Wandering1

Oh dear, it looks like we've gone two months into the future.

Just depends on how far you're willing to go just to reduce casualties. Normally you don't need to bother in BG, and most likely MG, since the supply wagon trick is usually good enough to displace enemies from trees. On legendary, you have to pull every ruthless trick out of the book to survive.

As much as I shouldn't probably mention this, as this probably promotes the wrong sort of behavior as far as historical games go: there are other uses to captured units besides the 1000 man benefit. Like using them as bait to draw enemies out of cover (empty captured supply wagons), or otherwise body shields to cover your men while they're reloading (walk them in front of the reloading brigade). It's up to one's imagination to find a use for units that the enemy will not shoot.

Has anybody actually beaten the Potomac Fort mission (the very first CSA mission) on Legendary? I'm wondering if 237 man artillery batteries at the fort is intended after the last update, given that previously they still were 75 men batteries. The man count exceeds the starting troop count of your cavalry troops, not to mention that the skirmishers are nearly 500 man squads, and are 2* skirmishers against your ~680 man 1* infantry brigades, I captured one of them and found out they have 50s in firearms and melee, versus 30/25 on your infantry squads.

Another little side note for the shattered units and their guns: you technically cannot kill 'shattered' men anymore, so they get to run off scot free. They become untargetable when they're shattered, and thus, you cannot get anymore guns. There is no reward for captures, or any additional rewards for shatters mostly because it would break the economy. It's ridiculously easy to get 6k captures at least on Fredericksburg as CSA; mostly a matter of boxing the enemy in and waiting for them to surrender from having nowhere to run. Which becomes easy when Telegraph Road expands, by virtue of the only retreat path to safety being the bridges through the town.

So long as money and availability of guns is a constraint in the economy of the game, captured weapons are in general going to be much more valuable than buying your own equal-strength replacements. Not to mention that weapon scaling makes getting equal-strength replacements counter-productive; trading Farmers for 1855s and 1861s is, money-wise, better than trading Enfields for 1861s/1863s, simply total price sunk to get those weapons. (8 at Economy 10 to 32 versus 20ish to 38, in this particular instance) If only because you can spend money on veterans, 24 pdrs, and cavalry Spencers than having to equip thousands of Fayettevilles/1861s.

BG is a 25% ratio. MG/Legendary is around 10% for kills to captured weapons (I'd have to check again, but I tend to think it's actually 12.5%, half of the BG drop rate). Similarly, rescues are 50% on BG, while 25% on MG/Legendary if I were to recall. Which should inform the user as to whether it is worth trading 4 Farmers Muskets to get 1 1855/1861/1863s, as 4:1 kill ratios are not exactly easy to pull off on every single map on MG/Legendary, if you're going for victories on every map.

Re: Harrison River (St. Petersburg) Minor Battle, for Union Is there a reason why the fortifications on the northern half don't extend all the way to the edge of the map? The little gap that is there is a really easy way to crack the northern defenses by getting flanking shots on the fortifications. Granted, you throw away about 500 men crossing the river, but that's trivial compared to the cost of charging the fortifications.

Small text bug for the Battle of Fort Stevens on Union. When looking at the career history, the battle text is blank. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=931716442

As far as increasing the lower cost rifles, all it just does is allow you to maintain a 3 corps army with a decent number of 2000 man sponge squads instead of building your 3 corps around a limited supply of low cost rifles. Weapon drops are still going to be more valuable than manpower cost towards late game, especially if the difference is 4 Farmers for an 1863 or Fayetteville. So long as you aren't doing worse than a 1:1 casualty rate, you'll still come out ahead on relative trade cost, as drops are 25% on normal. Obviously, the trade rate is a lot stricter in the higher difficulty levels as the captures I believe are 12.5% on MG (in effect, 2:1 casualty rate in your favor for break even), and probably even smaller on Legendary.

Weapon drops are based on casualties. So to your questions, yes to 1, no to 2.

As I mentioned in several other posts by now, if you want to see the precise scaling factors, they're already getting printed out in the log files. As far as Major General's scaling goes, the enemy army size is 25% larger on top of any other scaling factors.

To add a little more on top of what @The Soldier has listed out: 1. As far as scaling goes, there is a multiplier that is calculated from total size of the army, and there's a multiplier that is calculated from the specific unit type. Both multipliers are used in the scaling equation to determine final troop counts of each brigade. 2. As I believe I've mentioned in other threads, and as Koro states, the number of brigades does not change. Only the number of troops in those brigades, which means that there is a minimum size for each brigade, as well as a maximum size for each brigade by virtue of the scaling hitting a maximum unit cap. I've already posted a few examples of the output that you can see from the log files with regards to the actual scaling formulas. This has largely not changed; patches have recently only changed the scenario-specific multipliers for army sizes.

