Civil War Update History
Version 2.0.3, February 15th 1997
Campaign Game
- Stopped the game freezing up due to a bug when units were waiting for trains.
- Fixed bug where dead units may still be on trains, boats. This happened if a unit was deleted as a result of all it's subordinate units being killed.
- Messages explaining what has happened as a result of Naval Bombardments against fortifications have been added. Previously it used to silently destroy naval units and fortifications. The calculations used to sink boats has been modified to make it less likely.
- Fixed bug, which caused regiments that were nearly dead to merge with regiments of a different type.
- Prevented fortifications and railhead capacities from being upgraded while the previous level is currently being built. This prevents a loophole where you could upgrade fortifications to level 5 by starting to build new levels whilst the previous levels were still being built. This was also causing the wrong graphics to be displayed. Saved games are patched while being loaded to force fortifications and railheads to be within their correct range.
Version 2.0.2, September 28th 1996
Order of Battle
- Prevented transfer of units to organizations of lower rank than themselves. This was the cause of many bugs... including regiments with thousands of men in them, and data corruption.
- Transfer of unallocated Generals was using the wrong side's graphic
- Infantry Regiment's icon while transferring had some purple in it.
- Mouse Pointer changes to a brightened version of the rank insignia when transferring a unit and the mouse is over a place that it can be transferred to. Also changes to an arrow, when over the scroll icons. Also, mouse pointers have been made smaller, as it was awkward dragging around a large army sprite .
Saved Games
- Saved games where units are occupying illegal towns, or where regiments are too big, are patched while they are loaded to try to make the data alright and avoid the program crashing.
Version 2.0.1, September 18th 1996
Miscellaneous
- Recompiled program to overcome a bug in the C Compiler.
- Added some editting facilities. You can edit:
- Army names
- Regiment names and attributes
- General's names and attributes
- Edit Army Name
- Edit Regiment
- Edit General
- New General
- Saved Game stores version of game, to make it easier to check what is wrong when people send me saved games demonstrating program bugs.
- Saved Game stores who is controlling each side properly, so if you start up the game with -P=0 or -P=Both (see Version 1.1.0 update), the information is preserved when you load in a saved game.
- Fiddled with the sound volume tables to make the music and sound effects louder.
Version 2.0.0, June 17th 1996
Campaign:
- Campaign Options are disabled in 2 player mode. This is because changing them on one side but not on the other can make the computers get out of sync.
- New Artillery regiments have between 4 and 8 cannons (They used to get between 500 and 1000 men, which was between 20 amd 40 cannon).
- Bugfix in Battle Result Calculations... Fatigue effect was being applied in reverse! So tired men were fighting better than fresh ones.
Battle:
- 4 new historical Battles added (see player's guide for more information)
- Artillery can not rotate while they are reloading. They will attempt to remain within the arc of fire. If they must rotate then they must start reloading again.
- Reloading times reduced based on Regiment's fatigue and experience and their Brigade General's ability.
- Order Icons moved down, and the unit's name displayed at top of screen.
- Tidied up zoom icons display.
- If there are several units on top of each other, you can press F1 and F2 keys to cycle through them. This applies while tracking units or while giving orders.
- Order of Battle Display screen altered so that units that are killed in battle are shown with red crosses over them (before they used to sometimes be greyed out and sometimes have red crosses).
- Battlefield statistics display added to right hand side of screen. This displays a running total of number of men and losses on each side split into Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery.
- Firing Results calculations tweaked so that artillery doesn't cause so many losses, allowing infantry and cavalry some hope of attacking them before routing or shot to death!
- Battlefield AI: Many modifications and bug fixes made to get it to work better.
- Battlefield Mechanics: Many modifications made. Including better morale calculations and checks.
- When clicking a button you used to get a list of every unit near the mouse position. This list has been changed so that attached units are not included. To order attached units, you must right click to go the the Order of Battle Screen.
- Information about units on right hand side is automatically updated. Also removed bug where info was not shown after returning from Order of Battle screen.
- Artillery will stop and fire if they have attack orders and are within decisive range of enemy. Previously they did a morale check and would continue moving even closer.
