Aetius

Something needs to be done about on-demand routing, and the fact that routing doesn't use Condition. The fall-back / routing direction issues are partially fixed, but remain bizarre at times. Once they get fixed, it's going to be trivial to abuse the rout button for fast travel with no Condition usage. One possible way to fix this would be for the unit to become uncontrollable once routed, so that they rout the full distance. However, I think it would be better for routing units to use Condition instead - this prevents bizarre events like watching artillerymen pushing their cannons sprint away from your 50% Condition skirmishers.

It gets much stronger as the war goes on. At high levels, you're getting back 1-2k men in a scenario where you take 10k casualties. That's pretty powerful, considering they are all veterans and keep their weapons - essentially the equivalent of saving a brigade. I'm pretty sure it doesn't need a buff, but rather some of the other options need to be buffed to be more attractive instead.

See 43:17 in the following video - note the survivor numbers on my units (1/1 Rifle, etc): Now look at 1:34 in the camp video after that battle: You'll see that each of my units has more men in camp than they had when the battle ended. The numbers are small, because I took very few casualties and the units started small. Nonetheless I regained ... 42 men? I had Medicine level of 2, which is 4% recovery. 1/1 Rifle started the battle with 1100 men, and ended with 840, for a casualty total of 260. 260 * 0.04 = 10 men, but he only regained 6, which implies that Legendary has some kind of penalty to Medicine or Medicine level 2 is really 2% recovery.

Yes, but unfortunately they are useless except for identifying which VPs you actually care about - using that is how I learned to retreat immediately from Matthew's Hill and to know I can abandon the Stone Bridge in 1st Bull Run. A great example of the problem is one that caught me at the end of my Confederate Legendary run - the timer is very short on Stony Ridge, and if you lose it, the battle immediately ends in a defeat. Contrast that with Henry Hill as the Union in 1st Bull Run, where capturing the VP does nothing but invite more Rebel counter-attacks.

Sigh, I never even considered falling back across the river. It would help a great deal in this game to know which VPs will actually cause you to lose, and those you can lose and retake.

I think it's a side effect of the high lethality in this game. A brigade caught in a bad position can take 300-400 casualties in just a few seconds, regardless of their experience, and that's often enough to shatter them if they are small. A low-skill, high morale unit is even worse, which is why I never take the 1-star morale perk for infantry brigades - I've had bad experiences with low-skill high-morale units standing and fighting when they should be running.

This is mostly, but not entirely true. If, for example, you have two brigades in the line of fire, both will get hit. The primary target will take more damage though. A single unit taking fire from two opposing units will rout more quickly, and flanking fire is more effective if you can get in that position with your second unit. That said, the effectiveness of the fire depends on the shooter, not the shootee - except perhaps for morale damage. I fill them full whenever possible. The reason is that on higher difficulty levels, smaller brigades are much more prone to simply getting blown away, which loses all of their experience.

I played my first Confederate Legendary Ironman buying very few veterans due to the cost. It might have made it more difficult, but I made it all the way to 2nd Bull Run doing that so it'll be hard to convince me that it breaks the game systems. What ends up happening long-term is that the unit skills creep upwards but the star bonuses become harder to get (and keep).

It's not realistic, but it does allow the player to recover experienced brigades. I think restricting the hiring of veterans could be a feature of Hard or Legendary difficulty levels. I'd also like to see the Training attribute affect the stats of recruits, rather than the cost of Veterans, which would eliminate that problem entirely and add to the roleplay (as a commander focusing on training).

I suspect it works something like this: Damage = (number of hits) * (weapon damage) * (cover/terrain factors?) * (range factors?) number of hits = (number of shooters) * (firearms skill factor) * (range factor) * (accuracy factor) * (efficiency factor?) * (cover/terrain factors?) * (condition/morale factors?) * (some element of luck) So while the Farmers may do 18 damage, they get far fewer hits due to their steeper range drop-off and low accuracy. We don't know how much damage it takes to get one kill, or even if the damage is distributed directly against the unit hit point pool (18 damage * 100 hits = -1800 hit points, at 20 damage per kill that would 90 kills) or if the damage is applied on a per-man basis (if it take 20 damage for one kill, one hit does 18 damage and the second hit does the last 2 damage, with the other 16 damage wasted).

