inktomi19d

It’s not far; roughly the same as a supply wagon. You’ll usually need to rotate units off the line to have them resupply.

Regarding your first post: it can be easier to manage your armory if you don't restore your units to full manpower after most battles. The Confederacy in particular has trouble equipping all their units, so it makes sense to give your new units whatever the cheapest option is, and then equipping your veterans mostly with captured enemy guns. As confederacy, I basically won't buy anything other than farmers for a unit with 0 stars, 1842s or Mississippis for 1 stars, captured enemy guns for 2 stars, and the best I can afford for 3 stars. I find units as small as 800 to be sufficient for beginning most battles (that's big enough that they probably won't take so many losses that they just shatter), and if I started a unit off big, then its usually very experienced by the time its down to 800. Keeping your brigades at the largest size slows down their advancement so you actually end up with a weaker army in the late game. Smallish brigades can often hold fortified positions as well or better than big bridges, and suffer fewer casualties doing so, and you won't run out of guns trying to equip them. The other trick about armory management is that certain weapons are ultra-rare (revolver carbines, Henry rifles, Lemat pistols, etc.) so you'll rarely ever be able to buy enough at one time to outfit a unit. However, the armory restocks after Grand Battles, so when you see 37 Henry Rifles sitting there early on, you can buy them, and then by another 50 when the armory restocks, and so on until you have enough to actually use. So sometimes its good to pre-purchase rare or expensive guns that you know you'll want later.

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Absolutely, on Major General. Below that the scaling doesn’t seem to be enough to deter the tactic. I played large numbers of melee cav mostly to see if it breaks the game. It makes things very weird. The AI cav units can be a problem, but depending on the mission all the cavalry might be carbine, or there might not be any. The AI also seems to have a lot more problems employing cavalry than a player does; it tends to make bad decisions about terrain, and it’s fairly easy to exploit the bugs where units get frozen if they waiver in water or at a map’s edge. A player can also metagame to use their cav before enemy cav will arrive on the field, or to intercept enemy cav at its spawn points (with cavalry being particularly prone to freezing if it gets fired on near a map’s edge). The base game AI is not really very good at handling cavalry (it won’t even dismount carbine units), so a player can often outplay or exploit it more than other unit types. Large cav units tend to lead to very one-side battles, but if the player wins they are likely to completely destroy the enemy, and they can cover their losses. I wouldn’t do it in a serious campaign more because it’s so unrealistic and cheesy. I didn’t really mention it because it needs an urgent fix though; I mostly mean that if carbines need smaller units to be balanced, it wouldn’t hurt that melee cav also has smaller units. The way the game plays gets very weird with big melee cav units. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was because of the experience difference. I don’t think my 1* units had anything that improved damage either. I can deal with it on the CSA campaign because they get a lot of free units on the early missions and have an overall easier early campaign. On the Union side I haven’t gotten past Distress Call on Major General though, because I’m used to delaying two of the CSA advances there while I destroy the third. I’ll probably need to watch some videos to see different tactics there.

I’m glad you took my feedback constructively. Mostly I’ve been noticing that carbine units can’t effectively make other units waiver anymore in situations that should be ideal for it (like 2 carbine brigades firing on an infantry brigade that is advancing up a wooded hill at them in the southeast corner of the “Distress Call” scenario; that was one of those places where I was surprised that the very first enemy brigade was not only able to move through the fire but to do so with enough condition to charge). I really don’t feel that range needs to be increased on carbines; their range is workable if they are managed well. You just need to put your carbines a little behind the position where you intend to fight and move them forward. If you were to increase the range then it might be good to make them extremely ineffective at longer range. Civil War carbines were mostly used at musket range so that should be fine (I’m not sure how much you want to get into ballistics, but it has to do with the amount of bullet drop rather than the precision of the weapon). If you want to play with longer range, you might test the 1855 Springfield as a cavalry weapon since some units did use them and we can already see how that weapon works with skirmishers. You also might consider going back to smaller unit caps for cavalry (and possibly skirmishers) since brigades of those units were usually widely spread and divided into separate maneuver elements. It would help control the way damage scales so other unit types would always be able to mass more guns. Melee cavalry seems a bit too effective in large number too, so it wouldn’t hurt to apply an opportunity cost to fielding massive numbers by forcing them into 2 or 3 slots in an army. The main thing is that skirmishers and dismounts need to have an asymmetric effect on morale and condition. I think the base game accomplished that by giving carbines double the rate of fire of rifles. It might also be accomplished by tweaking certain aspects of the AI: for example, I just played Distress Call on MG and had three brigades on the wooded hill, and for some reason the AI led it's assault with one brigade of limbered artillery which closed to 100 yards under fire before unlimbering, loading canister, and blasting one of my units until it wavered and left position (I had them holding). Only then did the AI infantry charge past the guns. The artillery was in heavy cover so it wasn't taking much damage, but it was taking direct fire from three units and that should have made it chose a withdrawal even if it's morale and condition were good. EDIT — would it be possible to add a shock effect to certain weapons like with artillery canister? Historically units that had breech loaders and repeaters had more of a morale effect than an effect in casualties.

