limith

Changes look great - waiting for artillery capture fix

Union MG with no points in economy or politics until maxing 2 other options is incredibly hard. Recommend it for anyone who finds the game too easy. I find the Union much harder to play vs the Confederates. I don't know if it is historic, but the union troops at max training have worse firepower (shooting) than the CSA at max training. Firepower is pretty easy to get in game as it is. You guys might want to consider swapping the two since for some reason I'm under the impression the union were better marksman. CSA can have better everything else. ____ Would it be possible for you guys to increase the maximum path draw range in game? The one where you draw a path for a unit on map? It's very annoying to have to do multiple draws following a road in game multiple times for your entire army when you go around the long way to flank. ____ I'm a bit confused over why some of the skirmisher guns exist when they can use infantry guns which seem better, or sniper guns or rapid fire guns.

I see cases where units do not manage to get out of melee. The confederate AI did it to me consistently as Union on the 2nd battle in the campaign. However, units can rout all the time and get out of danger just as well. I see the AI do that right now in this mod. All the time. With the 1 rout speed modifier. I also see enemy flee out of pockets all the time on vanilla. We clearly have different playstyles, that doesn't mean what I see doesn't happen. I suppose it's my fault for spending 2 in game hours maneuvering my troops to surround the entire enemy line in Stone's River, the next hour shepharding the entire enemy line into one circle (the AI has routed at least 40 time successfully during this period). Then once the enemy army has no where left to flee, and I send in my cavalry and infantry brigades to melee, only half of the AI army surrenders while the rest shatter. While the rest of my circle shoots at them like fish in a barrel. My fault. Right. ___ In real life, if I had 300 cavalryman and I engaged 200 skirmishers on the verge of routing from the rear (when my infantry are hitting their front), and the 200 skirmishers fled, they sure as heck would NOT be able to flee faster than horses. In fact, where would they flee? Into the rear of MY horses? ___ "Good gameplay and making it more difficult is the goal" - I have a big issue with your definition of good gameplay based on the history of discussion on the Steam forums since early access. Good gameplay should not mean unrealistic gameplay. What you are advocating is unrealistic gameplay (which is present in vanilla, go play vanilla) for the sole reason of 'challenge'. In addition, this argument of challenge is completely false. It is a challenge because people can take advantage of flaws in the game in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME. This was why cavalry became slower than INFANTRY in vanilla, because of people complaining the game was too easy, that it was abusable by spamming units in melee, that they wanted more "challenge". What did Dartis do? He nerfed cavalry instead of fixing melee (which this mod fixed mind you). He gave the AI free armies after every single fight (rather than a real dynamic campaign). If Panda and Jonny wanted to make the game more 'challenging' and only that, they'd have gone the route of what vanilla did. Forget 4:1 AI scaling odds in vanilla (after completely wiping their army), let's have 10:1 odds, because the game is clearly too easy, who cares about realism! Olympic medal AI skirmishers. Supermen AI artillery that beats pretty much everything in melee. I for one don't want this. Seeing as the mod has REMOVED these things, I'd like to think the creators of the mod won't either. If you find your infantry being able to run down the enemy in melee and deal too much damage (because of using much larger brigades as reserves, and also a known bug with AI scaling) that's the player taking advantage of a game flaw reducing challenge. If I choose to not do that and have to suffer from the AI dealing extra damage to me in melee when one of my units gets caught, that actually adds challenge. Also FYI, my unit DOES manage to run away after taking 200-300 losses in melee. It's not impossible for my unit to run away. It's a bit high right now, but it's not impossible, and it isn't instant deletion like you are exaggerating. ___ And on the topic of surrendering, if the AI surrendered it is actually much MORE challenging to handle in many situations since you now have to defend a unit which can flip back anytime. It's also more realistic if the AI surrenders, and it helps the grand campaign, since if 1/3 of the AI army surrenders (or 1/2 if surrender was more reliable when a pocket forms), it explains how the enemy manages to get it's army back together so fast. It provides justification for challenge, and it HELPS THE AI (it would help the AI more if they could retreat offmap and know when they should call it quits). So no, surrendering does NOT make things less challenging. This being said, I do not agree with infantry being able to destroy an entire unit with 1 charge, which is your concern. I never said this, I don't want units to be deleted on a charge. I think that units which are routing should be able to get away, under reasonable conditions. My concerns have to do with the two cases I mentioned above which units should NOT be able to rout but they do in vanilla, which could be possible if the rout speed is tuned too high. These are not mutually exclusive things. TL;DR Good gameplay should not be artificial challenge that breaks realism. ____ Also at the end of the day, I can just mod back in how I want to play the game, which thankfully is possible in a reasonable manner. If you want to play your game the way you want to without considering the problems other people see, go ahead.

