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Does the Ai Army size scale with you?


LongstreetJohnson

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I have yet to fight a major battle where i outnumber the AI, wether i play as union or confederate.

i have played 2 campaigns both on normal difficulty till around second battle of bull run.

I am a seasoned strategy player both in this genre and others, i micromanage alot, and have won all the battles in each campaign with a casualty ratio 2:1 against the enemy. increasing the size of my army each step.

(no this is not just boasting) But eventough i do so well, the AI ALWAYS outnumbers me.

So back to my original question, does AI armies scale compared to yours on the different scenarios or are they a fixed size? 

If they are a fixed size and the game is just hard, good on you. If they are not and they do scale with you, my micromanaging is pointless.

i undertstand i could have just found this out by myself by playing 2 equal campaigns but its easier to ask.

 

Ps. Love the game so far.

 

Edited by LongstreetJohnson
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The AI scales with you, yes. In the end, you total victory will still depend on casualties and victories though, so killing more of them is still important. It's done so it won't make the campaign uninteresting and it makes sense from a design perspective, though from a player's perspective, it looks less appealing. The alternative I imagine is an AI that you only have to beat in to the ground once and then it can't recover at all and you just roll right over the rest of the campaign.

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Jones:

Yes, but as i said this aplies to both my Confederate and Union campaign. 

Koro:

I can see that, ok thanks for clarifying it.

it still makes the micromanaging/conserving every soldier pointless. 

if i try my hardest to not loose people so i can be better off in my next battle, 

but it doesnt matter because of the scaling. 

Then all that matters really is winning every game,but preserving your army in the long run has no effect/impact whatsoever.

So if thats true then the whole camp screen is basicly "flavor" and has no impact on the "campaign" in terms of difficulty.

 

 

Edited by LongstreetJohnson
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You still get to have your veterans, your generals etc.if you don't waste them - and that will make it easier for you.The scaling is only in numbers as far as I can tell. There is still a lower limit to what's feasible to bring on the battlefield as the AI seems to have a minimum amount at least so it does matter to preserve your army.

I cringe when I see my favorite brigades shot to pieces or my new two star general die - maybe that's just me. 

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Let me make an example, lets say the enemy is scaling x1.3

And i have 10000 men so AI gets 13000

My reputation is 100 and i use 25 to get 5000 more men.

now i have 15000 and the enemy has 19500 , but i have lower morale because of reputation drop.

Ergo there is absolutely no reason to do this except from a flavor point of view.

I agree with your point that you retain your "elite" brigades. But it still doesnt matter when you meet 40000 lvl 3 union brigades at bull run, when you have maybe 1 brigade at lvl 3.

But the scaling still makes certain mechanisms redundant, example the one above.

And yes if i do well in my early campaign it would be fun (to a certain limit) to crush the enemy later.

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Something that could be done is give the AI a large pool of men from the start, and if you really do manage to beat it in to the ground all the way, eventually it would run of men and be unable to keep matching your force. It would make the layer parts of the campaign uninteresting for me though in long term. 

Not sure how other strategy games handle this - usually the AI cheats to get more bonuses to build men 

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Yup i agree 100% and the pool should be bigger for union. 

But im not saying it isnt fun with a challenge, i just feel its something wrong when i play a "perfect" union playtrough and get outnumbered by the rebs at shiloh.

 

But the idea of AI casualities following them for an entire campaign is maybe not viable, it sure as hell would have made it more satisfying in a series of consecutive battles. 

To actually see that the great job you did had an impact.

But the "scaling" still isnt confirmed it just looks an awful lot like it.

 

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I wonder if the "autoscaled" AI forces are at a lower overall experience/competence level (e.g. comprised more of rookies and lower skilled commanders) if you're beating them severely each round?  If not, that might be a good way to keep the current "extra" numbers system while still rewarding players who are carefully husbanding their forces.

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4 hours ago, LongstreetJohnson said:

Yup i agree 100% and the pool should be bigger for union. 

But im not saying it isnt fun with a challenge, i just feel its something wrong when i play a "perfect" union playtrough and get outnumbered by the rebs at shiloh.

 

But the idea of AI casualities following them for an entire campaign is maybe not viable, it sure as hell would have made it more satisfying in a series of consecutive battles. 

