Hitorishizuka

Fallback costing condition and casualties when you were probably caught out of position making too aggressive an attack. Sure, okay, you're a perfect player with flawless intel at all times on every map and you clearly know everything you need to know. Why are you even asking questions about whether you should take Recon points? Are you just trying to show off how smart you are?

I already said, please actually read my posts. Yes, when I have numerical parity, I start looking for either a wave attack or to wheel en echelon and sweep the entire field. Knowing their #s tells me when it's safe to have everyone abandon the fortifications and get into position to instead start doing things like cutting off enemy retreat paths or otherwise preemptively blocking parts of the map.

Antietam isn't really that hard of a battle, since you have more or less free access to their entire backline whenever you want to take it because of the way the terrain is shaped and the map size. It's a waste of time or skirmishers to have them sitting around your lines just to frontal probe, given the way the AIs lines tend to be constructed there's not generally a lot of room to see anything. What you really want to know is when the AI is still demonstrating as if it is willing to fight but no longer has numerical superiority. You can't learn that from only when a couple units break because you need to see their entire army.

If you can recon all the way to the enemy's side of the map without getting your units shot to pieces, the battle probably wasn't very challenging anyway so this is kinda moot.

Skirmishers don't tell you when a fresh division enters the battle from the opposite side of the map. Knowing exact numbers is important for knowing when you only have local superiority vs map superiority. When you have the latter, you can then switch to doing wave attacks that sweep the enemy along and maintain a cordon that will reliably kill the entire army.

Unless you have a good memory, played the battle recently, or refer to written up notes, I actually found Recon 4 useful for knowing precisely when the enemy reinforcements hit the field. Also knowing when you've effectively broken the enemy while sitting back on defense by checking their #s (I generally look for rough numbers parity after they start at 2:1) and can transition to offense safely.

Did you start new campaigns when that system was put into place? Do you try and field maximum size battalions as much as possible or do you play small?

Okay, here we go. Still a Day 1 Victory on Cold Harbor, but actually play past Phase 1 so as to inflict real damage on the Union forces and actually experience something. Still a very easy battle. Casualties were manageable, could have been even more conservative on the final pushes. Now, was it actually worth it given the automatic AI rebuild? Not entirely sure about that.

Not entirely sure I agree yet...or at least, it doesn't seem explored yet enough how the dynamic campaign/manpower pool really works. I just messed around with a couple different Cold Harbor wins. Ninja phase 1 and Union got about 80k more troops after the battle. Destroy half their army and still win day 1 and the Union gets 70k (so less however many casualties you inflicted, in my case around 25k) BUT they also then got the benefit of additional training for 10% there. So in the end it was a push-pull and not just a net gain by opting to smash them in the face instead of taking the quick win.

The Confederate campaign is actually easier at least up through Fredericksburg. You will have periodic battles where you get to sit on defense and laugh at Union troops. Later on is when you really switch to mostly offense against the murder trenches and then you need to get creative (or somehow brute force it, it''s not impossible).

The problem is that it's either only recently changed to be more graceful or is inconsistently applied for each battle. I have a different Cold Harbor battle rendering now where I win on Phase 3 Day 1 as CSA but got onto the VP late and had the battle timer extend/stuck at 0:00 as it counted down the Contested timer (with no Union troops nearby) until it resolved to full Capture and then the battle finally ended.

Depends on what your losses end up being. It feels a little bad to win the battle like this and see the enemy's army size grow by another 50k. That's definitely more manpower than you get. If you can still win but draw the battle out and inflict a very good casualty ratio (which should be possible since you're mostly on defense) that might be worth it, so I want to test that.

I'm going to play out the complete battle in an alt save just to see what it's like.

As usual, a bit late getting to this battle in my campaign, but if anyone wanted to see visually how one can achieve the Phase 1 victory, I've uploaded it. It can even be cleaner than this probably, knowing more about the battle now, but this was still okay.

Congrats on the official release~

You can but it screws everything up. The dead officers will never disappear from the roster. The wounded officers will never get healthy.

It gets worse. This is post-Chickamauga (Victory).

If anyone is still having issues, I finally got up to recording this on Normal. You may hopefully find some useful tips inside. Good luck! Just watch your fundamentals. Attack when odds and terrain are favorable, defend otherwise. Press the assault hard only if must because of timers, accepting higher casualties. Whenever possible, seek to restrict the enemy's movements. Any time you can flank or even pocket the enemy forces, try to.

TBH Skirmishers have always been useful, they just weren't useful enough in comparison to upgrading all of the enemies' skirmishers in many circumstances. How has this changed?

I'm just amused to see that 20pdr Parrotts are still garbage. @Kloiste If you run out of 24pdrs and 10pdr Ordnance, try 10pdr Tredegar and 10pdr Parrott. I've seen mixed reports but personally I would consider the latter two more or less comparable with Ordnance.

It's advantageous so long as you don't put yourself in a bad position and lose more troops in a bad ratio to do so. Getting more experience on your troops is valuable as is the guns. (Remember, once you reach the top end, the enemy can't keep outscaling you!)

Brigades will almost always turn to target the nearest enemy brigade. You can easily use this to your advantage, this is actually an important feature of using Spencer cavalry, because you go in and get them to start turning, which then means they take flank shots from your mainline while your cavalry have already retreated.

I'd probably want to field Henries if I could if I was using a repeater rifle on infantry, but either way IME the conditions are a little trickier to engineer for optimal performance. Most times they'll do better/as good with regular rifles.

Yes, true, sorry for any imprecision. Spencer Carbines are amazing, Spencer Rifles are probably ignorable as they're a little rare and you'll have issues putting together enough for even a small brigade and it's questionable whether it's even worth it. (Although, uh, speaking of name imprecision...)

Everyone's already answered you but Spencer carrying skirmisher cavalry are some of the potentially deadliest units in the game. If you can get them set up properly on a floating flank, they can get in close and just pour in fire unanswered and rack up the kills. In Grand Battles where conditions are suitable it's fairly common for me to see those brigades with 1k+ kills. In my current in-progress post Day 2 Chancellorsville CSA save I have a unit that's already racked up 2000+ kills. They're completely ridiculous. The only things comparable are combined divisions or 24pdr Howitzers in a defensive battle where the AI must charge you.