I'm doing exactly that, but not seeing the amount of kills you are seeing per volley with novice troops and 12 guns (similar enough to 14 guns). You say you are waiting until they are in charge melee range which results in the high number of kills per volley. I am not doing that. I am just waiting for canister range (evidently it is rifle range), which is not charge melee range. If I had to wait for charge melee range to fire, I'd be firing less shots since I bring much smaller armies to battle than you and am outnumbered more, so getting a unit to abort it's charge is a higher priority for me, rather than killing more troops. The AI tends to charge 3 units at me at once for each cannon I have to cover. If I hit one of them at the shot range, another at the edge of canister range, and the last in melee I can rout 2 and stop . If I waited for melee for all three I would be overrun. Even at point blank melee range with 2* napoleons I do not see the amount of kills you are claiming (500), but 200. I have no ammo problems whatsoever in those battles without needing to wait for charge melee range. I'm obviously not going to waste cannon shots at long range. "a disorderly retreat of defeated troops." is the definition. Routing refers to the "Rout" status in game. If the enemy army is in a pocket they don't surrender, they stay in routed status. I can either shoot them or send units into melee. That's how the game engine works. In real life, they'd surrender. If I send units into melee maybe half will surrender (best case), while the rest will shatter. This is because multiple units are next to each other (their entire army) clumped together and units don't like to surrender if there is a friendly unit nearby with some amount of morale (routed units regain morale) so they'll tend to only do so after a few have shattered. Now if I have them in a pocket, and they are not surrendering, and the enemy moves sufficiently faster than my units, then it is entirely possible for them to flee through my units (the pocket). I've also seen this a few times in Vanilla. It's annoying and unrealistic to see an enemy fleeing unit surrounded on all sides enter one of my units and flee THROUGH it to the other side. Such units ought to just surrender, but they don't. It is frustrating in the end of battles since I have to play whack a mole and spend 5 minutes setting up a new pocket at some other corner of the map with an army that is exhausted (since I have to run them at shorter distance angles cause routed units move faster than non routed units) instead of the battle just ending (cause the AI can't retreat offmap which is what they do in Total War). With regards to skirmishers routing from my cavalry, in real life they'd probably surrender too, but the game engine only has a small chance of that. In vanilla I had PLENTY of cases where routed skirmishers would flee faster than my cavalry could catch up to them after losing morale in melee. These are the two things I hate. I have no concerns about fixing routed units moving slower than normal units resulting in large melee casualties (to be honest only the AI ever takes advantage of this. I never take advantage of this, and any infantry I send to push the AI off an objective usually gets routed by the AI's second line firing into it or I spam fall back so my unit can disengage). I have concerns about the above two situations which are 100% present in vanilla that may also be true after increases to movement speed of routed units.

Will this be taken from your barracks reserve pool? Would it be possible to split the current 3* officer into 2 tiers, since they require so much XP to level, to mesh with this change better? The gap in potential command from a high XP 3* officer and a low XP 3*/2* officer is incredibly high, and most of your officers will be 3*. A 2* is better than nothing, but their command is still pretty low. (Captains I consider 0*). Also will this be applicable for division commanders as well? One way of splitting 3*'s is to merge Captains and Majors (0/1*) into 1 officer rank, and reuse 2* for 3*, and 3* for 3.5*. Unless command is tied to rank and not XP? Something like the following: Captains 0-10xp Majors 10-25xp Lt Colonels 25-50xp Colonels 50-75xp BG 75-90xp MG 90-95xp LTG +95xp What gets recruited in the shop would change (much less Colonels to recruit). ____ Sounds great since I'm planning to play union and I seem to have terrible luck with skirmisher brigades losing their leaders all the time (when they have taken a total of 20 casualties :x)

