Bramborough

I rather enjoy the big "SoL mosh pit" battles, and wouldn't want to see them reduced. Partly just because I like them, but also partly because there were quite a few such big battles during the time period; de-emphasizing them would seem historically false to me. That said, it's not as if smaller-scale engagements by frigates simply ended during the Napoleonic Wars. I think it would be great to include a couple in the late-game chapters to break up the monotony a bit. Give us a good reason to keep a couple 5th-rates in the fleet instead of selling them off or burning them up as fireships. Similarly, I've noticed that the land battles taper off toward the end. I know "Audacity" has recently been added; hopefully there's a few more coming in the future as well. I've only played the Brit campaign; nearing its end. Haven't played the US yet.

Agreed, the value of AoS skirms isn't in combat power like their UGCW counterparts using scoped rifles. Ostensibly, one might expect the Baker and Ferguson rifles to have a longer range than smoothbores, but either that's just false or it's not implemented yet in EA state of the game. Your question about dedicated vs detached is a very good one. I guess I've been just assuming that detached skirmishers have the same stats as their parent unit as far as Spotting & Stealth...but that might well be an unfounded assumption. They do have the better Speed, so maybe they take on higher values in the other stats as well. I don't know how to look up their stat values in game, but could be tested during a battle with a dedicated and detached skirm side-by-side, moving them back and forth to see how far away they spot known stationary enemies (and also how far away they lose their "hidden" icon). That aside, the detached skirms are still very small and shatter-prone...that alone may still earn dedicated skirms a slot in a decent-sized land force. Pretty expensive third-tier tech to research, though, for just one unit.

I played around with this a bit last night. This is how much it cost me to recruit a 150-man unit from fresh recruits using Trade 22 muskets (which I had plenty in stock, so weapon costs were not a factor). Fusiliers 2729 Marines 3399 (25% higher than Fusiliers) Grenadiers 4485 (64% higher than Fusi's) Skirmishers 4511(65% higher) This was on Easy difficulty, and I did have several points in the crew-recruit-cost Career Point category. So actual numbers might vary, but I would expect that those percentages probably remain pretty constant. So, are Grenadiers better than Fusiliers? Objectively, of course they are. But are they 60+% better, i.e., are they "worth it"? That's a more subjective question which will vary from player to player with different styles. (Grenadier main advantage over Fusiliers/Marines are in Melee and Speed. Morale & Stamina are same as Marines, only slightly higher than Fusiliers. All three unit types share same values in Spotting Stealth Accuracy). So a player who likes to use a lot of maneuver, charging, and close combat, yeah, Grenadiers are probably well worth the investment. A more methodical style which relies on firepower in a tactically-defensive line-of-battle style can probably do just as well - or least well enough - with cheaper Fusiliers. Worth noting: the price difference pertains only to the initial hire (which I assume includes replenishing battle losses, although I didn't specifically test that aspect). AFAICT, all personnel, regardless of sailors, land unit types, skilled veterans or fresh rookies, etc...all cost a flat 3 per man in maintenance. So a Grenadier unit doesn't cost more than Fusiliers in ongoing wages. With that in mind, yeah, I'll probably still keep using Grenadiers myself, at least a unit or two to have a good charge/melee option available if the fancy strikes me, lol. (A bit off the main topic, I was mildly surprised to see that Skirmishers are roughly the same cost as Grenadiers, not significantly higher. Skirms now strike me as a good investment, especially for a more static style that includes artillery. Spotting Stealth and Speed values much higher than the other three types, and a little bit higher in Stamina/Morale, at basically a very similar per-man cost to Grenadiers...and as primarily arty spotters/recon, you probably wouldn't want/need as big a unit for combat purposes. I haven't used Skirms yet, but will probably give them a try pretty soon...seems like they might be almost as OP as UGCW skirms, at least if paired with decent-ranged artillery).

Right around that stage of the Brit campaign, it's a transition from frigate-heavy gameplay to Ship-of-the-Line-dominated. There's a couple of battles like this; the enemy has a lot more SoL firepower than you do. Even on Easy. I got through it with fireships. Use them to take out a few ships and then overman your few SoLs for a boarding advantage and go for some quick enemy SoL captures rather than sinkings (captures count too). You don't really have to fully "win" these battles, as they have victory conditions like "Eliminate X enemy ships" rather than "Eliminate enemy fleet". You might be in a desperate situation with no hope of overcoming the entire enemy force if you had to fight it out til sunset...but you don't have to. Take those captures and punch out for the victory...and a few more SoLs which hopefully you've got the rep and money to add to your fleet for the next fight. Pretty soon after St Vincent, the campaign gradually opens up a bit more on SoLs. You'll get some a few gift 1st and 2nd rates. There will be more 3rd rate Ardents in the Admiralty shop. Some newspaper events lead to cheaper costs. And of course, the more enemy SoLs, the more available to capture and convert (the +Rep category for Career Points becomes quite valuable here). By the time you get to battles like Camperdown and Copenhagen, you should be going in with plenty of SoL parity to get the job done.

