pandakraut

The different bars for the unit stats and the officers affect on the unit are explained in this guide

It was very recently discovered how to add and increase the size of tooltips, so now we should be able to add more of this information in game so it's easier to tell what is going on and what the benefits/downsides are. I also tend to follow this fairly early on, but post Shiloh I try to start building up a few pure melee units. I try to get them extra kills towards the end of battles and in counter charges. A bit of work to get going, but having some solid counter chargers behind your firing units can be a huge help later on. Past a point there is only so much we can do here, if the player brings enough artillery the AI just isn't going to counter it properly. That said, a continued reduction in kill damage for various weapons and artillery in particular is something we're continuing to work on. Mass artillery barrages should absolutely be effective, but we would prefer if the player had to send in the infantry to clean up a bit more. Also the end game much past Chancellorsville is definitely a problem and always has been. We could make it harder, but I'm not sure it'd actually end up more interesting. Slogging through fortifications is always going to be slogging through fortifications, and that's kind of what the end of the war ended up as. Maybe we'll come up with something eventually. You're probably correct that this is what is driving things up. It's an issue with several of the battles where the AI has relatively few units, but the player brings a very large force. The AI tries to scale into fewer slots and the numbers skyrocket. We probably need to try to come up with some other way to handle scaling in this scenario. Extra splits when the unit exceeds some ratio to the player's average size perhaps, though that kind of requires figuring out how to get them to show up on the 2nd day which is currently a technical limitation. Hopefully getting rid of the dupes and the new patch improves performance a bit for you. Also definitely look into capping the max AI infantry size if that makes things more enjoyable. Thanks for the continued feedback, hope you can get around the bugs that have been causing your trouble.

You need to use a hex editor such as hxd to read and make changes to that file. Some examples of how to change weapon stats and perks can be found here https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26225-weapon-and-perk-modding-guide/ Changing weapons for individual units is probably going to be pretty hard. The unit definition probably has a weapon id that would need to get swapped out with whatever you want instead. Finding the Id and then finding the actual unit definition would be a lot of trial and error. This is something we basically haven't done in the mod at all due to the difficulty and amount of work.

I didn't realize they varied either until you pointed it out. I had a feeling something was off but I never put together exactly what was happening. I always looked at the AI numbers and casualties other players were getting rather than the rewards themselves. Presumably the RNG can line up sometimes and you'll end up with the same number. I have a theory that the rewards on BG might always be the same. But when the difficulty factor is applied that is what causes the randomness. Only the BG numbers are actually stored in the game files, the % increase or decrease from the difficulty just gets applied to those. If you're looking for the latest and greatest check out Hibob Warbob's videos. He's got a max size infantry strategy that you might enjoy.

I verified my files to remove all modded ones and then ran a quick recording of potomac fort. You can see that I received $41300 and 2900 men compared to your $46600, 3300 men. https://youtu.be/Ibz8laIs_W4 I don't know exactly what causes the values to be different. But this variance is 100% present in the base game and whatever that functionality is, it's inherited by the mod. Every single legendary campaign that has been recorded using 1.09 or later shows slightly different rewards, even accounting for politics. The overall variance for Newport News appears to be roughly +/- $5k and +/- 500 men from the default value. Apparently, I had good luck when I started my recorded campaign, and I have worse luck than you do currently. I have tried to be very clear about where the mod affects the base game balance. Multiple configuration options have been provided specifically to allow players to revert the majority of balance changes while keeping the bug fixes if they choose.

Not easily. You would have to manually change the weapon in the assets file for all the units at Antietam. We basically don't look at the historical battles at all in the mod, so they may not play well with it installed. The maximum morale a unit can have during a battle does go down as the unit takes losses. Though this is not a 1:1 relationship. I don't know the exact numbers, but I think 50% casualties means the unit can get around 70% morale maximum. We could probably adjust that ratio at some point, though I think 1:1 is a bit too much. The shatter at 0 morale system that the mod uses does make it much easier for units to shatter or surrender if they've taken that level of losses. So they should be relatively fragile if they get routed at that point. Glad to hear you're enjoying the mod

