Read The Interview With Jeff Briggs of Firaxis, Inc.

• Over 20 brand new scenarios with historical and speculative variants (giving over 120 separate situations) including full and half-day battles.
• A random scenario generator with 4 types of engagements including small skirmishes, minor altercations, moderate engagement and large battle.
• New terrain types including standing corn, stubble fields, plowed fields, bridges, fords, sunken roads and embankments.
• Special units rendered in historically detailed uniforms including Union and Confederate, Zouaves, Sharpshooters, Texas Brigade, Iron Brigade, Louisiana Tigers and Ragged Confederates.
• Meticulous research by Civil War historian and game designer Joe Balkoski and the Firaxis team:

  • Most detailed contour map of the battlefield ever seen.
  • Excerpts of the never-before-published manuscript by Ezra Carman, commander of the 13th New Jersey Volunteer infantry at the battle of Antietam.
  • Exhaustive research on units and troop positions.
  • Historically-accurate nicknames for almost every regiment and battery in the battle.
• New easy to use interface features

  • Fire effectiveness indicators to show which regiments are doing the most damage
  • "Can't do that, General" explanations
  • New easier-to-use Command Bars
  • New scenario picker screen with hypertext map display and photographic views of the battlefield
• A whole host of AI enhancement and new order features, improving the fun and realism, requested by loyal Gettysburg! fans.

  • Line of sight is improved for realism
  • Artillery can fire into edges of woods at moving or firing enemy units
  • Regiments can move through towns only in column formation and will not rout into towns
  • Regiments will cross Antietam Creek only at fords and bridges. Units will not enter Rivers.
  • Volley fire has been changed to a firing mode in which the regiment will fire only in volleys
  • Artillery can be ordered to hold its fire until the enemy is within canister range
  • Regiments currently in melee can not be given orders except retreat
  • Fallback orders can be issued only to regiments that are currently in command
  • Brigade retreat and fallback commands

Courtesy of Jeroen Hill

Basically Antietam will be the sequel to Gettysburg but Antietam will certainly have some new and advanced features.

Terrain

The game is played on a huge 3D map on which you can zoom, scroll and rotate. Just as in Gettysburg, the map again has detailed terrain features like streams, trees and peach orchards but also hills, rocks and knolls, That are the things where you would rather not have the enemy on when going into battle.

One of the important fields where the armies clashed was the Cornfield and Firaxis put it in the game indeed, when moving your men into the cornfield they of course step on the corn and the corn will actually be stubble. Expect to find more terrain features like Fords, plowed fields and of course the Sunken Road which is entrenched terrain to all troops. Antietam! will feature the 3 bridges the Union army needed to cross the Antietam Creek and I have seen a screen shot of those and they are even more detailed and bigger then the bridges you saw in Gettysburg. To simulate engagements like Burnside's bridge Firaxis made sure that only way to cross Antietam Creek is by putting your troops in maneuver column and march over the bridge.

New Unit Features and Orders

Firaxis listened to requests from the fans and designed new units and worked on all the uniforms. What I've heard and what Firaxis confirmed, the Confederate regiments will have that "poor" look like they used to. Meaning that in 1 regiment you could see men with butternut uniforms, men with gray jackets and blue pants and a slouch hat or a kepi. It is not clear if the Union regular infantry will also have different uniforms, I did saw a regiment with those bags on their bag and another regiment without them. In Antietam you will also find the special famous units. So far we know that Firaxis put these regiments in the game : Sharp Shooters, Zouaves, Iron brigade, Irish brigade, Texas brigade and also the famous Louisiana Tigers.

Firaxis designed some great orders and commands for your units. Brigades will now have the possibility to Fall back or retreat all at once. A new feature or should I say AI behavior is the fact that regiments in melee combat won't respond to orders except retreat. The Volley command we saw in Gettysburg is now more of an mode, A regiment can be put in volley mode meaning that they will fire volley after volley without the player having to be involved. Artillery will be able to switch into Canister mode, that means that they will hold their fire until the enemy is within Canister range AKA"Masked Batteries".

At Antietam the Union had some very big green regiments, some of them never even fired a shot so they are at full strength, a Thousand men! Gettysburg had a limit on the size of regiments but Antietam's limit was raised, it will feature full sized regiments like it should. Lee's army was almost a third the size of McClellan's army, but all that were left were hard-core fighters in regiments as small as 60 men. Firaxis created a new "Elite" morale level for some of these units and played with the fire effectiveness algorithm to simulate the results of very large green regiments facing very small hardened regiments.

Multiplayer

Right now there is a rumor that Mplayer.com will not support Sid Meier's Antietam! Firaxis confirmed that in an e-mail to me but they said that they were planning to get it on the Microsoft Gaming Zone. This means that we'll loose the cool chat box features of Mplayer.com but in return we get faster games cause Zone servers are simply much faster nor does the Zone have maintenance times so you can always play.

System requirements

This is what Jeff Briggs said : "They are the same."

Where to get it, when to get it, and how much will it be

It will be available on the Firaxis web site were you can order it so it won't be available in your local game store! The game will cost only $24.95 and Antietam will also have a 1,800 page thick manuscript called Ezra Carmen's Battle of Antietam, which was written by the commander of the 13th New Jersey Volunteer infantry who had become obsessed with the battle. The manuscript records what happened at the battle in extreme detail. Firaxis contacted a university professor who was preparing a five-volume set of books detailing the Civil War and who translated the manuscript for Firaxis. That exclusive manuscript will be available in fully printable form when Antietam releases.

This review was written by Jeroen Hill with special thanks to Jeff Briggs from Firaxis for answering my questions.

Top