Wandering1

Well. At least empty supply carts can be used to bait the enemy, if you want to be really cheesy since losing the supply cart doesn't count against your manpower at the end of combat.

Re Buying Veterans: veteran cost varies by how much veterancy you're actually replacing. Adding veteran recruits onto 1* brigades is not as costly as adding veterans onto 3* brigades. Which means that replacing Union veterans is a lot cheaper than replacing CSA veterans, typically. It is true that the commander determines a starting unit's veterancy levels. For clearing the 1* hurdle though, you only need colonels on standard infantry brigades. Brigadiers are better assigned to maxed out skirmisher or cavalry squads to not lose efficiency. As far as having a shortage of high ranking officers to clear the 1* hurdle, however, this is not usually a problem depending on how many brigades you're expanding in the early game. After the first combat or so when the unit obtains experience, you can swap out colonels and brigadiers from current squads into new squads, and replace them with Lieutenant Colonels.

As far as officers go, you don't need to have brigades to assign officers from the pool. The officer pool re-loads with a full pool after every major battle, and you can hire them without assigning to brigades by going to the barracks menu in the Army camp. Which does mean that you can buy out every officer from the pool and have a long bench of officers, but on Hard Mode, that's money usually better spent on weapons or veterans.

I'm sure that might be easier to pull off on Normal; the last run of Confederates on Hard, they actually pushed me off on Stone Bridge, because I weighted my Corps to have a thick left and center. Allowed me to mop up all of the Union Brigades on the Left and the Center, but it would take too long to reorient to the Right before the map forcefully ended from the day dragging too long. Not to mention several of my squads were mauled to 300-400 men.

If you really want to make your life easier on hard mode? Send skirmishers up and give the computer a reason to waste its condition/ammunition charging them. Or giving an incentive for enemy melee cavalry to charge your skirmishers, and draw them into a trap set up by other skirmishers. Plenty of things to do if you're creative.

I typically don't end up buying cannons, because I'm a miserly bastard, and don't bring cannons typically to the minor missions because they're too slow for the mission objective when melee cav can get the job done quicker. If we had infinite timers and supply wasn't an issue, I'd actually use cannons more to plink enemy infantry. Unfortunately, forced mission timers make you do things a bit more efficiently.

Well, it's not just Larkin you can drag them to, getting them to run through Spain gets the same job done in terms of making sure they're not in cover. But yes, it is indeed a micro nightmare. It was one of the things I screwed up when the melee cavalry got brave and hit my skirmishers while I was trying to bait.

If you were determined enough to micro a bunch of detached skirmishers, I'm pretty sure you could bait them into walking into the open at Larkin Field rather than the blob of trees in the center. You would bait them by getting them to charge your detached skirmishers, and they would take the 'shortest' path to get back to wherever they were going.

1. As Bill says, they return to the unit with their veterancy and weapons. As far as career points go though, you still wouldn't spend on medicine before you max out Politics or up your Army Org as necessary, because 2.5% of 100-500k cash and 10000+ recruits in general is far greater than 20 guns and 20 recruits per point of medicine at most for your basic infantry squads. 2. Also as Bill says, limitation on veteran squads is cash and equipment. Create new sponge squads with weak guns, intended to soak charges, whereas your veteran squads are smaller with better guns supporting the sponge squad when they inevitably get charged. 3. Guns, guns, guns. If you win every battle, you'll generally have enough reputation to buy the reputation guns between every major battle. Don't need to buy every cannon from reputation though.

They did eventually push me off of Spain/Larkin Field on that run, because I was running my cavalry back to kill the lone squads. Inexplicably though, after they pushed me off Spain/Larkin Field, they barely hit me at Hornet's Nest. They rotated to try and force me off the church, which has far fewer trees to keep the blob safe.

That campaign, I barely bought any weapons until Fredericksburg just to make sure I had two fully staffed Corps (I actually populated the third, and it turns out I didn't need it, something to remember in the future). I just relied on drops since I was completely wiping out the CSA on some of the maps. Only things I did buy were the JF Brown TS's for one skirmisher squad, and my cavalry swords.

On Brigadier General, you don't really need to spend the money for either side if you play min-size armies. Major General is another world, because you only get 10% drops or something like that from kills, which forces you to buy weapons instead of using salvage all the time. By Fredericksburg on my Union Brigadier playthrough, I was sitting on $1.4 mil. Unfortunately didn't save right before Fredericksburg, and that campaign is now on Last battle, meaning you can't open it, so you'll just have to see the post-Antietam cash. I did spend down to $1.4 by Fredericksburg, if I were to recall.