- Artillery limbering and unlimbering times vary with fatigue, experience and efficiency. Logic changed to avoid frequent limbering and unlimbering when moving short distances. While limbering or unlimbering, they may not move or fire. The horses and men move about while limbering, unlimbering or reloading.
- Battlefield window: rotate icons are displayed at top of window instead of scroll icons.
- Historical Battles patched so that all regiments do not have zero experience!
Miscellaneous:
- Unit Information area: Used a smaller font to avoid problems of unit and leader names not being displayed properly.
- Two Player mode checks that both computers are using the same version of the game. If they are not, then the player's receive an error message.
- New graphics from Strategy 1st added:
- Mouse pointers
- scroll bar
- Icons
- Battlefield troops, horses, buildings, trees
- Main Menu
- Union Victory Screen
- Campaign Maps
- Encyclopedia Main Menu
Encyclopedia
- Fixed a bug with left/right arrow icons not working properly.
Version 1.1.6, 7th February 1996
Campaign:
- Fixed crash bug when troops moving by water tried to rejoin command or last remaining units under a command are given transfer orders.
- Fixed a similar problem which could have happened when moving by rail.
- Fixed memory loss problem caused by troops moving by water.
Version 1.1.5, 24th January 1996
Campaign:
- Fixed bug, which caused AI controlled armies to rejoin their president (who doesn't really exist) causing unpredictable behaviour and machine crashes from then on). This may also be the cause of other crashes whilst processing the AI. Thanks to Ethan Gibson for the help in finding this bug.
- Fixed bug: Trains sometimes had ghost units on them, which caused program crash (often a DOS/4GW error 2001). Thanks to Ethan Gibson for the help in finding this bug.
Version 1.1.4, 15th December 1995
Miscellaneous:
- In German version, starting game with command line options, uses German version of main menu (art\screens\mn_ger.lbm) instead of international version (art\screens\mn_menu.lbm)
- Passing saved game filename on command line works, instead of adding an extra "*" to the filename (e.g. save*.sav instead of save.sav).
Campaign:
- Fixed crash bug, when AI tried to transfer brigades that were out of command range and was the only unit in its organisation. Thanks to Andrew Dixon for help in finding this bug.
Version 1.1.3, 15th October 1995
Campaign:
- Fixed Problems with saved games:
- Ferries carrying troops were not being read in properly, resulting in troops stuck in the sea.
- Trains were not storing their passengers properly, resulting in stranded brigades.
- Units involved in battles not stored correctly. This means that saving in the middle of a battle while there are other battles waiting to be played that day would not read in correctly
- Clock's date and time are set up correctly after loading. This was a problem if you had campaign time turned off because it left the date at whatever it was set to before.
Battle:
- Fixed Bug when a unit reattaches all units, but some of its units are not on the battlefield then it still tried to attach them. This caused a freeze up at the end of the battle before continuing the campaign.
- Fixed Battle AI bug concerning detached units whose parents are not on the battlefield. Sometimes armies were being allocated to Corps resulting in an unstable Order of Battle structure eventually causing a crash later in the campaign.
Miscellaneous:
- Fixed bug in Polygon renderer used to draw arrow heads, which caused random bits of memory to be unallocated.
- Unit Information area on right of screen in campaign and battle includes the unit's organisations (e.g. "1st Brigade, 2nd Corps, Army of the Potomac" instead of just "1st Brigade").
Version 1.1.2 beta, 12th October 1995
Campaign:
- Unit's and General's experiences are updated after battles.
- Visibility of enemy units set correctly when player is controlling both sides (using -P=B on command line).
- Facilities can be built on both sides when player controls both sides.
Version 1.1.1 beta, 26th September 1995
Game:
- Bugfix: Encyclopedia Icon works again!
- Bugfix: Loading a saved game works again!
Campaign:
- City Supplies and Resources are not increased while it is being sieged.
- Bugfix: Units don't alternate between occupying and unoccupying every pass through movement phase.
- Added a few missing railway links.
- Railway way-points can not be used for boarding / disemabarking from trains.
- Mouse Pointer changed to arrow during Movement Phase messages.