I don't need to do go so close to the enemy as the morale damage from canister shot is sufficient to rout enemies. I find the ability to rout multiple enemy brigades more valuable than having additional kills on my artillery, since if I waited until they were right on me, I'd have wasted multiple potential shots. I don't see the value of moving my artillery or infantry out of forest cover just so I can canister them in melee range. My infantry can kill them, and so can my cavalry, once the enemy has been herded into a pocket and surrounded on all sides so I can force a surrender. In addition, if you wait until they are almost right upon you, you are not guaranteed to repel them with 1 canister volley, which can lead to large casualties for your infantry unit. Furthermore if you shell the enemy at shot range (not canister range) a few times, you can lower their morale enough that the AI won't charge your lines, which is vitally important if you are outnumbered 4:1. Ammo is not that big of a problem if you primarily use at canister range. You can capture supply wagons and bring some of your own ammo. I've only used napoleons and ordnances and they feel balanced to me when parked behind an infantry. I haven't used artillery to spam enemy outside of my vision since it's a waste of ammo, and I don't do what The Soldier does with canistering only at melee range. If those are problems, they should be fixed, by adjusting the damage curve for example. The only thing I want to avoid is vanilla where my cavalry cannot do their job, which is to chase down routed units, or to run down AI artillery/skirmishers who somehow can rout faster than cav (since my formerly 90 condition cav loses all of it's condition while slowly killing the routed unit on MG). I don't use my infantry to chase after enemies primarily (they do a bad enough job with rout modifier 1 as it is). This largely shouldn't impact me if I have the enemy surrounded with infantry as it is and they have no where to run. The other thing to avoid is making it so that the AI can escape a pocket (completely surrounded) by running through my unit sent to melee them, because that would be very annoying. As long as these are handled, I'm fine with whatever changes are made.

Either 1) AI routing units are ignoring condition, 2) AI ignoring melee movement penalty or 3) something is odd with hitboxes because even with rout speed 1 (and even rout speed 0.5 but very rarely with 0.5) I still see cases where the AI can escape melee lock and then maintain it's distance gap from high condition (60-80) units when routing despite it supposedly being "slower than if they were falling back". If they are ignoring condition then the default rout speed should NOT be faster than falling back. This is because your units lose condition when engaged in melee at a very fast rate, even if the enemy is routed. In addition, afaik, your units in melee get a movement speed penalty, which needs to be taken into consideration. The people catching up to the routing units are not moving as fast as a normal walk or fallback. So you have funny things like AI artillery routing faster than skirmishers or cav (which is what happens in Vanilla) that are trying to finish them off. Or skirmishers routing faster than cav. The Soldier says he gets 120 kills/volley with rookies using the worst cannon and only 14 guns and says artillery is OP. I'm winning battles thanks to artillery, but due to morale damage, not kills. I can get more kills from my veteran infantry. I haven't noticed any sky high kill rates myself with artillery on a consistent manner, most battles are like what killjoy says. Maybe change the damage curve to prevent this type of damage at point blank. In a 6 hour battle with rookie (9 veterancy, 40 firepower, level 1 perk) Napoleon, 12 batteries campaign start, I got around 2.5k kills, when I did nothing but canister the enemy at basically point blank in no cover territory. If artillery did the amount of damage The Soldier says they do, it would've taken me only 16 rounds to get that many kills. They don't, on average, it takes me something like 5 volleys of canister to rout the confederate troops, and a volley does maybe 20 kills at best (unless the enemy is routed, then it does a bit more). Maybe artillery is overpowered at the best case scenario, but balancing things around the best case scenario being the average isn't the right thing to do. ______ Random thought: Would it be possible to make artillery surrender work similar to supply wagons, but be able to fire? It doesn't make sense the way artillery is modeled in game right now. If they just instant surrendered that'd be closer to what happened in real life. It also means you have to defend the artillery you capture, and you could have fights over cannons. If surrender with fire is too OP against the AI, then just making them surrender like supply caravans is good enough. Means you can't just go behind enemy lines with a single unit. I imagine it would mostly help the AI since the AI could then recapture cannons. Definitely would make some early game battles harder. _______ Campaign balance: 1st side battle Union is incredibly hard on MG. AI gets a bunch of 2 star units and outnumbers you tremendously, you have to spawn camp and abuse knowledge of the game so much since even with veterancy 7 you can only have 1 star units with 28ish melee and a random 2 star that may or may not be good at melee. You can also only deploy 3 units and if you bring reinforcements, the starting scenario troop numbers are way too low (2x200 men skirms + 2x600 men inf + 1x250 skirm cav) with no detach skirmisher option. The AI can charge your infantry and kill 300-500 men in one charge. The AI has 8+ 1200 men inf and 2 250 men skirmisher cav along with 3 artillery against your troops in the first phase, and gets more reinforcements in the 2nd when yours come in (I could barely afford 1 extra brigade of 1000 men). The fortification melee bonus inside the supply depot are absolutely worthless, the AI can just charge into them and instant rout the unit inside and there's nothing you can do. There also seems to be a bug with the fortifications where you units don't engage in melee while suffering melee damage (your units will "shoot" at the AI dealing melee to them). The 2* AI charge bonus is way too much this early on in the game when you have either 0 or 1* units.

