Hitorishizuka

Speed's a good one for those battles, yeah. I've actually been playing around with raising a couple Generals for ammo who are defense choices in what I know are long battles that you don't get a break to refresh and have them deploy first but XP is hard to get away from.

I'm so close to having a Brigade of either infantry or skirmishers with some of the really high reload/efficiency rifles...probably next map progression on Union. Getting repeatedly flank shots off with those is brutal against morale. Re-bored farmers are garbage at anything but being in cover at close range against someone who's not in cover so they can use their full damage bonus and not get penalized by accuracy. If you can somehow set that up they're fine but once range and accuracy advantages start coming in from everyone on the enemy have 1855s they're really hard to use.

That's so much mess...Prospect Hill is really easy to take. Just walk through the woods on the east and you can push straight through Stuart's cavalry and force them off the map. Then do a clockwise wheel until your forces are aligned N-S and push straight west until the woodline and the VP. It's easy to outshoot half of the Confederate brigades since they'll all be in the open, then you can keep wheeling and use brigades in forest on the northern part to attract fire as you keep rolling around and focusing and pushing back the new corners. You'll run out of time by then but the VP will be secure. You only need maybe 10-15 brigades for this, the rest you can leave up north anyway and have them join the next map. Same thing, so messy...just leave a few decoy brigades in the city and run everyone to the far north. You can push through the two brigades in the tree barricades since you're just close enough to use building cover and then start walking straight down the Confederate line N-S. Eventually you can threaten to pocket them. Once phase 2 starts, just rush a couple mid sized brigades south to the river to catch reinforcements shifting from Telegraph right when they're crossing and easy pickings while you're finishing the collapse of the rest of the northern Confederates.

Yes, maybe read some of the other topics in the forum instead of just posting in your own. ;P

The battle is mirrored from the Union side, where you can and should be attacking before your reinforcements get there. The AI isn't good enough to know how to press an attack (and also as a player you are smarter than to take the forward positions the AI rushes to which are much more vulnerable) but if it ever improved it could learn. The battle's winnable for Union within the first phase of battle.

For doing it on the fly, take Recon 2 so you get the scouting report. Keep bouncing back and forth between the camp screen and the battle as you start increasing your forces. Once the enemy's forces start increasing, you've found it.

Assuming you're talking about Day 1, yes the Union is very slow because they're following their plan of slowplay it until their reinforcements hit the field, then attack en masse. If you want to fight before that you need to advance on them, which isn't really a great idea given the terrain.

Ep11: Welp, saw this coming. You already fell for the trap. The fortifications on this map are really, really bad to hold. There are trees right across the river in every position that will cover the enemy and let them outshoot you if you use the forts. It does guard a little better against melee since they'll slow down and lose condition by having to cross but it's not much of a help. Wow, you actually detached skirmishers. The line you brought your forward troops back to is actually the one you want to hold for the map, then stretching left to the trees on the river side. Top side stays south of the road and curves with the buildings. Basically open ground all along the enemy's axis of advance compared to sitting in decent tree or building cover. They have a thin strip of woods to advance with in the north but keep artillery right there and you're covered. If you go too far north you'll get enveloped from behind when the northern reinforcements come if you stay there. Yes, you have fought there before. If you could have kept the one enemy brigade in the water you could have maybe stayed and engaged them at least and done a lot of damage back FWIW, even if your own cover was questionable. The whole run and fallback was unnecessary, though. This is why they told you to detach skirmishers, leave them in the woods, and fall back with your main brigades in an orderly fashion. Skirmishers have increased stealth, cover, and detection, this is why your main brigades have a harder time fighting them. Fight them with your own skirmishers backed by cavalry. XD The wrong lesson...this map you can actually hold that line...well, not quite so far north, but you can hold it. Your general should have been up there supporting all of these maneuvers the whole time. You still basically never use him. Your distant artillery should be turned off, they're wasting ammo. Doing a couple kills per volley is garbo, not decent. Complete missed opportunity not having your artillery forward if you're sticking to defending those positions as hard as you have. On your left, you start to see the problem of sitting in barricades. You get one unit of yours shooting not all at once (better for morale shock) against 3-4 of theirs. Stripping a lot of units from your front just to hold Henry Hill...wouldn't really recommend that once the melee charges start coming. Still not using your general at all (this is a recurring theme). No skirmishers or anyone sitting in the vision spots so you don't really see the unit taking the far southern flank. You've got units doing who knows what on their own unsupported while your left flank is collapsing after I already said you stripped too many units away from your defense. And with no general to try and stabilize morale. Unit in barricades broke because it was getting outshot and flanked from being shot down the line. Good job capturing supplies again but I question your priorities. Lines are breaking down all over and you kind of need them in the fight and you aren't exactly short on supplies... Yeah, this was tough to watch. I guess good job on going 1:2 at least and achieving victory but your losses were incredibly high. This map is actually a pretty easy one for Union vs the AI because they're too dumb to do anything but attack center and center-left for most of the battle. You should probably take a look at your brigades screen more to see if certain units were underperforming (I have a hunch your artillery just didn't pull their weight from how far back you had them most of the battle.) Also doubly tough since this is all prerecorded and it's honestly starting to drag on me to keep giving the same advice and not see it show up.

Problem is it's useless for assigning force numbers. Not sure if it's a bug or WAI, seen it on all the multiple day battles.

Haha, no, sorry for any misunderstanding. I was saying at a meta level, it feels like they are bullet magnets, doing it is just asking for the game to start handing wounds out, but you don't notice as much if a non-notable general was the one who was wounded.

