like, whether preplanned turns or realistic delay of information/command dissemination. By far the most exciting and demanding game I have ever played is the board game Diplomacy, which has preplanned turns, but no information lag. Yet I do not doubt there also exists some boring game with preplanned turns! In the end tastes differ.
Sincere regards,
S.Kroeze
About delaying the orders and chat messages, I think it is quite essential realism factor. I suggest we add it, but make an option with which it could be disabled if players wish. I also really start to like the new turn-based real-time strategy game concept we are forming. 
This system also have some nice features (as much time to plan as you like, within time limit).
, it seems that the most serious threat to an army is deterioration, not a superior tactical genious on the opposing side. Thus, logistics, infrastructure and simple straightforward campaigns become more emphasized than military tactics, IMHO.
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