User Reviews (1 - 11 of 49)

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Windows XP home users are out of luck!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 15
Date: November 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When I tried to load this game on my new computer, I got an error message saying "lee.exe bad image The application or DLL C:\program files\firaxias games\Sid Meier's Civil War collection\smg\msvfw32.Dll is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette."
I wrote to the software company but so far no reply after months of waiting. Maybe you game buffs can figure it out? I'll check in from time to time to see if there is a reply to my note.

Are you kidding??

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 14
Date: April 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Sometimes I wonder if these reviewers have a personal interest.Ok I bought the civil war package. I'm a 50 year old guy who enjoys strategy games and thought it sounded fun. " Grant-ed" the historical parts are cool. But "Lee's" be frank, I had more fun watching paint dry. The optics reminded me of the early Command & Conquer series. Slow, boring, repetitive- almost got hemmeroids waiting for some action!If your a hard core Civil War buff you'll like it, if you like action try Command & Conquer Red Alert 2, and wait for Civil war to catch up to the 21st century!

Horrible Game - Stick with Age of Empires!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 28
Date: December 27, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game stinks. It reaks. My dog looked at me while I was playing it, and he was like, "Hey, why are you wasting your time with that garbage? Play Age, and wait for a decent Civil War RTS." Then he laid a big dog log on the floor to show what he thought of the game. YUCK!!

Too out of date...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I was looking for a cheap game that would hopefully give me a few hours of entertainment. This was not the right choice...way too out of date.

It's a Double Bummer

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: September 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

My grandson, age 14, and I both would have appreciated being specifically informed that this bummer will not run on Windows XP.

Game play and historic accuracy poor

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 12
Date: March 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game play is clumsy. For example, if your units are all bunched together, trying to select a specific brigade is difficult. You may click on a unit of that brigade, but for some reason, it doesn't select the brigade. Secondly, selecting a brigade commander is supposed to allow you to move all units in that brigade at once. That works - except your brigade commander doesn't have the option to move your units 'double quick', so you end up needing to move each brigade separately if you want them to get to their destination quickly.

The historic accuracy of the game might be there as far as the landscape and units available, but as far as how the units were deployed, it fails miserably. For example, in the pickett's charge scenario, the confederacy starts very close to the union and the union army is not dug in (what happened to the stone wall that protected the union forces which Longstreet used as one of his main reasons not to attack? He reminded Lee that the confederates had one a battle in the past because they were protected by a similar wall). Even in the intro, it says the confederacy needs to march 1 mile to reach the union (this is false - in reality they had to march 2 miles). In the real battle, the confederacy were slaughtered long before they reached the union - part way along the march, they had to get over a fence, which bunched up their forces and made them especially vulnerable to union cannon - none of this is reflected in the game.

By distorting such crucial strategic points, they can not hope to claim that this in anyway puts you in a true historic battle. One may dismiss these descrepencies, but these strategic points are exactly why one side or the other succeeds.

Speaking of cannon, there is very little variety - cannon at the time, if they did any research for this game, would show everything from grapeshot to cannister. The game doesn't offer any options for what to fire.

I don't understand these other reviews that give so many stars to the game. Its clumsy and historically inaccurate. Maybe the other reviewers are so desperate to finally have someone pay attention to their hobby by making a civil war game that they are incapable of reviewing it critically.

Buy Sid Meier's Gettysburg instead

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: September 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

For some reason, this collection of three games (Gettysburg, Antietam, South Mountain) has more technical glitches and bugs than the standalone release of Gettysburg. I experienced so many audio and video problems in Antietam and South Mountain that I have to pronounce them unplayable. Your results may vary, but Sid Meier's Gettysburg was a better buy for me.

Who took the "strategy" out of my strategy game?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 26 / 34
Date: October 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I just got this package, and let me first say that it is a great looking game, with an intuitive interface, and seemingly bug free. Here are my problems with the game:

1. The only strategic element in the game is when, where and how you move your units in to engage the enemy. That is pretty much it.

