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Make brigades downsizeable


P-Dup

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I think it's a pain in the ass, that you are not allowed to make brigades smaller to free up recruits or weapons for the armory. I guess it's a design decision, because you would have to implement an experience system for the free recruits. But right now I'm sometimes forced to reload an entire savegame, when I make a bad decision in the army management screen, erasing all other changes I made until then, which can be quite frustrating, when managing bigger armies.

 

My suggestions: Just make all recruits, that are freed up by downsizing brigades, lose their experience. It's a bit harsh and you would like to keep those situations to a minimum, at least when managing experienced brigades, but at least you could toy around with the numbers of new brigades, that you may or may not want to raise. Or give it a global "Apply" button, making you able to queue up multiple changes in brigades at once, again making you able to toy around with the numbers a bit.

 

I'm surely a bit on the OCD-side of live, wanting to have evenly distributed even numbers of soldiers in my brigades, but for me the system currently in place is suboptimal and I cannot be the only one feeling like this.

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This is an excellent point, and I'd like to elaborate a bit if I may:

First off, I think the structure the developers use inside the camp is kind of brilliant. Historical factors - Political/Production/Manpower - are boiled down to a few numbers and the tactical element of the game remains the focus, as it should. 

However, P-Dup is entirely correct that having to reload to the entire camp to change anything is incredibly frustrating. If you make a mistake, if you run out of points fixing this problem but need them back to fix that problem, you have to restart again. And again. And again. I have run into this ever single time I have gone into camp. 

Personally, I really enjoy manipulating my OOBs. I like to mix and match weapons and unit builds. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I like knowing all the options before I make my final decision like any commander would. I hope, and rather suspect, the developers will spend a little time fleshing out the camp army building tools to make them a bit more user friendly from a rough draft point of view. 

Theoretically, the force pool a unit has when he enters camp is static. Any changes made to a unit - using reinforcements, weapons, new unit creation, etc. - should be able to be eliminated individually without having to restart the entire build. However, wiping the entire build and starting over should be easy without a full restart.

A player could then make changes until they found what they wanted. At the end of camp, a player hits some variant of Approve OOB and we go to the next battle. 

This should be an easy fix; time consuming, probably - but not terribly difficult. 

I'm uncertain of the implications to experience on bleeding troops off of existing units, but I would also like to be able to reassign veterans from one brigade to reinforce my most elite brigades. Long term, you should be able to bleed a brigade and recreate a depot of unassigned reserves of 1 star, 2 star, 3 star vets and allow their incorporation into a new unit affect its XP appropriately. 

 

Edited by Andre Bolkonsky
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It was the general practice and character of both armies for service to continue with the same regiment through the war (which could include incorporation of depleted formations in another existing unit.  

An important part of veteran experience and unit cohestion is knowing all about your own unit and the officers and men in it, an instituional learning curve investment lost with piecemeal transfers. 

I believe that disbanding a unit returns rookie manpower - is that right?   

 

As for letting us try different approaches to organization in camp before saving those changes, that would be fair as organizational changes were evaluated before implementation. 

Edited by MikeK
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I have two thoughts on this that might be a good solvent:

 

1) Allow the ability to "combine" brigades in the camp. Particularly later in the war, it was common for two or more badly depleted units to be combined to make one of reasonable size. This would allow you to take two devastated, but high veterancy, brigades and combine them - having one veteran brigade without flooding both of them with recruits. (To have two full strength brigades, you would of course then have to raise a whole new one). Rather than having two mediocre full strength, you have one near full strength but highly elite, and one raw. This is quite historically accurate. To maintain total realism, there would still be s *slight* hit to the veteran brigade to simulate loss of unit identity of the unit absorbed, but it would likely be quite small.

 

2) A new function to "save" your OOB: There should be a "Confirm all changes" button which saves everything you've already done, and a "Reset recent changes" which resets changes that have not been saved using the "Confirm" button. Then, when going to start the next battle, a pop up should say "Confirm all changes?" before going to the battle to prevent you from accidentally not saving and then entering the battle with your army unreinforced. Note that at least from the deployment screen you'd still be able to back up to the camp if necessary. (An example of what I mean by this is that sometimes you might realize after the fact that based upon the needs of the battle you might want to make additional structural changes. When I reached Antietam in the Union campaign, I had two corps of four divisions each. I learned on the deployment screen that I needed three corps for the battle - so I had to go back to the camp and take a division from each of my two corps to create a third smaller corps - and for anyone wondering, yes, I won the battle quite handily).

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 12/11/2016 at 0:00 PM, Andre Bolkonsky said:

Any changes made to a unit - using reinforcements, weapons, new unit creation, etc. - should be able to be eliminated individually without having to restart the entire build. However, wiping the entire build and starting over should be easy without a full restart.

A player could then make changes until they found what they wanted. At the end of camp, a player hits some variant of Approve OOB and we go to the next battle. 

I'm uncertain of the implications to experience on bleeding troops off of existing units, but I would also like to be able to reassign veterans from one brigade to reinforce my most elite brigades. Long term, you should be able to bleed a brigade and recreate a depot of unassigned reserves of 1 star, 2 star, 3 star vets and allow their incorporation into a new unit affect its XP appropriately. 

+1 to the rough draft features, barracks management can be very time consuming if you make a mistake. I find myself using the autosave often for experimentation.

+1 to merging veterans into larger brigades with proportional experience gains, but with a small XP penalty because unit cohesion will be reduced. 

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