Initial guide to Grand Tactician: the Civil War

This will be a rolling updated guide as I play this game more

Initial campaign

The 1861 campaign is buggy. Start at 1862. I do recommend saving it every 5 days so if it crashes you don't lose too much

Campaign warfare

So when you begin the campaign (I start at 1862) you will notice there a bunch of fully formed armies in places like MS, TN, all over VA, FL.

I recommend you consolidate. To move an army, you click on the army logo, and then right click on the area you want the army to go. At that time you can then select the transportation mode by left clicking on the ones you do not want (there are sea, road, and railroad, and usually all three options are highlighted- so for example, if I wanted to go by road I'd click on railroad and sea and those would go gray). Then click the check mark at the bottom and after the order delay, your army will move by road to where you wanted it to go.

Order delays are the big thing to get used to in this game. In the actual war, you didn't have radios to talk to someone immediately to do something. You had to send a horseman to that person to give orders, and that person had to send horsemen to his subordinates to give the further orders, so moving a division or more was a time consuming task. So you want to try to always think ahead and get your corps/armies moving and close together at opportune times.

Also, you want to keep your corps in headquarters distance of the main army, that way, if a big fight begins, like at gettysburg for example, all the army can concentrate

Tactical battles

Tactical battles are the meat of the game, what all that maneuvering and recruiting and whatnot is supposed to get you to. After messing around with this game for a while, I think I've figured out a little bit of how to make a battle go (at least a land battle, haven't done a siege yet).

So you will start in the deployment phase, with your army of whatever size on the field/coming.

Now you can have a whole army present, or you can have piece of it present (if you look in the command report you can see full Order Of Battle and if any reinforcements are coming- such as gettysburg where you start with I and XI Corps for the US and more arrive later).

So let us operate under the idea that you have one corps of three divisions

So you can look at your tactical map from the deployment and it will be the far off third person view. Now, depending on what objectives there are and which ones are lit up in your enemies colors, you can make a strategy. You can click your army commander and move the whole army to a certain spot. You can go down to each division commander and place one in a different spot, which will move each commander's division to that area. You have a deployment range. Once you have positioned the troops to your desire, then you click play and the battle goes.

So, when it comes to tactical infantry combat- you have three things to worry about- weapon type, cover, and distance to orders. A brigade of 2000 with rifles will have a longer range than a brigade of 2000 with muskets. Infantry has three order sets for firing- long, medium, and short range, and whichever you select is whichever range your men will open fire. So if you have long range selected on a musket brigade, that will maybe be 100 yards; meanwhile, if your men have Lorenz or Enfield, that may be 3 times as much. So be wary of that when you begin a fight.

Use cover like trees and roads to your advantage. When you position a brigade you can right click and hold it to swing the facing of the unit. the unit will be positioned based on frontage available, so if you try to stick 2000 men in between a 50 yard fence gap that won't work, but if you put them on an open hillside, you will get a nice straight line. So beware of this too. Trees, fences, walls are all good cover. High ground is great. Funnel points like bridges and fords can lead to massive enemy casualties

Distance from ordering generals also matters. You could turn initiative on and detach a unit to get them to function on their own. But if you don't, and you are doing the normal courier system, then you have to realize there will be an order delay. Let's say you have the high ground and you're blowing your enemy to hell. You see the bodies hit the floor and figure soon you can get a brigade to do the bayonet charge. But there will be a delay because the brigade commander has to send peopel to the regimental commanders to tell them they can charge soon. So you would want to give the order just a bit before you think the enemy will be wavering so it actually happens.