This is abusing the scaling system if I did this with 1k infantry brigades and 6 gun artillery, so definitely not going to do this. Also having such large gun batteries means your cavalry will be useless since the AI artillery will be too large to charge with cavalry or infantry reliably. I never use more than 12 guns to keep AI artillery size low, usually 6 guns.

So on the union side I've discovered high amounts of infantry skirmishers is mandatory unlike the CSA. Seems my infantry can't hold the line when charged and artillery doesn't seem to be able to rout charging CSA troops in 1 volley of canister. My infantry can't fall back fast enough in forest but skirmishers can. I've consistently managed to get AI skirmishers to surrender with my cavalry alone in melee (after they've routed), and if I send a cavalry brigade into a bunch of routed enemies at the end of a battle )when they are surrounded) I've found more units will surrender than if I send an infantry. Infantry can cause surrenders too, but cavalry are much better at it in my experience. This change would be absolutely ridiculous and I would definitely mod it back to 1 if it ever changes like that. "Silver lining" is only relevant on the Union side, and is a big annoyance on the CSA side. You can't catch up to them unless you have them surrounded already, even with a 1.0 modifier. I never have problems on the CSA side with my units being stuck. In fact even on the union side I prefer the enemy units to be more stuck (eg I changed artillery rout speed from 1 to 0.5 myself). This is because it's very easy for units to lose all condition while in melee fighting routed units even if my unit does not move. I had a unit in my battle on the corner of the map lose all condition in melee vs 100 artillery that had routed and there was absolutely no place for the artillery to go. All a 3.0 modifier means is that you can't chase down artillery at all. The AI can run away from your units fine as it is in melee with a 1.0 modifier if there is a place for them to run. A 3.0 modifier won't prevent me from capturing units on the CSA since I devote around half of the battle timer moving my units to surround the AI location (no shooting at all) so there's no place for them to rout to. TERRIBLE IDEA. If my unit is caught that's my fault, I don't want my unit to run 3x as fast when routed than when not routed. Union first battle you get some 2 star napoleons and they deal like 10-20 kills at canister range with 12 cannons. I agree, I've never seen such high damage numbers. You'd have to be hitting them in the rear in open territory, and even then it does maybe 40-90 kills per volley. Are you sure you applied the mod correctly The Soldier. ____ I've confirmed the skirmishers not firing thing is due to the units being hidden. On the Union side none of my skirmishers didn't fire since the AI kept charging me forcing me to fall back (and they always had vision on my skirmishers). My units not firing constantly happened on the CSA side since the AI never was able to close the gaps so I could hole up in forest and not be seen (and my skirmishers were useless as a result).

If I give them a move order they'll fire 1 volley then they'll refuse to fire the next volley unless I give them another order. It doesn't have to be at the edge of their range either. Usually happens if the enemy has no vision on my unit and my unit isn't getting shot back at and if firing would reveal my unit. I think there's AI logic to keep your units hidden (my skirmishers have stealth perk) ____ Infantry L1 has +100% accuracy while skirmisher L1 has +50%. Afaik accuracy = greater damage. Granted skirmisher L1 has +50% cover too but in terms of raw offensive output, skirmisher is weaker. I've found it's harder to level up my skirmishers compared to infantry (can't use them in melee, have to micro every volley, can't purposely exhaust their condition via toggling running) so getting the L2 is harder than infantry as well, and forget about L3 perk, I had skirmishers training since beginning of game and am in Charlottesville and they just got L2 barely.

