Wandering1

One other thing that has not been mentioned yet because of the shock cav nerf: due to the fact that unit stats scale significantly based on difficulty (see: multiple 3* units that basically have 100 melee, regardless of unit type), two 3* artillery units will eventually beat back a single shock cav unit that runs into them if they're stacked on top of each other. This being because those artillery units have 100 melee, ask not how that is possible.

Antietam has plenty of open ground to use cavalry in. Just don't use shock cavalry on maps with a lot of forest cover (i.e. Chickamauga, Shiloh).

One thing to note: speed modifiers do apply to forests. Units move slower in trees, whereas roads give normal movement speed. It's just that the movement AI won't take into account optimal path to get to the destination in the least amount of time; it just uses the shortest route.

To crush the hopes and dreams of @Draluigi, the scaling only takes into account the total number of brigades you have, and how many men you have in them. Not a matter of how many you have at the given time (this is taken into account by the 'initial size' of the squads before scaling, not as a matter of the scaling multiplier).

So what we're saying is that you're asking the player to dismount his shock cavalry every time he wants to do a charge? Which is to say just imposes a small micromanagement overhead for people to use shock cavalry in general. I could be wrong here, as I have never seen personally how they re-enact the Battle of Sacramento in Kentucky, but the texts clearly describe it as a cavalry charge and not just a dismounted infantry charge; something about there being riderless horses that dislocated one of Forrest's shoulders during the melee in his first combat. Not that it should be representative of all the later charges that he did, but the fact is that he had to deal with a melee involving horses.

I would also point out for people that think Shock Cavalry was irrelevant during the Civil War: wasn't it Nathan Bedford Forrest that popularized cavalry charges during the period? You do get his 3* cavalry group as a reward for CSA Shiloh, if I do recall...

There's a difference between melee bonus that is granted by fortifications, and the general damage modifier that is implemented by different types of cover. The bigger reason why melee cavalry kill so slowly in trees now is because a 65% damage modifier is applied to the cavalry units while mounted; previously there was a bug preventing this from working. Damage modifiers work on top of the cover bonus. So if infantry are shooting each other in the trees, they kill really slowly first from the cover bonus on the defending unit taking effect, and then whatever damage modifier is applied on the attacking unit (I think it's 75%? Skirmishers are 75% in the trees). As far as melee goes, it's strictly the opposing melee stats (unit stats + weapon), damage and their modifiers, and any associated fortifications bonus. In particular from trees, the main thing that trees provide to a melee is the damage modifier. This modifier applies to both melee and ranged; it's just that the range damage is miniscule anyways from the 100% cover that it isn't affected by the damage penalty very much.

It's not a matter of removing the bonus; it's removing the bonus for one case (cover bonus between meleeing entities) while retaining the bonus with respect to every other entity that is not in melee with it. In a system that is designed around having to run on computers with low specs, you can't expect every unit to maintain two states of statistics (w.r.t. melee units, and w.r.t to non-melee units) for every brigade on the battlefield.

And what I meant it being technically possible; doing something precise like that, from a programming standpoint, would require a rather significant change to the underlying engine. Among other things, there is still the rest of the campaign to finish...

It would be great if that were technically possible; I find it unlikely to be implemented at this stage of the game, if we want only the units meleeing each other to not be considered in cover, whereas other units shooting into the melee would still have to treat them in cover. I can see other problems if it's a blanket effect of meleeing units not being in cover. Fredericksburg, anyone?

I will also note though, that while the melee damage nerf for cavalry in forests is still in place, even this change wouldn't matter much due to units being in cover while meleeing (ask not how Farmer Joe manages to put a tree or a buddy in the way of every shot that comes flying towards him, including canister).

Pretty much if one is allowed to use the pistols in melee combat, it would turn melee cavalry basically into the revolver cavalry from TW Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai. Which is to say, the best anti-cavalry unit, but for the wrong reasons (revolver cavalry got two shots off before entering melee with other spear cavalry, and still fired their pistols in melee).

First thing I would mention is that you shouldn't plan on stacking 2500 soldiers in a single squad immediately; it requires having a ready supply of generals to not suffer efficiency penalties at unit sizes that large. You can hover over the efficiency tooltip to see if you are suffering any penalties due to lack of a high enough command stat. Not to mention, three squads of 2000, 2000, 1000 is a lot more maneuverable than two 2500 man squads. Maneuverability is the thing you must use when you're fighting an enemy that severely outnumbers you; essentially throwing out detached skirmishers to bait the enemy into charging, or otherwise turning when your main line is still shooting them. Hard to hold the line on Antietam when you don't at least have two full corps, because you don't have enough squads to cover all of Dunker Church and the Sunken Road.

That's actually a bit counter-intuitive; larger squads are actually easier to flank than smaller squads, because they take longer to rotate due to rotating on one point. Regardless, unless the tooltip is very visible, it will probably be missed. Not to mention having to add tooltips to every other squad type to keep it visually consistent.

