Hitorishizuka

Just finished Union side on Antietam. If I was even a little more careful/less bloodthirsty I could have kept these Brigades alive (only kept 1 from shattering) but it was worth it. You have to baby them and be really careful about how you use them but they kill everything if they can get into melee. (Or you can just cheese reinforcements if you know they're coming in. Stage 1 Antietam, you can put 2 cavalry at the far south and instantly ruin Law and someone else's Brigade as they're trying to come on the map.)

Did a real quick replay. Didn't do quite as well as the first time I played from memory, but here you go. Had a little money left so I upped my cavalry size from what I reported right before I did the mission.

Can't download your save to check what your campaign is, sorry, getting an error. For reference, I loaded my old save and this is what I had when I won Crossroads. Assume weapons are Springfield 1842 unless otherwise stated. Division 1: 2* 1000 Infantry w/ Harper's Ferry, 1* 1500 Infantry, 300 Cavalry w/ Palmetto M1842, 1* 8 Gun Artillery w/ 12PDR Napoleon Division 2: 1* 1500 Infantry, 1* 1500 Infantry, 1* 8 Gun Artillery w/ 10PDR Ordnance, 1* 140 Skirmishers w/ Sharps Division 3: 1500 Infantry, 1500 Infantry, 1500 Infantry, 13 Gun Artillery w/ 6 PDR Wiard I think I only took one of the Infantry brigades from Division 3 to hit the 9 brigade limit. So I brought 7140 men, 300 cavalry, and something like 400 men w/ the Artillery. I'm pretty sure I lost most of the cavalry (maybe the entire brigade) trading against their artillery but otherwise it wasn't -too- bad.

Melee from both sides with numerical superiority, generally. Melee from one side or without sufficient numbers will just kill the unit off slowly.

Union troops are garbage against equal tier if both are in cover IME. I can have 2 star with more men and what should be decent stats shooting against CSA 2 star in equal heavy cover and they'll slowly lose that fight. (50 casualties to 15 inflicted, that sort of thing.) You pretty much have to rely on artillery, cavalry, and doing whatever you can to take forest edges and force the AI to place troops in poor cover.

The AI autoscales the # of units it brings to whatever you have and can have been utterly wiped out in a previous battle and still bring nothing but 2 star vets. Nothing about this is a historical simulation. ;X

First, you do. The pieces show up as captured in post-battle. No, you can't use them directly during the battle but it's at least something. And the basics of horses do show up already, so it's fine. There always needs to be a tradeoff for performance vs verisimilitude. It's not as if every single gun or man is rendered, anyway.

Nah, infantry will absolutely fire into a mob of melee combat, if you're watching closely you're probably just seeing the standard infantry take forever to go through their fire cycles. If neither artillery nor infantry were allowed to fire into melee, not only would positions be a lot more difficult to hold in general (because the AI almost always has more men and can just overwhelm you in melee by shoving units down your throat) but cavalry would quickly become OP. The only thing that keeps frontal cavalry charges balanced right now is that after/in the process of killing the first unit they hit, they'll take withering return fire from everything else around. If they weren't allowed to be shot at, they'd kill the first unit basically for free and then have a chance at either making it to the second unit in line and getting in melee and protecting themselves again or at retreating afterwards and only taking a single volley in the back as they run.

You need higher Army Organization stat. I had the same frustration early as well. Enough points in AO gets your Brigade Size up to 2500. You can tell units to not fire if this is being a problem. They do generally try to get one last volley off if they're close to shooting instead of flat out running.

Scattershot thoughts: AI changes are good. I've definitely seen the AI like to climb into dense formations on certain maps. This can work because they're trying to hammer as a strong point instead of do a sweeping advance but sometimes they're too timid to use their local force concentration. Any buff to capturing units is a plus given how hard it is to do without accepting some risk. Getting only manpower before was worthless. Malvern Hill is a bit of a grinder for Union, so that's nice. CSA mostly just floods in through the cover lanes and outshoots and it was a little obnoxious. Economy buff is nice. Something needed to make it competitive with Training and Politics. Ha. That cavalry message in Gaines' Mill definitely confused me also thinking I'd be getting a free brigade.

An alternate solution might simply be to remove Army Organization as a stat and instead just flat out give the player army size increases every so often that match dev expectations. Combine that with fixed enemy size amounts for each battle. Then it's on the player to staff up to the necessary size moving forward however they choose. They either have managed to have a core of vets from winning past battles or they've got masses of rookies and have a hard fight ahead. --- As a side note, it should also be noted that in the current system making an effort to rear flank enemy units in order to capture them (as opposed to overwhelming from the front to shatter or just letting them rout from fire near the end of a battle) is pretty worthless compared to the risk to your flanking units. Getting captives, which you only got at increased risk, for manpower which is completely useless. I don't think anyone is really at risk of running out of manpower compared to money for veterans given the way you currently want to not grow your army mindlessly because of scaling.