2. There are no recources to manage, nothing to collect, nothing to build, and nothing to research. You have no idea what type of weapons you or your enemy are using, and what the relative combat effectivness of those weapons are.

3. Unlike other civil war games I have played, victory points are somewhat meaningless, as they have no application to future scenarios or battles. For example, I have "Civil War General," a turn based Civil War game, and in that game, how badly you beat up on an opponent, and thereby how much "supply" you obtain from making him give up ground, counts towards your total supply points, which then allows you to purchase better weapons for your troops in future parts of the campaign. Without this consideration, as in this game, there is little point to going the extra mile to really trounce your opponent, you merely have to meet the scenario's objective, and that is it.

4. The game eventually boils down to you sitting there and watching your guys shoot. You do not have to monitor their morale, organization or health. The units even retreat on their own. You also have no idea of your unit's relative combat effectivness from a numerical standpoint v. the opposing unit you want to engage. You also have no control over who your unit directs its fire against, you just move them into relative proximity with the enemy and they start shooting.

5. While the map is beautiful, it is difficult to determine what is high and low ground, and whether your unit is on that area. In other games of this genre, your unit's info card will tell you their elevation and level of cover, however, there is no such feed-back in this game except what kind of terrain you are on, (grass, woods, etc.) You really have no conception of how the terrain affects your unit from a numerical standpoint, only that one type of terrain is better than another. Without this info, it is very difficult to decide how and where to conduct an attack.

As this game is only $15 it is well worth buying, and it is very historically accurate. I just would have liked to have seen it in a campaign type mode with the above considerations, it really has potential.

VG game, needs a major overhaul for XP

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 24 / 24
Date: March 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I love Sid Meier's games. I had never played Gettysburg before but have always been fascinated by the battle. I picked up the Civil War Collection for under $20 the other day and have been both exhilarated and significantly disappointed with it.

First, the exhilarating stuff:

The gameplay is very interesting and can be extremely challenging. I've been playing RTS games for years, including AoE, AoK, AoKTC, Empire Earth, Empires: DMW, RoN, AoM and a couple of others. Gettysburg is refreshing compared these games because your sole focus is fighting (no economy to micro-manage) and the fighting is far more historically accurate than other RTS games in terms of the use of formations, flanking attacks, morale and line of sight.

Take note that another recent review has stated some things that aren't correct: Brigade commanders can move regiments at the Double-Quick simply by pressing "Q" while the Commander is selected, and while the units are already moving to a destination. Also incorrect is the assertion that cannon do not fire "canister" rounds at close range. This element of game design is transparent, but it is noted in the manual that all cannon (especially Napoleon batteries) do more damage from close range than from a distance - in order to simulate the use of canister rounds by intelligent artillery officers, so no need to micro-manage this.

Second, the not so good stuff:

The game is now 8 years from original release, and it shows in ways that are crucial to the player's ability to actually play it. Most players are using Windows 2000 or XP these days, and the Antietam and South Mountain add-on games don't actually work fully on XP. There is no sound for the add-ons, which is a shame because they are actually newer code than the original Gettysburg is. Of course, Firaxis has a "patch" that "allows" the Windows XP platform to run the game, but the patch is incomplete and there are still major issues with the game as a result. For instance, one can't see the name of saved games when trying to reload an ongoing battle! Also, there are issues with map scrolling which cripple enjoyment of the game. Specifically, after loading up the game and playing the first scenario of the day, you cannot continue to the next scenario in sequence because the map will not scroll at all. So you are forced to shut down CWC and restart it to get the scrolling screen back. This is VERY annoying.

I've tested these issues on two completely different XP machines over the last week, and it is a consistent problem with both with a default install of the game (default directories, etc.). The game is broken; perhaps because of a DirectX incompatibility (I have 9.0c (latest version) on both XP systems.

So, very good game with major bugs for XP users. If you're still running Windows 98, go ahead and get it. Sid, please have Firaxis fix/update this game!

A Patch for Windows 2000 and XP

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: February 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

There is a download available at the firaxis.com website to allow Civil War to run on Win2K and XP.

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