Wandering1

Alas, we cannot play this Soviet style of putting a guy behind the guy in front to pick up the rifle when the guy in front gets shot.

Well, if it's down to finding uses for money, there's always something you can buy. Whether it's a good use of the money, I tend to think is a very different question. Then again, while there is little incentive to using max-size armies, the question of good use of money perhaps is not an applicable one for people attempting to play with max-size armies.

Would money spent on supply really matter that much compared to how much money you're spending on rifles, in that case? Money spent on supply would come out to about 2000 M1842s per Corps. Which for a max size army, that's not that much compared to putting 2500 men in each infantry brigade.

There is actually one little quirk about bringing 2500-strong infantry brigades over 500 man skirmishers or 750 man cavalry units: troop scaling. 2500 man squads cause more enemy scaling than skirmishers or cavalry units, which as an aside degrades the effectiveness of the 500 man skirmishers and 750 man cavalry units because they have larger squads to chew through, since skirmisher and cavalry unit caps do not scale with army organization, just more squads.

You never know, there could have been a Ulysses Grant on the Confederate side that was the 8th cousin of the one that is much better known...

Grand scheme of things though, given that supply is capped at 25000 a corp, even if you don't spend all of the supply in the battle, it's not that big of a deal compared to the money you're getting in at each battle. I believe Antietam and Fredericksburg were at greater than $300k on victory? I believe Union Fredericksburg was at 500k.

To be a little more specific, the captured supply that appears on the goods screen does nothing. You should still capture supply wagons for the free men they provide if you need the extra manpower, and you aren't already capped at the extra 1000 men from capturing enemies.

The starting perks are more related to how you want to play your army. While there certainly is a 'meta' build right now for starting perks based on practical usage, the meta build becomes rather obvious once you finish your first campaign. And in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't change too much how you play in the long run. Re: filling with Veterans for standard infantry brigades. My policy is two per corps, but this will vary depending how many casualties you're taking (and thus, money losing on veterans). Caveat to the cavalry question, I strictly use melee cavalry because skirmisher cavalry require too much micro to use effectively when I can spend that time microing sniper skirmishers. To me, there's only a small window where replacing cavalry with veterans is worth it. This is where the unit's melee skill is somewhere between 40-70, where replacing them with veterans is comparatively pretty cheap (veteran cost is based on how much veterancy they actually have). Once they start reaching 100 melee skill in each battle easily, I start filling them with recruits until they hit around 80 melee skill. If I need full vet squads for the major battles, I will fill them with vets (grand scheme of things, replacing cavalry with vets is still relatively cheap compared to replacing infantry with vets). On the topic of sniper skirmishers, it varies depending on the map. A heavily forested map, where most units are in 80-100% cover, sniper skirmishers are useless because they do too little damage. On the more wide-open maps, they kill at around the same pace as artillery for a fraction of supply cost. And replacing sniper skirmishers with veterans is rather cheap if you don't lose too many men. I forgot which map Cedar Mountain was. A lot of the time though, if you want to win, don't walk in the front door. Take the time to do the long flanks where the enemy isn't expecting you, so you aren't getting creamed by artillery in the open. Most of the artillery pieces have their niche uses. Rifled artillery tends to do better long range damage, whereas howitzers are more short-medium range. Most important, however, if you're playing CSA, the artillery pieces start shining when you place them behind your infantry where the Union forces tend to throw men by charging at you. The artillery starts firing canister when the enemy gets close, and that's where howitzers start racking up hundreds of kills.

As far as skirmishers go, in my Union campaign, I've noticed you basically had to buy every single TS scope rifle to have enough rifles to outfit a full skirmisher brigade with them by Antietam. Around basically 100 per major battle, so you have to save before 1st Bull Run, Shiloh, Gaines Mill, Malvern, and 2nd Bull Run. And this assumes basically no casualties in the squad, since you have relatively little room for replacing the TS's. Sharps are a lot more common, but have less room for error in terms of not getting canistered while sniping enemy artillery batteries. This is reversed for CSA, because you get the Whitworth TS's in bulk from reputation relatively early on. I had two full skirmisher squads filled with Whitworth TS's by Fredericksburg. Which if you let your snipers hit the battlefield for most of the minor battles to level up, they'll easily hit 100 firearms by Fredericksburg to dish out damage while using a fraction of the supply that artillery use.

Just curious, after finishing my Union run of Antietam (which, I think the reverse scaling made things too easy, but that's another topic), I noticed that it rewarded me with the Iron Brigade, led by John Gibbon. ...Curiously, I got John Gibbon earlier from 2nd Bull Run. Are we supposed to get twins of the generals frequently? In the picture, you can see John Gibbon on the left, leading III Corps, while he's also leading the Iron Brigade, on the right.