Is "No Adaptation" basically an extra level of difficulty, kinda like "Super Easy"? Or is it independent, so that it would be possible to play, say, Hard but also No Adapt? I have not opted into the Beta, but this seems to have been implemented into the main version already (am on 0.9.7 rev.35547). I see the "No Adaptation" option in a campaign start. I've also been seeing the regular "Follow Orders" default and an increased-rewards option available on sea battles (but not land battles). I have not, however, seen a no-adaptation option on individual battles, but I assume that's because that particular campaign started before the update in question.

Marines vs Fusiliers: Slightly higher Morale & Stamina, slightly worse Melee (which seems kinda weird). Same values in Spotting, Stealth, Accuracy, and Speed. Marines also cost about 600 more than Fusiliers for raising a 150-man unit from fresh recruits. TBH, I'm ambivalent that Marines are really worth the tech cost/reputation to research. For that matter, I'm not sure even Grenadiers are, either. Units ramp up pretty quick to 2 stars with good skills even with average officers; I'm kinda thinking that just sticking with Fusiliers is viable and more cost-effective. (Brit campaign of course. I know the American troop composition is different but am not familiar with it yet).

Am in late Brit campaign, the point where the bills start stacking up with all those SoLs. Last night looked closer to understand better what exactly all the costs are. Learned a few things which may be helpful: Ship Costs. Class specific, of course, but range from roughly 1200 for a 5th-rate up to 3500 for a 1st-rate. Ardent-class 3rd-rate (most numerous SoL) about 2100, while Bellona runs just below 2500. Merchant troopships run from about 500 for the small 2-slot to 1300 for the large one. (these are rounded ballpark numbers, not exact to the penny). Trophy ships cost half-price. For example, an Ardent which normally costs 2100 will cost 1050 as a trophy. Guns, weapons, & officers do not affect a ship's maintenance cost (nor do they affect the ship's sell price in shop, either). An "empty" ship costs just as much as a fully manned/equipped one. With one exception... Upgrades DO increase a ship's maintenance costs. So, unlike weapons and officers, with an upgrade there's not only the initial buy (which is usually pretty hefty in itself), but an ongoing maintenance cost as well. And it's not negligible...one Lvl I upgrade can add hundreds of dollars in upkeep cost on a SoL. (note, upgrades increase maintenance cost, but they do NOT increase a ship's sell price in Admiralty shop. So when selling a ship, do not forget to remove (most) upgrades beforehand; most will give a partial refund, but a few actually cost to remove). Crew AND Reserves cost 3 per man. So there's no cost savings in moving crew from active to reserve. Land troops count for this as well. As far as I can tell, there's no difference between highly-skilled veterans and fresh rookies (as far as maintenance costs go). Note also, there's no way to outright dismiss hired sailors/soldiers, whether active or reserve. Once hired, you're committed to paying that 3x wage until he becomes a battle casualty. So if you're trying to reduce your overall manning levels to cut costs...well, make your next fight a reckless bloodbath, lol. Captives cost 1 per man. Usually not a big budget item, but they DO cost, and makes it a little annoying that you cannot ransom/exchange them immediately after capture but have to wait for the game to take them off your hands. ------------- All the above has made me rethink some of my gameplay practices/habits. I already wasn't being overly lavish in ship upgrades, but likely to become even more frugal with them. Likewise, I hadn't been in the habit of keeping a lot of Trophy ships hanging around a long time as a "SoL reserve", but now will probably cut that out entirely; either convert or sell to Admiralty NOW, not later. Similar thing with keeping a few smaller ships around for potential future fireships; nope, burn or sell now. Building and maintaining a large land force on several troopships AND simultaneously keeping all ship crews fully or over-manned is probably just too exorbitant. Since they share the same Reserve pool, it's probably better to shift manpower back and forth between ship crews and land units depending on the fight at hand. For this reason, those three crew-related career-point categories have suddenly skyrocketed in value from my perspective. I had been in the habit of modestly overmanning ships. Not to max, but enough that the ship could take some battle casualties, do a boarding, and leave a prize crew on a captured ship, and still not go too far below optimum. This is one practice I'll probably actually continue...but at least now I'm more aware of the costs in doing so. I may not do it with every warship, though...will probably specialize the ships a bit more, making more of a distinction between overmanned "boarders" and optimum-manned "shooters". A bit long-winded, but hopefully some of this is helpful to some folks.