This distance also matters if it comes to maneuvering under fire/surprise. the closer your general, the quicker your men will react

Indepth tactical battles

So I will speak on in-depth tactical battles, using a battle I recently fought- Wilson's Creek- CS- 1861

I begun with Sterling Price and his army of 5600 men. I had three brigades of about 650 each, a brigade of 1300, a cavalry brigade of 1200, a battery of 120, and a brigade of about 700

We were coming from the direction of Wilson's creek. The first thing to do is send people off to capture objectives. In general an objective will change color when your opponent or yourself captures it. This is a good initial way to determine what direction your enemy is coming from

So I begun and headed north on the map towards a farm field with fences on it. I sent three of my 650 man brigades to this fence, along with my 2000 cavalry brigade (dismounted). I sent my 700 man brigade off to my left to capture an objective and announce myself. My battery and my 1300 man brigade was in reserve. So off we go.



here are my three brigades lined up in the farmfield near the fence.



here is my dismounted shotgun cavalry and my 700 man brigade coming up in the rear
So, before we get into the action let me explain how positioning seems to work. Line of sight seems to matter. If your men cannot see they will not shoot, however, if your enemy can see they will shoot. Also weapons matter. If you have smoothbores and your opponent has Mississippi rifles your only shot is to either get close OR be in a situation in which distance is negated, like fighting in the woods or something. Even hiding behind a fence, if you are outranged you will get shot up.

So we lined up behind the fence and as you can see Gen. Lyon's army is marching down the road towards us. So they came, crossed the river, deployed, and advanced in line lickety split. I then brought up my battery to place in the field as well as my 1300 man brigade



So the action started. It immediately went bad for me because all my men mostly had mixed muskets so my range was much shorter. so I had to move them immediately up to the fenceline and have my battery bombard them. Their brigade of 2000 men came at my left flank, but they got entrapped between my left hand most 650 man brigade and my cavalry + 700 man brigade coming to hit them in the ass.

Now this leads to my next topic, morale. At this time in the battle it was going poorly for me. 650 men with mixed muskets aren't going to defeat 2000 infantrymen with springfield 1842s. Neither will 1200 shotgun cavalry, nor will individually 700 men with Mississippi rifles.



But morale will decrease fast when you are being shot at from all edges. These 2200 men were the lynchpin of the opposing army, When you are getting musketry from in front, artillery bombardment from a field, cavalry shotguns hitting you from behind, and mississippi rifles hitting you from behind, eventually green troops will run, and that's what happened. I only inflicted about 300 casualties but I DEVASTATED their morale, and so that brigade ran.



Then I used my 1300 men on the right flank to hit their infantry and roll up their artillery, and brought my cavalry down to do the same on the left, an victory was complete, despite being slightly outnumbered and outgunned.


Weapons matter. You have to outrange your enemy or get close
Height matters. But not so high that you can't see what to aim at.
Morale matters. You don't have to kill everyone. Just hit them from so many edges that they get scared and run away. This is when charging is effective.

Artillery is best served using bombardment in an area, rather than picking out indiviudal brigades or batteries. Just hit the whole area with an arty barrage and decrease morale for multiple units rather than just one

[SDW1000]

@williamcarter1993 Well it's been a year and half since I've made that comment. I hope they've updated the game by now.

[williamcarter1993]

@SDW1000 very much so. I have been thinking of making a new one at some point but I might wait for the DLC

[One Eyed Jack]

Thanks friend ,this has helped a lot !

[SDW1000]

Slightly out of date info now..lol

[webartist30]

Thanks for this guide!!!! :) this game is going to freaking rock when its completed, imagine when they upgrade the graphics of the ground and trees and uniforms etc. Its quite an involving game and the replay value will be incredible. And further along get the behavior of the generals and HQs of that time down to perfection.

[GrandpaGoose69]

do you have any insight on Policies? bit confused as my policy trees don't continue to advance, such as the diplomacy (can only get up to diplomacy 2) or industrialization(industry 2) policies. are there pre-req policies for others? or is it simply a matter of waiting long enough for policies further down to become unlocked?

[williamcarter1993]

for some reason washington autobattles because you are not fighting the army alone, you are also fighting the surrounding city fortifications

[Pontax]

why does it autobattle some battles I want to fight? I was at washington with my entire army and it auto resolved my entire work I did to get my armies there?

[williamcarter1993]

also I did update with the recent part on tactical battles

[williamcarter1993]

because I work full time and it's not in video game testing