The numbers on the strategic map and those displayed as a reward after the battle are the same. Here are the time stamps for the prebattle numbers from the same examples above. https://youtu.be/zVgUEuppl9M?list=PL6-2WZCqywMUvVOalOdQuzcQBxEASq-mp&t=2315 $52900, 3700 men, 3 pol https://youtu.be/g8pugYF-7mw?list=PL6-2WZCqywMWNyI4imucF1tSJjyaqs2qx&t=2560 $47800, 3400 men. 0 pol https://youtu.be/uav4nqktxN8?list=PLt-JAMmvyAGkJLwjA3jEj8SGelO2CAeAg&t=360 $49000, 3500 men, 3 pol No link to Mukremin Gul's video as he doesn't show the pre battle numbers. You can compare against your own campaigns to confirm. If the values matched exactly then the rewards should differ by 7.5% since you invested in politics in the second one. 47800 * 0.075 = 3585 3585 + 47800 = 51385 which is not equal to 52900 Comparing multiple different vanilla campaigns from different players I could not find numbers matching exactly. I found the same thing when comparing against vanilla saves. I'm not sure what else I can test to try to prove this point. Edit: toned down some frustration from a long day

The mod makes no changes to the reward amounts for any battle. If it did I certainly would have noted those changes in the changelog. This is easy to check by verifying local files through steam to revert the mod and loading up your saves again. The reward values displayed pre battle are updated every time a save is loaded, so you can see them changing when doing something like switching to the J&P mod where reward values have been changed. I did some checking around found that the rewards for legendary Newport News in unmodded playthroughs do have a random element to them. This specifically is not due to captures of men or supplies as those values are not included in the displayed reward popup when returning to camp and the pre battle and post battle reward numbers line up as well when captures are excluded. Some examples: https://youtu.be/3kTRGZv_h28?list=PL6-2WZCqywMUvVOalOdQuzcQBxEASq-mp&t=1134 $52900, 3700 men, 3 pol https://youtu.be/1ht13kYXAos?list=PL6-2WZCqywMWNyI4imucF1tSJjyaqs2qx&t=1199 $47800, 3400 men. 0 pol https://youtu.be/sRq5PPKQyAo?list=PLWGIUDB4ZZsbvSh049eR4mvIay3z9kgIF&t=723 $48400, 3400 men, 4 pol https://youtu.be/249MTBYb5Ek?list=PLt-JAMmvyAGkJLwjA3jEj8SGelO2CAeAg&t=941 $49000, 3500 men, 3 pol Then I started comparing my old saves from various campaigns. These were generally all made at least several months apart. $49200, 3500. 0 pol $45400, 3200. 0 pol $44400, 3200. 3 pol Next I restored back to vanilla game, started multiple campaigns in a row and received 41300 and 2900 every time. Switched back to 1.9.2 and started a new campaign and received the exact same reward. So whatever is going on seems to be tied to a random seed that gives the same result fairly consistently to the same user in a given timeframe. Given all the examples available, it appears to be more common than not for the rewards not to match exactly for each player. While this could add up over time, presumably some values will be higher and some lower and it will even out in the long run. The same variance exists in battles due to the sizeRandomization scaling factor, no two campaigns will be exactly alike. While no rewards were changed, some of the other changes and bug fixes do change the campaign balance a bit. Some of them will make it a bit easier, some will make it a bit harder. The majority of the balance affecting changes can be disabled in the config. For example, the latest version does make the tutorial battles a bit easier as the majority of the community is clearly on the side of them being harder than they need to be. This can of course be disabled if you prefer. I would highly recommend reviewing the changelog and the config file so you can adjust to your own taste.