Well, since I didn't see Longstreet's Corps spawn due to the early victory, I was under the impression the reinforcements spawn as soon (or shortly after) as your main line corps spawn (as you might notice from the screenshot above, my 2nd and 3rd Corps that formed the main line didn't even spawn before the battle ended). As long as you never let Jackson's Corps enter the trees and sit in there, it would be trivial to grind down Jackson's corps if you had your main line units also.

Kind of sad that if you can basically crush Jackson's Corp without incurring a boatload of casualties, you would intentionally leave one unit alive so the map doesn't prematurely end, and you would spawn-camp Longstreet's Corp. Wonder if you would have time to set up cannons in a fashion to instantly canister Longstreet's corp as soon as they walk on the map.

It may be unnecessary, but I believe the point in terms of reducing casualties was not to walk up the center and the right where you're stuck in open cover, and spending a lot of supply on guys in cover.

I will admit, in that run of Malvern HIll, I had plenty of time left over to not fight as aggressively once I breached the wall. In the end, I believe I had around 30 in game minutes left on the timer when I killed the last Union unit. Whether there was another option that could yield less casualties? Probably, if you used the west side to skirt the artillery again. Most of the casualties were in the green divisions I used to break the left wall.

The point in this case, is that I actually wanted to keep fighting, but the battle ended prematurely. In the future, I would have to skirt the VP just to intentionally drag the battle out to get experience.

I would argue it's more like a 1.5:1, because the game doesn't allow units to fight to the last man. It just automatically destroys the squad when they are beyond 75% attrition. The backdrop of that is that I have 40000 manpower available to reinforce that level of casualties, so losing 8000 of 19k isn't that big of a deal if you ask me.

It isn't necessary to counter-attack, if you're just looking to win, but basically I consider mastery of the map to mean complete destruction of all enemy units in the time limit (which, sometimes, the time limit is... quite restrictive, let's put it that way). For my Union playthrough, so far, I've only been able to completely destroy the enemy on some of the minor battles, 1st Bull Run, Shiloh, and Malvern. Malvern actually had 15 in-game minutes left on the clock.

On my CSA playthrough, it was actually a quite long battle because I was actually using the fortifications instead of falling back to the trees. Didn't wipe out the Union army because I had too much ground to cover before the battle ended.

Was it supposed to be possible to end the mission before Longstreet's Corps even makes it to the battlefield? Just did 2nd Bull Run doing the much less bloody option of swinging everything around the left flank, and the mission ended before any real fights began. I mean, I'll take the 300k money and 13k recruits for barely any casualties, but still doesn't seem right that a major battle can be ended this simply.

Depends on your definition of bloody, I guess. The screenshot I posted above, I wiped out the entire Union army and never had to cross the west ford or the east bridge. Just penetrate the left wall, and pour everything through the breach since you outnumber the Union troops on Malvern. Most of the union artillery is parked on the forest near the east bridge, so as long as you skirt the artillery while you're penetrating the wall, you won't suffer as many casualties from being in the open while the enemy is dug in.

I find that using melee cavalry or sniper skirmishers to crush flanks is a lot less casualty intensive than using infantry for melee. Melee cavalry being a lot easier to level up to 100 melee, considering their massive melee bonus in comparison to everything else later (due to enemies upgrading to M1855s, which reduce their melee efficiency). As of current until cavalry lose their invulnerability from meleeing in trees, melee cavalry are a lot easier to break defensive formations on forested hills because there's no minimum range on cover, like Company of Heroes does. Even better if you have a forest to approach the hill with, and as long as you're not charging into 5 squads, you can break the front and let the infantry walk in, so they don't have to grind it out in the open.

I should comment that for my wins of Malvern, I wasn't using 3 corps. My campaigns are using essentially minimum # of corps required to even enter the battle. Just my little predilection to not touch Farmers or Re-bored Farmers with a 10-foot pole because of how inferior stat-wise they are compared to M1842s.

To follow on with what others have been saying, the easy way of penetrating the line on Malvern Hill as CSA is hitting the left wall. Since they only have the one brigade on the wall, and maybe 2-3 behind it, you can throw basically 5 greenhorns with high melee rifles to charge the fortification. Once the fortification is broken, you basically advance through the breach, and use the declination on the left side of the hill to line-of-sight enemy artillery, which allows you to complete an encirclement of the remaining forces. Similarly, the line-of-sight issues also allow you to only fight enemy infantry that bother walking up to your men in the ditch. Which, since conveniently the infantry on the right side will not move off their hill, means you're not actually fighting all of the union infantry at once. If you reach the bottom of the first section with your infantry by the time the map expands (by you capturing the main point on the wall), you've effectively boxed them in. I still ended up using two cavalry brigades on Malvern to mop up supply wagons and artillery that were vulnerable.