- Units withdrawing after losing a city battle will do so immediately instead of waiting till the next day.
- Bugfix: Regiment's supply levels reduced when appropriate.
- Bugfix: Merging regiments doesn't crash any more.
- Hospitals have an effect on recovery rate. Resting units in a city with a hospital will double the recovery rate. Being within about 30 miles will have a lesser effect.
- Unallocated Regiments in CAL have their type listed as well as their name.
- Naval Battle result: "Union suffered no damage" message was coming up even when referring to Conferedates.
- Naval Battle result: Flotillas of correct sides displayed. It was backwards before.
- Naval Battle result: Flotilla sizes are shown before any ship are sunk. Empty flottilas are displayed as "flotilla consisting of nothing" instead of "flotilla consisting of".
Battlefield:
Version 1.1.0 beta, 21st September 1995
Campaign:
- Designed and Implemented a completely new Campaign AI.
- Combat Value of cities changed:
- Capital cities have extra 10%
- Occupied cities have a much higher value based on their occupier.
- Larger Cities have higher value (up to 70%).
- Fixed bug that could cause building supply wagons to wrap the cities supply levels to small values.
- Naval Units can only be built in sea ports.
- Fixed bug with realism settings where low unit type realism prevented the facility and supply realism settings from working correctly.
- City Supply levels are shown in the City Information area.
- Resource generation adjusted so that small towns will produce more than they used to.
- City Supply rules rewritten to work as designed:
- Each town has a supply level
- They supply any troops that are nearby
- As they supply more troops then the supply level drops.
- As the supply level drops then they can not supply troops so well.
- New supplies can be created by building Supply Wagons
- Supply wagons can only be built if you have supply depot
- Town supplies are auto-updated a little every day, and also receive supplies from their capital city.
- Resource/Supply generation bugfix: Towns only supply other towns if they are controlled by the same side!
- Water routes are shown when highlighting naval units.
- Messages about Naval Battles are displayed during the movement phase.
- New regiments are named after the state they were built in rather than the city.
- Route Planner written, moving by land picks fastest route avoiding water, marsh, etc as appropriate. There are two route planning algorithms implemented: a fast one that simply avoids water, and a slow one that finds the quickest method taking into account the movement speed over different terrains. You can choose which one to use from the campaign options dialogue.
- Campaign Orders: 4 mode icons at bottom instead of 2:
- Any
- Move by fastest method [default].
- Land
- Only move by land
- Rail
- Only move by rail
- Water
- Only move by water
- Units rejoining command will use best route available instead of walking.
- Campaign Options added:
- Campaign Clock:
- On/Off, when off the clock does not move whilst giving orders in Campaign mode. You must click the clock icon to end the day.
- Route Planner:
- Quick or Full.
-
- Full
- Picks the fastest route taking into account movement rates on different terrain types. Not recommended unless you have a Pentium.
- Quick
- Route planner only avoids impassable terrain (e.g. sea).
- AI Passes:
- The maximum number of passes the Campaign AI will try when allocating orders to units. Low numbers will be quicker, but may not come up with as good orders as for higher values.
- Units on boats/trains can not be transferred until they arrive at their destination.
Battlefield:
- Infantry, Cavalry and Horse sprites all redrawn.
- Fixed bug that prevented reloading animation to be displayed.
- Animation speed is based on distance that units move instead of going as fast as possible!
- Fixed bug which may have caused Regiments to become independant.
- Artillery's decisive ranges increased to prevent them charging into enemy.
- Artillery with attack/charge orders will stop and fire instead of charging enemy.
- Formation rotation speeds reduced a lot!
Miscellaneous
- Saved game Filenames can be given on the command line to auto-load a
saved game. You must invoke the exectuable directly rather than
using the CIVIL.BAT e.g. type in:
exe\dwg.exe mysave.sav - Other command line options include:
- -c
- Go directly into campaign game
- -b
- Go directly into a battle game
- -p=USA
- Player is USA
- -P=CSA
- Player is CSA
- -P=0
- Player is nobody, AI plays itself
- -P=B
- Player controls both sides
- Various internal bugfixes and code tidying.