Hitorishizuka

Ha. Yeah, I encountered that too and F11'd it, forgot to post in here about it. It shows up twice in Career too.

Anyone messed around with 20pdr Parrots after this second buff yet? Are they finally worth using or still not worth the cost or even still flat out inferior to cheaper options?

I don't have an accurate screenshot because I took advantage of mid-battle camp to refill guys which screws up the final numbers, but deployed 36k+4.5k+1.2k, lost 8k. Faced 40k+3k+3k, killed 30k+2k+1k+1k captured. IMO: Day 1 take advantage of your early force disparity to push hard on the western flag and then bunker in those woods. Positioning correctly there's a gap between those woods and the one to the east you can use to force the attacking brigades to sit in and you'll crush them down. There's some annoyance with them getting to rush into the fortifications to the west of that forest clump but you'll still outshoot them anyway with a couple more brigades offset. By pushing hard I was able to kill ~10k for 1k losses on Day 1, which basically wins you the map. Day 2 you have a couple options, but assuming you did the above, you'll have mauled the forces on the eastern side of the map. Leave a token strong brigade or two on the VP with some artillery and have everyone else push hard to the SE and you should be able to take the flags and kill all the brigades there before the flanking force from the west starts putting a lot of pressure on the VP. At that point just rotate your troops back. You can use a N-S line stretching from the same forest clump you used in Day 1 and heading north to defend with and kill the attackers, because taking the SW VP and holding it will influence the AI to start sending more troops that way instead of rushing your original VP. Day 3 finish killing everyone in the west, there's basically no one left. Day 4 kill the remaining couple brigades in the SE and win. I would still favor Politics first because the other large portion of your expenses always is refilling Cavalry brigades, which take basically unavoidable losses and cost $30k per battle or thereabouts to refill.

My Avatar gets WIA out of the Division Commander slot all the time ever since I started using Combine Division a lot more.

For initial units I will probably just click a spot because unless you are taking a very forward position you can just run and they'll get to where they need to go before the enemy gets there. For second wave reinforcements I will probably draw routes because I need them ASAP and I need to make sure they stick to non-forest paths.

Hit the Withdraw flag on far right, that orders them off the map. You should do this with empty supply wagons and your own brigades that are very damaged and close to shattering also. Ideally you should manually run them close to the retreating edge first so they don't risk taking a bad route.

Yeah, you have to do that anyway if you're mucking about with combine division and you want to ensure the right brigades combine.

I am reasonably but not 100% certain the Division commander hangs out with the 1st Brigade and is obviously in direct control if you combine division (and this tends to get them killed).

The key thing to remember is that none of the VPs matter in the end except for the final ones. All the intermediate VPs should be used as guidance for how to control the AIs movements and general hints on where you can find them. What you've described is actually, interestingly enough, exactly what the RL Confederates ran into in that battle--as they pressed in on the Union lines, their own forces wore down and the Union became more and more compacted in a defensible area until their final shell couldn't be cracked. To combat this you need to ensure that Union forces can't keep retreating in good order to better and better defensive positions. Broad suggestions: In Phase 1, ignore the VPs initially and push the center directly between the two. Then use that as an anchor to push south (token guard north to not get flanked) and cut off the Union forces at the south VP and pocket them and eliminate them. In the next phase, ignore the VP at the start and instead push hard west, then north to come up behind them. Then do the same thing as before and push against the VP from the west while having anvil forces south and east. Done correctly, you should be able to pocket and eliminate the majority of the Union forces before the final VP while still having most of yours intact. Then you should be able to brute force the Pike (attack from the SW, the cover's better for you on that side) against what's remaining.

Well, if you take lessons from WW1, no man's land craters can actually be okay cover.

There are usually not enough fords or bridges on these kinds of maps to make this practical (Antietam they will have to swing very wide around to the north as that's the only uncontested crossing. Artillery won't do anything, even medium range artillery isn't particularly effective as implemented right now. I kept defenders in cover in the area getting shelled basically because I didn't care and a hundred, even two hundred casualties was meaningless compared to the ability to hold good cover and keep that flank secure and the crossing area contested.

Welp, recorded my first video. No talking, didn't feel like it. Min-size CSA campaign on normal, just picked a random battle to showcase. Interestingly it played much different than the last time I was here. Does anyone recall whether Chantilly was just changed in the past patch or two to be 1:2 odds from 1:1? Or is this actually showing how AI auto-scaling screws you if you don't take your biggest brigades since it scales to your theoretical, not what you actually brought? My last CSA campaign I had only 1:1 odds on Chantilly and it was an utter breeze, I had to actually think about this one for a bit. The last time I did Chantilly I was able to take Skirmishers and get very good work done with them due to how the terrain is spaced. This time I flat out couldn't afford to because the enemy brigades are so large and numerous that I needed another couple infantry brigades to just hold the line instead. (Also I couldn't take as much artillery either.) @Acika011 since you asked for a video

I'll dispute this one. 24pdr Napoleons are worth their weight in gold, they are absolute murder if you put them on a unit with a decent Firearms score. 10 pdr Ordnance and 10 pdr Tredegar are the next best options, especially for newer brigades that need training. 12 pdr Howitzer is pretty bad, 14pdr James is very bad. 20pdr Parrot underperforms for cost even still after the buffs. (10 pdr is okay). 6 pdrs of any kind are mediocre, you should basically never need to use them.