I find that's very rare to happen, and I have maxed out 2-3* artillery brigades. My artillery generally makes only 1200 kills over an entire battle (about the same as one of my elite infantry) and that is because the enemy are usually not in canister range. I find artillery's morale impact to be more effective in rolling up the enemy lines. You have to really try to get canister kills by constantly moving into enemy range and it's not worth it vs just shelling them at shot range and routing them (then running the routing enemy down with your infantry in melee). I modded my game to have a skirmisher cap at 350 men, so that doesn't work. Also I find my skirmisher brigades lose leaders (KIA) to barely any fire whatsoever so I only ever run snipers (who don't get shot at to not lose leaders). Skirmishers seem to still be bugged in not firing automatically even with hold position off and it's not worth running large amounts of skirmishers in my army having to give them fire orders for every single volley. I can get 100% cover in most areas anyway with the right tactics, and I have +25% speed corps general and +speed 'rearguard/reserve' brigades in every division who moves about as fast as skirmishers. Skirmisher perks don't result in as much fire damage as maneuver infantry, and infantry don't need to be micro'd to fire every single volley. If I needed light infantry to hold the enemy's attention in no cover terrain then I'm doing something wrong, such as approaching from the wrong direction or not lining my units up properly for a charge. If you position units correctly you can have infantry in no cover firing at the enemy in cover without getting shot at (basically take advantage of the way the AI does targeting priority) It's a big difference between whether the enemy infantry will surrender or not I've found. Shock cavalry is almost mandatory for them to surrender. Surrendering results in the enemy losing veterancy in the campaign, while an enemy unit shattering doesn't (according to panda), thus having 1 shock cavalry in each corps to force the enemy to surrender after routing enemy units is mandatory in my book. In addition, routing enemies is very common for me when I use my artillery not as canister shot killers (which takes a significant amount of time moving, I assume you have horse artillery perk) but rather morale damage dealers. I don't have more than 1 per corps since that's all I generally need. I've started capturing about 1/3 of the enemy army now after figuring it out halfway through the game. Their job is not to run down enemies, but to force surrenders. My maneuver infantry do a better job of running down routing enemies, or charging into enemy artillery. ____ Haven't used oversized brigades myself, using nothing but 1000 men brigades and 6 gun artillery. K:D (including surrender) tends to be between 1:8 to 1:10. My infantry deal most of the kills, artillery is there to cause routs.

"The MaxSize entries are reused for the player as well, but if you turn off removeSizeCap they aren't used for the AI. " Wait so if I want the size cap that is defined below to be enforced I should set this to "true"? The name is confusing then, should be something like overrideSizeCap. "More of a general question, but do you feel limited in resources? My current impression is that it's far to easy to acquire far more men and cash than I can ever use. I'm sitting with a reserve of 500k/100k around Chancellorsville for the Union Legendary. I'm not sure if that matches other player experiences though." On the CSA side, men is not a problem, but cash and weapons are (to midgame, when weapons becomes less of an issue once logistics and economy finally ramp up). I burned through 400k cash preparing for Fredericksburg (recruited about 9k men, army of 40k men). For the last battle on CSA it's good at have at least 100k troops, so I expect to need 2.4 million to ramp up to the final battle. That being said, after learning that capturing enemy units causes the AI to weaken (while shattering doesn't) I've discovered I don't need to invest in veterans so much. AI brought nothing but green troops after 4 battles in a row of capturing almost their entire army, and my 2 star units ate through them, so maybe only half of that would be required. It's very expensive recruiting veterans. I've found pretty consistently that I will burn through this much money for every 10k men I've added to my army (while maintaining level of veteran). In terms of making money more of an issue: 1) reduce politics max money effect to 50% instead of 75%, 2) increase power of medicine (it's too weak right now when I take only 1200 casualties in a side battle and 3000-8000 in a major battle), it's a dump stat right now 3) making us pay for supply usage should cut down on excess cash, maybe have supplies cost double what they currently do so at logistics 0 and go down to normal at logistics 50% 4) I'd consider increasing the cost of officers by 25%. " think the range perks are the best selection in basically all cases currently. Since they all come with +accuracy as well they give you everything you need. I hear speed and reload can be very good as well depending on play style. Currently I feel like there is little reason to take the non generic accuracy damage bonuses." I tend to take the grape/round shot bonus for tier 2 and it's effective. I find most shots are at round/grape range (the middle one) when I'm on the defense, and it's basically a +100% damage. It makes it so that counter battery fire is fairly effective and worth it, even if damage to infantry isn't great. ___ So for Training in campaign, the tooltip says + stats for rookies, but I don't see the tooltip changing the stats my rookies have even after putting in 2 points of career points into it. Does it only affect manpower gained AFTER I invest points into it? In which case it's useless since I'm sitting on a stockpile of 100k troops which I can't use since I a) don't have army slots and b) don't have weapons in the armory I can buy to use 100k. A few extra points in training later on wouldn't have an impact then, I should have maxed training first then or something.

