Wandering1

The biggest thing I would say that has huge difference flavors between the various franchises: Total War's combat model works a lot better for the classical/medieval armies, by virtue of the necessity of infantry squares. One can see in UG:CW where melee blobs start dominating because the computer can technically use the entire brigade to fight, whereas in Total War, your melee frontage is still limited by how many ways you're in contact with the other squad. It starts breaking down when we hit Industrial Age armies, because the ranged power creep is in much higher steps than the melee power creep; that is, one side that has Fire by Rank and Platoon fire implemented becomes an order of magnitude stronger than a basic army without Fire by Rank. Total War's model fails entirely when we hit Modern armies, that don't rely on tight formations, but rather looser/skirmisher formations. Since the entire battlefield must be modeled to provide the necessary cover that Modern armies need, that kills the franchise in two ways; one, the amount of work that is needed to model the various cover on the battlefield, which is tremendous for the scale that they're working at, and two, the micromanagement required to properly use cover. This is where the Company of Heroes model shines, where it is intentionally limited to company level tactics in order to allow cover to be used appropriately for modern armies without requiring a supercomputer to run the game.

Were we able to camp on the spot like you could in Civil War Generals, I imagine we'd already be spawn camping the enemy. Especially on Stones River as CSA. More likely than not it won't really change; it just means one has to take the placement into account as to whether one pushes or not on the following days; especially considering for whatever reason, condition does not reset between days.

To answer your questions, it allows you to fight for a few hours longer if you wanted more time to thrash the Union, both at Brawner's Farm and the 2nd Day. You can mop up quite a few units as CSA at Brawner's Farm if you do a few... exploits that I won't detail here. The more you kill at Brawner's Farm on the first day, the fewer brigades you have to fight on the right flank on the second day; if you nearly wiped out the Union at Brawner's Farm, you can use the entire right flank to envelop the Union Center and Right.

To be clear, I didn't include the entire log output, because the common user should not have to care about this in general; the base multiplier is done on a per-map basis per difficulty level.

Well, the 'visual' impact is much less the stats (because the user doesn't stare at the stats in general), but rather the fact that all of the enemies are 3* units whereas the majority of your own are 1* units.

That is because, again, the stats themselves are not the biggest factor of change. They just cause some border cases to happen, like 3* artillery blobs out-meleeing shock cavalry in the open because they all have 100 melee (+ 10 for their artillery gun). The bigger noticeable change is the fact that the stats are directly related to the veterancy of the unit, and the game, to my observation, randomly assigns the 1*, 2*, 3* skills if the unit hit the appropriate skill level. Those 3* skills are the more noticeable changes if the enemy starts out-sniping you.

The unit with higher morale would be more resistant to morale shocks. I think we're hitting semantics here.

@Col_Kelly That is because you're expecting linear scaling of the statistics, whereas in fact, the stats are just one piece of the equation. Just because you have twice as much morale as the guy you're shooting at doesn't mean the enemy routs in half the time; it just means he is less resistant to morale shocks (flanks/rear attacks). Similarly, twice as much melee does not mean you melee twice as good; the melee skill is just one component of the melee equation (including the weapon's melee stat, in essence). Edit: To your question of what happens when the base unit stats are 60+, that means the log output shows higher than 100 stats. Whether the game, after loading in this data, considers them to have greater than 100 stats is a different question; the UI just shows the unit capped at 100 in all stats if you capture the unit. I have seen in the log files 200+ statistics on load.

To copy and paste the same log output that I placed inside an Antietam thread... North Milroy c: 0.7821705 =aiAverage/playerAverage*aiArmyBonus 2018/(1720*1.5) Cdiff:2.458333 aiTotal/playerTotal: 59/24 kindDiff: 2.0625 aiKindTotal/playerKindTotal: 33/16North Update Milroy HP:2739 adapted:2739 to 2950 coeff:1 diff:1.25 crossEffect:-0.07 rand:0.2395332 Clamp01(average*(countDiff+kindDiff*2)/3): 0.7821705*(2.458333+2.0625*2)/3=1North Update Milroy initial eff:19.2 st:19.6 mo:19.1 me:20.5 f:20.5North Update Milroy attributes coeff:0.6690562 bonus:1.873249 eff:53.75689 st:54.87682 mo:53.4769 me:57.39668 f:57.39668North Weapon update Milroy rifle_US_1855_58_RF|31 new:rifle_US_1855_58_RF|31 coeff:1.761364 I have bolded the output that is meaningful, and underlined what I am talking about. I am not at home at the moment, so I cannot provide log output of something for a Brigadier General campaign, but the 'bonus' attribute would be much lower on Brigadier.

