What 18th and 19th Century Battles Would You Like to Receive with General Staff?

We have decided to reward backers of General Staff on Kickstarter with thirty (yes, thirty!) battles / scenarios for the General Staff Wargaming System. They can be any battle, skirmish or detail of a battle (think the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg, for example). The only restrictions are they should be battles with a limit of about thirty units per side (the map just gets too crowded with more than 60 units running around) and there should be two superior levels of command (e. g. if we were to do Gettysburg there would be the  Army Commander and the Corps Commanders with divisions being the units represented on the map).

Let your imagination run wild! What battles, scenarios or skirmishes would you like to see? Please post in the comment section below, or use this handy Contact Us email form or write to me directly at Ezra [at] RiverviewAI.com

Screen capture of a scenario using a map of Trenton and General Washington’s Continental Army. Click to enlarge.

 

 

Creating Victory Conditions in General Staff

The General Staff Wargaming System provides users with the tools to create scenarios of their own design. These scenarios can be historical battles or they can be ‘what if’ scenarios (e.g. what if Custer had brought Gatling guns to the Little Big Horn or what if Robert E. Lee fought Wellington). To determine the victor of these scenarios or battles we need to have a predetermined set of Victory Conditions. Below is a screen shot of the Edit Scenario Victory Conditions screen:

The Victory Point editing screen in the General Staff Scenario Editor. Click to enlarge.

And below is a screen shot of the self-checking error function for setting Victory Points:

General Staff automatically checks for impossible victory conditions. Click to enlarge.

The General Staff Wargaming System is designed to give maximum flexibility to the scenario designer. It fully supports creating scenarios from 18th and 19th century armies and any map.

How to Edit Unit Speeds in General Staff

We recently had a series of very spirited discussions about the speed of units in various formations and across different terrain types during the Napoleonic Era in the Facebook Wargaming groups. A number of people were very kind to forward documents, tables and charts that had estimates of unit speeds. But, one thing that quickly became apparent was there was quite a bit of disagreement about, “how fast could a unit march,” in the 19th century.

Furthermore, we hadn’t even begun to talk about battles that took place in bad weather (the battles of Stone’s River and Fort Donnelson during the American Civil War come to mind).

The solution, obviously, was to allow the user (the scenario designer) to have complete control over these values. Consequently, we’ve added a very easy to use utility to facilitate editing and displaying unit speeds in various formations across different terrains.

Below is a video we created that demonstrates these utilities:

First Look at the General Staff Scenario Editor

The General Staff Scenario Design module allows users to create new battle scenarios by combining any two armies created in the General Staff Army Design module with any map created in the General Staff Map Design module. 

This screen shot of the General Staff Scenario Editor shows how victory conditions are established for a scenario. Click to enlarge.

The General Staff Wargaming System allows users to create armies, maps and battles from the Age of Gunpowder. These can be historical recreations or completely new ‘what if’ scenarios.

How to Import Scanned Maps Into the General Staff Wargaming System Video Tutorial

We just completed the second tutorial video: How to Import Scanned Maps Into the General Staff Wargaming System. These video tutorials are available both on YouTube and they are accessible directly from the General Staff Map Design Module itself. Many thanks to Jason A. Stuart for the narration and Ed Isenberg for the tremendous video editing.