Lincolns Mullet

The only way true LoS would work is if this game was designed using the Combat Mission engine and every bullet and every piece of canister shrapnel were modeled. Nath's argument to "forbid infantry shots through friendly troops" isn't as simple as it sounds. What if only a small fraction of a friendly brigade is blocking your entire 1800 man brigade from firing? Should they still not fire even if visually it looks like they can?" Games aren't designed simply with ideas, if only it were that easy! Entire design documents are created for how a unit moves, let alone how firing behaves. I drew up a basic example in the attached image. This doesn't even factor in friendly units, trees, elevation, etc. With the blocking building, how many of the 1800 CSA soldiers have line of sight and can fire on the 800 man union brigade? Does 55% of your men fire, while the others don't? Which 55%? There's some men on the far right that have line of sight and their attack would trigger a flanking penalty on the enemy unit. Since only 30 men on that side fired their weapons, how much of a morale hit does the Union brigade take? You'd have to factor the # of guns fired on the Union brigade from the flank and how much that shot effects morale, while also factoring in the effect of the other men firing on the left side of the brigade who are not causing a flanking attack. What if the union brigade is at a much lower elevation? Let's pretend I have artillery directly behind my CSA brigade and they're on a hill firing down at the Union brigade. At what angle would the artillery be able to fire "over" my troops without hitting them with canister fire? If my troops are affected by canister fire, does the game model how much of the shrapnel hits a % of my troops? Or does my brigade take max canister fire damage even if the canister fire is only touching 5% of my entire 1800 man brigade? Visually it would look like it's barely hitting my brigade, but my brigade would take losses as if it were directly fired on them. The amount of calculations required to do this in real time with 100k men all fighting at once would probably cripple a super computer. And similar to what Koro said, the movement/pathfinding in the game is not accurate enough to have satisfactory control over friendly fire situations. More often than not, your troops would either be subjected to heavy friendly fire and/or they'd stand around not shooting because 10 friendly soldiers are blocking the shot of your 1800 man brigade because if the 1800 man brigade fires, those 10 friendly soldiers would die. The gameplay as it stands simplifies all of the above situations in a way to make it playable and enjoyable, in my opinion. Could certain aspects be improved upon? Sure, but I think friendly fire with infantry or artillery is a dead-end topic in regards to UGCW.

I think I felt a snowflake blow past me

I've had a lot success putting arty in those trees. They barely lose any men due to cover and can rack up to 2000 kills. Put them on that hill and enemy arty will pick off a lot of your men/cannon. I used to do that before and it does work, but I usually lost my unit or it was severely depleted. Cool that different tactics work though either way.

I put the arty to the north in those trees. You get great cover, AI units can't attack you except for their arty, and you get great flanking fire on the entire Union army. Focus on their arty first and then target anyone crossing the bridge. Keep a brigade in the woods with your arty to keep any Union cav or troops coming across there. If necessary turn your arty around to canister fire anyone coming that way. I dont like keeping my arty on that hill because union arty pick it apart.

There's room for two. Not so much to ask right? Lol

They could definitely keep up with the ACW theme in their next game and create that dynamic campaign everyone is clamoring for. That would ensure we'd have THE civil war game for the next decade, a replayable masterpiece. Then they can move on to whatever else Hell, I can still play Sid Meier's Gettysburg and enjoy it to the end and that's nearly 20 years old now. Whatever they do though will be just fine and will have my support!

Great feedback and some novel suggestions with the skill tree. Very constructive!

Thanks for all the recommendations! I think I will start with Shelby Foote. Seems like the kind of deep reading I'm looking for right now.