In this particular case with the cavalry part of the trifecta, there are two parts to the question: 1. Why bother including melee cavalry if there are only a few battles where you aren't severely hindered by trees? It just essentially becomes a 'new guy' trap, for people that aren't well versed in the ACW. 2. If skirmishers become less vulnerable in the trees to their natural counters, it basically just encourages people to stack skirmishers instead of cavalry when forcing people out of trees, because skirmishers naturally have a cover bonus (so light forest effectively becomes a heavy forest, practically speaking).

Just walking into the skirmishers in the trees, really, since the AI will automatically run away from you. Eventually they'll run out of trees to hide in. Not that this is the most workable solution on heavy forest maps. Like Chickamauga.

Got too many captures on Antietam and Fredericksburg to get that many. On the bright side now, I have a healthy stockpile of CS Richmonds and Fayettevilles after Gettysburg and Chickamauga, on my Union Max Size playthrough.

Originally I imagine this was to make sure you didn't break the in-game economy by stealing the upwards of 10000 Fayettevilles in one battle (or 7000+ 1855s on Fredericksburg, which is painfully easy to do as CSA). I imagine a replacement bonus for captures will be implemented whenever the rest of the maps are done; I can't see them giving ways to make the campaign easier while the corps-wide scaling effect is still in play.

Difficulty in Chickamauga on Union is the fact you're fighting 3 Corps worth of troops, with just 2 Corps, with only 1 day of supply if you intend to take Jay's Mill and Brotherton on the second day, across a gigantic front (meaning two supply wagons have to be able to supply a line that's pretty much as wide as Gettysburg, if it didn't chop up the fights into sub-parts). The first elements which are used on the Day 1 have no resupply window between Day 1 and Day 2. Meaning if you don't swap the units around to substitute fresh units into the initially spawned units on Day 2, you're going to be fielding troops that don't have ammunition. Other disturbing things that I found out because of the further nerfs to shock cavalry; one 3 star skirmisher can hold back 6 full-size shock cavalry squads in the trees now. It takes forever to kill one 3 star skirmisher that has 100 melee, even outnumbering the skirmisher 6 to 1. Which begs the question why would anybody ever field shock cavalry, when an equal number of skirmisher brigades can get the job done quicker in the trees.

I think Gaines Mill is not even the best example in the early game, because you don't even have to fight the skirmishers in the trees at the start; you can just take the long walk around the north and force the skirmishers to come to you in the open outside of the trees. Which makes them relatively easy to kill. I've had to deal with JF Brown snipers at Shiloh on Hard, but even Shiloh isn't the best example either, because there's enough tree cover to make sniper skirmishers hardly effective.

I believe that still wouldn't change much, even if you were to flip where you apply the reduction; if you're playing min-size armies, you may only have 2-3 skirmisher units, but if you're playing all 5 corps, there's a pretty good chance you're going to have at least 4-5 skirmisher brigades. In fact, the more skirmishers you have traveling as a group, the safer they are against cavalry; one cavalry unit that charges one unit gets shot at by the remaining blob of skirmishers. Same thing applies if 3 cavalry units charge your blob; if you outnumber the cavalry squads, you'll still beat them back.

As far as weapon scaling goes, it doesn't just affect skirmishers; it applies to all types of units. Just that there's very little room to scale on the sniper-end of things, whereas there are plenty of options in the carbine/repeater end. I actually find sniper skirmishers to be much easier to deal with than Spencers; Spencers tend to group up and blast units not in 100% cover relatively quickly, whereas snipers tend to just sit at range and poke your brigades. Lastly, proposed changes of affecting only 2-3 skirmisher units doesn't change very much; the later battles tend to have the computer field at least 10 skirmisher brigades over the course of the multi-day battles, not to mention the weird one-offs like Rio Hill. Heck, Gaines Mill has about 5-6 Union Skirmishers at least.

By the academy, I mean the ones you pull when you're out of officers to hire from the pool of both your barracks and the available supply, and by randomly generated, I mean the officers that are generated after every major battle. They're randomly generated in that those officers that are created after every battle are not the same officers that you will find on another playthrough (except maybe the Brigadiers); the names and experience levels are randomly generated. Generally speaking, you shouldn't run into the officer issue if you're not playing max size armies and you're not suffering a high casualty rate in your army. Even on my 120 brigade playthrough, the spare officers after every battle usually cover any KIAs that I have; there's a pretty constant rotation of officers in this respect.

Yeah, that is built in to help people that lose their entire officer corps in one battle. Problem with the officers from the academy in general is that they start with 0 experience into their current level, unlike the randomly generated officers that usually start with some amount of experience.

25% is the base amount for captures (as in people shot and killed), with 50% being for rescues. On the higher difficulties, this percentage goes even lower (I believe 10 and 25% on Legendary, respectively?). So long as men captured doesn't provide any weapons though, there's no reason to stop us from doing something that sounds like a war crime, but I'm not going to describe here because it's significantly gaming the system; even more than getting free Fayettevilles from combining 100 Fayetteville squads into 2000+ farmers squads.