pandakraut

This also opens up abuse cases where you charge around behind enemy lines capturing units and then they just teleport to your base with their weapons. Having to actually guard captured units seems like a reasonable mechanic even if the end result when they are freed doesn't make much sense. No need to even bother with counter battery, the AI will basically leave it's artillery undefended and you can just run it over and capture it with a few infantry units. To clarify this, any unit hit by ranged fire in UGCW also resulted in nearby units getting hit by a percentage of that damage. However, there was no friendly fire from the animation of canister being fired through a unit as long as the target being fired at was far enough away. One of the big benefits of moving to an actual 3d engine is that projectile arcs can be implemented so that artillery positioning actually matters. While it is certainly more frustrating than UGCW, I think this is something players will adapt to after a bit more time with the game. Especially since their are notifications for when you are messing up. When you say they were routing towards the enemy, do you mean enemy land units or the enemy ships? I don't think the ships are currently factoring into land unit routing direction, so if you encounter this in game I would recommend reporting it as a bug.

It was mentioned on the discord today that the devs will be trying out tech refreshing after every battle instead of every stage. Between the far more frequent refreshes and the ability to discard techs for free it should be much easier to get to the techs you want with this system. Personally, I also like the unpredictability of being forced to adapt to whatever you are given instead of being able to choose an optimal route every time. Far to many of the techs just don't seem necessary at the moment which is as much a comment on the combat balancing left to be done as the techs themselves.

Capturing ships also fulfills the destroy conditions. Though the goal conditions don't always reflect that.

I agree that land combat still feels clunky compared to UGCW. Unit facing isn't quite as consistent and there are a variety of movement bugs that the devs are working on fixing. The shorter range and far greater power of melee also makes it feel strange. That could be intentional since the weapons are different, but the devs have also mentioned that more balancing will occur once more of the campaign is in place and stable. There is a known bug related to captured artillery that was either just fixed or is being worked on. You should be able to take basically any ground unit and have them take over the captured artillery piece and then be able to use it as normal Regarding routing units, the higher surrender chance in melee makes this feel like a much more minor issue than in UGCW to me. Though in both cases you can almost always control the rout direction if you setup your lines to anticipate it. The AI unit basically tries to find the area with the least enemy units present to rout towards. So if you charge an enemy unit with 2 units and they get mixed up in melee, the enemy unit will try to go to an area free of units which can happen to be behind your lines. Double lines, supporting artillery, and such can all help contribute to enemy units routing in a specific direction. Though again, right now, just hit the enemy units with massed charges and they will probably just surrender anyways.

If more battles were added experience gain would probably need to be slowed down to avoid the problem you're describing. Adding an extra minor battle per stage probably wouldn't clutter things too much? Though the number of PoI's might need to be reduced in some cases as well. I do also like having the PoIs available as well for the extra flavor without another battle that will rapidly become routine.

soon TM

The next version will include a modifier so you can adjust the AI units size up or down.

I've tried implementing both of these in the past but was unsuccessful. Just can't figure out how to make it work on the technical side. Many of these issues are at least partially being addressed in the new version that is currently in testing. Hoping to have it ready for release in another week or two.

This post has the base game values: https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/ In the mod the return from captured units has been cut roughly in half. Allied unit weapon recovery rates have also been modified, but basically if you keep them alive instead of getting them killed you'll get more weapons.

This value varies by difficulty level, but the weapon recovery percentage will be higher for captured men than for men killed.

I think you should give artillery a second look. Properly perked and deployed you can win battles with them by themselves. It's a bit harder as the CSA, but the 3" and the blakely still do pretty well. 14pdr James can also usually be captured from the Union frequently enough to deploy a few units and those are a bit ridiculous at the moment. Maybe my perspective is a bit skewed since artillery is basically my specialty at this point, but there are some minor nerfs coming in the version which is in testing. Mostly just adjusting some outliers and addressing the supply situation that allows just fast forwarding while artillery kills everything. Capturing the unit still doesn't get you 100% cannon return, at least on MG and legendary. But you move from 10% to around 30% return. This was definitely working at one point, but I can take another look to make sure it didn't break. I'm definitely the type of player who just moves officers around to maximize xp gain instead of following any kind of role play. While this route does move your avatar out of command for a bit, they still usually make it back up there.