Another thing I've wondered is how artillery is treated in scaling. Star quality aside, is a 24-gun battery seen simply as a 600-man unit, or equivalent to a 2500-man brigade?

I'm sure Burnside would've been ecstatic to obtain such a result. :-)

Really liked your usage of detached skirms in Perryville. The more I watch of your videos here, the more I see that our playstyles are quite similar in many ways.

Just watched the Antietam & Iuka videos. Nicely done at Antietam, given your mostly 0/1-star infantry against roughly equal numbers of 2/3-star Rebels often in good defensive positions. One thing that struck me about your Antietam fight: Given the intensity, duration, and high casualty rate, it seems like your officer losses were surprisingly light. So there's another silver lining coming out of that bloodbath. At Iuka, the timer expired before you took the flag (although you were pretty close). That's pretty common, but then I noticed that your line was right up to the flag, just barely far enough away not to cap it. Opposition was only a brigade or two, so it seemed intentional. Makes sense, in order to inflict more casualties....but this went on for a while, and I started getting nervous that "overtime" was going to expire before you stepped forward to the VP. In this battle, does overtime just keep going indefinitely as long as the player doesn't activate the "Contested" countdown? After two full campaigns, I still haven't fully figured out how these timers work. Sometimes there's a short overtime, sometimes long, sometimes none at all. As CSA I had to completely refight a Chickamauga which had actually gone very well, and my guys were just a couple hundred yards from that last VP in the northwest. Boom! Then the timer handed me not even a draw, but an outright defeat. I've been pretty leery of the timer since.

Nice. I often do something like that to ensure units are firing at whom I want. But I hadn't thought about that particular method. Makes sense...have arty pile on to the guys who are already having a hot time of it. Good idea.

Interesting; hadn't read this anywhere else that I recall. Anyone able to confirm/debunk? And if valid...what the nature of the "divisional proximity" bonus might be? Kinda in same general topic area (leaders' battlefield effects), does Corps commander provide anything other than the selected perks and the morale resistance/recovery bonus within command radius? And does XP have any effect on a Corps commander (I've read that he does not factor into the unit Command stat, like division/brigade commanders do). Right now, it appears to me that there's no difference between a full-XP LTG like Lee and a freshly-promoted one; they both get three perk slots and a command radius. Is Lee's radius slightly larger? Or perhaps his morale +modifier slightly higher?

I've read multiple times that 100 is merely the max displayed value, and that the stats can indeed increase beyond that level. LAVA brings up a good point about the Command<Efficiency situation. What's not clear to me is whether Morale Stamina Firearms Melee ("MSFM") are affected. I know they're not directly limited by Command the way Efficiency is. But are MSFM influenced by Efficiency (and therefore indirectly by Command, "one step removed"?).

Thanks so much for that link. I had the paperback version of it as a kid in the 70's, it was my introduction to the topic. I don't know what happened to it, hasn't been in the house my entire adult life. What I'd always remembered, and had never seen anything like it elsewhere, were those wonderful panoramic color drawings of the major battles. So much better than even the best of maps in terms of conveying the movements. Has always stuck with me, and have long wanted to restore to my library. Lol...all this time, however, I couldn't remember the actual title, and also didn't remember that Catton had written it.

I like both proposals, and would support implementation. Yes, they're not perfect. And no doubt some enterprising folks will find new ways to "break" the intended spirit of these changes. But I think they're both far better than what we have now. As far as the second proposal...I don't know that we need a 30-min lockout. There are some ports (St George's Town, as most obvious example) which take a long time to get to. I don't begrudge folks coming to attack us there the opportunity to make that multi-hour sail at a time which works best for them. What annoys defenders is the inability to screen; the log-in and immediate PB-join without complete avoidance of intercept. I would propose instead a 5-min or 10-min lockout, so that there's a window during which screeners can intercept. This would preserve the attractiveness of getting a battlefleet to a predetermined long-distance location via individual sails, and then enter OW in a coordinated fashion. But they still have to deal with the defensive screen...instead of bypass it with impunity. On the other hand...making the attack fleet dodge screeners for a full 30 min seems a bit much. That said...I would still support the 30-min lockout as described in OP as far preferable to what we have now...which is screen irrelevance (and therefore less opportunity for other players besides those in the actual PB battle fleets to meaningfully contribute).

