The American Civil War

[Bilbo_Sacket]

We are excited to release to you fellow Wesnoth Fans, a little treat. For those of you that have played Eastern Europe at War, the Infantry Wars Era, or 18th Century Warfare, this mod will probably appeal to you. This is going to be another historic mod to add to your *favorite* mod library. The American Civil War has long had an appeal, naturally, to our very American Team. We wanted to have a mod for The Battle for Wesnoth on the Civil War for the longest time and have found a way to make it work for you guys. The Civil War is an important part of our history, (I hope you Europeans and others out there can appreciate it too) showing the resilience of our freedoms. The point of history is, for us at least, to look back and see the inspiring things of yesterday, to collect new heroes, and to have a hope for our tomorrows.
So, our new mod! Well, what is it like? I highly recommend that you download it and find out, but basically the flavor of it is a cool experience of the battlefields, the cool tactics and new weapons that would transform into the modern age of warfare. We have used current Wesnoth mechanics to create a reliance on formation, nifty leadership opportunities (often customized to the character) and packed unit descriptions with cool bios and stories to make your Wesnoth experience emersed in the period. As it has recently been released, it is mostly designed for a multiplayer PvP experience, but you can also face the AI. We are working on improving the AI for future releases, as well as campaigns, custom maps, eventually adding period music such as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" and "Dixie," terrain, and other customized features. To assist in the battlefield feel of our era, we are shifting a little bit away from an RPG gameplay, using AMLA's to retain Civil War texture. Our art is all original except for real deal portraits (photos taken before 1920 are copyright free) which we gave to various characters. You can also look foreword to intense naval engagements, multi hex shooting artillery and more in the future.

here are some screenshots from our testing phase.

battle lines being drawn

rewarding brave soldiers

Note that this is the place where we will make announcements concerning our progress, as well as use this place for collecting feedback ideas, and contributions. We are very open to receiving any of these, if they support the main goal, which is portraying the American Civil War with the greatest detail, and allowing people to view the war in a different light than it is often shown in the history books.

[Atreides]

I may be a Canadian but as a long time wargamer the ACW has been a major fascination of mine. Partly it started with TV shows such as North and South and partly with the classic SSI game Rebel Charge at Chickamauga (due to which I've mostly played the South) in the 80's.

Of this type of mod I've actually only downloaded the Battleground Europe so far. This would be the second.

[Atreides]

Just DLed this and there's a small problem that ought to be repaired. It has a dependency of none. I mean it tries to DL "none" and can't find it. I'm pretty sure that the pbl file has a teeny error in that dependency is written wrong or included where it should not be. (Ack ever since I took a webreak to follow the war I'm getting rusty very fast!) Anyways just pointing it out that it might look confusing to newbies when they get it. It doesn't break anything.

OK I checked and while I don't have the pbl the info.cfg shows that it has a "none" instead of "". That's it. : )

Looking forward to trying this out when I start playing again.

[Bilbo_Sacket]

We just recently finished checking for copyrights on the music that will be used in this era, so we will probably fix that when we update next. Thanks for the feedback!

[Atreides]

We just recently finished checking for copyrights on the music that will be used in this era, so we will probably fix that when we update next. Thanks for the feedback!

Civil War era music by any chance? That'd be awesome. I think I _still_ have the Ashokan Farewell earworm even after decades (from Ken Burns' classic doc : )

[Bilbo_Sacket]

Just DLed this and there's a small problem that ought to be repaired. It has a dependency of none. I mean it tries to DL "none" and can't find it

The error should be fixed now, in addition we have now put out the music as well, here is a list of what we included.

• The Bonnie Blue Flag

• Dixieland

• Kelly's Irish Brigade

• When Johnny comes Marching home

• The Star-Spangled Banner

• The 111th new York

• The Battle Cry of Freedom

• Fife and Drum

• Hell on the Wabash

[Bilbo_Sacket]

In addition, there was a little error, it appears that I had forgotten to include the race in the _main.cfg file so none of the units had names, that has also been fixed along with a few other small errors.

[Bilbo_Sacket]

We have started the beginning stages of a campaign that follows The Army of the Potomac in the eastern theatre. General Hancock is the main character, and the campaign will begin during McClellan's Peninsula campaign, and end at the famous battle of Gettysburg. We have also started working on animations for some of the units which we hope to release soon. We are also looking into adding more music to the MP version. We're working hard and will have a new update soon.

[Atreides]

Hi! I finally am back to Wesnoth playing and at last I got to try this. It is spectacular!

Buuut... alas I got a lua error when my P10 attacked and killed a enemy Colonel.
game_error: unknown unit type: ConfederateStatesBrigadierGeneral
followed by a stack traceback and some esoteric stuff I won't retype

The music is amazing. The graphics are stunning. The unit descrips are wow... I started to read about my leader (Longstreet - heh he was 54/62 in his class... ironic) but it was so long I decided to save that for later. The artillery abilities seem spot on (I built 2 arty at start - not a wise move but hey) and the different ammos are incredible.

Hmmm I just noticed that I wrote P10... that's the Parrot. That was it's designation in the old 80's SSI civwar games 10 pounder parrot rifled artillery. : )

p.s.
After playing some more it's only that Confed Col that causes the error every time it dies. Everything else works fine. Except that there was a really strange advancement for the Con Col he could become a Col or a Vet Inf or a Sharpshooter??? Looking through the unit database for the era I noticed a few possible oddities. A bunch of factionless units that I suspect ought to belong to one side or the other (such as Conf. Brigadier). Advancements are _so_ easy to get mixed up, I've fixed a lot myself. The webpage database is invaluable as an aid for spotting them I've found.

Oh and a note on how the AI recruits: It seems very fond of Officer units. Too fond perhaps. It's been rather easy to kill them with inf/arty.

[Bilbo_Sacket]

Many of the problems you refer to especially the ai, have been fixed in updated versions of our mod. If any of the problems are still there, though please contact us. I am glad you are enjoying it!

[Bilbo_Sacket]

We've been working on a campaign to go with our mod. We're excited to release it, but we only have a very small programmer team. If there are any of you who would like to participate, we have a few projects, particularly for people who know what they're doing with terrain. We also have a couple of other projects. If you're interested, we highly suggest you check out our mod American Civil War. Thank you for any help or considerations.

[Elliess]

It looks very intriguing and I can't wait to try to play.

[PapaSmurfReloaded]

The art style is so cool, big ups!

[Mechanical]

Helo guys! I found a bug - "capture artillery" ability has no description and didn't work

[Transfermium]

If this project is still active in any shape or form, I did make a map of the Eastern Theatre of the American Civil War a while back - unfortunately, I've since lost the list of placenames for the villages (though IIRC I did place them according to some period maps).