Sorry for not responding earlier, sometimes I miss the new message notifications. These settings are somewhat configurable. In the /Mod/Rebalance/ConfigFile you can increase the values for brigadeOfficerExperienceMultiplier, divisionOfficerExperienceMultiplier, and corpsOfficerExperienceMultiplier Battles led affects officer xp gain rate, command stat, and the bonus the officer provides a unit towards their next perk. There is a penalty to these at 0, and the maximum bonus caps out at 3 battles led. I did some checking and all indications are that it is working as expected so maybe I'm just not explaining it well. If you select a unit, to the left of their name is a small box that contains an upward line. If you click on this you'll get a list of all battles the unit has fought in. If you hover over the battle you can see which officer ended the battle in command. Unless you have been going through officers at an incredible rate, or are frequently moving units around or disbanding them, these numbers are far lower than I would expect. A patch with a variety of performance improvements will be out soon. While the engine itself will eventually experience a lot of slowdown no matter how good the computer, some of the recent changes in the mod dropped the FPS more than they need to be. The upcoming patch should restore base game FPS levels. Regarding charges, we make the AI more able to recognize when it's units have an advantage in melee over the player. We also make the AI more likely to actually charge together instead of one at a time where they can be picked apart. The big piece of information I'm missing here is how you are perking and equipping your units. If you're full accuracy spec'd with low melee damage weapons and 20 melee stat you are going to be in for a bad time if a 3* unit impacts on a charge. Especially if that unit has a good melee weapon and charge perks(which would also make it much more likely to charge.) If you have melee spec'd units in your army you can counter these charges fairly effectively in melee. I'm not sure what happened with scaling here, I'm completely unable to replicate those kind of results. Closest I can get with those kinds of numbers are 3k units, which would be much less of a threat. This would be a case where I would highly recommend using the scaling configuration values to just decrease them to a more reasonable size. Wanted to address this point specifically. Capping the sizes lower would make balancing easier, but it also removes the option for a playstyle that some players really like. We try to make scaling recognize which size units players are using and to adjust to that accordingly, but it doesn't always work out in every scenario. There is also a config option that allows you to make this change if you want. In the AIConfigFile there are size caps for the main unit types AIArtilleryMaxSize, 1250 AIInfantryMaxSize, 6000 AICavalryMaxSize, 2000 AISkirmisherMaxSize, 1000 I think this is the base game tooltips causing confusion again. Every infantry weapon in the base game other than the henry had 300 range. The tooltips were just indicating a relative effectiveness at max range, if I'm being very generous in my interpretation. The only max range matters a lot of time is definitely an issue. Though I would argue that moving in closer as the player does have significant benefits, especially on certain weapons. Getting the AI to do that effectively is a whole different issue though. This is something we're continuing to look into. This can be turned off in the AIConfigFile by setting duplicateRandomProbability to 0. Sorry you hit this twice, wish it was a bug that I could fix. Thanks for the feedback overall, sorry again that my responses are a bit late. Glad you got a bit more value out of the game, if you decide to pick it up again at some point we may even have a new version out by then

Updates for V1.9.2: Fixed a bug that was causing rewards to be given multiple times after CSA Shiloh and Union Antietam.

I think one of the changes was that the union can't add men to existing brigades. Either have to create new ones or merge existing units together.

Officer experience gain was intentionally slowed down, so that there is actually a sense of progression throughout the campaign instead of having entire corps worth of brigades led by MGs. The mod changes the xp thresholds to hit various ranks. Getting to Colonel is very quick, but it will take a while to get to BG, and then take a similar amount of time to hit MG. Note by xp I mean an internal total xp for the officer, not the xp progress bar shown in the UI. That shows xp towards next rank rather than total xp. Many players are getting their first MG around the 2nd bull Run mark, though the timing will vary depending on officer losses, how much focus is put on farming xp for officers, and if you get lucky and get a high xp BG in the barracks early on in the campaign. Depending on how close some of your BG are to MG and the various other factors, you might just be a bit behind schedule. Corp command and division command give flat xp per battle, grand battles will give more. Corp command is relatively good xp but won't be as fast as what you can achieve on a unit where you're focusing on gaining xp. Officer xp goes up as a units stats go up. Stats go up slower the higher they are. So the fastest way to level an officer is put them on a recruit unit, and then get that unit lots of kills and time spent walking around. The xp bonus from multiple battles led stacks counteracts the xp slowdown as the stats go up a bit, so finding the optimal point of when to switch officers around will not be consistent. Battles led is a completely custom mechanic to the mod. The battles led for a given officer is tied to a specific unit. The officer that ends the battle in command of the unit gains the led status for that battle. So if your officer is wounded, in their first battle commanding a given unit, they will still be at 0 after the battle ends. This is more a technical limitation of how we managed to get this to work than an intended restriction. If you have an officer who has completed multiple battles with unit A, and then you assign them to unit B, they will start out at battles led 0 with unit B. If you swap them back to unit A they will retain their battles led for unit A. If that is not happening let me know and we can dig into what is going on further. As far as I know, saving and loading doesn't break this system because it gets updated on battle end. Saving and loading does lose wounded officers as we are unable to add them into the save file currently. You'll still keep the replacement officer, but if this is happening repeatedly it can definitely be a major hit to your officer pool. This is a somewhat rare bug caused by in battle save/loads. What seems to happen is that all units that were shattered get restored to full strength when you go to the following day of a multiday battle. The only solution I've seen is to restart the battle, though perhaps going to an earlier save might work. I don't save during battles very often myself, so I've only run into it with single saves when testing other things. Otherwise you're stuck killing them all again. Hope the above provides some context. Glad to hear you're enjoying the mod overall, if you have any follow up questions feel free to ask.

Updated to 1.9.1: Fixed a bug that was causing the AI units to be larger in the starting battles.