Also, can we please have more control - or at least warning - about how and where units get deployed. I received an unpleasant surprise during my Legendary Union run at Shiloh when my artillery division was deployed to the Union left all by themselves. The game appears to be making an assumption about how divisions are constituted sometimes, and doesn't tell you that half or more of your brigades won't be initially deployed.

The Union Distress Call scenario on Legendary Difficulty is too difficult - it's beyond legendarily hard, and into absurd territory. It's the second scenario in the campaign, and the scenario-provided units are a couple skirmishers, a weak skirmisher cavalry unit, and two under-strength infantry brigades. Even if you were able to bring every possible man, you're heavily outnumbered ... and the Confederates receive not one but two overstrength shock cavalry units (850 men), which just destroy your brigades one by one in charges that you can't stop. There's no other scenario that I've seen so far where their cavalry gets such huge buffs. Those units need to be dialed down to perhaps 500 men.

I'm going to try it on the next playthrough. The need for more and better infantry is pretty obvious, but I feel like I never had the weapons to equip them. A 2 star brigade of 2500 men armed with Farmers isn't going to do much good (except as charge breakers, perhaps). I just finished my first Union run, which was much shorter. They don't even have the Farmer option, and the Distress Call scenario is absurdly difficult - the Confederates get not one but two overstrength shock cavalry units, and they just knock you around like a pro boxer. And don't get me started on Shiloh. It was ... very unexpected that I had to carry Shiloh by myself as the Union, while on the Confederate side my force was half high-quality scenario-provided units. I'm pretty sure that there simply aren't enough men in the Union recruit pool, no matter what, to have a chance - but we'll see when I play it again. Of the two, I feel the Union campaign is far more difficult on Legendary. This could be because I'm less familiar with the Union campaign, but I don't think it's just that - nasty surprises like the cavalry in Distress Call are far more prevalent, and your units are less able to deal with them. Union playlist:

And sadly, this run has come to an end. My expectations were that I would be low on manpower and cash, so I focused on Politics. As it turned out, my biggest constraint was weapon availability - there were numerous times where the weapons to re-equip a brigade simply were not there, regardless of the amount of money I had. This was exacerbated by unit losses and high casualties. I failed to develop my grenadiers effectively (melee infantry), which cost me big in a couple of battles. My shock cavalry was a highlight - despite several costly mistakes, they were extremely effective. I believe I could have benefited significantly from developing a couple of full-strength skirmisher units for fighting in forests and towns - it would've taken less manpower and their cover bonuses mean they can hold up a brigade or even two for extended periods of time.

Left click on a unit in the quickbar at the bottom to select it, then left click in the deployment zone. (If the deployment zone is inactive in a multi-zone scenario, it'll take two left clicks - one to select, and one to place the unit.)

The cavalry charge bug against small units in long fortifications. This is 0.74 hotfix2, but from a 0.74 hotfix1 saved game, if that makes a difference. The odd behavior of division orders when you have five homogenous brigades in a division.

Thanks - I think I benefited greatly from the cover hotfix. I've tried using Hold, and it works well when you don't need to shift to avoid getting flanked. I definitely could have used it more there, especially on the center brigade. Of course, what I really want is to be able to give that order to my troops myself, so I can have them sidle sideways into line.

I suspect it is a bug, but I would take it in Legendary. You think push most of my troops up the left side? Or try to swing around the right? I made a weak push on the right, but there were a lot of troops there - not sure I could actually make that happen. I made a conscious decision to avoid the use of Veterans because they are so expensive. I could definitely revisit that, especially given the weapon constraints, which are much tighter than I expected - I've spent a lot of money on replacement guns that I might not have needed if my infantry units were better. This was also a trade-off - I chose to focus on Politics in order to get more recruits (and cash). I built II Corps as a place to put units due to the AO constraints on I Corps, so I could swap out units for different missions. It's definitely possible that was a bad decision.