I suppose we ought to wait and see if there is going to be a statistics tally at the end of the campaign iterating how many innocent pixel boys/old men you threw at the meat grinder.

This also inherently means that there is a ceiling in terms of number of troops that you have to face, by virtue of infantry brigades not scaling past 2950 and cavalry brigades not scaling beyond 1050. Whether anyone would field a 100k army just to spawn a 200k army for the enemy though is an entirely different matter.

One thing that may not be clear: the number of divisions or brigades does not change with regards to the total size. Meaning, in the case of Antietam, where I believe the enemy is fielding 59 or 60 brigades, the difference of 10k troops would effect an additional 170 troops per brigade, approximately. So it's not an extra division flanking you, it's just more men hitting you in the front if you didn't have a division flanking.

Well, I would caveat for Gaines mill that the wide swing can cause immense number of casualties if you don't walk around the north at the start, and march east through the skirmisher army that's sitting in the trees. Tend to think Confederate First Bull run takes the cake for even legendary easy battles; even on legendary, doubling of firearms 10 and stamina 10 doesn't make the squads even hit 1*.

This particular scenario has the enemy with 3* units, because they in general are of smaller size than the brigades that you are deploying. Which, as an aside, means that throwing a 2000-man clubmen squad (as in charging the enemy out of the woods, with 1842s) is a good way to knock em out of the trees, and into the open where you can shoot them.

I would say, in general, that the briefings are best understood when you have good knowledge of the game's terminology and mechanics. The OP, from what I was interpreting, left entire brigades in the north, when this is not the intended behavior. It is intended to use detached skirmishers in 100% cover to force the enemy to trigger early charges, draining condition, and among other things, opening those charging brigades to cross fire from the brigades that are not getting charged (which causes a rout, and thus, achieves the intended objective of stalling). Similarly, one should be stalling on the opening tutorial mission for Confederates using the cover when possible, and retreating to reload. Otherwise, using the skirmishers to envelop the brigades engaged with the units on the fortifications to get flanking shots. As far as the briefings go, whether they should be tailored to the experienced player, or to a person who has no inkling of the historical events of the battle, is a different question.

As far as the underneath implementation goes, every difficulty has an army multiplier, whether it's 0.75 (25% smaller, colonel) or 1.5 (50% bigger, legendary), which gets modified by the scaling factors (unit counts, unit sizes, etc). Fixed army size sets all of the relevant scaling factors to 1. Pretty sure the army size multiplier is 0.75.

As far as the implementation goes, Hill's got the basics right; the unit is treated as only facing one direction (from the shield that is presented as the cover point). This is problematic when the fortification defends larger than a 90 degree field of vision. The individual units are not treated as individual objects with regards to cover (that would be Total War implementation, which is much more complex than this). As such, regardless of whether the individual unit is on one end of a long stretch of cover or not, it is able to shoot at the other end without worrying about range, because range is also calculated from the same point. In fortifications, the unit is basically treated as doing platoon fire, instead of firing as a volley. It ends up being the same damage over time, but it reacts to shooting different targets a lot quicker than with a volley.

As a general note, all of the modifiers have scenario specific multipliers; one set for every difficulty level (army multipliers, weapon multipliers, etc).

I would say with regards to the counter-attack, you don't even need to drive the Union brigades off the wall; you can just walk all the way around the North, use some spare SC brigades to distract the guys on the wall, and march past while the SC brigades are getting shot at. Just walk around to the cap point afterwards.

Ah, Chickamauga. That would explain it. I went for the day 2 victory, and netted about 20k casualties from doing that. Also, I notice that not all of your cannons are at 12 guns. Not that artillery crews are manpower intensive, just that I'm surprised someone's actually bothering using 20 pdr Parrotts; I have about 220 of them sitting around in my reserve. Anyways though, if I actually bothered to place more points into Army Org to go for 24 brigades per corp, I could have disbanded one of my infantry brigades to go up to 2500 men; I just wouldn't have any troops left in the bin. Back on topic though; I've noticed that for the most part, officer losses are more a factor of how often the unit gets stuck in melee; when I ran it, I did lose some officers, but only maybe about 4 that came from my forces. The officers of the NPC brigades got shot, and got dumped in my hospital for the next major battle.

So it does. It doesn't tell me whether all the brigades are running 2300; unless you were just buying the reputation troops after every major battle, I'm still wondering how you have that many spare troops unless you just kept them in reserve and formed the corps strictly for Cold Harbor. Running 36 infantry, 9 Artillery, and 10 Cavalry in the current BG playthrough;