1) I noticed the new AI modifiers csv which has removeUnitCap there. I thought in the previous version changelog it said to put that in the general file instead? Which is the correct location? 2) What is the interaction between removeUnitCap and AIUNIT TYPE HERE SizeCap? I feel like the sizecap also affects players. Also the infantry one doesn't seem to work. 3) Edit nvm, I see aura range is increased by a ton 4) I actually never used the corps leader accuracy perk myself, I used the speed perk. I like the new tooltip on artillery, really helps me figure out which cannons I want to use, I understand why 24pdr Howitzer is good now. 5) It's really hard balancing when to invest in logistics as CSA. If you invest it too late you run out of guns you want in the armory, while if you invest it too early you can't afford any of the guns (have to also invest in Economy). 6) Both Cornith and Prairie Grove ended a full 30 ingame minutes early (Victory). I think the time remaining counter is wrong, since they ended at the full hour mark. 7) Training campaign perk probably could use a slight bump to the training cost bonus due to the in game veteran costs not taking into consideration your current unit stats (rookies vs veterans thing I mentioned a while back where the same stats can cost money when recruiting veterans). 8: Counterintuitive thought: based on my understanding of accuracy works, I feel like grabbing all of the +firing range perks for a Howitzer Brigade is the best strategy since Howitzers have such low firing range for canister shot. 9) Battle of Fredericksburg prelude should have 2 deploy slots instead of 1 for CSA since you don't have skirmisher detachments anymore. That being said, the AI is bad enough that it wasn't an issue, I was able to hold the bridge with only 1 unit. What happened to the flanking unit the AI had? 10) Funny situation where my canisters are losing ammo even though I have a supply convoy supplying it with ammo. The tier 3 general aura +100% increase seems to increase the supply convoy resupply range circle as well. Except in practice I have found that the supply convoy does NOT supply units outside of it's original (non 100% increase range) area. This looks like a bug.

AI changes its army composition based on what you bring as well as scripted composition for the map. If you bring skirmisher cav the AI will be more likely to bring skirmisher cav. If you bring snipers the AI will be more likely to bring snipers. If you bring large artillery brigades the AI will be guarenteed to bring more larger artillery brigades. In this way you can control what the AI brings by avoiding using specific brigade types. In terms of weapons scaling the AI has weapons scaling as well, but up to a point. The point is based off of the AI's armory value as well as scripted settings. It won't scale down to what you bring, but if you bring, say, Napoleons, in the Battle of Bull Run, then the AI will switch to Napoleons even if the AI armory value is at 20%. If you stuck with Ordnances, the AI would bring 12 Pdr Howitzers or Ordnances (you can detect this by the captured cannons list post battle). However if you bring some 20 Pdrs the AI won't have those yet. So the best advice here is to bring weapons you want to capture that's not too old. Eg I brought some expensive Lorenz rifles on my skirmisher inf the entire AI infantry switched to using those (when in the previous battle in the same campaign with the same armory values they were using Springfields and Harpers Ferries), and I was able to capture 8000 rifles. The AI scales to the best weapon you have per unit type, so it's better to not equip one unit with it if you can't equip others, UNLESS you are intending to farm for weapons via capturing. In which case that's the best way of acquiring weapons the armory is out of stock on.

It seems that reinforcing a brigade (that is 100% green) costs money when veteran is selected even when the brigade is 100% green and rookies won't change the stats at all. Not sure if this is a bug you can fix. Might be due to how your Training stat is implemented.