To actually see that the great job you did had an impact.

But the "scaling" still isnt confirmed it just looks an awful lot like it.

 

It is confirmed by developers both on the beta forums and the official one. Too many posts to dig it up. One way to test it is to go directly to the historical battle and see how many enemy troops there are. Then go back, create your brigades and see how many they have now

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Ive done some testing as well now, looks like the antietam auto scale is about 2x.

im sorry but i think this is a flaw in this otherwise excelent game, as it makes what you do in the camp screen basicly not matter at all, neither does trying to conserve troops troughout the campaign.

And i do believe that is one of the key ingredients in the game, feeling that it is YOUR army and that you have carried it trough the whole war.

This makes it just a series of preset battles with a false feeling of a continous campaign. All you really can control is your army composition.

And it makes several features totally reduntant and useless, ref the example i made earlier (using rep to get more troops). 

Again i am sorry, i have 39 hours in this game since release and loved it, but this actually kinda took the fun out of it for me. 

But im just one individual, if others feel the same way i hope they remove the autoscale and rather try to balance it with perhaps:

1) The number of troops you get

2)AI preset amount of troops (historical?)

3)This could be changable by the player from difficulty settings.

4)Game over if you loose to many troops (not just downscale enemy)

 

Too close off, my opinion is that autoscale of AI troops compared too yours ruins an otherwise amazing experience of an excelent concept in an Ultimate General campaign game.

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I get where you're coming from Longstreet.  When I realized that Elder Scrolls Oblivion did this on the consoles (scaled monster level with your own level), I could "see" the design come out through the gameplay and lessened the experience.  I still really enjoyed the game as it was challenging, but from that point on I knew that I would rarely if ever wander into an area where I'm not "supposed" to be yet based on my level, as everywhere was scaled towards my current level.

So, maybe an option as you suggest could be added to remove scaling (or only have scaling on the hardest difficulty level)?  I imagine the fear from the devs would be that a player could create a very powerful army and steamroll the AI for the rest of the campaign. This, too, would appear that something is broken though.  It's worth discussing further!  

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That is a good comparison Lincolns, atleast feelingwise. 

It all comes down to wether this is a problem for a larger portion of the player base. Because  in the end the most important thing is that independent devs like this get more money to make more niche gems as ultimate general is.

I do not have any insight in the game making process and what could be changed or not.

But as i see it, if they could impliment it beeing the players choice (in terms of difficulty) everyone would be pleased. 

What concerns me and gives me hope that it will be changed at the same time, is the fact that it makes certain aspects of the game rendered useless.

The most viable strategy with scaling is to keep your corps as small and elite as possible. Wich i believe is not the devs intention, everyting else will be from a roleplay point of view and not the drive to win. 

Its still in Early Acess, i for one hope they remove/change the scaling into an alternative, and i would be more than glad to contribute in the discussion if it something they view as a worthy problem. 

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You raise some very interesting points Longstreet. One of the funnest things about this game is the feeling of taking your army through the whole war and see it progress and rank up with every battle. However if the AI will always autoscale to have more men than you then as you said it really makes no difference how well you do in every battle and that does indeed kill the immersion.

At the moment the campaign is very scripted and it almost doesn't matter if you win or lose any battles. This is why the AI presumably autoscales with your army; so that it always has a fair fighting chance as the campaign goes on. In order for Nick to do away with autoscaling we would have to have a dynamic campaign where destroying the enemy army in the field at a critical major battle ends the campaign with a victory for your side. 

Edited by Butch
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Ending the campaign on a major victory might not be ideal as you might miss out on half the campaign. But why not use some form of scaled scaling wherein the AI army grows with the player's, but the exact scale between the two depends on casualties on both sides. This way succes will lead to an easier time in the next battles, thereby increasing the odds of final victory, while failure will make things harder in the future. That way the result of a battle has effect on the campaign while still keeping some scaling for balance.

eg: AI army is scaled to the player's at a ration between 80% and 120%. If the player wins battles with low casualties and heavy damage on the AI the scaling will trend towards 80%, while heavy player casualties or AI victories will trend the scaling towards 120%.