Ran into an artillery unit AI issue today playing Antietam (my Union cavalry horde campaign, not the Legendary Ironman). The Confederate reinforcements that approached from the southwest towards Dunker Church led with their artillery unit, even after spotting infantry in the woods in front of them. Predictably, it was entirely destroyed in the first volley by the three brigades waiting in the trees. I bugged an issue with giving orders at the division level. A division with five cavalry or five infantry will inexplicably send the fifth unit way off to the side when given orders as a group, instead of making a continuous line. The AI apparently has trouble when being attacked by three or more cavalry skirmishers, and appears to stop shooting entirely while the cavalry rotate in and out, blasting away. I bugged an issue with cavalry charges as well. Small brigades occupy only a portion of a fortification, and if you charge from the other side, the charging cavalry heads to the unit's flag ... which is over the middle, empty portion of the fortification. When they get there, they just stop and do nothing. If you order them to attack the unit, they will just stand there - they believe they are in the middle of the enemy force, but they aren't actually engaged. I suspect this could be exploited with skirmishers as well.

Your understanding is correct. The general rule of thumb is no. That said, there are exceptions. The fundamental problem with fortifications is that they are wider than your brigade front, which produces an unfavorable firepower gradient. This means that while the unit is in the fortifications more enemy units can target them, and their own fire is diluted. The cover and damage reduction doesn't make up for that - 2 units firing at you, each with a 25% reduction in damage, is still 150% of the damage you would be taking one-on-one. The usable fortifications are short, straight line emplacements that face the direction you need to fire. Poor fortifications are long, curved or hooked, and/or exposed. A prime bad example is the Confederate right flank fortification at Marye's Heights - it's stretched so far that it permits six full-strength Union brigades to fire at one defending brigade.

Yep, I've bugged that one and a few others (ranks on the disband dialog is especially bad). I think whatever they use to display their text decides what to display in a space delimited fashion. For example, if the field limit is eight characters, "123 56789" will display as "123", "1234567 9" will display as "1234567", and "123456789" won't display at all.

I'm up to Gaines' Mill in my Legendary playthrough, and the only artillery I've captured for the last several scenarios has been 20pd Parrot guns. It seems that on Legendary, the Union artillery from 1862 onwards is composed entirely of 20pd Parrot guns. While I'm grateful for the reprieve since they are still pretty ineffective, it seems like there should be more variety. I would suggest larger numbers of guns, and some AI tuning to reduce fire at extreme range that is ineffective.

Scenario-breaking bug in Ambush Convoy (Confederates), start at 11:30 - unable to retake the supply wagons. I F11'd it as well: Also note the 2000-man captured unit in the lower left of the video screenshot - I double-checked, and I did not receive their weapons at the end of the scenario. I'm not sure if that's an actual bug, a function of Legendary difficulty, because I routed them off the map, or because the scenario ended in a draw.

I've started streaming a Legendary Ironman campaign as the Confederates, including separate videos showing the choices I made in camp. Legendary is ... unforgiving. I made a serious mistake on Ambush Convoy and lost two artillery units and one cavalry unit, which cost me big and caused a draw on Stay Alert that shouldn't have happened. Shiloh also ended in a draw - my units did ok, but the standard units on the right flank didn't even get close to the Hornet's Nest. Here's the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEwRYnMw8pyZ6oOf1fow0jQ And the first video, Potomac Fort, which took me about six tries to win.

Also, since infantry brigade ranges are normalized, range factors into this too - presumably weapons with longer range get some kind of accuracy bonus. I suspect that Firearms does not affect reloading speed, but Efficiency affects both based on the tooltip.