To be fair, not everybody here has 20/20 vision; we have to care about the people who are wearing bi-focals also. The bigger problem in general with regards to performance is that the game is not multi-threaded to support the massive number of units on screen. This is a limitation with the Unity engine, as the Unity engine doesn't like multi-threading. Side note, I think you're talking about Chancellorsville and not Chickamauga; Jackson was not alive for Chickamauga.

The 'buffed' stats really only come into the picture when you are playing the higher difficulties. Stats in general are controlled by a scenario level multiplier for the AI; on BG, this is typically close to 1. There are a few things that make it higher, but not on the scale of 1.5 and 1.75 that you see in Hard/Legendary.

I did get about 4000+ Fayettevilles from dragging out Gettysburg on my Union Max Size Campaign. Since all of Ewell's divisions start with Fayettevilles by default. Not sure if it is true in reverse, you'd more likely just get a bunch of 1863s.

Not sure if the rifle counts scale at all, but there's another 750 Fayetteville purchase later on that I got in my Legendary CSA run. Not sure you'll ever get a full 2000 man brigade with Fayettevilles before Gettysburg, but you basically treat the squad as if they were Skirmishers.

I should also point out that a lot of the time, it's only making use of fortifications when it benefits you to use them; as in, only use the forward-most fortifications at Dunker Church just to start the battle with. Mostly as a matter of getting the melee bonus to fend off large brigades charging you. Once the Sunken Road is expanded, and the enemy tries to flank you, you should fall back to the tree line around Dunker Church and let some of those flanking brigades hit the Sunken Road instead (which gives you a total of three points to apply flanking pressure; between the tree line and the sunken road, and the edges of either flank). You don't necessarily need to go deep strike the artillery or otherwise make behind-the-line issues, as long as you apply a lot of pressure on the flanks, the line starts crumbling, and you get lots of free shots on routing units. Chasing said routing units with skirmisher cav or carbine skirmishers gets you a lot of free shots also. Doing so, as stated over and over again on this forum, requires quite a bit of micromanagement because of the skirmisher behavior in general that does not favor chasing.

Depends on the definition of especially large army. If by large army you mean a few thick 2000/2500 man infantry brigades, then no, there is very little point in doing that, because Antietam has a lot of ground to cover. However, on the other hand, if large army means having lots of 1000 man brigades, then yes, there is a point for Antietam, because of the amount of ground you need to cover, and the amount of ground remaining to do flanking maneuvers. Which is to say, there's a lot of room to do flanking on Antietam. If you don't have at least half a corp for the third corp, there's little point in trying to defend Stone Bridge, mostly because there are at least 6 large brigades that spawn at Stone Bridge. If you practically only have one or two brigades, it's better to just fall back to Sharpsburg to consolidate your lines, and push back out to Dunker Church/Sunken Road after you've dealt with Burnside's brigades.

Once your artillery crews have high firearms and the 1*/2* skills, 24 pdrs start shining because of the massive amount of damage they do with shells/canister. 3-Inchers and Napoleons work great for the less experienced crews by virtue of their higher accuracy values. Similarly you would use 10 pdr Parrotts and Tredegars to train up rookie crews.

The morale benefit at 100 morale, if I were to recall, is +10 morale. Which is to say, if you could have upgraded the named regiment with better guns, by all means. I would say the reputation strategies differ between Union and CSA; Union has half as good recruits as the CSA, meaning that the +10 morale on a fresh Union brigade is a lot more meaningful than +10 morale (difference between 10-15 morale and 25ish morale to start for CSA recruits). On the other hand, CSA generally has less weapon access than Union, so weapons can be a lot more useful in terms of expanding your CSA army. I would not buy artillery with reputation unless they're 24 pdrs, in general. Especially on BG, where artillery is usually pretty plentiful stolen from the enemy. As far as rifles go, if you have choices of rifles, Fayettevilles > Highest # of Rifles > Everything else. I don't buy Spencers or Henrys at the moment due to amount of micro required to use them effectively, when you're likely to be busy managing skirmishers or artillery.

The point in me mentioning Legendary is that Legendary is much stricter ammo requirements than BG/MG because of the massive army boost that the enemy gets. I don't know how you're burning both of the 50k stacks on Fredericksburg unless you're running several 24 gun batteries; just ran Fredericksburg on Legendary now, and those ammo stacks only hit 25-30k.

