Wandering1

By the same measure, you shouldn't be seeing Fayettevilles in the store or as reputation purchases until basically after Antietam, if we're trying to maintain historical accuracy; the machinery for making Fayettevilles was captured from Harper's Ferry, if I were to recall.

Sarcasm is hard on the internet. But let me help add to the sarcasm: Tutorial didn't give me enough npc cannons to sacrifice to feed my own stocks after battle. /cry.

Can one imagine trying to fight Crampton's gap with 60000 men, with accordingly probably 60000 men on the CSA side?

When the division commander is a Major General or higher, you can have Lt. Colonels commanding 2000 man squads. I agree on equipping 2500 man sized brigades for Legendary; you'll easily out-strip the amount of guns available. 2000 man squads is doable though. Doing such will empty the entire stock of Farmers and Re-Boreds between each battle depending on how many casualties your sponge squads take. Also on Legendary, somewhere between 1500-1700 is when the enemy squads essentially cap out at 2950 for the major battles. Meaning taking more men in those squads will not penalize you from a scaling perspective because the enemy squads are already capped.

Well. Practically speaking, the 3* units only didn't spawn because the initial unit stats were so low that doubling their stats didn't push them into 3* range. I.e. if they're 0* units, they'll at best be 1* units. When they're effectively 1 and 1/2* units to start with, they all become 3* units.

I was going to say... it seems like certain profs around here are not considered old anymore.

Would also depend on one's definition of 'fun' in that context. Previously, crushing an 90-100k army was not particularly difficult with 50k troops, because the computer was not particularly bright about troop placement. The number of brigades that the computer gets doesn't change with army size, only the number of troops in those brigades. Meaning if you have more brigades, you actually get more opportunities to flank than with fewer brigades. Note that more brigades and more troops are not one and the same; denser brigades yields a similar effect in terms of troop scaling, yet doesn't give you more tactical options in terms of flanking or using different types of units.

Consider, on the reverse, the scaling affects the computer also by having brigades too large to fit in a single space. Which means you have lots of computer brigades side stepping each other, and giving you free shots. Now, there is the problem of if the computer throws all those units in a suicidal charge. At that point, it's having enough resources on hand to repel the charge; namely having a few 24 pdr batteries to canister the entire blob after they come in.

The scaling applies to both sides. If you're playing for min-size armies, you get as fewest corps as possible to proceed on the map. On some maps though, like Antietam, you want the large unit count if you want to be able to hold a long front without falling back to Sharpsburg as CSA. Regarding the long-term game of using maximum size armies, there are tradeoffs. Maximum size armies with dense units tend to be able to resist in one location longer than if you kept the units at a minimum of 1000 men. Also, if all of the corps available end up on the map, it means in general you're training a deep officer bench, because even if one corp sees action less than another corp, the officers in that corp are still gaining experience, along with the little bit of experience that most troops get by default (via morale gains). The drawback is, on the major battles, if you have spare corps that don't see action. Scaling accounts for total army size on majors, which means the corps that are not seeing action are adding to the scaling.

I do have a feeling I know why the bug is happening, but regardless, it seems quite annoying to have to deal with cavalry that can magically be in your backlines when you're outnumbered.

So, after playing through Cold Harbor's first two phases as Union, I've noticed the following changes: 1. CSA reinforcements come in about half an hour earlier than your reinforcements (at the 1 hr mark) in the first phase. They used to arrive at the same time, so the reinforcements can fight each other. Now, since your reinforcements arrive at the 30 minute mark, there's no time for them to get to the battle without spending all of your condition running unless they are cavalry. Even then, they won't make it to the southern fortifications in time before phase change, meaning 5 brigades have to be facing down 10-15 for practically the entire duration of the phase. For people who aren't exactly extremely skilled at the game, this is basically another Cross Keys. 2. The scaling is increased, by about 30%. What used to be 1500 size brigades I was noticing earlier are now 1900, and some of the 2000 brigades are now hitting 2900. 3. Similarly on phase 2, reinforcements arrive for CSA half an hour before your reinforcements. Placement of the reinforcements is a problem now, because the first set of reinforcements are way too far away when the closest fortification is one of the easily flankable fortifications due to the length of the fortification. I'm still wondering why the fortifications are designed to encompass such a long length when the flanking is still based on one direction. Not to mention the fortification is not a 100% fortification, despite it being the most important fortification for the phase on Union; I can easily imagine a CSA player charging the key fortification and making it through, just by virtue of the surrounding trees providing cover from reprisal fire. 4. Unrelated to the changes of the hotfix, I've noticed cavalry teleporting behind fortifications (visually represented as cavalry waltzing through fortifications without triggering a melee). Was the whole teleporting enemy cavalry a bug that's always been there? See the attached images, where the red dot on the map does not match the displayed location of the cavalry unit.

The long story short is: Combine a 2500 farmers brigade into a 500 Fayetteville brigade, get a 3000 Fayetteville brigade. Combining brigades is not explicitly mentioned in the game, but the option is there to allow two understrength brigades to merge into one brigade temporarily.

Well, time to see if I can still push a 20000 man size blob through the bottom fortification on phase 3 of the First day. I'll replay the battle again when I get home.

