Aetius

It's not that the store will provide more, it's that the previously available weapons disappear if you don't buy them. In other words, if you want to build up a stock in your inventory, you have to buy everything in the store before the next grand battle. This is critical for rare weapons like the Whitworth TS, for example - otherwise, each store iteration gives you too few rifles to equip a unit big enough to survive.

Just got done with a test run on Potomac Fort on Legendary. Couple of things I F11'd: - Manual targeting is too sticky. My units in the fort were targeting fleeing units that were well out of range, and ignoring units that were less than 100 meters away. This led to situations where they weren't firing at all, forcing me to micro-manage their targeting. - Flanking fortifications works again, yay! - Holy cow, the issue with carbine fire rate seems to have been stealth fixed. One of the initial Union skirmisher units was just blasting away at a fantastic rate using Sharps 1855s. I suspect this will lead to skirmisher cavalry being very, very powerful. - Melee cavalry nerf seems good, judging from Crocker's effectiveness - still very useful, but less overpowered. - Withdrawal behavior are still problematic - Hexamer's skirmishers kept withdrawing at an angle from the only relevant Union unit, and into the open. - Left to their own devices, melee cavalry will withdrawal for hundreds of meters for no apparent reason. - I was able to maneuver Crocker's melee cavalry right up next to the 2nd Ohio - on their right flank, almost touching - and the unit never responded. He actually got off two volleys of pistol fire.

I can only add to the 1st Winchester pile. I prefer to go around the east edge of the map and use cavalry, as you can quickly overrun the skirmishers and one or two artillery units in the Union rear. Also don't forget to capture the supplies that enter from the east side of the town about halfway through the battle. 1st Winchester is all about low casualties and hopefully collecting artillery / sniper loot. Cross Keys is difficult because it requires a very precise configuration - your defensive brigades in the center woods MUST stay well back in such a way that the Union troops are forced to fight from the river, and they need your best artillery support. You should also set up on both flanks hammer any brigades that try to flank the center woods. Getting skirmishers / cavalry across the river behind the Union lines will help reduce the pressure on the center and collect a lot of artillery loot. Once you figure out how that works, you can do this:

All the Corps units do receive the +5 melee/firearms buff from Defender, and being in the general's aura is not required. I F11'd it, we'll see - if nothing else, that needs to be made clear in the ability choices.

I ... hadn't actually noticed that - that's probably a bug? Or in camp all units in the Corps are considered in his aura? I'll look into it.

There are some effects. On the battle screen, the icons on the upper right indicate optional maluses that will be applied to the AI based on your victories in side battles and sometimes grand battles. They are temporary though. I think this will not get changed anytime soon because it's tied up in lethality being too high. It's not difficult to inflict incredible casualties on the AI - casualties that historically would have brought an immediate end to the war (I'm looking at YOU Fredericksburg, 75k Union casualties). Attempting to factor this in more heavily would make later battles too easy, or conversely impossibly hard if you weren't doing well.

Yes. I've seen a Lt General give his speed bonus to units from another Corps. The Lt General bonuses appear to be applied to every unit in the general's command radius without regard to organization.

The Republicans did not have any party apparatus in the South, for pretty obvious reasons, and thus were unable to get on the ballot. Evidence suggest that even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered - for example, Lincoln was on the ballot in Virginia, and only received 1.1% of the votes. Ballot access was a problem for the Democrats as well - they did not make the ballot in New York and New Jersey. Not going to say that - further research indicates I'm ... really confused about what happened in New York and New Jersey. Agreed. If you won't accept primary sources and books that aren't research papers, it's an impossible standard to meet - I don't have access to research journals. You should definitely read Tagg though.

This is, and has been, a fairly widespread problem. I think it has to do with limitations on reinforcements and deployment that are not visible to the player. For example, in Gaines' Mill, your second Corps trickles in bit by bit, with odd unit groupings and sometimes missing units. In your first playthrough, this is very unexpected and disconcerting, given how far those units have to travel to get into the fight. The last two groups are often unable to reach the fight, and you have zero control over who comes in when and how they are distributed.

I do want them to be effective in their role, but I'd really like to see some more variety in the AI's choice of artillery, especially on Hard and Legendary. I think right now the weapon quality selection is simplistic and based on cost and shop availability to that side. The "best" gun for the Union appears to be the 20pd Parrot, and I'd guess the "best" gun for the Confederates is the James (which is historically odd, but whatever). Since Hard and Legendary crank up the weapon quality for the AI, it actually ends up with a less powerful artillery mix focused entirely on long-range counter-battery fire because those are the most expensive guns.