Updated to 1.9 Major changes include making the two starting battles easier, replacing the +ammo perk bonuses that don't work, and adding the ability to turn off or adjust scaling. No scaling mode is not balanced by default, some battles may be far too easy or far too difficult. This is intended to be used in combination with AISizeMultiplier to adjust difficulty as desired. My recommendation would really be to leave scaling on and just adjust AI sizing from there, but the option has been provided as is if you want to use it. UI Changes - Units can be merged by dragging and dropping. Unit type and weapons have to match and the sum of both units hp must be less than the unit types max hp. Merged units stats will be averaged as normal. The dragged unit will be destroyed and its officer returned to the pool. Credit to Adishee. - Cavalry can now hold position. - Highlighted penalties to reload speed in perk descriptions. Perk Changes - Artillery tier 1 Logistics perk now gives +speed in place of +ammo. This is due to the +ammo stat being bugged. - General tier 1 Strategy perk now gives +spotting. This is due to the +ammo stat being bugged. Fixes to Union Deployments - Crossroads, Rendezvous, Crampton's Gap, and Harrison's Creek deployment slots now match total units that can be deployed. - Stones River, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Cold Harbor deploys fixed so that all deployed units now show up on the field. - Stones River supply wagons now appear on day 2. Configuration Changes - modifyTutorialBattle added into ConfigFile, enabled by default. Reduce the difficulty of the the first battle in each campaign by removing the random sizing adjustments to AI units and increasing the size of player units slightly. - disableScaling added into ConfigFile, disabled by default. Enabling this turns off all scaling based on the players army. AI sizing is determined by difficulty and a random factor. - improveArtilleryTargetting, now disabled by default. Requires far to much focus on enemy artillery given the options the player has available to keep smoothbore artillery close enough to be effective.

Adaptation being on enables scaling. If it's off the AI forces will be mostly static.

Unfortunately no, someone showed a screenshot on the forums and that was about the end of it.

Fairly sure it's possible, someone managed it in the UG:G game. None of the active modders have gone in that direction though.

The first battles for both campaigns are pretty universally considered terrible introductions. Both in that they are more difficult than they need to be and that they don't allow the player to customize their army at all prior to the battle. One workaround is to save and then load the battle right after starting. This results in the reinforcing units being larger which makes the battle a bit easier. The second link below also contains sample save game files if you just want to skip the first battle entirely and see if the rest of the game is something you are interested in. Compared to total war I would say the battles are a lot longer, but also tend to be more interesting since you have different scenarios instead of mostly just having two deathballs slam into each other. Definitely not as slick as the TW games though, it's a much smaller developer. You don't have the open ended campaign, but there are a decent amount of different ways to build your army and this can make battles play out fairly differently so there is quite a bit of replayability available depending on what you're looking for. For the first CSA battle, there are a few steps to make it easier. First, while you're crossing the river you want to send either your general, cavalry, or a detached skirmisher NW to get the attention of the two union infantry units heading towards the fort. If you get in their way they will either charge you or turn to fire at you, which gives you more time to get your units between them and the fort. Wiping these two units out will make taking the fort much easier. Second, try to preserve your cavalry unit for the 2nd part of the battle. If you send him NW in the second part, you can get behind the enemy infantry, capture his supply wagon, and keep his artillery distracted and perhaps kill it. Third is to send out detached skirmishers at the start of the second phase to slow down the enemy advance. You want to try and be in 100% cover, just trade shots if they'll let you, otherwise fall back if they charge. Goal is just to buy time for your reinforcements to come up. The game is definitely very micro focused, pausing frequently can help until you get more used to the timing of when units can be left alone vs needing extra attention. If you are getting shot by a hidden unit or a unit out of your range, you'll need to move your units into position to counter this, they won't do it automatically. Though they will shoot anything that gets into range. You can give AI control over divisions, but you'll get infinitely better results if you give them orders yourself. Units that encounter an enemy unit will take the most direct line of fire when targeting them. If you want specific flanking angles you'll need to manually position your unit so that the flank will occur. After a unit has been assigned an order and the movement/attack arrow fades out, you can mouse over them to get the arrow to show up again. A unit with a movement order will move to that position, but it will also fire at any unit that enters its firing arc that is encountered on the way. In between volleys the unit will keep moving forward while reloading. This can be used to fire and advance into melee or you can use the hold fire button to keep them advancing. A unit with an attack order will move so that the target enters its firing arc, and then stop and fire as long as the target remains in the arc. Normally this order cannot be given if an enemy unit is between you and the target. If an enemy unit gets between the target and your unit, it will get fired at and your unit will keep moving forward to try and attack the intended target. This can result in frustrating situations where you want to attack a specific unit, things get jumbled up and your unit walks forward into an unwanted melee. There are mods that improves this behavior. For melee, you want to make sure you have your charge available and preferably you want to always be hitting enemy units with 2 of yours at the same time. Your options are pretty limited at the fort, but detaching skirmishers and putting them behind your units so you can counter charge into melees can help. Some introductory guides that may help: https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1692659135921638188/ https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1590910447 There are also a variety of campaigns on youtube if live play examples is more your preference. Hopefully some of this helps, if you have any follow up questions just ask.

