Fang, I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with your points here.
Main combat unit during this war was the Infantry man, spring does not currently have very good methods for animating organic complicated models.. Infantry tend to look terrible, no matter how much effort is put into them.
It would be more accurate to describe combat during the war as infantry being used to force other infantry into a position where it could be killed efficiently by artillery, tbh.
Which is why, as the war ground onwards, trench-warfare tactics became prevalent, to neutralize the North's growing advantages in overall artillery. The Civil War was the last major "pre-modern" conflict- fought mainly with one-shot rifles, no machineguns, and fairly lousy artillery. The improvements in rifles over previous conflicts, both in terms of rate of fire (about 3 per minute) range (about 500 yards, effective) and accuracy (about 500 yards, firing on a mass, about 200 yards, individual targets) made a huge difference over previous pre-modern conflicts, because they were finally accurate enough for massed fire to be effective at hundreds of meters, as opposed to slightly over a hundred meters, at the time of the Napoleonic wars.
But it was artillery's vastly improved reliability, accuracy, and deadliness that really made the biggest difference. It simply wasn't possible to have infantry sit out artillery fire, even if it wasn't massed. Despite what the movies often show, Civil War artillery was almost always firing fuse-timed explosives, contact-fused explosives... or cannister. You can't just sit around, when your opponent can put an airbursting shell full of shot overhead every minute or two.
The infantry either had to retreat, dig trenches, or advance. This wasn't such a big factor during the first two years of the war, but as of about 1863 onwards, more modern artillery made a giant difference. Moreover, most of that advantage was on the North's side.
Many battles were won almost entirely on the power of artillery against infantry, especially on bad ground, such the main battle in Gettysburg, where the South pretty much destroyed themselves trying to dig artillery out of high positions that overlooked their only real axis of retreat. See Picket's Charge
Lastly... infantry can look pretty good in Spring. SWS has good-looking infantry, for example. They're just hard to achieve. And there's the pre-animated mesh approach, which nobody has actually tried yet... it works for tank-tracks, and might look good for infantry, too...
Scope of the civil war was not small battles.. we are talking HUGE numbers of men involved in large battles.
Not true at all! There were dozens and dozens of small battles, skirmishes, etc., in addition to the large, set-piece battles that we normally associate with the war. You're thinking of WWI. There were lots of small battles in the Civil War, determined by hundreds, not thousands.
Moreover, from a game-design POV, scale is relative. One guy may represent 10. Nobody said they were building a simulation.
both the Union and Confederate infantry basically all had the same equipment.. a rifled musket, (this was different for north and south) and clothing.. The only thing that seperated the men out, was training, and leadership..
While it wasn't WWII,
there was considerable variety of weapons used , and very large differences in quality. Moreover,
as this points out, technological advances during the war made a major difference in the effectiveness of arms during the war.
All the gameplay is going to then have to focus on manuvering around the map, and out thinking the enemy.. which will require large maps, with some sort of take and hold point system, ala either world in conflict, or something else.. essentially following the sid meiers game Gettysburg..
This is now quite possible. With LUA, we can easily define "cities" on a map, that are the sole source of resources.
With no radar, and a large map, combat could very well be defined in terms of finding, holding and ultimately either capturing or destroying cities in order to win the war. Without radar, even with a fairly realistic sight distance you could have very realistic battles, where horsemen might have to <gasp> actually serve as scouts.
As for formations... line-move adequately depicts how real maneuvers went. It's not like everybody moved in perfect blocks all of the time- in fact, that only happened during set-piece combat, and then only before tactical maneuvering began in earnest. So what, if players have to set up their lines manually, to have set-piece combat? If they design their units well, then using lines will actually make sense, for the same reasons it did IRL- if, for example, the guns fire in ballistic arcs with high velocities and range, putting collide / avoidFriendly on 1 will cause players to not use clumps, because then only the front of the clump can fire, whereas the entire line of the other guy can fire. Making people stop to aim, like they have to IRL (even with modern rifles, pretty much, unless you're just spraying) will mean that clumps running up on lines will just get owned, and advancing in lines will make complete sense to the tactical player.
Why make the engine the blocking point, when it really isn't?
although the models will be differently textured.. and the big AT guns will be cannons instead :D