I hope they are good now, since they are all you capture on Legendary as the Confederates.

Loaded up my Union game that was saved after Chancellorsville, and received two of the same medal. F11'd, and reproducible from my save game.

And Levine is overly pedantic, focusing too narrowly on official Confederate records and ignoring other evidence. For example: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2006.05.0375%3Aarticle%3D21 An example of a newspaper being a little loose with facts? Could be. There's no way for us to know today. And regardless of the the actual details, the historical record is clear that Union soldiers and civilians feared the use of blacks in combat by the South and believed it had occurred, and used that as an argument for allowing blacks to enlist and fight for the Union - which they did, in large numbers. And what possible evidence could we have besides written opinions, since secession had never come up in court (and probably couldn't, given its nature)? That's not the only evidence, either. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, supported secession ... by the North. The last part is a myth. Lincoln was a deeply unpopular candidate, and a deeply unpopular President throughout his time in office. He was elected with only 39.8% of the popular vote, using a strategy that leveraged the larger electoral vote counts of a few key Northern states and the disunity of his three significant opponents. He wasn't even on the ballot in many Southern states. In fact, Lincoln was so unpopular that he had to be smuggled into Washington DC to give his inauguration speech. Larry Tagg, the author of The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, estimates that his approval rating in modern terms would have been around 25%. And even people who voted for him didn't necessarily agree that secession was illegal, nor did they necessarily support using force to keep the Union together.

No. The first ten amendments were the Bill of Rights, which were primarily concerned with explicitly protecting specific individual rights from the intrusion of the newly formed federal government. They were adopted on the heels of the Constitution itself. The only amendment in the Bill of Rights that dealt with state power was the 10th Amendment, which was largely a restating of Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation. The 11th and 12th Amendments came slightly later, and were basically housekeeping - the 11th was the belated establishment of sovereign immunity, and the 12th was a bugfix, as the original process for Presidential election allowed for a deadlock.

I think an article by John Stauffer does a decent job of covering the history. The short answer is no, but blacks did support and fight for the South, usually unwillingly but not always. Yes. There is a very large body of evidence that, at the time, secession was considered as a drastic but quite legitimate response to political issues. Indeed, quite a few Northern newspapers were supportive of peaceful Southern secession in the period before the war started. One of the best sources is Northern Editorials on Secession, by Perkins, which is a rather large collection of Northern newspaper editorials collated in 1942 and is not available online as far as I can tell. However, a book review at the time had this to say: One of the most obvious takeaways from Perkins' editorial collection is that very few people at the time doubted the legitimacy of secession - they were much more concerned about it actually happening or not happening. Lincoln was part of a relatively small minority in his insistence that the Constitution legally forbade secession. Furthering the above response, the states existed independently for years before the Articles of Confederation were signed - let alone the Constitution. In fact, it's a quirk of history that the states that ratified the Constitution by definition seceded from the United States formed by the Articles of Confederation - the 1787 Convention ignored the process for modification included in the Articles and instead drafted a new Constitution. The Articles of Confederation were very explicit in detailing what they were. Article 2 of the Articles reads: The Articles were thus explicitly an agreement between independent states to form a national government, not the formation of a national government that then delegated powers to the individual states.

I'm less concerned about the teleporting in that instance, and more concerned about the fact that I had won, and the game acknowledged that I had won - and then my victory was taken away. I have to replay it anyway (I quit without saving in disgust), so I'll stream it.

Also on Stones River, it's possible to position infantry below the easternmost fortification such the attackers can shoot the defenders, but the defenders can't shoot back.

Stones River. I had just done a slow and careful left flank maneuver that captured the western VP. My troops then advanced, rolled up the line, and cracked the eastern defenses. The eastern VP was taken. Boom, the day ends, next phase. Suddenly, my troops are back where they started, except in worse positions - the left flank position I had established was completely gone. Both VPs displayed Confederate flags at the beginning of the phase. In other words, I won by taking both VPs, and it showed me owning both VPs - and then I got to watch as they were taken away because my troops were arbitrarily removed from the objectives. That right there is a keyboard breaker - that position is so incredibly painful and costly to crack, and due to the scenario design I have to do it twice?