Ah, but that is the crux of the problem; you don't need Logistics on Fredericksburg CSA, and you don't need Logistics on 2nd Bull Run for both sides. Even on Legendary. Which basically means you could have placed in the 'income' general as CSA for those maps.

Well. I would question whether the descriptions of the battles tell you the entire story; Antietam is a mess with regards to supply for CSA, whereas Fredericksburg is a joke for supply. Secondly, most of the general skills are not related to combat at all; only Army Org and Logistics have any impact on the combat portion of the game. The others are related to outcomes of the battle or purchases. Which, at least with regards to Economy and Training, are you going to tell the user to keep swapping between two General in Chiefs every time they're in camp just for weapons or veteran training? Admittantly, with the proposed system, to force the user to have meaningful choices, you're going to have to significantly change the effects of the skills anyways; it would be rather boring if you had 'ammo general', 'income general', and 'shop general'.

So I ended up beating Antietam; my reputation was too low to suffer a loss. It did end up being a rather pyrrhic victory, but fortunately manpower was my abundant resource at the time; after the battle, it's flipped to money. Which meant that the reputation gains ended up being spent on the additional 3000 men, because the minor battles did not yield an abundant amount of manpower relative to cost of the battle. So, Fredericksburg is going to be interesting, but at least I have a lot better cover to work with than on Antietam. For shout-outs, Kelly's suggestions did actually spawn a different strategy; that of basically falling back to Sharpsburg after Burnside's corp spawned. Then it became a melee slugfest until the end of the map, and I swung around the back with cavalry to cap Dunker Church and the Sunken Road.

To elaborate more on the points: For the second, if you have, for this particular example, 45 skill points, and you only have 15 points worth of skills to spend them, it means there's no strategic choice of skills, only tactical. So there's no real 'choice' in the skills, just when you get them. The third, is a two fold argument: first, the idea of progression, as your general gains experience. If you remove the skill point gain from the minor battles in order to reduce the number of skill points overall, then there is no progression for doing the minor battles. Second, it would actually be to your disadvantage if you engaged in the minor battles, because of the limited gun supply. The last, again, is two fold: first, if the reason to revamp the skill system is to make the skill point choices have clear, tangible benefits unlike the minute percentage gains that is present, then what you're really doing with that solution is changing where the unclear benefits lie; that is, which skill is actually needed for the battles, because you don't know what the optimal skills are for the battles (if you are specializing generals for particular stats). Second, if the solution of either system is experience with the game, then there's no difference in either system as far as a new player is concerned.

From a game design perspective, probably the reason why the Career system (or otherwise, skill point system) is there is to give the player a measure of growth overall. When you have... what, 15-ish major battles and 30-ish minor battles per faction, if you want every battle to matter, right there you have at least 45 'skill points' to allocate. Which inevitably means that if you want to force the player to make choices on the skills instead of eventually maxing all of them, you have to start stretching the number of skill points to max a skill. Now, obviously, one might counter-point that the minor battles need not give a skill point, but rather just give money/troops/reputation, and only give skill points to the major battles. I would argue however, that for those that have plenty of those resources in stock would not have any incentive of running the minor battles, especially considering the armory only replenishes after every major battle (which means, fighting minor battles reduces the armory stock, meaning you may not be able to replenish all the guns you want if you lost too many of a particular type). As another argument, if the point is to reduce obscurity on the Career point system, effectively having lots of General-In-Chiefs simply produces a different obscurity; that of the ideal choice for every major battle. Which a new player would not know anyways until after playing the battle once (if we're working under the assumption that not every player needs to know about every battle of the ACW).

I just opened up an old save on my Union Max Size campaign, and it wouldn't allow me to increase above 25K. I'm curious if the 50K was just a symptom of the earlier bug where an incorrect second supply wagon was added to the corps.

Which begs the question: If the battle is completely unwinnable, unless you basically play for min-size armies, does that not mean you're basically making Legendary a one-rote script to victory if there's very little variation in strategy? Even if you decide to flee from Antietam, the odds will be even greater at Fredericksburg, simply by virtue of there being more brigades to use the 1.5 scaling multiplier against. And there's very little option to flee from two major battles. It would be a lot easier for me to believe the supply issue is strictly to simulate Confederate supply issues if the Union actually had higher supply caps. But they don't. Which leads me to believe it is strictly a balance/gameplay reason as to why it is 25000 in the first place.