Reran the map on hard. Made a few mistakes and got a few squads killed from melee cavalry getting brave and hitting me when my cavalry was missing, but the attached screenshot should be pretty descriptive as to how to bait isolated units. Basically, the computer thinks it's smart and tries to ninja Pittsburg Landing with a lone infantry unit. Fortunately, your ironclads have aim hacks, and shoot into fog of war without LoS on the unit. So if your line is still pretty far up, you know somebody is trying to ninja Pittsburg Landing if you hear the ironclads shooting.

The hammer charges they do actually makes it easier since they don't charge multiple units at once, typically, again since counter-charging with cavalry is such an effective tactic at the moment. On Spain Hill/Larkin Field, I intentionally placed my infantry where the enemy would have to step into that little river gully in between the tree sections. So they would have to charge uphill (meaning, majority of the time, they failed to charge if they weren't at 80+ condition, and when they did, they got mauled by cavalry). Because the enemy doesn't get their element of surprise, it's quite easy to control where the enemy is shooting from. Which inevitably means you can set up your support appropriately. Granted, there is a timing issue with regards to the enemy reinforcements where you only have a small window to gobble up artillery before the enemy reinforcements catch up with you, but they only have one or two waves of reinforcements, if I were to recall.

Nope, you can only see how broken enemy troops are by capturing them. Like finding out after capturing enemy skirmishers on Shiloh, despite getting the -10% enemy weapon quality, they still have JF Brown TS's. And 50 melee and 60 firearms on Hard mode. Not that the 50 melee helped them from getting mauled by cavalry.

Depends on the size of the 4 other brigades, but yes, in general, I try not to rush my cavalry into dense packs like that, because it's much easier to let the four other brigades block each other from firing, and just stall by letting the one brigade shoot my infantry. As you spread out on a wide front on Shiloh, you'll find opportunities to isolate enemy units. If only because considering how the rout mechanics work, you can nudge your infantry to encourage the routing units to rout in a particular direction. In other words, into hungry cavalry waiting for their meal. With regards to forest cover in general though, I don't think it's the forest cover that is the bigger problem, so much as cover does not have a minimum range. As long as you're considered behind a tree despite trying to slash a guy in melee, nobody can effectively shoot at you to save their fellow brigades from getting mauled.

You do not need any recon points to see the extra information on your own units. I'm talking about your own units, where you can see the bars slide over and the number increase from 20 to 21 for example.

Wasn't even pushing that hard, it's just that on that map, there are so many forests, melee cavalry are practically invincible. Just use three of them like a wolfpack and eat all the loners, maybe go for two brigades since the second brigade can't damage your cavalry fast enough before it gets mauled.

On my Union playthroughs, map ended before the day ended. In this case, from wiping out every confederate brigade. So mileage may vary.

Now, whether Shiloh is implemented as a multi-day battle is a different problem. Currently, it is a one-day battle.

You can actually already do this for the multi-day battles like 2nd Bull Run. You can replace brigade/division commanders through normal processes at the Army camp inbetween days. You don't even need to hire them before the battle, and can hire on demand.

You can actually see what influences the stat gains by hovering over the particular stat for the tooltip in the Army camp. Melee is improved by melee kills. Firearms is improved by firearms kills. Efficiency is more or less overall kills. Stamina is, more likely, overall movement. Alternatively it might be interpreted as spending condition, but would beg the question why Stamina doesn't scale as quickly as Melee for Cavalry squads. I normally hit 100 melee way before I hit 50 Stamina on my Cavalry squads. Morale, strangely from the tooltip, seems to indicate time spent on the battlefield, and not really as a function of doing well or not-so-well. Routed squads still maintain the same morale rating in general as squads that are racking up thousands of kills with relatively few deaths. Which, seemingly, has the implication that standing behind the main line, partying inside the local farmhouse has the same morale development as being the lone 2000-2500 man squad on the salient in Fredericksburg, sponging 10000 rounds every other second. You can actually see the bars for the individual stats increase as the battle goes on, by hitting the extra information window on a particular unit. A unit in constant combat, you're going to notice the upticks in firearms and melee a lot more quickly than on a sniper or artillery squad.

If you really cared about min/maxing idle time, when the unit has been mauled to about 300 men, you can spend 5 minutes rounding up your mauled squads in a corner to tell them to run laps around a tree now. Instead of standing around idle or fleeing from the combat.

Didn't know about this part. Thanks for helping me automate telling my newbies to run laps around a house to build up their stamina, since stamina is only grown from walking.

Well... for 1st Bull Run, I don't think you really have a choice in the matter with regards to using 6 pdrs, unless you blow all your starting cash on different cannons rather than guns for your men. It's just fortunate that you can redirect the two NPC artillery brigades to the bridge to help canister Sherman and Keyes' brigades to make sure that front doesn't crack.