interesting things about the path that you would take. I’m also a big fan of standard
interfaces, so if I had that to do today, I probably would try to go with more of the stan-
dard RTS interface. I think at the time that we were doing that, it was pretty early.
WarCraftwas out, but I don’t thinkStarCraftwas out, andAge of Empirescame out at
just about the same time. So the interface standard had not coalesced when we did that.
I think that in recognition of that we gave the player the option to use the
right-click/left-click way of doing things too. But if I had that to do today, I would proba-
bly make the standard RTS method the default and make the click-and-drag the option.
As opposed toRailroad TycoonorCivilization,Gettysburg!has discrete scenarios:
you play for a while and then that battle ends, you get a new briefing, and your
troops reset. Why did you opt for that style of gameplay progression?
Well, I did that because
the stupid Battle of Get-
tysburg had too many
units! [laughter] I would
have preferred a com-
plete battle at the kind of
level that the actual game
turned out to be.
Basically, to make the
game fun, I have found
that you need to have
somewhere between ten
and twenty-five discrete
units that you can move
around. Unfortunately
the entire battle had sev-
enty or eighty regiments,
so it would have been totally out of control. We tried for a while actually fudging the
scale, and saying, “You’ll actually be given brigades but they’ll act like regiments and
then you can fight the whole battle.” But it didn’t feel right skewing the scale in that
way. So, we got to the point where it was, “OK, the most fun and most interesting bat-
tles are of this scale. And that really means that it’s a portion of the battle. And we have
to accept that, and live with that, and make the best of that.” And I think the scenario
system was an attempt to do that.
I think that in an ideal world I could have picked the Battle of Hunter’s Run or
something where there were only three brigades and it was all capturable in a single
scenario. But nobody’s going to buyThe Battle of Hunter’s Run; they all wantGettys-
burg!So it’s an unfortunate part of history that it happened to be such a large battle.
And, I think it worked fairly well. But I understand when people say, “Well, I really want
the whole battle.” And we tried to give them that, and show them that they really didn’t
want that in this system. It was a case where history and reality didn’t create probably
the ideal situation for the game system that we had. But it was our feeling that, as
opposed to either giving you the whole battle and overwhelming you with eighty units,
or trying to play some pretty convoluted games to get the whole battle into that scale,
Chapter 2: Interview: Sid Meier 29
Gettysburg!