@wittmann:
This would be my favourite game, but Larry has said on his site that he has not yet reconciled how the economics can work. The South cannot compete financially. I see his point.( And feel his pain.) It has to be turn based and have a cut off point. The November 64 election is the obvious one.
How an A&A-style Civil War game could work is an interesting theoretical question. As you’ve mentioned, the economic element would be a tough nut to crack. In very general terms, perhaps the rough parallel with A&A would be that, in A&A, the Axis starts out militarily strong but economically weak, and thus needs to hit hard and fast before the Allies can crank up their economic output and overwhelm the Axis with sheer numbers. This is a bit similar to the situation that existed at the beginning of the Civil War, but with important differences too. At the start of the conflict, the Confederacy wasn’t really militarily stronger than the Union from a numeric point of view, and wasn’t in a position to invade and conquer Union territory on a large scale (something which, in any case, wasn’t its strategic objective). Rather, the Confederacy was in a fairly good position to fight a defensive war to hold its own territory (this being its actual strategic objective), in part because its armed forces had high motivation and good leadership (especially when compared with the Union side, which was lacking in both areas in the first half of the war). This point, however, raises another difficult issue: should the game system “force” the Union player to replicate the Union’s command deficiencies for the 1861-1863 period, and if so how? I for one would be unhappy with built-in “idiocy rules” that forced me to make the Union’s mistakes.
Your idea about the November 1864 election serving as an end-point is a good one. Instead of the game having A&A-type victory cities for both sides, perhaps it could have political victory conditions on the Confederate side and geographic victory conditions on the Union side. The Confederate objective would be to convince the North that it could never win militarily, i.e. that the best it could ever achieve against the South would be a stalemate. This could be tracked on some sort of political points scale, with a victory being achieved on the Confederate side either by reaching a very high level at any point in the game (at which point the Union quits), or by reaching a somewhat lower level by the November 1864 election (at which point Lincoln loses the election, and his successor is presumed to make peace with the Confederacy). For the Union, victory could be achieved either by occupying a large percentage of the Confederacy’s territory, or by occupying and holding a smaller number of territories that have a higher political value (Virginia would be a key objective).