And as for me, I would consider the Combine Brigade exploit a bug; ideally it should just mix the guns as appropriate, and not homogenize the guns of the combined units. However, implementing that is a bit out of the question at this point for the engine. There are ways of making it less exploitable, however; like, say, taking the higher number unit's gun as the gun standard of the unit. Meaning if you want a 2500 man Fayetteville unit, you need 1251 Fayettevilles. At that point, you're trading unit count for temporary free guns; and as some of us playing on Hard/Legendary can attest, unit count matters a lot when you need be able to cover a wide area.

I suppose along that vein, the better question to ask: what is the definition of difficulty? Does difficult mean it requires you to think out of the box? Does it mean one is forced to think/compute faster in order to attain results? There is really no one answer to this; some definitions sit better to some people than others. Exploits will still happen regardless; just what one considers an exploit is a different matter.

Don't worry about it; just don't mention the gravy gun in the closet.

A few things to note. 1. Yes, playing Hard and Legendary require that you exploit game mechanics to make the battles less painful, since resources are the main constraint; how far you're willing to exploit the mechanics though, is a different matter. 2. The combine brigade gun exploit I thought was originally found by @Hitorishizuka . Not that I particularly use the exploit; I'd rather not have free guns to win, but rather 'out-of-the-box' thinking. Just want to get the record straight. 3, For those of us that do have an in-depth understanding of the maps and mechanics, Brigadier General is way too easy. Even when doing things that are self-inflicting like using maximum size armies, and upping the enemy weapon scaling as much as possible by intentionally not stacking Farmers/1842s. 4. The AI difficulty is mostly a matter of troop counts, but even troop counts don't really change the equation that much; the computer will still make the same mistakes. Just that how much you spend to counter the troop counts is a different matter, as different strategies result in higher costs than others.

Campaign. I never play the historicals. Previously on Legendary, I was only seeing 500 caps on the skirmishers; which makes for skirmisher stacking to be viable relative to infantry stacking, since if the computer already capped out, you'd only be dropping the size of the infantry brigades you would be seeing if you added more skirmishers.

That is something I noticed; AI skirmisher caps being higher than 500, and Cavalry capping out at 1050 instead of 850 now. I didn't end up doing a push on the second phase, mostly because my army loadout was not optimized; ended up with 2 1000 brigades and an arty brigade on the Southern fortification. Which is not really much to push a point that has 3 20 gun artillery units on it. I'm sure if I put 3 2500 man groups on the southern flank, it would be a cakewalk onto the point there since apparently the enemy brigades were only about 1500 large on the second phase at most. The ones at the southern flank were around 1100, and got mauled walking into the fortifications.

Well. Just finished Cold Harbor on Union. Turns out to be incredibly easy to do a Day 1 victory on Brigadier General. If I was very aggressive in the first phase on Day 1, I could have finished the battle with fewer casualties; there were a lot of half-strength squads guarding the Central Breastworks at the start of the third phase. Which made it incredibly simple to just throw a 20000 man size blob into the southern most fortifications to force my way through them. There was only a single 1000 man squad guarding the southern-most fortifications, and after that it was getting flanking shots on the rest of the squads that never left their fortifications to help the flank. Tend to think there needs to be more AI brigades available to CSA on the First Day on the Left Flank; as mentioned in another thread, it's covering way too much ground for one Corps. If you get any full squad wipes on phase 1, it makes punching the line a lot easier.

Let's just say there were ways of making the minor battle enemy armies small. It involves a lot of shifting of small units into the 1st Corps. Whether that's been fixed though, is a different question. Playing through the minor battles on my Union Max Size army at the moment.

On the English wikipedia, it redirects to Defense in Depth. More commonly used in modern times, as you place infantry on the front, with machineguns to support the infantry in case the enemy tries to achieve a breakthrough. The idea being the machineguns are to suppress the enemy to allow the rest of the line to adjust to the attempted breakthrough. More to the point in this game: the basic idea that is already put into practice is to place infantry units behind other infantry units instead of going for the wide line. Working under the assumption that the enemy will break through the front at some point, so you put in ways to make the breakthrough cost them.

Who would have thought that a particular map would have to teach people the basics of Elastic Defense without the underpinnings of how Elastic Defense works? Looking forward to it. One thing to note, however: are the battles represented as multi-day battles, or several battles in a row? The difference being whether you get rescues and captures inbetween so you aren't wasting potential rescues if you reinforce between days, which is one of the more current problems in the game.

Other things that I would point out depending on the scope of the mods: If it is basically just a map editor using current resources, that's a lot less work to make the Unity Engine work. If we're trying to tweak underlying formulas (like cover formulas), allow units to use out-of-context guns (like, for example, cavalry being equipped with infantry rifles to use when dismounted), or allowing guns to be used in melee (i.e. implement revolvers while meleeing), that's a pretty big amount of work; the Unity Engine is not really designed very well to allow data model changes.

Long time ago. My COH2 Record: https://www.coh2.org/ladders/playercard/viewBoard/2/steamid/76561197962086244 Used to be in the top 50 on AT for both sides, until my partner and I moved on to other things.