That is completely contrary to what I've seen. 1) Are you sure the cavalry wasn't getting shot by something else? Was the cavalry mostly full condition before you moved them in? I've generally seen cavalry wipe out artillery its size while taking maybe 20-30 losses, if that. 2) Same as above, do you know the condition of the infantry before they started? If they had 0 condition, they're not going to do anything in melee, it's going to be a slap fight. And then the infantry are going to get fired on by other units and eventually rout.

As I found out afterwards, only if you can win fast, at least. If you got bogged down and the game started bringing in more and more reinforcements then those extra Corps would actually matter. Thankfully, I was able to push in and take the point for the early end shortly after the first timer (right as CSA reinforcements seemed to be hitting the field) so it didn't matter. I ended up staffing up 3 Corps and ignoring the Reserve. Smaller battles are there to give you more Career points so you can both afford the necessary AO to meet Grand Battle requirements and to give you basically free funds/manpower to reform your poor limping armies from the last Grand Battle. In your case, what probably happened was your AO was lagging or you had only small Elite brigades in your first division so you had nothing to catch bullets with. It's possible to hold the first point with the cover given, it's the second that's very difficult. Near as we've been able to gather, the AI autoscales based on what you're allowed to bring, but will also only downscale so much.

They're very expensive in terms of veteran costs because they tend to rack up XP like crazy feasting on units, if they survive, and the shop only gives you so many of the appropriate weapons anyway so it's hard to even equip a bunch of 750 brigades. If you can do it they're definitely worth it and it makes the Brigade tremendously safer from taking a couple bad volleys and shattering, but your money is probably going to be tied up elsewhere keeping your line brigades intact.

Dark grey is their innate earned stats, light grey is their stats from Perks and General.

Attempting to staff up the Union side for 2nd Bull Run and I wanted to cry when I looked at the Deploy screen. 4 Corps, 20 Brigades/Corps? Umm...yeah, I got my AO high enough, but I'm way, way, way short on funds to actually equip that many brigades. (And the store just ran out of 1842 Springfields, so that's fun too.) Eyeing my reputation right now and thinking how much I can get away with burning in order to just get rifles, sheesh. And naturally I don't have any points in recon so I can't check what my efforts are doing to the enemy scaling.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if there are any nearby enemy units they will automatically turn and engage the cavalry with gunfire while they're stuck in melee. This, obviously, will absolutely ruin them and cause them to rout. If you want to get doubly annoyed, try charging a group of three artillery brigades with a single cavalry brigade. Sure, you can tie one up in melee, maybe two if you are really fortunate. But the third will rotate, canister your cavalry, and murder them. Even two artillery brigades can get a little dicey if they aren't right next to each other so that one charge can force both into melee. edit: Purely as an anecdote, in the battle I just played, I had a cavalry brigade of 750 sitting around in the enemy rear waiting for an opportunity. When an enemy brigade of around 1200 strength remaining retreated, I charged straight into their path and forced a surrender in fairly short order. That's around the odds you want to take. A cavalry brigade of 250 simply isn't that useful for anything beyond spotting or solely artillery/supplies hunting because of that manpower disparity.

Yeah, I've had units get captured/shattered because they got charged in melee directly from the front, lost, then retreated into the enemy units and got tangled up with more stuff and surrendered. Kinda dumb that that can happen. Had to basically sacrifice a brigade of cavalry to rescue them once the AI had retreated the captured brigade all the way through their lines.

My experience is that 1-2.5 or so is about the limit to where I'd feel comfortable taking a reasonably experienced Melee Cavalry brigade into enemy infantry. Also having small cavalry brigades in general makes them far more likely to shatter when they take incidental fire from anything. 250 cav vs 1800 is just going to get run over, try against 700 for far better results. I've been using a brigade like that on and off, absolute limit 1 per Corps. They get decent kill counts and generally shouldn't die but you do have to watch out for them in order that they get into a good position to fire but then don't get charged or something like that. I've seen a brigade of 200 kill a few hundred in a medium length battle while taking only a handful of casualties.

Gaines' Mill is brutal. So far it's the only battle I was forced to take the Draw on. The CSA just has way, way too many men, I was outnumbered at least 2-1. Had the same problem of AO not being high enough to bring 20 brigades in the first stage. Honestly, it's kind of obnoxious always being outnumbered as Union. CSA gets enough brigades to keep the entire left two points in contact while still having a hammer to drive through the right flank where cover sucks and towards the hill. Your reinforcements arrive at roughly the right time to preserve the hill but not to keep their right flank from then sweeping down the entire left and dislodging you. It's extremely difficult to hold. I had a chance at taking back one VP in the last minutes of the battle but then 3 more fresh brigades showed up to contest it and I ran out of time.

IMO that's basically the point of a campaign. If you husbanded your army correctly and have a huge army by the end of the campaign, you should be able to walk over the enemy. And yes, that should probably tie into a more dynamic campaign where if you achieve full victory enough you can short circuit large parts of the campaign and end things early. And early on, a commander who focuses on Army Org should have an advantage over one who did something else as opposed to have actually just made the game harder for themselves.