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Author Topic: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)  (Read 59808 times)

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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #15 on: July 27, 2018, 05:03:00 PM »
Steam page live




The American Civil War has erupted! On both sides, Grand Tacticians needed to take command of the opposing armies and to lead them to victory. Prepare your nation for war, plan cunning maneuvers, defeat your enemies in the field of battle, and become one of the greatest Grand Tacticians in history!


Homepage: Here
Official forum: Here
Steam: Here
YouTube: Here


Single-player


Announcement Trailer




Published on May 3, 2018



About

Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865) is a real time strategy game combining a strategic campaign with tactical battle game play. Run your nation, muster, manage and support great armies, and maneuver them to defeat the enemy. Once the opposing armies meet, command your troops to victory in battles fought on historical battlefields.


Features:

•   Choose your side in the American Civil War: Real-time campaign, spanning from Secession to the end of the war, with historical objectives for both sides.
•   Change history: What if European superpowers intervened to end the war, or Lincoln lost the presidential election of 1864?
•   Scott’s Great Snake: Lay siege, raid and blockade your enemy on land and sea or use blockade runners to keep the life-lines to Europe open.
•   From Fort Sumter to Appomattox: Watch closely the morale of your citizens and troops. As the war drags on, fervor turns to fatigue, the treasury threatens to run dry, and measures like drafting will cause unrest.
•   Keep the armies marching: Build and manage the flow of supplies to your armies. Utilize and expand railroad lines to supply and move armies for the first time in history!
•   Pivotal battles: Fight battles lasting multiple days on historical battlefields. Use engineers to build pontoons and dig trenches, see reinforcements change the tide and commit your reserves to defeat the enemy.
•   Grant vs. Lee: Manage hundreds of historical commanders with personal attributes and specialization. Famous commanders inspire soldiers and citizens alike and loss of reputation can be irreparable.
•   Command Great Armies: Huge armies of infantry, cavalry and artillery, with realistic command structures and historical Order of Battle.
•   Bring the Civil War to life: Amazing Civil War re-enactment and combat footage from LionHeart FilmWorks, and an original soundtrack of old time music and drum and fife band.












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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #16 on: July 27, 2018, 05:04:42 PM »
Making of Grand Tactician: The Bugle




Published on Jul 27, 2018



In the first Making of Grand Tactician -video, Alan Tolbert, a musician and reenactment infantry bugler talks about how the authentic bugle signals were recorded to the game, and the role of bugle in the Civil War. More videos taking a look behind the scenes of the game's development will be released later.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #17 on: August 02, 2018, 10:19:37 PM »
Updates 02/08/18


Organizations can be placed under AI command giving the said commander a stance. After this, the commander will use his units accordingly, while following your movement orders.



To reduce micromanagement (without placing commanders under full AI command) "Manage details" -order will instruct your commander to use his own initiative to react to encountered threats.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #18 on: August 23, 2018, 08:49:46 PM »
The next devblog is just around the corner, and in it we'll take a look at the General's paper work.

Also, the scouts are reporting the sound and dust cloud of an incoming game play video, some weeks away.



The headquarters will keep your reports up to date.





Back then, officers had a lot prettier handwriting too.

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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #19 on: September 20, 2018, 08:08:49 PM »
Chickamauga





Published on Sep 20, 2018
A Pre-Alpha* battle game play trailer, showing some of the features in the game's battles.

*Everything seen or heard is subject to improvement and change during the development.
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Offline Zipuli

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #20 on: October 20, 2018, 07:57:19 AM »
Hi guys!

We just released October's devblog, discussing the battle AI in the game:

http://www.grandtactician.com/thecivilwar/blog/articles/battle-ai
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #21 on: October 20, 2018, 02:36:12 PM »
Thank you Zipuli :thumbsup


Battle AI





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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #22 on: October 30, 2018, 02:24:31 PM »
Scale?

Answered by the dev:

Hi,

The scale is brigade level, with artillery mainly organized into battalions (multiple batteries). The brigades are not sub-divided into regiments that you can detach and move around, though you can detach skirmishers from the brigades and smaller detachments to capture enemy guns. These are game design choices to keep the huge battles manageable and performance acceptable - the engine calculates a lot more under the hood than most games do, and the more active elements, the heavier it gets. But the engine itself is scalable, so for example a smaller battle like 1st Bull Run etc. can be created in regiment scale.

Armies and number of controllable units are not limited in battles. Single units have a maximum number of men when recruiting during campaign. But during campaign, like happened in reality, unit sizes will vary due to number of recruits, desertion, sickness, casualties...

Weapons use different ranges across the board. So yes, a rifle-musket will have longer range than a carbine, a smooth-bore musket, or a shotgun. Ammunition is partially combined within lethality value, so your unit armed with muskets show ammunition X (not divided between buck and ball), but this is taken into account in calculations. Artillery has more ammunition types.

