LyciaPintella

Artillery holds up pretty well in melee, true. Also, I've noticed that charging cavalry are pretty weak until you have their melee skill trained up. I'll try to get them involved in some already-winning melee battles a few times to train the skill up before I rely on their charges on their own. If you don't do that, you may have more luck with a skirmishing gun varianty and dismount them to rapidly shoot at the arty.

Enemy troop formations should not be able to block my artillery from shooting their artillery. As I've switched from playing primarily single player to primarily multiplayer, I've learned that putting a sacrificial infantry unit in front of your artillery is common and effective. While it does impact friendly LOS as well, people have learned formations that still allow them to be effective while return fire is difficult if not impossible in some situations. I'd like the LOS checker for artillery to completely ignore enemy units in checking to see if it has LOS to a target. I don't mind infantry LOS for shooting being blocked by hostiles because that makes sense; let them work for their arty kills. My other arty related suggestion is that if arty is LOS blocked from shooting its preferred target by a friendly unit, it should cycle through other available targets until it finds something it can shoot.

If you have friends who might want to try the game this is a great time to get them involved in the community and pew pewing each other. https://www.humblebundle.com/glens-staff-picks-games

Alright. After getting the hang of a few tricks I can pretty much crush the AI again, though I take more losses and have harder decisions than the previous builds. My solution to the Oak Hill dilemma is as follows - everything that comes to the East of that hill in this screenshot gets eviscerated. I still think we need some better work with arty targeting from hilltops with friendly infantry below them, but whether that comes in this game or the next one, I'll live. Anyway, screenie of me trying out some Napoleon mass battery tactics: http://i.imgur.com/RuVzw90.jpg

I'm still poking around at general Union vs Confed balance, but the thing that has caught my eye is that artillery is picking closer targets that happen to be LOS blocked by friendly units. I can manually pick an enemy further away that the artillery will then fire at, but after a volley they will switch back to aiming at the target they can't shoot. This is common when I have artillery near the top of a hill with infantry below. This screenshot shows a typical formation where this will happen. The arty on Oak Hill will target Baxter or Bucktail, usually be blocked, but if I select someone on Oak Ridge to target they will start popping shots off until they auto switch targets again. http://i.imgur.com/IKBC01l.jpg (Tried to make a link or include as an attachment and the forum dropped the hammer on me, dunno what's up with that)

I've been able to rip the CSA to shreds in firefights as the union if I abandon non-forested defensive positions and focus on the major ground. I feel that buford's cavalry is not able to really complete its objective of holding McPhereson's ridge in a historical way, but I can pull them back to any forested area and use them to delay like they were intended. I agree that cavalry needs to hit from a flank or at least charge in between reloads to be effective. However, in my recent playing, this actually does seem to be the case. Others are reporting different results, of course. Artillery targeting - with the pseudo 3d terrain (which is fine), feel free to spoon feed me on targeting. Like, if I target an enemy artillery and it switches off to shoot something else, I wouldn't mind a message saying why, or a way to force them to shoot what I asked them to for say, 2 minutes. I've played the game since release and I still don't know where to put my artillery in several situations.

Hey I know sometimes we're not in the lobby together but if we message each other on steam we can get a game going. If you want to add me that would be great! My name is Lycia Pintella and http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197964091100/home is my profile linky.