Wandering1

So, been trying to clear this for a few days. Every single time, it is not the fact that I'm having to deal with 123k versus about 49800 men; it's the fact that I run out of supply that eventually allows the 10000 man size melee blobs to breach the Sunken Road. Which begs the question: should supply carts still stay at 25000, if we're expected to eventually take on 100k+ armies in the later battles? A similar problem exists on Chickamauga where you're effectively shuttling 2-3 supply carts across a large front, and now that melee cav is nerfed, you can't in a time-efficient manner steal supply carts and destroy artillery in trees (unless you use the dismount trick).

If you're paling from those odds, you'll have fun with Antietam. 123k versus a little under 50k, for my current run.

Perhaps that was a bug fix to ensure that the division actually spawned, if someone forcefully pushed the timer?

Well, I'm not sure if 'skipping' them really just means they start at Hornet's Nest instead. I'm avoiding having to fight for Hornet's Nest in the first place, because in the higher difficulties, the NPC army does not scale with the 1.5 multiplier for the Union units. Meaning that you'll always lose a straight fight when trying to charge 2500+ brigades sitting on Hornet's Nest.

Well, that sounds like you're skipping the reinforcements arriving. I typically end up running the timer on the first part of the right flank just to make sure all of the reinforcements have time to walk (not run) up to the northern edge of the map.

The notification for enemy reinforcements arriving does not occur until you actually see a brigade of the reinforcements for the first time; meaning that if you hit the appropriate timer, the divisions will spawn regardless. Whether you can skip the event because you forced a phase change quickly or not? That I haven't had the opportunity to test, mostly because the easy way of getting around the reinforcements is to draw the Union army away from Hornet's Nest, using parked brigades on the right to instantly run up to Hornet's Nest the moment the phase change happens again (before the enemy can move up to Hornet's Nest to take position).

While replacing officers between days is certainly possible at the moment, there is a bug in the game that prevents the kill or wound from counting, so you just have a worthless officer in your inventory indefinitely. So ideally you wouldn't want to try replacing between days at the moment.

In some respects though, it actually makes the scaling easier if the computer is using 24+ gun batteries. It doesn't help the computer even more on the higher difficulties they all use 20 lb parrotts.

See the following example from the log files, if you're curious: North Milroy c: 0.7821705 =aiAverage/playerAverage*aiArmyBonus 2018/(1720*1.5) Cdiff:2.458333 aiTotal/playerTotal: 59/24 kindDiff: 2.0625 aiKindTotal/playerKindTotal: 33/16 North 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=1 North Update Milroy initial eff:19.2 st:19.6 mo:19.1 me:20.5 f:20.5 North Update Milroy attributes coeff:0.6690562 bonus:1.873249 eff:53.75689 st:54.87682 mo:53.4769 me:57.39668 f:57.39668 North Weapon update Milroy rifle_US_1855_58_RF|31 new:rifle_US_1855_58_RF|31 coeff:1.761364 You'll see the variables 'aiTotal' and 'playerTotal'. This refers to the total number of brigades in either side's armies. This particular example is from 2nd Bull Run, Legendary.

There's a difference in the game between short range shots (two brigades next to each other and shooting) and hand-to-hand melee. Short range shots use the firearm statistics as usual; hand-to-hand melee is strictly melee stat of guns, damage, and the melee stat of the unit. As in nobody's shooting each other in the face until one side starts retreating (and gets shot in the back).

Even worse, you're getting punished for bringing more guns by virtue of increased supply consumption.

At the end of the day, the damage modifier just skews the kill counts downward. Meaning in this case, if your 12 gun battery was hindered whereas the 6 and 24 gun batteries were not, the 12 gun battery should have performed slightly better. That's all of the questions I have regarding artillery performance; the bigger problem though since I assume the damage calculations do not vary greatly between artillery and the other unit types, is whether the other unit types suffer the same dropoff in terms of marginal performance. I.e. does the 1000 man brigade actually have higher damage per man than the 2000 man brigade? One just doesn't notice this in general because it's rather hard to check; too many variables to skew the results.

One last question before this phase of interrogation is satisfied: were all 3 of the batteries on the same type of terrain for all of their guns (as in the models in game)? Just as there were damage modifiers for cavalry in the trees (you can see on the tooltip damage%), there are likely damage modifiers for artillery as well, just not as severe as the cavalry case.