I think I really like this mod. I really only became aware of it a few days ago, and (after figuring out where to install the files on a Mac) and the first several times I started there was a lot of stuff that turned me off (like the generally slower movement, and the huge potential to pick the wrong things in camp and create an unplayable army) so I've really just started playing it seriously. I made a copy of the vanilla game's "Resources" folder (not the one for the game, but the one for the macOS app bundle, which is where all the game files live) and the modded game's folder, and I've been swapping them to keep playing my vanilla campaign. In my vanilla campaigns I chose to start my army off with at least one brigade each of skirmishers (or sharpshooters on the CSA side, since they don't get much access to carbines until late enough that they should be giving them to cavalry anyway) and cavalry in every battle, leaving behind artillery or infantry if needed to fit the deployments, and focussing on asymmetric combat as much as possible. So I've been trying to play that way a bit as I check out the rebalance. I've only played up to Shiloh so far and restarted campaigns about 6 times as I made some really bad choices setting up my army (or found myself buying nothing but pistols so I could play Pac Man). There's a lot that I just haven't figured out yet. That said, I'm really having trouble employing skirmishers and dismounted cavalry in the rebalance. The weapons are basically just poorer versions of infantry weapons (or they are infantry weapons, so it's hard to find uses for them other than as a replacement for. The very high rate of fire for carbines (2-3x what infantry weapons typically have) in vanilla give those weapons a very disruptive effect. The cavalry and skirmisher AI usually seems to withdraw when it takes fire, making the ability to shot faster and always have a weapon loaded a decisive advantage for scouts stumbling into enemy scouts. The rapid fire also means that carbines are very good for keeping routed or wavered units from recovering, and hitting multiple rapid volleys against a flank. If a carbine unit gets routed, it will turn and shoot the moment it recovers which also helps to preserve them when the enemy is trying to chase them down. I'm not sure if every volley does a certain amount of morale damage or if its based on casualties, but I'm certain that if a unit gets anywhere close to wavering two brigades with carbines will push them over the edge. I've found other ways to make use of skirmishers (sharpshooters or light infantry mostly), but I keep feeling disappointed that I can't use them to control enemy mobility and vision nearly as well, and carbines are rare enough that it feels like it might not be worth even trying to learn them. In the videos I've seen online people build a lot of skirmishers, but basically just use them like they would have used detached infantry or use a few sharpshooter regiments. I also don't usually see people making dismounted cavalry a critical part of their plan. The infantry stuff (which is really the reason screening troops exist anyway) is great though, and a new experience on its own.

In practice the damage rifles do on the approach tend to balance them out. Rifles have much better range and accuracy, and slightly better rate of fire. Morale and stamina have a bigger impact on melee than damage, and he unit with rifles will virtually always have an advantage in morale since they hit first. Since you should almost always always soften up the enemy with a few volleys before going into melee, rifles are almost always better in general use. Two big exceptions. First, if you have a unit of muskets that you keep protected for their entire advance and then melee with them, they are better. Second, rifles are expensive, so it's still worthwhile to equip green troops with muskets, and phase the rifles in slowly as you capture them. The main thing to remember is that melee is bad for both sides no matter what, and you will be firing at range even when you plan to melee. Setting up a good situation for melee (getting lots of cover fire, making sure your troops are in good condition, etc.) matter much much more hannwhich weapon you have. As soon as the enemy breaks it doesn't matter if they had farmer muskets.