The design of Shiloh in Blue & Gray proved to be a much easier job than I had anticipated. Most of the basic work was done already in the design of Napoleon at Waterloo, Austerlitz and Borodino. The Game Developer was able to provide a rules outline almost before the design of Shiloh had actually been done. What remained then was to determine terrain. Combat Strengths, and a Combat Results Table.
I had thought that designing the game map would prove to be among the easiest tasks of the whole project. I quickly discovered I was dead wrong. Originally, my chief reference source for geography of the area was the West Point Atlas of American Wars. Using the basic idea of one hex equals 400 meters, a map was originally designed using data from the West Point Atlas. Frankly, it just did not seem right. Upon comparing the West Point Atlas data to the official, Thom map, it was discovered that the map in the West Point Atlas had a scale that was off by a factor of two. Thus, the original map I designed was two times too large. Additionally, it turned out that the map in the West Point Atlas was drawn in 1885, twenty-three years after the battle was fought! As a result, the road network was entirely inaccurate. Eventually, the Thom map was used as a prototype for Shiloh.
The development of the combat Strengths proved not to be a very difficult task. Very complete orders of battle were provided in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. Using the concept of 350 men equaled one Strength Point, the rest was just arithmetic. Fortunately, both sides had about an equal percentage of veteran and green troops, so this factor evened out in the end. The Northern troops were in somewhat better shape physically and were better equipped. As a result, the Union has a slightly high Strength Point total than the 350 men to one Strength Point formula would give.
Determining the Victory Conditions was perhaps the most difficult part of the entire game design. First of all, the objectives of both sides had to be determined historically. Fortunately, I had written an article on this battle for MOVES 9, and was fairly conversant with the topic. Basically, the South wanted to destroy the Army of the Tennessee or, at worst, prevent it from being reinforced. Historically, the Rebels failed on both counts and additionally had their own army severely mauled. The North itself was so badly crippled that it was unable to really follow up on any kind of exploitation the second day of the battle. They had to be content with just driving the Confederates off the field of battle. Taking this into consideration, I would rate the North as having won a Marginal victory.
Of course, history and simulation are two separate beasts. Initially, in playtesting, the North proved to be too strong. Although the North should be able to win a Victory if they survive the first day, they were winning Decisive Victories at the end of the first day. The answer to this problem proved to be the restrictions on the Northern Player of moving on the first two Game-Turns. Historically, the North was caught literally just getting out of bed. This problem was compounded with the fact that General Grant had gone up river for a conference with General Buell and had neglected to leave any one of his subordinates in overall command of his army. As a result of these two factors, the Union spent the first few hours of the battle fighting as five separate divisions rather than as one coordinated army. Although the divisional commanders cooperated together beautifully, particularly for the Civil War era; it was just no substitute for an army commander. Thus, I felt that restricting the first two Game-Turns movement for the Northern Player would accurately reflect the situation. It proved to be a workable solution in playtesting.
Another factor to be brought into the game was a combination of the Combat Results Table and the Attack Effectiveness rule. This brings into simulation the point at which a unit is destroyed. A De result does not mean that every man in the unit was killed or wounded. It does mean that that unit received such heavy casualties that it ceased to exist as an effective unit or that its command structure was so badly damaged that the unit ceased to exist. An example of the first was what happened to Second Brigade of the Fifth Division [Union Army] under Col. David Stuart; the brigade lost one third of its men killed, wounded or missing; an example of the second was what happened to the Second Division [Union Army] under General W. H. L. Wallace; in the midst of a general retreat, Wallace fell mortally wounded and the organization of his division simply collapsed. Attack Effectiveness simulates the same factors, but to a lesser degree. Attack Effectiveness was one of the main reasons that the South could not win the battle. Although not a single brigade-sized unit or larger was destroyed during the first day in the Southern Army, its offensive capabilities were virtually destroyed by the end of the first day.
Players should note that their casualties, in terms of Strength Points, will be approximately three to four times higher than what was historically lost in killed, wounded and captured. Again, this simply represents a unit's effectiveness: not just casualties. An example would be the condition of the Northern Army at the end of the first day of battle. Grant started out the day with an army of 33,000 men in the field. The total loss in men, killed, wounded or missing, for both the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio for both days of the battle was 13,047. Yet at the end of the first day of battle, before the Army of the Ohio or Lew Wallace's Third Division could reinforce Grant's Army of the Tennessee, Grant estimated that he had only 7,000 effectives remaining at his lowest point in the battle [corresponding to the sixth Game Turn]. That would equal a grand total of twenty to twenty-five Strength Points remaining out of a starting total of 121 Strength Points. Thus, in game terms, Grant lost 80% of his command the first day of battle.
Historically, the battle of Shiloh was one of the most interesting and decisive of the Civil War. Just as the First Battle of Bull Run showed that the Civil War would be a long conflict, Shiloh gave the first indication of just how bloody it would be. At the time of the battle, April, 1862, it was the largest single battle involving American troops in US history. The total number of American casualties, in both blue and gray, was almost twice the total number of casualties of the entire Mexican War. If Bull Run set the time scale, Shiloh set the cost; the war was to prove long and bloody.
Copyright © Decision Games