Campaign map will be revealed later (we are working on it as we speak), but thinking Total War, but real time, is not totally inaccurate description. The map will unsurprisingly focus on United States. Battle maps will be mostly historical ones. These details are not yet 100% locked, though, so I won't go too deeply into them at this point.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #23 on: October 31, 2018, 04:04:19 PM »
The developers reached out and sent me an invite to join the test team....I said yes  :thumbsup
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Offline Skoop

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #24 on: October 31, 2018, 07:48:31 PM »
Nice, the game looks great.  Can't wait to see how it unfolds.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #25 on: October 31, 2018, 10:48:16 PM »
I will update this post here when I can.
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Offline zakblood

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #26 on: November 02, 2018, 11:22:10 AM »
such a shame its a RTS and not turn based, pause able RTS, but still RTS all the same :howdy
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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #27 on: November 13, 2018, 04:41:12 PM »
Visual Presentation
Posted Nov 13



Gen’l,

To-day’s Engineers Corps Log is all about visual presentation. We´ll take a look at where we are now, and what to expect in the future.

The Troops Look Thin, sir.

When we talk about graphics in Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865), we need to take a look at the game concepts and techniques first.

One of our main goals in the game is to show this conflict in the biggest possible scale. For the battles, this means hundreds of brigades with many thousands of single soldiers and hundreds of cannons. All at the same time, all connected in an AI matrix – and all in real-time!



Our original idea was to present this all in 3D and use low polygon models for the soldiers, horses, and artillery. Unfortunately, the first engine tests showed us the limitations. But because we still want to keep the epic scale, we decided to change our initial concept and replace the low poly models for soldiers and horses with sprites.

For this task, I created high polygon models for men and horse, with additional equipment and bone rigs for animations. Out of this, I created ~ 47 animations /stances for Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery and Others (Commanders, wounded, captured, &c.) split into three sprite sheets layers (Inf, Cav, Others). And because we wanted to have a fluid unit rotation, we “shot” every frame from 12 directions (12 cameras). This all limited the sprites to not more than 65 frames on one layer, meaning every animation or stance has limited amount of frames. On top of it, we split every sprite into 3 parts: jacket and hat/cape, trousers and all the rest. Why so? Because this allows us to color the different parts separately via code.

After all this work, the first results were rather disappointing: Blurred, low detailed and strange moving soldiers occupied our battlefields. But our daily work with the Unity engine taught us how to solve most of these issues and to-day we are quite happy with the results – not only because of the improved looks, but also due to the low impact in performance, compared to other techniques.



However, the balance between graphics and performance will always be a thine red line, and subject to improvements along the way. For those who get lost in this confusing technical part, the above title image shows a picture of all work steps and two different colored brigades.

Furthermore, we spend some time on performance optimization. This allowed us to improve the terrain as well, while improving the FPS. More objects, better LODs (level of detail), detail distance, light, camera, and more.Together with sound and smoke, we could create an intensive battlefield atmosphere, even with our very low resources.

And as always… work in progress! Testing, bug fixing and improving is ongoing all the time.

Ship Ahoy!

In the last months, we´ve implemented all our battlefield features and we move now with full steam ahead with the campaign map. Ilja writes the campaign concepts and Oliver integrates the basic terrain and first features, like troop movement on land, rail and water, as well as telegraph lines, as you are reading this. One of my first tasks here are the naval and land units.

Please keep in mind this is a very early phase of the campaign development and we have not yet finalized the final details.

However, the campaign game-play will have naval movement for troops, overseas trade, blockades, and naval engagements. You will command paddle-wheel steamers, battleships and ironclads, traders and blockade runners, as well as troop transports on open sea and major rivers like Mississippi.


Most of the units will have a unique model for each side, like the USS Monitor or Cairo for the Union


or the CSS Virginia for the Confederates.


All models will have smoke particles for engines and guns firing, plus other small nice features.

Even without a separate naval battle game-play layer (like in latest Total War -games), we´ll try to create a very exciting and important role for Naval Units and fleets. But we’ll discuss this in more detail in one of our future Engineers Corps Log!

Most Respy,

Gen’l. Peter Lebek,
Chief War Artist.

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Offline zakblood

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #28 on: November 15, 2018, 03:58:23 PM »
must admit after playing Armored Brigade as that's also a RTS, i'm thinking i may now also enjoy this one as well lol

with the developer also replying on steam with it's slower and not normal RTS type pace, i'm more looking forward to this as well now, as lets be honest, the war certainly could do with a good new engine one now as well, as it's been a while since i've done the time and period and now wish to get back at it sooner rather than later, so good look everyone, look forward to seeing and hearing more :thumbsup

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Offline Asid

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Re: Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)
« Reply #29 on: November 15, 2018, 04:10:28 PM »
Hi Zak

It is NOT a click-fest. The developers are very approachable and want to make a great game for wargamers and strategists to enjoy  :thumbsup
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