Gettysburg: The Turning Point is a tactical simulation of the Civil War classic encounter. The game time can stretch over the entire three days of the battle, or one can choose to play any one of the three days of the battle. Playing with units at the ½ brigade level (e.g. Meredith A and Meredith B) creates the rather heroic (and fun!) task of managing truly massive numbers – 120 or so units for the Union side if one chooses the “campaign” that is fighting the battle from beginning to end.
Victory is determined by possession of particular locations and relative casualties. The game space is the familiar map representation of Gettysburg and environs divided into 200 yard squares on a 36x52 grid with roads, streams, hills, and trees that affect both movement and combat. A unit occupies a single square with some limited “stacking”.
Brigades are historically accurate in terms of their manpower and combat effectiveness and divisional and corps leaders confer bonuses in combat, provided they are close enough. Units arrive on the field at the historically accurate time (with a degree of randomness that can be selected as a game option) at their actual arrival spot.
The game can be played either against another human opponent or the computer. It is essentially turn based, meaning
that one side moves, there are combat results calculated, and then the other side moves (although there are actually some 12 distinct parts to each turn). Units are restricted in their operations by an allocation of “operational points.” This limits how fast a unit can be deployed and forces commanders to make some tough choices – slug through the trees, or take the long route over using the roads, for example. Double-timing a unit to the fray can leave them too exhausted to fight! Operation points (allocated at the end of turns) are also needed to recover from “fatigue,” which results from movement and casualties and affects “morale.” The wise commander keeps an eye on unit’s morale since the unit may be routed if moral drops low enough.
As one would expect from SSI, there are multiple difficulty levels and many choices for realism (e.g. ammo, hidden units). Various keyboard commands display critical information on individual units, allow “line of sight” for firing (crucial for artillery), targeting, viewing of terrain without units, and more. SSI did all they could with the technology of the time to generate a reasonable interface and realistic results that reflect tactical decisions made by the commanders.