Am having same problem as OP. I right-click on "Tow Request", and nothing happens. - Tried removing guns/upgrades. - Tried spawning into OW and back into port. - Restarted game & steam. Even tried rebooting my computer.

You have just made a pretty enormous change to the entire shipbuilding aspect of this game. The fine woods requirements (and relative scarcity), regional bonuses, competing demands for LH (e.g., War Supplies), and re-introducing varying quality in captured AI ships, each on their own merits would've significantly altered the crafting environment. Taken all together at once, and you've shifted the trade/craft gameplay to such an extent that the playerbase hasn't yet fully adjusted to it; folks are still trying to figure out "the new normal". And I don't think we will fully reach that state until pre-patch gold ships are mostly attrited out of the players' collective inventory. That might take a while. I think how the playerbase eventually evolved to meet the new environment might've been pretty interesting. As one example, I think quite a few players are learning that middling-quality ships aren't necessarily quite so bad after all. Your 9.96 changes were clearly meant to make Exceptional ships, well, "exceptional", rather than "minimum acceptable". And from my perspective, we were slowly headed toward begrudging acceptance among the playerbase of that new reality. Your observation "...not used and thus are useless. Nobody makes them and nobody buys them." was certainly true very recently, and still valid for many today. I think if you had let this process continue, however, for another few weeks, this statement would've become increasingly obsolete. Yet now you've announced another seismic shift in the shipbuilding aspect of this game...before allowing the current paradigm to fully establish itself. The mere fact that you've announced these changes is going to affect how the 9.96 changes play out. I really don't understand the timing of the announcement, following so closely on the heels of 9.96.

2185 Started in late March; works out to almost exactly 10/day. I don't know whether to feel proud or disturbed about that.

Why would that difficult to code? As far as I can tell, what you're describing is the way it was before the alliance patch (except for the clan-specific bit).

I rather like the concept of the coming tag/ROE mechanic. I think the fundamental problem underlying all of the battle entry/exit issues has been the challenge of transitioning between highly compressed OW time/distance/speed and real-time/distance/speed battle instance. The large pull circle and no-join timer seem to me a pretty elegant way to address that on the entry end. Each battle initiation takes a "snapshot" of all vessels within visual range (i.e., all vessels which should realistically be able to participate anyway), and immediately transfers that entire tactical picture to the battle instance. Makes good sense to me. It'll all come down to just how much larger the pull circle is compared to the current version. - No more watching a tag occur not very far away, but unable to join due to wind on the bow and 2-min join timer. - No more seeing additional enemies show up in battle because of good wind as they came out of a battle screen or managed to leave port and beat the timer. - No more NOT seeing an expected nearby friendly enter the fight. True, maybe that guy still won't try to help...but at least is running a risk of his own.

My hunch is that the new woods won't be used as main framing woods like Live Oak, etc. After all, we don't build ships with frames of Compass, Lignum, Pine, or Redwood either. Instead, I suspect these may be the "new resources" referred to in devs' statement: "New resources will be required to craft exceptional ships". http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/16751-important-october-patch-information/ Just a guess; could be wrong. Guess (hope?) we'll find out in a couple of days.

I'm a PvP1 player, I have no dog in this particular PvP2 fight. Just wanted to throw out there, there's no indication that capturable national capitals are coming this patch. This came up over the summer as a hypothetical idea (in OP of the linked thread). The language was "Potential proposals for discussion: Capitals could become capturable". I've seen nothing since showing that this proposal is actually being implemented, in either this patch or a future one. http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/15638-development-plans-for-conquest-mechanics-rvr/

They said "10-15 days"...9 days ago. So tomorrow we're entering that projected window. I wouldn't expect it over the weekend, but am reasonably confident that it'll come during the Mon-Wed timeframe next week. If it slips again (and it might...pretty complex patch), they'll let us know. Just like they did last month when they decided not to do a September patch. How much more of a "slight heads up" are you looking for?

Thank you for the clarification, I appreciate it. I think it could've come earlier, as the misconception of different mission types sprang up almost immediately last week. There was no explicit language in the OP to suggest such. But it was an unintended implication in your use of the term "hostility mission" in one bullet. Many of us took that as meaning something new and separate from the already-implemented "missions" with which we're familiar.