JohnReynolds

I haven't played in a couple of months and don't know when (or if) I will play again. I am curious to see how the fixed scaling works but there are other things that take the fun out of the game. It would be nice if the devs had a sticky thread to mention which complaints they plan to look at and which ones they actually believe are valid features that we are going to be stuck with. Seeing the same complaints mentioned over and over leaves one to wonder if they see those particular complaints as non-issues. The difficulty moving troops short distances with accuracy (and safety) is one. Controlled withdraws is part of that. And an enemy who would rather die to the last man than lose a battle is another I can think of. A really nice game for the most part but some little things seem to be really irritating that would appear to be easily fixed.

Making small adjustments to a brigade's position can be frustrating. There have been many times I have tried to move a brigade and clicked on a location that shows heavy cover only to find out that it stopped somewhere else with little or no cover. Once under fire the unit can't be moved without it taking flanking fire. Moving a unit back 5 meters shouldn't result in it losing a big percentage of its men and breaking.

I have heard that the army that loses the battle is the first one to leave the field. In a battle of armies of similar strength, if the enemy is willing to bleed then you must be also, or retire from the field. Superior tactics can only go so far. In UG:CW the battles always seem to be a fight to the last man.

Well, things got side-tracked. All I really wanted to know was whether smaller brigades were harder to hit than large brigades to which there doesn't appear to be a definitive answer. And yes, I was playing on easy because I wanted to see what was the best way to build an army. I won Antietam from both sides playing on normal in historical mode and will probably stick to historical mode from now on.

I have won all my battles except for Antietam which I intentionally made a draw. I have watched a lot of video's and do understand flanking and preventing flanking. I tend to micro-manage my troops. I do things like having a unit fall back a short distance when charged so that units to the left and right can destroy the charging unit before it ever gets to my lines. I have over $300,000, an army of over 75000 and 45000 recruits that I haven't put into service and stock piles of weapons in my armory and most of my brigades are led by generals. The "problems" I am having is that I don't want to throw away a third of my army to destroy enemy troops that are only going come back in the next battle more experienced than ever. The problem is spending time in camp strategy to get the best army you can only to have the game tell you can only put 8 units on the field or jack up the enemy to negate your efforts. It is a very nice game but the campaign aspect of it needs more work or realism, in my opinion.

Well, I became frustrated (every reb unit was a 3 star and they were all in woods or fortified) so I turned all my divisions over to the AI and let it fight the battle (Antietam, Easy Union Campaign mode). Its strategy was to march up the center of the map charging anything that got in its way. My troops won with each corps taking between 30% and 40% casualties. I then restarted and kept my units in the woods, out of range. I brought my cannon forward and killed about 300 rebs. Then I let time run out and took a draw. For 60 men lost I got 1 career point, 1 rep point, and bunches of money and recruits. Nearly all my officers were promoted for just marching their units a few hundred meters. I play the historical battles on normal and don't have a problem. But the campaign mode is just too weird. I will miss the small battles but it just isn't fun or anywhere near realistic.

The reason I ask is that I had two 2-star brigades of 2500 men each with nearly 100 firearms rating fighting two 3-star rebel brigades with about 650 men each. All four brigades were in deep forest. Instead of getting 4 to 1 casualties I was barely getting 2 to 1. Even when it got down to 4600 men to 600 men it didn't seem to get any better. And I had 3 brigades of cannon firing into one of their brigades! Long range but it still should have done something. Did someone go back in time and give them Kevlar vests?

The changes I suggested in the original post would not work unless some other unusual features of the game were changed. As mentioned above, the players veteran brigades would rapidly be depleted the way the morale and damage is currently structured. My opinion is that the morale is set way too high. They should give way long before their casualties reach the levels they do. Lee's casualties at Gettysburg were about 33% and the Union about 25% which is about a worst case scenario. The Union suffered 12% at Fredericksburg before giving up.

I find it strange that you can use money to replace or add veteran troops to your army. Not realistic in my opinion. What if all troops came in as full size, raw brigades. Fighting would increase experience but also result in gradual attrition. At some point you would have to decide whether to keep using an experienced, but small, brigade or to merge it with another brigade. This actually happened in the Union army in the last year of the war. Some loss of effectiveness would result to the merged brigade due to loss of cohesiveness. I don't think adding raw recruits to existing units happened much early in the war. Some new recruits would be obtained from the home area where the unit originally came from but I think most new recruits joined, trained, and were deployed as a new unit. But in the last year of the war the Union was conscripting and paying bounties to get new recruits and adding them to old units because that was the only way the the new recruits could be made to fight.

The aspect of managing my army to make it better than the enemy (sorry Gen. Lee, those people) was the main feature that made me want to play this game. As it currently is I guess I will just play the historical battles and forget the campaign element of the game. Maybe they could not scale the AI and let the player eventually build an army that wins the war (or loses). At that point, do a reset. Force the player to disband a certain number of brigades or corps (or add recruits and supplies if he lost), the enemy would be reset, and player gets the option to change difficulty levels. Then the player can finish the campaign.

A good following book to the "Killer Angels" is "In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain" by Trulock. Chamberlain was an unusual man dedicated to honor and duty. Six time wounded, governor, faced down a riot alone, and died of his war wound at 85. "General James Longstreet", by Jeffry D. Wert. I think Longstreet was a better general than Lee but Lee was the better leader. Longstreet never got the accolades that he should have because of his willingness to work with the federal government after the war. I also recommend Shelby Foote's history if you have time to read 6000 pages. But I think he also created a youtube channel about the civil war that you might want investigate.

The Union casualties at the bloody battle of Fredricksburg were about 11 percent and CSA was about 6 percent. Damage and morale seem to be way too high in this game. All assaults and defenses turn into suicide missions. Reducing the damage weapons do and troop morale would allow the units to break at about the same time as they do now but without the unrealistic losses. Of course recruits and weapon supplies would have to be adjusted.

At present, RUN, CHARGE, and HOLD are acknowledged as being received by the units. Why can't that be done for FALLBACK and HALT as well? Also, would it be possible to press <F> and right-click on where you want the unit to fallback to? Sometimes I just want the unit to move back a few meters to be in better cover, not have them rush off in some weird direction 200 meters away. Currently I have to hit <F>, wait until they are in cover, then pound the <space> until I see HALT, and then hit <space> again to release them. Seems unnecessarily difficult for such a simple task.