This will likely be in the next patch from what Nick was suggesting. Side battles will have some additional benefit to winning them that will affect the enemy army during the Grand Battle. To what extent this will be is unknown. It could be as simple as reducing overall enemy army morale for that battle or total strength (-10%), etc. or more advanced (additional AI reinforcements to fight on your side, or on the enemy side if you fail to beat a side mission, etc). My only suggestion to this, if it's how it will work, is to ensure the side battles are not predictable affairs. If the side battles are relegated to a "map grind" simply to gain experience, men, and to negatively affect the AI at the grand battle then the purpose of having the side battles loses its novelty. They become something you just "do" because, why not? If there's little to no risk in playing them they why would I ever skip playing a side battle? If there was always a level of unpredictability to the outcome of the side battle, then every playthrough of the campaign will result in you making different/difficult decisions each time. And maybe the variability of the side battle isn't creating a wild swing between being very easy or very hard, but that there's an unknown risk to losing more men than you expect each time you play one. There should always be an inherent risk/reward in these cases because it gives greater meaning and weight to YOUR decision to play the side battle or not. The variability could be that each side battle brings up to an additional 0-15% enemy troop strength over and above what your recon tells you will be on the map. When you start the map, the game rolls and hits at 8%, and that is how much the "base" enemy troop strength is increased. You won't know this until you've already started the battle, so you either try and fight it out or withdraw to save your troops but lose the battle. This way each time I play Battle of Newport News, and it says I'm up against 9k Union troops, it might actually be 9.5k or 10k which on those sized maps can be a significant difference. Also, I agree about the easy difficulty setting and certain people not wanting to choose that no matter what. I know my own pride and belief in my gaming ability will always keep me from playing on "Easy". I refuse. lol. So I think if someone plays on Normal, they themselves consider their ability "normal" and when perception doesn't match reality (they get creamed by the AI) then the initial reaction is that the game is too hard, not that they should try and get better at it (or try easy).

Anyone have any recommended Civil War books? Looking for a thick tome I can spend weeks reading. Lol

Great series CC! Loved Bridge Too Far. Very cool campaign dynamics.

If we want it to be real, then fallback should be the default command to slowly pull back. But it can't work that way with how high casualty rates occur. Fallback as it works now is like an organized retreat. The reverse march command wouldn't be realistic over long distance, but for playability purposes only...it would be useful in UGCW. And if was on a leash (ie, cant reverse march past a certain distance) how would that be handled in-game? Would the brigade ignore the command if it was too far away? Would it revert to normal marching and turn around? Would it be a toggle that provides a circular "distance" ring showing where you can click to engage the reverse march? Any movement order outside that ring is invalid? In SMG it was a very slow fallback precisely because it would seem odd a 500 man regiment is marching backwards at any great rate faster than shuffling. Lol

As in the Union should have it easier in the beginning and not the CSA? Or that its easier to learn the game playing as CSA from the beginning? In terms of learning the game, I agree both initial battles for either side should provide equal ability/challenge to learn how to play. Plenty of unfavorable odds in later battles to beat players down lol

Historically the Union had it harder than the CSA in the beginning. Keep in mind the last half of the war hasn't been implemented yet, where CSA should have increasingly difficult odds.

This is how it worked in SMG. You chose fallback and the regiment would slowly back up while continuing to fire. This wouldn't work in UGCW because of the lethality of weapons. You need to fallback very quickly to avoid massive casualties. If casualty rates were lower then a slow fallback would work. I do like the reverse option. It could be a toggle and when you have it on AND move a unit, they move to that position without changing facing. Slowly, of course! A controlled shifting of forces, or retreat without exposing your backs to the enemy or randomly falling back. The CSA position at 2nd Bull Run would be perfect use of this as you are forced back from defensive positions and want to pull back to the tree line.

Great review and rundown of your experience RoadRage! Quick question: what difficulty setting was this on?

I agree. I find they increase their melee stat far too quickly. After 1 battle it can almost be maxed out.

Right. That could be a unit that's better micromanaged, but still effective for a little while if you forget about them. A possibility of limiting their range and effectiveness would be to lower their condition. They're always running but never seem to tire out, but if they're part of a brigade and run for too long they get tired? That would keep them on a short leash, so to speak. You couldn't detach skirmishers and run them all over the place like special forces as fallendown described them. You'd detach them only to move ahead into some woods, protect a flank, protect artillery, etc. And if their "auto retreat" behavior remained, then they'd get tired from doing that all the time too. Maybe the exception would be to build real skirmishers in the Camp screen if you want a more specialized unit to operate independently. But all of those brigade-detached skirmishers would have limited range and effectiveness. Right now they can be exploited by using them as bullet/cannon sponges, and harassing enemy troops behind the lines ad nauseum.