Good to know. I doubt this is also the case, but it was not specifically mentioned in the testing above: you never ran out of supply on the 24 gun battery, correct? There are multiple reasons you don't bring 24 gun batteries in the current build of the game; turning speed, enemy cannon scaling, and supply consumption are just some of the more tangential factors in terms of performance that I wanted to make sure was isolated from the results.

Not sure how the reload mechanics work if you Hold Fire, since I haven't gotten too deep into testing how often they reload from turning. Do the batteries reload while you have the Hold Fire button active after turning? Another symptom could be that the larger batteries take longer to reload, but this I'm not sure about since I don't stare at my artillery often.

One thing that is not exactly detailed in the kill count: how often were the batteries turning? A 6-12 gun brigade will turn a lot faster than a 24 gun brigade, and thus the 24 gun will get fewer shots off.

Well. Skirmishers aren't the weakest; that belongs to artillery units. However. Due to the unit scaling being a general scaling multiplier on unit stats, AI units will get free melee stat to be a lot higher than what you think they should be.

Despite knowing how the battles play out, the game mechanics differ greatly from history that you cannot replicate the same tactics. Namely the supporting brigades shooting into a melee, using canister on your own troops, and using supply carts as bait (this is the American Civil War, and not the Three Kingdoms period of using wooden oxen as trojan horses ).

@A. P. Hill I tend to think of it less as failed tactics, but rather giving the player flexibility on number of brigades brought to the battlefield. Players with fewer brigades are not going to have nearly have as long a line as the computer (since, if I were to recall, the computer has a fixed number of brigades regardless of how many you bring, just the numbers of those brigades change). Thus, for maps where the VPs are widely spread out (Shiloh, Prospect Hill Fredericksburg, Chickamauga), the go-to would be to add more brigades rather than make the brigades denser in order to get around the fact that you have widely spread out VPs. While we can argue whether that's the right design for the game, to me the more important issue is whether this is obvious to a new player or not.

I would comment on the CoH AI: there's a reason why the Expert AI is not exactly the toughest AI to beat, and that's because once you wipe a squad by cutting off its retreat path, the AI can never catch up. This happens pretty often since the computer does not understand when it has been enveloped.

While I agree with the need for audio notifications, there IS actually a not straightforward audio cue for Union on Shiloh that someone's trying to ninja Pittsburg Landing. It's the gunboats shooting into the fog of war, since they automatically target anybody in range.

Currently, the new maximums (which used to be 2950) get basically the same result now. So it's a bit of a moot point; it won't matter if you have a 15k Corp or a 20k Corp, if you hit the maximums, you can bring 'thicker' brigades to make the job easier. We'll just have to see if the new maximums make the minor battles too easy when you're throwing 2500 men brigades at 1600s.

Short answer: both of those are inputs to the scaling function. Long answer: much more complicated than that. Those that are curious can look for the log files that are printing out debug information for the unit statistics that are loading into the game.

I would comment with regards to morale: the maximum bonus, if I were to recall, from reputation is +10 Morale. In relation to how the enemy scales, most enemies have anywhere in the range of 50-100 morale (1* vs 3*s). If you're already scaling to 3*s, generally speaking the enemy will always have higher morale than the equivalent veterancy of unit (green/regular/veteran/elite), only really matching when all of a unit's stats are 100 in everything. I have no confirmation as to whether underneath the numbers can scale higher or not (I do see in the log files something scary, like 200+ efficiency, but whether it gets pruned down to 100 after loading is a different matter). Another point about morale: it is the easiest stat the level, by virtue of just the unit being present on the battle map. One will hit 100 morale before you get 100 in any other stat relatively quickly (especially for long battles, where if a unit is not used for the entire 2 hours that you're playing the battle, it will just rack up lots of morale levels).

Entire army is taken into account; just the multiplier that is calculated for the small battles is now different than the multiplier for the major battles. Meaning you will still be punished if you bring a 10 brigade corps whereas the small battle was expecting 15-20, because you have another 15-20 brigade corp that you could have brought. The main reason the scaling is done this way, from what I can gather, is more technical than anything else; the game pre-loads all your unit data to avoid having to re-initialize the battlefield every time you change the corps you want to deploy (i.e. long load times). This is done for the sake of the low-performance computers.