Technically I do but it's tiny and I generally only upload Mechwarrior Online stuff since I can just use Shadowplay and record good matches. I'll try and remember to do a dedicated record of my next battles arbitrarily just to show them. I'm playing a min-size CSA campaign on Normal right now just for funsies, I should be getting close to Antietam again actually.

Not to take anything from his accomplishment, but keep in mind scaling. 6k out of 140k enemies arguably means less than 1k out of 20k.

Yes, precisely, that's one of the ideal places to put them. If you're sitting in a line of forest or other cover that stops, you can put sniper skirmishers out in the open and effectively extend your line and use them to keep shooting. Their stealth bonus means they still probably won't be shot by artillery, they get to take advantage of flank shooting, and you get more fire on target causing units to rout faster. But as GeneralPITA said, they do eat ammo, so if you want to conserve try not to have them shoot at absolute maximum range, they do experience a bit of dropoff to where one volley only does a handful of kills instead of what they really can do.

More or less. Pick a direction, hide in the woods (watch your rear if necessary), then start moving out either as or shortly before your reinforcements are hitting the field. Depending on area you may be able to take out a brigade or two early without much risk just with detached skirmishers. The only directions I wouldn't go in would be W and SE. I went SW so that I could automatically pincer the enemies. Going E or NE lets you try to concentrate weight instead. Whatever works for you.

Fight defensively, even when on offense. Infantry and artillery mostly do their job even when you leave them alone provided you put them in a smart position to begin with. You only need to micro cavalry and skirmishers. Skirmishers you give them long range rifles and use them to shoot at enemy brigades that the AI tends to just sit right outside the range of your own and get free casualties. You can also use them as flankers at the far edges of your lines. You only need to keep an eye on them to make sure they didn't chase the enemy after an attack order was given, otherwise they'll be fine, even if sometimes they don't shoot. Cavalry gets your main focus maneuvering them around to find artillery or find lone brigades and using detached skirmishers to absorb fire to let cavalry get in clean.

It might be interesting to try but honestly it's not like Whitworths are worth using unless you've completely run out of 24pdr Napoleon, 10pdr Ordnance, and 10pdr Tredegar.

FWIW sometimes the AI just isn't aggressive enough. In the middle of 2nd Bull Run right now as CSA and the Union just isn't really attacking. They love lining up brigades outside of each other's rifle range so artillery can pelt them but they're only infrequently committing brigades to the attack and mostly piecemeal, so I just sit there and insta-rout them in a volley and the AI never can manage to assemble the critical mass they have when they have me outnumbered 2:1. Of course, it's equally annoying seeing that because I usually like to try and wipe them out but going on the offense to chew through the 40k remaining guys when I only have 28k or so is a little silly and wasteful, so I might well just lame out the rest of the map on the 3rd day if they don't do anything. I'm actually still having a cash issue anyway so taking less casualties would work out just fine.

Parker's Crossroads is kinda dumb because the AI gets to field so many skirmishers that are basically invulnerable in the woods and you have a terrible starting position to boot. Ignore the VP and the fortifications, run into the woods to the SW. You can set up there and just hold for awhile until your reinforcements start hitting the map, then you can start pushing out. You should be able to catch one of their brigades crossing the river between forests on the northern side while you're sitting in the woods and get good damage on them. You can also kill one of the artillery brigades in the far NW for free since they just run their infantry to the VP but their artillery will stop to shell you to no effect. Once all the CSA forces make it onto the field and you can afford to stop watching your southern side, you can swing your forces out, contest the forest directly NW of the VP, then use that to push them all the way off to the east as your other forces make their way onto the map from the north. I only managed a 2:1 kill ratio which isn't very good considering the manpower advantage you have overall but I got greedy/lazy and had my guys melee near the end to try for captures when you should basically never melee with infantry after a certain point in the campaign IMO.

The cannon will eventually push them out, even 100% forest cover only does so much to protect against grapeshot. Long range cannon fire doesn't do anything and as you saw infantry fire is relatively ineffective. If there was nothing else in the area, just sending cavalry into them would have worked also. I wouldn't send the infantry brigade in to melee because the AI gets melee ratings for free while your brigades probably don't have above 25.

Yes, that's the general strategy, but I still recommend getting AO high enough to use around as many brigades as practically see the fight by around there, they're just all vets or so. The key is too avoid scaling up by including brigades that legitimately would never have seen combat or who would be stuck sitting around waiting for fighting for awhile because there isn't enough combat width to have them in play effectively. Run small with a couple 750 melee cav brigades and they get to run over everything, too. Run small and the 24pdr Napoleons which you can afford by not having to buy loads of grunt rifles get to blow everything up.

Recruit brigades get to be max size, a few regulars at 2/3 or so, then you can fill out the rest with fairly small vet brigades. That level of numbers means your regulars don't have to get overrun quite so fast and your cavalry can actually do something.

IMO the other trick to min size is that getting a high AO to raise your Brigade caps makes it easier to level recruits, who will have Brigades of 2500 compared to enemy 1000. By Gaines Mill I'd at least want the second Corps at minimum (the first Division definitely sees the battle) and I think I was probably at AO7+ by then. Malvern you can deploy your full first Corps immediately so you want to max that too even if you only bring a couple Divisions out of the second Corps.