It's definitely a gameplay vs. realism issue that the devs could never win regardless of the direction they choose. In general I think it's better to lean towards playability than realism, especially if realism ends up frustrating more people than it satisfies. I know for some players the realism is the juice, so I get it. lol But as it stands now the game is completely playable with how artillery works in the context of the game, even if it doesn't look or behave quite right compared to their real life counterparts.

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but there's supposed to be a "trap" mechanism that can trigger or not trigger on any given battle so that your original recon #'s are lower than the actual result. You go into the battle confident there's only 10k troops, and then there ends up being 14k. Tortuga, you don't happen to know what your recon told you about the enemy army size prior to starting the battle did you? Do you remember if it matched to this final result?

I noticed in a game tonight an example of how routing might work. At Shiloh as CSA, I ran cav all the way to Shiloh church. Union infantry just south of it routed my cav and they went sprinting further north into more enemy brigades. They had plenty of space to the west of their position, or even southwest, to head back towards friendly lines. In fact they could have ran in any direction other than forward (into the enemy) or directly backwards (into the enemy) and they would've been safe. Instead they ran in the exact opposite direction of the brigade that caused it to rout. Maybe the facing of the brigade which causes a unit to rout correlates with the direction the routing brigade retreats? Imagine your army comes up from the south part of the map, enemy from the north. Due to flanking during the battle, one of your units is now facing south to fire on an enemy brigade. The enemy brigade routs away from your south-facing unit, which sends it deeper into your territory. I'd say in general that's a fairly rare circumstance? It seems most maps your units have their backs or flanks facing the part of the map they started on/came from, and are not often facing the area of the map they started on to attack an enemy unit, Just a theory.

I only wonder because cav and skirmishers are brigades you can create as part of your Corp, that its simply a gameplay decision of rock/paper/scissors when it comes to dealing with skirmishers. By what I mean is, maybe skirmishers work how they do now to force you to have at least some cavalry in your army to deal with them. Just a thought. As far as the skirms always running away, that may need to be changed. If you really want them to hold position, they should be able to hold position no?

I think it'll be just fine with the intended game design. You're right that if a good player beats every battle, their army will become even more lopsided if the enemy army is shrinking and/or becoming less effective. However! The goal then would be to ensure each difficulty levels offers an adequate challenge. The core concept of the campaign is recreating, or closely approximating, the historical odds for each battle. And with that design concept comes with the stated design that not all battles can or should be won. That it's OK to take a loss or withdraw if things are not in your favor. So the second part to this concept is to ensure all levels of difficulty are addressed, and then the dilemma of compounding victories making the game too easy will only be a problem for the best players, or those playing on easy or normal but should be playing on Hard. In this way, if side battles affect larger battles AND side battles are challenging enough that an average player may lose some, then the benefit of winning a side battle will be weighed against the risk of losing the side battle (or choosing to withdraw once you see you can't win). If a very good player is steamrolling the AI on normal, then they need to go to Hard. If most players can steamroll the AI on Hard, then Hard needs to be made more difficult. That's my take on it, anyway. The key will really be about making each difficulty level appropriately difficult for different grades of players. Whether or not the side battles diminish the enemy army isn't the issue, in my opinion, it's whether the difficulty levels are scaled appropriately. How that is done can be worked through design, AI, or straight up bonuses for the enemy like morale and damage increases. I think the ideal situation is constricting the amount of men/gold you get on Hard and Normal so that you have to husband your troops effectively. I'm not a big fan of adding artificial morale and damage bonuses to the AI, which is why I typically play on Normal and still get a challenge. On Easy, resources should be very forgiving so you can send your men to the meat grinder fairly regularly and still get enough resources to replenish losses.

They are working to address this in some way or another, z4ys. It'll be baby steps, I think, but in the right direction. Keep your eye out for upcoming patches!