Battleground ACW 'Bits & Bobs' for Newbies

[Kingmaker]

HiHi

Welcome to the club, if you are new to the games, below are some ‘Bits & Bobs’ you may find useful for the ACW ‘Battleground’ series, ‘fraid it ain’t in pretty or in any particular order as its a ‘Cut & Paste’ job from stuff I passed on recently.

“ Re advice, tactics I leave to you, that Sir is what makes you, a General! :-) (in these small scenarios tactics ain’t much more than ‘Charge & Shoot anyhow).

But some things folk often seem to forget are the simple things like making full use of the buttons on the 'Tool bar', eg heard more than once, "... I forgot to shoot off my Arty!!!" usually preceded with an expletive, well the simple way round that is to try and remember to use the ‘Next Stack’ button (2 gray squares with red arrows in them) which will scroll through all unfired units.

To save time when it ain’t obvious if a unit can fire at anything use the ‘Visible Hex’ button (Red & Black circle with black cross in it) that will put a red X on all hexes that can’t be seen by the unit and hence can’t be shot at.

The ‘Jump map’ button, (to the left of the ‘Next stack’ button) can be useful to show you units dispersed away from the main screen map, maybe a routed unit you have forgotten of something.

If you are building breastworks, using the ‘Toggle units’ (half blue, half white button) to clear away the units, makes it easier to see who’s built what and facing which way.

If doing ‘Sneaky stuff’ the ‘Spotted units’ button (Binoculars) shows you if your unit can be seen at final placement, also useful in reverse, ie if they can see the unit, who’s spotted it, sometimes you pick up enemy units you didn’t notice before.

‘Highlight Org’ (last button before the ? ) is very useful for keeping track of units for ‘Command radius’ purposes and, “where the piggin Hell is the rest of my brigade gone!???” stuff.

The ‘Command radius’ is important in the game, details are on another useful bit folk sometimes forget to use which is ‘Scenario notes’ in the ‘Help’ drop down menu, ... which I have just this minute discovered doesn’t work if you are on MS Vista OS; Microsoft, bless them ain’t carried it over, check out the ‘Scenario notes’ if you ain’t on Vista, 10.0 Parameter Data is the important one but lots of other useful/interesting stuff in the ‘Notes’.

Have thrown it up on my old Win98SE puter. The important bit re ‘Command radius’ is Reb leaders; Brigade 3 Hex, Division 6 Hex, Fed leaders; Brigade 2 hex, Division 4 Hex. Another useful bit in ‘Parameter Data’ is the ‘Weapons Effectiveness table’ specially for Arty, and, for the longer battles check out the ‘Dawn/Dusk’ times again specially if doing sneaky stuff, Tip, the G’burg dawn is wrong in the notes, it’s an hour earlier, I know coz I got caught out with it :-) . Mmmmm thats a bummer not having those notes to hand, Oh well there’s progress for you.

On screen something I find useful is moving Brigades in column en-mass, put the Brigade commander in with the lead unit, double-click to ensure both are highlighted then hold down the Ctrl & Alt keys and Right click where you want to move them to, saves moving each unit individually, works at Divisional level as well, spooky to watch on the screen.

I find it useful to check out ‘Release’ times, in the Reinforcement drop down menu, as you can then put units into column the move before they are released, so they are ready to go, also remember ‘fixed units' can change face/be put in column/build Breastworks/and sometimes fire (again, use the ‘Next unit’ button) even though they can’t move from their current Hex

One more then will call it a day, again some folk don’t bother, but I always watch the Battle replay, you can sometimes pick up enemy unit moves that will not be shown on the final screen as the units ain’t in ‘line of sight’, eg you can see them moving towards some hills but not see them when they have arrived.

OK nuff for the moment if I remember any more will add later, sorry a lot of the above may seem “Cor blimmy bleeding obvious” but hopefully there will also be some useful stuff there.”

“ In a rush this morning, but one thing I meant to point out, is if you can guess which enemy units are fixed, it, ... "sometimes" ..., is worth not firing at them as if you hit they are released, Buchanans boys doing the Kamikaze against your limbered Arty is a case in point, they were fixed, now they are using up your ammo, and dying in droves in a noble gesture of self sacrifice :-) But if they hadn't gone disrupted you ‘may’ have lost that battery ??, firing at guessed fixed units is an awkward call, but I include it for future reference. “

“ Another one you may find useful is to use the ‘Shift key’ to bring up place names etc on screen, useful for finding named Fords, note, not all Fords are shown on all Battlefields you still have to hunt for them.

I also find the ‘Shift key’ helpful on ‘battle replay’; as soon as you can click on the Red cross button to bring up ‘Full Screen’, quickly move to where you think movement is going to occur and hold down the ‘Shift key’, the place names are helpful when trying to reconstruct what happened where.
Another tip, you may not have come across is to help with terrain, if you right click on the Terrain box (bottom left were your Ammo is shown), it shows you the Hex sides, useful for finding crossable points on Creeks and stuff.”

Hope there was something of use there.

Anybody else got anything to add, please do so.

All the best
Peter (The Other Kingmaker)