Yes, good initial instincts. One thing to note, however, is that your frontage on a left flank attack isn't wide enough to support all of your forces. I like to leave a couple brigades in the south in the cover there to pin them and keep them from pushing out too far when they start falling back. Small maps like this are also good ones for sniper skirmishers to get a lot of work done where you can micro them. Your flank is probably too wide. You had cover on their side of the river you could have used to get your first brigade into firing range and then get your other forces across the face on the north and into position. Tyler could have stayed there and you could have brought your forces up to support instead of falling back. That's the position you wanted anyway. You wasted a lot of time moving your artillery up around to the north. In a situation like this where you could have had good cross cover, you could have left them right on the other side of the river from the cover and let them get medium range flank shots the entire time before having to be moved up. Cavalry not doing anything when they should have been charging the enemy cavalry. Left your left brigades on run unnecessarily. Also weird brigade drawing placement. In a situation like this, generally advance forward with units in cover first, then push the open field flankers in to do damage. You lost a lot of men in the open by not having things timed correctly because you're too attached to drawing out fancy multi-brigade moves instead of moving them into place one by one. ;X

No idea. All indications are that you're just another general, though, so... That actually might be interesting and quick to try. Swap your general into a tiny unit and on purpose get them shattered.

It's random, I'm just snarking that it seems like if you try to do things like that they seriously do always get wounded. I've never had a Corps commander get wounded, though, so that's at least a safe choice even if the XP gain isn't strictly the fastest.

Yeah, tried that, they're bullet magnets for getting wounded, even when in charge of a Division. ;P

Yes, correct. Medicine is actually directly comparable to Politics and is probably the 2nd best overall skill, assuming necessary minimums in Recon and AO.

Well, as noted, Politics build, so yes I do have more cash, but what I'm saying is that the early mid-tier guns you bought (Lorenz, etc) quickly become unnecessary because of captures. You just need a spare bit of extra cash for picking up some of the early expensive ones like 24pders but after that the majority of your money is going to go towards rebuilding cavalry (15k+/brigade after every Grand Battle usually).

Maybe once weight and such was factored in, but there's nothing to indicate it's a trap gun just from the stats. The problem is the damn thing just doesn't do anything for its cost, you can have 10pders for half the cost that have equal or better performance. While I can't know what the problem is, I half wonder whether its stats are just switched in-game with the 10pder Parrott or something.

FWIW, I think it's probably better to scout with 750 men anyway. Yes, they're more at risk if you weren't paying attention, but on trade they're more able to take advantage of unguarded artillery or a weak retreating unit than just a scout cavalry group. (Also cavalry should always be paired with detached skirmishers to bullet shield for them anyway but that's a separate thing.)

No, you misread Politics. Politics is superior to both Econ and Training since it gives only a slightly smaller benefit effective but does it for both. Politics doesn't force you to grow your army size, it just gives you more money and recruits and you can choose to do with it what you want. No matter what you will need to spend money on veterans as your small units, artillery, and cavalry take incidental casualties, so even if you want to focus on buying guns it's still superior. Medicine equally is generally held to be better than other choices because it saves both men and guns--this is actually somewhat competitive for this specific build since you're trying to pre-buy guns so much and aren't as concerned with losing guys. Honestly any other benefits in Econ are outmoded by Gaines' Mill anyway since by that time you get given enough free guns in captures and so on to have moved everyone to Springfield 1855 so long as you kept your army small, since that was already stated as a goal in this. I put a screenshot of my camp screen in one of the Fredericksburg topics and you can see I was buying all the Artillery (and every other good gun) pretty much willy-nilly but I had 800k left sitting around right before I was about to start that battle. Recon 2 is still recommended anyway so you can ride the line of how big to make your army in each battle before scaling kicks in. (Also, as a sidebar, giving melee cavalry more expensive weapons is actually worth it. The starter pistol+saber is single shot only, the others are 6 shot revolvers and it's definitely an upgrade that works for them. You can also tell the difference if you raise a couple units at the same time with different weapons and track their Firearms stat growth, it shows up.)

I've seen that too. The other thing that I have been complaining about for awhile is that skirmishers won't auto-shoot a lot of the time and needs to be given attack orders. This contributes to them getting into melee because sometimes they'll run up and pursue their target to keep shooting if timing was bad and get caught up in melee with something else.

That probably means you were reaching way above the 'historical' army size. I also ran into the same problems and I had a pretty sizable force.

Unless the unit has guns kitted for melee and a good melee stat, though, the best benefit you get is displacement, they don't actually kill a whole lot for being in melee (unless outnumbered enough for a surrender) and rapidly drain Condition. That's the more important part, 0 Condition units move glacially and have to be rested or just accept a very slow pace of advancement. Plus, being in melee blocks everyone else from shooting and opens you up more to being shot at by their buddies coming in behind.

True, but I don't think many of those exist? Everything seems to be walls and barricades of some fashion.

You can't tune down melee cav too far or there's no reason to take them at all, though, and one of the unique tools in your kit gets degraded. Ranged cav are actually a fair bit safer even if they tend not to pick up the massive kill numbers and melee cav is really your only fast hammer to use when timing is tight and positions needs to be taken now. (Melee charging with infantry is honestly generally not worth it.)

Mind, if fortifications get buffed, then something should probably be also done about directionality. If I take the effort to flank all the way around to the back of very strong fortifications, they should have 0 cover because what they're hiding behind is on the wrong side.