Just finished Fredericksburg on Hard as the CSA, and had something really weird happen in the last phase of the battle. When the focus switched back to Telegraph Road and the southern hill, a large number of damaged, exhausted Union brigades appeared northeast of the Telegraph Road VP and began moving toward what was left of the fighting in the south. Apparently, most or all of the Union units from Marye's Heights were teleported to the last phase. This was frustrating because my center Corps had advanced, pushed the Union reinforcements across the creek towards Fredericksburg, and then captured the southern portion of the town. There was no physical way for those units to get to the Telegraph Road area without either fighting through a full-strength division or crossing a bridge under fire and going all the way around to the east, which would have taken longer than the phase lasted. None of my units were teleported - only Union units. Fortunately, I was able to resume a defensive position and fend them off, and I had a couple of skirmishers and some cavalry that were able to delay the Union units enough to keep the Telegraph Road VP from being captured.

Not at all. I quite frequently maneuver by division - it's why I name my units the way I do. I also sometimes build a skirmisher horde and move them as a unit (like in the woods on the Confederate right in 2nd Bull Run), and I only use cavalry in groups - it makes them far more effective and increases survivability. This is frustrated by the "straight line only" feature of division / group movement. I counter it somewhat by using what I call "gaggle mode", where instead of drawing a front line to give the units a formation, you make a quick squiggle around a single point just to get all the units headed in the same direction. To perform a flanking maneuver you have to do it 2 or 3 times to curve the units around, but it beats the hell out of drawing a path for each brigade - I only do that when it's required to get brigades to follow roads.

Two melee cavalry brigades will take care of that problem for you. Spend as little money on them as possible, and be careful not to run them in front of enemy infantry. If you can afford it, a third skirmisher cavalry brigade will help them deal with enemy melee cavalry as well - though if you're careful, you can train enemy cavalry into your infantry to destroy them.

It's possible - though maybe the algorithm is sometimes working backwards? The command appears to be ignoring the current brigade positions, and arranging them 1-2-3-4 from right to left. This set of orders is pretty much guaranteed to take the longest possible time to get the brigades into position - look at the path 1/4 Rifle has to take versus how far it would have to go to get into position if it marched up next to 1/1 Rifle on the right. The only way it could have been worse would have been to send 1/1 Rifle all the way from right to left. Also note that it took a few tries for me to get this screenshot - the other sets of orders were rational and sent each brigade forward on a least-distance path. Maybe it has to do with the brigades being in column?

This is useful, until one of two things happen - the game decides that what you really want is for all of your brigades in the division to swap places in line as they move forward fifty yards, resulting in a chaotic mess, or you order the division to attack an enemy brigade, at which point they point themselves at the enemy brigade and squeeze together, almost instantly causing the center brigade(s) to start sliding.

The problem with the brigade auto-adjustment is that it needs to be smarter. I've seen a brigade start sliding to one side ... where it promptly runs into another unit and then keeps sliding in the same direction. I've seen a unit move from one end of Henry Hill to the other in a continuous search for a space to call his own, which is something no brigade commander would ever do no matter how stupid they were. What needs to happen here is that if the adjustment would run into another unit on the other side, the brigade needs to then move "backwards" (i.e., away from the enemy, using the retreat algorithm) until it doesn't overlap any more. That way he remains more-or-less in the line, but doesn't overlap and interfere with other units. What's even more intensely frustrating about this behavior is that I cannot order the right-step-march the AI is clearly doing, the one that every recruit learns in the first week of training. I instead have to tell the unit to wheel, exposing its flank, and then guess at the position which will be correct when it wheels back. To do the maneuver safely, I have to have the unit fall back and then move forward again, which is time-consuming, condition-consuming, micro-heavy, and a little silly. It would make things a lot simpler and easier if we could just tell the units to shift left or right a bit to clean up the line. I would, if the skirmishers would then follow-up and keep harassing the unit they've been told to attack. The frustrating part of this is that it's clear there's already behavior in the unit AI for this - you will sometimes see skirmisher or cavalry skirmisher units move up, fire, fall back, reload, and then move up again to repeat. The issue is that the skirmishers seem to "forget" their orders at some point, sometimes quickly and sometimes after a couple of rounds. This is especially bad in groups of skirmishers - they will all rush forward once, fire, fall back and then stop for no apparent reason, which is intensely annoying when you are pursuing an enemy unit and need them to keep moving to stay in range. And it's not a function of movement, because snipers have the same problem with "forgetting" their orders even though they aren't moving. Skirmishers also have a foolish habit of retreating into open ground, instead of sticking to cover. What happens in the game goes far beyond that. I've seen a charged unit pursue the routed chargers for miles, using all of their condition and charging alone into the enemy line as if they think they are supermen. I can see pursuing the enemy for fifty yards, because you lost your head - not halfway across the map, especially when such pursuit is clearly suicidal.

Just had a hard freeze on Malvern Hill as Confederates, which is a first for me. Tried to F11 it, waited about 10 minutes, nothing.