Fred Sanford

I hear you. I slide to get close, then click the arrows at the end of the slider to fine tune the number.

So YOU'RE the one driving up the cost of 20# Parrots? The Martin Shkreli of artillery! On a serious note, I get your idea on ''minimum sizing" your way through the campaign in order to avoid the auto-scaling mechanic. The devs should consider an different approach since I think this is a distinctly non-historical approach. Can you imagine (any of) the Army of the Potomac commanders saying "No, I don't want more reinforcements, the Confederates will just bring more also" IRL? IMO, the game incentive should be to build the biggest, most powerful army possible- maybe tie the Reputation gain for winning or drawing against a larger enemy army, and lowering the Rep hit on a loss?

This is a key point to me. If we go with the historical 'just gun crew' sizes, artillery will be too fragile in the game.

Except there'd be about 4x as many units on the map, with the consequent impact on performance. Also, historically brigades operated together, but if we had separate regiments used the same as brigades are now, they'd be all over the place. The game already allows more operational flexibility than historically feasible wrt to command and control.

Maybe if regiments were shown in the Camp only? i.e., performance stats, composition, commanders and all that are tracked on the regimental level, and they player could form, reinforce or disband these regiments in Camp. The player would also group the regiments into brigades, which would be what gets used in battle, just like now.

If they went with those numbers, there would have to be mechanics to account for attrition losses from disease, desertion, etc since those paper strengths were never maintained by either side. If I recall, the largest brigade at Gettysburg (Pettigrew) was ~2700 strong, and was an outlier with respect to size. Most brigades on both sides fielded around 1200-1600, even though they had 3-5 regiments in their OOB.

Has anyone played Rule the Waves? It's a naval game set in the dreadnought era where you manage your nation's fleet. It has a ship designer, so you can design your own ships (and watch the technology rapidly advance) and engage in a naval arms race with the other powers. When war breaks out, there's a tactical battle generator that you use your fleet to fight it out- anything from fleet battles to single ship duels and cruiser actions, etc. Don't get it for the graphics, though. Very basic interface and graphics, but there's a surprisingly deep combat model behind it, as well as the ship designer and technology. There's videos up on YouTube. It is actually something akin to what I'd like to see the Ultimate General series develop into. Say instead of just the ACW, you were 'chief of the army' for one of a variety of nations. Your "Camp" turns would involve building, equipping, and deploying your forces to guard your nation's territory and/or interests. Every once in a while, a war would break out, and you'd have to fight some battles produced by a battle generator using the forces you've developed. You could research technology and purchase new equipment, and make decisions about whether to have a large conscript standing army, or a smaller professional force, militias, etc.

Maybe a way to fix scaling and the relative uselessness of Recon would be to make the AI scaling factor inversely proportional to your Recon. So the higher your Recon level, the less the AI army scales. This could be justified by saying better Recon allows you to plan for battles with better force ratios in your favor. Also, maybe higher recon could allow more brigades/corps for battles for much the same reason.

Could varying levels of surprise be added to the difficulty settings? For that matter, 'orders delay' in general, such that in higher difficulty levels, units won't respond immediately, but have a wait period proportional to distance from your commander, efficiency, commander experience etc. This would simulate the time needed to compose orders, and send the messenger to the unit. Delay impacts would also be part of the difficulty setting selected, rather than just having more opposing troops scaling.

Hey I just signed up. Has anybody played any of the Command Ops series? That game has a functional chain of command so that you can give an order to the HQ unit, and the subordinate units will move in a coherent manner to the objective and adopt the formation specified by the player. Maybe if they enabled the division HQ (or show it as attached to one of the brigades to cut down clutter) and you could basically exercise control at the division level for the most part, micromanaging individual brigades only when desired. A pretty big change obviously though.