Command Lines: Why We Need Thinking Soldiers

The Confederate brigades of Generals Jubal Early and Isaac Trimble were heavily engaged along a forest road on my left flank, and near the breaking point. Half their regiments were regrouping a few hundred yards behind the line, having been shot to pieces over the last hour of hard combat, and before long I'd be forced to send those scared, exhausted troops back into battle to assist their comrades. My center and right flanks were collapsing and completely open, respectively, and the battle was teetering on the edge of disaster when General Winder's exhausted division finally arrived from a hard day's march in 90-degree weather.

Without a second's respite, I ordered Winder to deploy his division for assault on the right flank. Then, when his brigades were arrayed in four long assault lines, one behind the other, I set him to an attack stance and gave a new destination: the Union gun batteries that were shelling Early and Trimble. A courier rode off with the orders, and a few minutes later Winder's division surged across the long, open field to the exposed Union left. Then I went back to managing the crisis on my left: General Winder could take care of the right flank by himself, but the battle was over if I lost the left.

Upper Management

This is the neat thing about Take Command: 2nd Manassas and its successor, Gettysburg: Scourge of War: you always have the option of seizing direct control of your subordinate units and moving them as you will, but it's more effective to work through the chain of command. The size and scope of battles in TC2M makes even the biggest Total War melees look like minor skirmishes, so for most of us, the only way to effectively manage it is to give orders to division commanders and let them direct their brigade commanders (who, in turn, control individual regiments) into combat. They don't always do it well, but usually competently enough.


When the chips are down and a regiment needs to be positioned perfectly, I'll grab hold of it and give it direct orders, but as on a real battlefield, there are too many units for a single commander to direct individually. If you have set a unit to respond only to your direct commands, it will take no initiative no matter what happens around it, so there are serious risks to biting off more than you can chew.

The Take Command series takes a risk in how it removes power from players' hands, but adapting to those limitations supplies ample rewards. Playing the series today, more than 10 years after it came out, I am reminded all over again of how dull it can be to command manageable armies that do exactly what I tell them. Chaos, unpredictability, and confusion are hard to convey when so much of good game design is about good feedback and responsive controls. We are used to having godlike control over armies and kingdoms, but Take Command strips that away. You have a good set of tools for commanding your armies, but they're not quite up to the task of micro-managing them in massive, complicated battles. It seems like it should be frustrating, but somehow it's intoxicating.

Independent Minded

Take Winder's attack, for example. While I was frantically rallying the exhausted and nearly broken regiments holding my left, I kept glancing over to see how Winder was doing. To my surprise, he quickly dispersed his division to go after different targets. Rather than simply taking the objective I'd set, his "aggressive" stance led him to start seizing every opportunity in front of him. The main Union gun batteries on my right flank were gone or captured, and Winder had two brigades pursuing them and the remnants of the infantry that had been guarding them. But with his remaining two brigades, he was pushing all the way out into the middle of the battlefield, about to come down behind the Union front line.


I hadn't expected that, and thought about dispatching another courier to tell him to regroup at the original objective and hold his ground there -- I might want his division concentrated if more blue-coated troops appeared. But he'd found an opening, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it might change the entire battle.

It was a commonplace sequence in Take Command, but one that illustrates how that series reminds players that it's not all about them. Subordinate commanders are not just AI drones waiting for their next command from the Overmind. They make their own decisions, make mistakes, and wander off to go deal with something personally and leave you wondering where they could possibly have gone. From time to time, they even find a hidden opportunity.

Controlled Chaos

At those times, Take Command is less about winning than about experiencing the chaos of command on a battlefield. You're not the only agent on the battlefield, particularly when you are playing as a subordinate commander, and have to deal with AI-controlled peers and superiors doing things that drastically alter your own position. It presents you with completely unexpected situations driven by other characters, and you must often strike a balance between going with the flow of events and attempting to wrest control of them. It becomes a test of judgment, where many war and strategy games test your ability to understand and manage systems.


Those games can be so reductive that they deprive experiences of their grandeur, of any sense of connection to real events. They are as tidy as the maps you find in a book of military history, where everyone's position and strength is clear, and the correct course of action is both obvious and easily executed. Take Command muddies the waters by limiting the player's role to that of a single commander who has a particular place within a hierarchy, and by making the game a question of how well you commanded rather than a simple question of whether or not you took your objectives or won the battle. Reframing your role and responsibilities, the question of "what is the right thing to do?" becomes much harder than it usually is.

To continue on a theme from last month, the same way that Crusader Kings 2 reconsiders how we approach strategy games, Take Command does the same thing for wargames. We tend to think of evocative worlds and roleplay as the province of action games and RPGs, but strategy games provide their own opportunities to inhabit someone else's shoes for awhile. To experience things firsthand, not as a bloodless math problem, but as something dynamic and personal.

Take Command is far from the only wargame or strategy game to do this (Panther Games have done something similar with games like Command Ops), but there is a simplicity to the Take Command series that few other games can match. It's also cheap, available for $10 via NorbSoftDev's website.