Haven't see anyone else mention it on discord or the steam forums, though that doesn't mean someone else isn't getting it.

Have you submitted an F11 report? Hopefully something that is relatively easy to fix.

Could you elaborate more on what you mean by this? Our options within the battles are unfortunately fairly limited. On a campaign level we're probably limited to the reputation system and casualties. I feel like the issue with adding this kind of thing is that in a static campaign they are just arbitrary cutoffs, since the player can't actually affect how the war progresses beyond winning. Also it seems like these systems would just double down on penalties to the player. Taking high casualties is already bad, losing more rep because of it just makes the death spiral hit faster. Or to go a different way, the campaign could be changed to end when one side takes x casualties, but this seems like it's just encouraging various exploits and just shortens the campaign in most cases. Feels more appropriate for a sandbox style campaign. A lot of this just the limitations of modding. With more access I could definitely see ways of implementing this kind of thing more.

The game is still in early access. A major patch was just released in the beta branch adding mid game saves. Both campaigns are fully available at this point, but big fixing and balancing continues.

There should be a menu that pops up under the Intermediate window that has a cancel and a research button. If you select some of the other research options does it also not show up? Or is just marines not working correctly?

Can be found here, it's the only submod available currently https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/34966-historical-submod-of-jp-rebalance-mod-release-thread/ We've debated it, but it kills off an entire style of play to penalize it too harshly. The battles led change for officers was a step in the direction of providing at least some trade off though. It's not that the AI can't do them, it's just that the player tends to be so much better at setting them up, and at countering the AI attempts do the same that effectively the AI only attacks frontally. Every now and again you'll see it hit a flank with cav, but it's fairly rare. I would argue this opportunity cost is already pretty high. Cavalry have one longer melee, maybe two in them and then they are out of commission for a while to rest. And they are quite expensive to maintain, especially at higher veterancy levels. Even taking a single volley can cost you thousands or 10s of thousands to restore. The AI gets around the cost since it doesn't really pay to maintain the high veterancy units, but it also rarely gets to deploy cavalry in any real concentration unlike the player. It always feels bad as a player when a unit gets overrun, but in most cases the AI unit can really only pull this off once as they will get horribly punished by any nearby units firing into the melee. I would qualify this as starting around Antietam. Some of that is difficulty based though as the weapon quality on legendary compared to MG or BG can be quite significant. Chickamauga is the last battle I tend to really enjoy, past that it does become quite the slog. Not really sure how that would get fixed, as that's kind of what trench warfare would be. We might be able to change up existing battles some more, but it isn't possible to add new ones as far as we've figured out.

Glad you're enjoying it overall Mounted cavalry in melee against a unit in 100% cover currently have their melee damage cut in half. This value may need to be adjusted a bit. Though in general, my opinion is that skirmishers caught by cavalry anywhere except in a fortification should have a fairly difficult time holding against cavalry in the game. Melee cav is definitely more effective in game than it was historically, especially against formed up units. Some of this is to allow the AI to actually threaten the player with this unit type since the AI basically only knows how to frontal charge. Some of this is to give them enough punch to be worth fielding as especially later in the campaign they have trouble finding opportunities to do anything on less wide open battlefields. It's definitely an area we'd like to fine tune more in the future. The distinction of saber and carbine cavalry is definitely one of the more gamefied aspects, but it does allow for some more interesting specialization and alternate history approaches if the player chooses. Cavalry are one of the best potential scouting units the player can field, so I think that aspect at least sort of carries over. The recon career stat is hard to balance since, depending on playstyle, it's either incredibly strong or near worthless. An artillery and sniper focused army loves it, an infantry heavy army probably doesn't care. The extra features we've added do give more information on the status of enemy units which can help with super optimizing play, but it's still mostly a luxury. An issue I see with getting more reconnaissance information based on the number of cavalry units in the player army is that they can just disband and create them at will now that horse cost is refunded on disband. Adishee's historical submod has gone with the cavalry on the field direction, where units are nearly blind without a nearby cavalry unit or general to spot for them. Cavalry itself cavalry being mostly ineffective in a combat role as I understand it. That's much further than I think we want to go with it, but there might be some spot in between that makes sense.