North vs. South

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Review: North vs. South

War is hell, as General Sherman once said, but it's different kinds of hell in different times and places. Armaments, rules of engagement, command structures, and terrain make the ancient battles of Greece and Rome distinct from those of the Union and the Confederacy--a fact which developer Erudite seems to have ignored while designing its new turn-based strategy game. An attempt to prybar the American Civil War into the Great Battles engine (Alexander; Caesar; Hannibal), North vs. South is an almost unmitigated disaster.

Let's start with morale. In NvS, it heavily outweighs active strength in determining a unit's resolve to face the enemy. This was accurate enough in Greco-Roman times, when casualties and troop numbers were relatively light and discipline spotty even among the fabled Roman legions.

But by the 19th century, large armies regularly obeyed orders to remain under fire in horrific conditions. Thus, out of about 75,000 troops fighting in the bloodbath that was Antietam, more than 21,000 died. Applying the Great Battles' morale-based system to Antietam in particular and the Civil War in general, is wrongheaded and produces unrealistic results.

As much can be said for another major failing of North vs. South: It vastly underrates the power of artillery and concentrated fire from infantry. The war was not decided by pitched melee battles, but you wouldn't know it by playing this game.

Then there's the inability of the Great Battles series to represent its generals' strengths and weaknesses in more than the most generic terms--namely, the number of commands an officer can issue to surrounding units and the distance to which that control extends.

This approach would be fine if the general was Julius Caesar, whose orders were executed on the fly by comparatively small groups of expert soldiers, but the Civil War owed its battlefield initiatives to an elaborate chain of command, extended lines of communications, and personal enterprise. By not personalizing the differences between individual generals to a greater extent--including their occasional arbitrariness and refusal to put orders ahead of on-the-spot decisions--Erudite has severely compromised the game's accuracy.

The upside: The graphics are attractive, though the interface contains too many buttons that perform similar functions. Scenarios can be edited this time around, and they load at a swifter pace than those in the Great Battles trilogy. North vs. South plays competently over a LAN, the Internet, or via modem, but it plays like a generic turn-based strategy game that's been poorly adapted to its subject.

I could cite many other examples of the game's historical blundering, but one more will suffice: The game's accompanying documentation discusses the war only in a short introduction--one rife with factual errors. For example, the Democratic Party didn't field three candidates in 1860, but two. Lincoln's predecessor as president was James Buchanan, not Franklin Buchanan.

Anybody can make mistakes, but lax fact-checking only reinforces everything stated above. North vs. South is a moribund turn-based war engine perfunctorily slipped into Civil War costume. And unfortunately, the costume doesn't fit.-- Barry Brenesal / GamePro