Putting them on new artillery units can also be quite effective and much safer.

Part of this is that officer xp gain was reduced and that unit stat gain(what officer xp gain is based on) was also reduced. Another part of this is that officers will stay at colonel rank for much longer while their command continues to increase. In terms of getting access to new corps commanders, the fastest way is to buy the highest xp BG or colonel you can, then put them on a new unit with low stats. This unit will gain stats faster in battle than if they were commanding a more experienced unit leading to officers ranking up fairly quickly. It's possible to have a MG by Shiloh and a LTG somewhere around Gaines or Malvern Hill. An officer will stop gaining xp if the unit they command has 100 in all stats. Division and Corps command gives a flat xp amount per battle. There is a new version in testing that will smooth out the Colonel/BG leveling a bit, still working on testing the Union campaign though.

A GoG version of the mod is available, it's listed in the first post in the thread under the link to the steam version. UGG is also made in unity and can also be modded in the same way as UGCW. Jonny has done some looking into modding UGG but nothing has been released at this point.

Working on some changes currently, if all goes well maybe a small path within the next month. Merry Christmas to you as well

Correct, once you have enough rep then the button will display.

It's worth noting that the battle this thread was started over is partway through Chapter 3. Ramping up the challenge as the campaign progresses is just as important as having easy introductions battles. Another very common complaint about UGCW was that halfway through the campaign the battles became boring because the player had such an overwhelming advantage. What are your impressions of the first few battles in the British campaign? To me at least, the first battle at least seems a much more reasonable start than UGCW had. I'm not quite sure where you got this impression, but the devs have slowly been adding more differences between the difficulties. Resources gained, enemy strength, and how difficult boarding actions are to win are the current differences and likely more will be added as development continues.

In another game that could be interesting, but I really don't think this is the right engine or type of game for sneaking based missions. Either the mission becomes an instant failure state as soon as you are discovered, or it will be more beneficial for the player just to kill everything in their way that they possibly can to gain more xp and weapons.

@SweatyPenguin Canister does seem relatively ineffective. I've usually found it's more useful to just use solid shot. Even if the crew casualties listed are low the morale damage seems to be quite high leading to either outright surrenders or easy boarding situations. For killing crew directly I've found it far more effective to bring multiple ships into musket range and let the crews blast away. Seems a bit too effective really. The one reason I do use canister currently is that one of the devs mentioned that it can't start fires so I'll switch over at the last second when boarding in hopes of not getting unlucky and having everything explode. Am I following your points correctly that the two main concerns you have is that crew kills are hard to get with cannon fire and that AI ships should surrender sooner when their masts are down?

Descriptions are correct. We aren't able to swap the icons or the amount of bonuses assigned to each perk so the visuals will not match up with several of them.

Saving and loading after the officer is wounded is likely the issue. The save is probably not holding onto the custom wounded officer information. I'll take a look, but the saves are pretty much a black box to me so not sure if I can do anything about it. I basically never use mid battle saves myself(outside of multiday battle camps) so that's probably why I missed this.

These are bugs please use the in game reporting tool to send your logs to the dev.

This seems very likely to get added in the future after other features are further along.

While I would agree that scaling in AoS can be a bit sudden, if it were removed entirely then the game would become incredibly easy unless players were much more restricted in the ships they could buy and capture. The scaling in UGCW is pretty much a solved problem at this point. The optimal way to play on legendary currently is to Max out AI scaling to farm as much xp and weapons as possible. There are only a few battles where scaling even sort of keeps up with this. If you'd like to continue that discussion I'd recommend heading over to this thread and reading my write up of what the impact the apparent rubber banding actually has.

enableAISizeMultiplier is something that I want to add to this mod as well but have not had time to implement yet. AIInfantryMaxSize just controls the size cap on infantry so if a battle doesn't already scale that hard there won't be any difference. FYI, I think the infantry size curve starts to break when units go over 6k so I wouldn't recommend it. A huge part of the challenge in the game is getting the resources to get a large army going in the face of superior AI units. Once the player can field Max size units the scaling isn't really designed to keep up properly. Until I can add the modifier in I don't see a good solution for you other than playing with self imposed restrictions on how large your units can be. I'll try to get something available before the new year.