Scaling tied to numbers of casualties might also add an extra tactical choice when choosing between large or small armies. Large deployed army means larger deployed AI army, which means higher overall casualties for that battle, which means a bigger swing on the total casualties and therefore the scaling itself. If the player faces a difficult battle he might choose to deploy less troops, thereby reducing the effect of a defeat on the overall campaign.

Additionally it might be interesting to keep troop quality in mind too. After completely defeating the Confederates at Shiloh (with everything but their cavalry routed of the map after the first day last stand), in the next battle I find six 2500-man three-star brigades, I wonder where all these high-quality troops suddenly came from. I would expect high enemy casualties to lower the overall quality of their troops in future battles.

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3 minutes ago, Krikke100 said:

Additionally it might be interesting to keep troop quality in mind too. After completely defeating the Confederates at Shiloh (with everything but their cavalry routed of the map after the first day last stand), in the next battle I find six 2500-man three-star brigades, I wonder where all these high-quality troops suddenly came from. I would expect high enemy casualties to lower the overall quality of their troops in future battles.

Next campaign represents peninsula campaign, so they are not same troops. Even if they are the same units you can consider them being reinforced  with veteran troops from another theater (same that we can do recruiting veteran replacements).  Even if you rout them (congrats) you do not caught them prisoner, so stragglers have plenty of time to come back and regroup. 

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Well, the next battle was one of the smaller ones with the description saying I'm facing Bragg (who fought at Shiloh), so I figure it's a Western battle. Fair enough that survivors regroup and such, but seeing an army composed entirely of three star units still seems a bit weird.

Edited by Krikke100
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However, as a counter-point, if you play poorly and you have your armies die like flees, the AI does not scale with you. It keeps growing stronger with every battle. That's what happened in my first campaign. So, I don't think the AI scales with you. The AI is pre-scripted to be a challenge to you from the start of the campaign in each and every battle, presuming you'll play with average/good performance.

So, if you play well, you must start to feel you're gaining an edge over the AI after a few decisive battles.

Ofc, this applies to the "historical" campaign in its current state. I do hope we'll get a dynamic campaign (and that it will be playable in MP!)

 

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Alright, let me explain. I played so far 2 campaigns as the CSA.

First run, I was discovering the game engine, plus, I was focusing entirely on creating few but very elite units. When I came to Shiloh, I got so terribly outnumbered the AI I was supposed to suprise crushed me to pieces. His skirmishers got me flanks and started running in depth while all my units where getting massacred. There were many stacks of 2000 + units in front of me.

Second run, this time I put more emphasis on army organisation, so that I can deploy more units, though rookie ones. So my corps was this time like twice as big as what I had in the first run. What's more, I had like 3-4 artillery too. Guess what. This time I was not outnumbered. I slighlty outnumbered the Union even, though that was only in the beginning. After this, I kept winning ground without much casualties.

My guess : in the first run, the AI had not scaled down.

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I think scaling either needs to be adjustable, or an option to turn off/on.  From a historical perspective, it makes sense.  but from a gameplay perspective, its rather annoying to be playing the union and inflicting a 8/1 kill/death ratio on the CSA and they keep coming back with more 3-star brigades.  On the other hand, this would make the end of the campaign very boring as we would just have overwhelming force.  Maybe for the beta allow a ratio slider for the players to try out and let us figure out what a good balance would be?

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2 hours ago, Luckybluemoon said:

I think scaling either needs to be adjustable, or an option to turn off/on.  From a historical perspective, it makes sense.  but from a gameplay perspective, its rather annoying to be playing the union and inflicting a 8/1 kill/death ratio on the CSA and they keep coming back with more 3-star brigades.  On the other hand, this would make the end of the campaign very boring as we would just have overwhelming force.  Maybe for the beta allow a ratio slider for the players to try out and let us figure out what a good balance would be?

You said it. The late game could be very boring.

So maybe it's better to to keep the current system.

However, difficulty could come from other sources : it could be about hasards of a dynamic campaign or hasards of dynamic battles.

I won Shiloh as the CSA yesterday, and, as it was my 2nd run, I knew perfectly what to do... And the objectives are quite easy to take if you are ready to pay the high price. I therefore miss UG Gettysburg system, where you'd sometimes prefer to watch and see, rather than rush for the objectives.

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