Hitorishizuka

They never get any stronger at that point and they're stealing experience from units that still need it. It's not a question of being precious or not.

I just feel bad because finally dragging them to Vet3 (which takes like half the campaign) and then I promptly retire them so other units can get the XP. Same with Vet3 anything, really. It's going to be pretty amazing once I get to the Richmond campaign and get to open my storage back up (so to speak) but I wish there was more payoff now. *laughs*

Hard without knowing exactly what the state of your army is going in and how that also could be influencing things. In general, don't use the fortifications, pull everyone back to the treeline, and just turtle it out for most of Day 1. You can get cheeky and probe out with cavalry on the western side and maybe sneak snipers all the way around to the back to start working on enemy artillery but IMO their attacks just don't get that serious. Back your forces up with cannons with good canisters right in the center opposing the wheatfield/nearish to the VP and you should repel all the serious attacks.

Cavalry is useful for most of the battle because you can use melee cav to chase down the starting Confederate skirmisher cav, then you can have them on the border and cheese kill two full brigades later as they path onto the map. Then there's still plenty of ground for them to maneuver around and sideswipe Confederate forces streaming back north to counterattack the Church and at the end of the second phase you can still get them south into Sharpsburg and cheese the artillery that start there again.

VPs also represent lines of control/supply. You may not have any forces there in-game but the magical supply wagon is a simplification for forces and supply coming in from the rear.

*cough* My Union campaign playlist is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVwXdrQMpYA&list=PLWscnbIydjzTX3fTsz19lqowRwZ3kuogE Just a slow roll with a couple battles a week, aiming at showing off basic mechanics and the like and what you can do with a small, focused army. It's geared more towards people who are still learning the game's fundamentals, which is why I'm only doing this on Brig Gen.

If memory serves, Benjamin Magnus tends to have pretty bad kill ratios (still positive, though) as a result of that, because he's fielding a lot of green troops early and just smashing his troops into theirs for awhile. His ratios may improve but I never really watched his stuff in-depth. Unfortunately I'm being pretty slow uploading my own campaign else I'd try and toot my own horn a bit. ;P Fredericksburg should be going up this week, at least.

I won't confess to any deep reading on the subject, but I've seen in passing at least that Longstreet was the subject of a lot of criticism from Lost Causers. This may likely contribute to him getting subconsciously devalued in overall rankings.

I'm still of the camp that thinks melee cavalry were overnerfed. They were always fairly useless late because of everything turns into fortification warfare or everyone's in a big blob anyway so they can't do anything but even now early their killpower is down enough that they have a very tiny, finicky niche. When that niche works right (Union on Antietam for example) they're pretty funny but it's otherwise hard to justify taking any, especially compared to good sniper skirmishers and skirmisher cavalry are now in that broad role right now.

That's exactly what I meant. You can fine tune the performance of your army by shifting experience around. This is most relevant when you have a large army in play shortly before/after a Grand Battle but is always something to watch. Spending a few minutes doing so can get +10 to a few brigades from time to time, which isn't nothing.

As a side note, this is a subtle thing to do when managing your army to figure out where exactly to put your officers to get the most bang for your buck. By just carefully swapping officers around you can effectively harvest 'extra' XP above a tier by downgrading an officer on one brigade and moving them to get another brigade up to another tier or just to shelve them and let someone lower get experience. A large roster of Brig. Generals is generally going to be more useful than having only a couple Maj. Generals and a bunch of Colonels

It's really not bad so long as you realize the fortifications are traps and the town cover is incredibly good. Then just play skirmisher games and run your reinforcements up and it's fine. The train can't really do anything to you if you're sitting in 100% building cover.

That might be worth a report if the middleground to achieve Day 3 is so narrow and unintuitive.

Just to put in the second opinion--ROF > all, then accuracy/range but generally just take only the high ROF carbines. Two quick volleys to start triggering routs is more important than one accurate slow one.

You can just replay the battle if you're this frustrated with your result, you know? The battle isn't really that bad, especially if you know anything about it going in.

You can view the battle objective by clicking the button on the far upper right of the screen. That would tell you that you need to hold all of your VPs, take the two northern Union VPs, and take either one of the southern Union VPs (middle victory condition). It's thus easiest to ignore the far bottom one and isolate the forces down there and just flood the north. If you maintain clean battle lines and look to encircle the enemy troops you generally shouldn't have problems with enemy troops coming out of the woodwork. You should still have guards on your points anyway just in case but it's not really a big deal. I do agree that it's a little strange that you never get to field the 4th division of the 2nd corps (and maybe part of the 3rd division? I don't remember) but a single division and change shouldn't be killing you. There are a lot of good playthroughs here and there that may give you some ideas if you watch how other people approach the battle.

Your army numbers are a little iffy. You should have AO9-10 at that point and fielding a lot of men. I brought 36k to the Union's 50k (and I run notoriously light), which ends up being basically even with how much you outnumber them on Day 1 and how you can basically clear the entire field of their initially deployed forces. There are only 3 main points you need to attack if you can hold onto your initial VPs (doable, they're decent defensive positions though you may find better luck in pulling back from one of them further south a little bit), so just ignore the far southern crossing and refusing that flank and take the northern three. As for moving against an entrenched foe, please remember maneuver warfare and strategic flanking. The AI will forcibly withdraw its forces when it realizes that it is flanked, even out of good defensive positions, so you can use this to your advantage to destroy them.

I still like a couple melee cav brigades per Corps on 20-24 brigade battles to hunt skirmishers depending on terrain. Otherwise skirmishers can get so obnoxious, especially if they have snipers and just sit outside your range and shoot your infantry.

Do you recall if that's still accurate/how bad the drop off is? I've been using 500 man skirmishers at the top end, I'd be curious to know whether I need to let them wither down.

Revolutionary war could be interesting, just reduce more things down to small brigade level only and a lot more skirmisher usage.

Without more detail about the actual composition of troops it's hard to give a truly accurate answer but the pure numbers should be fine. It's possible to have Gaines' basically won before your last reinforcements hit the field let alone get close to the fighting.

Your rookie brigades should be starting at 1 star assuming you have even a reasonably high officer to lead them. Even if not they still actually start with something like twice the firearms score of Union rookies. That said, you probably skimped on Army Organization as well so your max sizes and # of brigades are lower than they could have been. 1250 is fine for 40-60 stat journeyman but it's not really good for rookies.

Most battles with Union numerical superiority are hampered by really bad terrain and/or they only arrive piecemeal. You want to focus your forces locally on areas and overwhelm them and defeat them in detail before their reinforcements arrive and you want to fight smart and use the terrain so you do so in a manner that mostly preserves your own forces in the process. Terrain, veterancy (Union start with baaaaaaad troops compared to yours), and weapons tend to matter more than strict numbers.

There are definitely posters here and elsewhere who have problems on Normal (no shame there) so that really probably was a good change.

Morale, Marksmanship, Sharpshooting. Morale because rookies run at the slightest bad hit and anything to get over that hump and get them to stay in line is what I'm looking for, Marksmanship because I prefer to get a more accurate first volley and use less ammo, Sharpshooting for the same and the spotting help. FWIW, I'm coming around to like the Lorenz more as I'm going through the early game again. 2/3 the price for not really that much of a drop off in effectiveness is great when the enemy isn't dropping anything useful on a Normal playthrough and you actually are trying to outfit units. Cutting costs wherever possible is important towards the goal of building up a giant stack of cash to roll around in (read: spend in a giant orgy in the last campaign bulking out reserve 100 all stat brigades back to usable sizes)