pandakraut

1) Weapon quality is currently not always directly reflected in price. The Lorenz and the Enfield have higher prices due to being imported weapons. 2) Some battles/phases don't have the wipe out enemy army for a win enabled. This isn't an area we can really make changes so we're kind of stuck with whatever is currently in the game. 3) The battle timers have been generically increased due to slower unit movespeeds, harsher condition penalties and such. In some cases this probably gives the player too much time. Part of this is also that on harder difficulties more of that time is going to be necessary. I assume you've built up a pretty strong experience advantage over enemy units by that point and are going to be able to roll over the quite quickly.

It is recommended to bring at least one troopship to this mission. More will make it easier and only 2 warships are needed to deal with the enemy ships. Grenadiers or other advanced infantry will help if you were able to get the tech for them. You can bypass most of the defenses by sending rowboats up the center of the river mouth. At most they'll take a shot or two from the defending cannon. From there you can land right outside the first VP.

If you field a captured 6th rate sloop of war and a 7th rate brig you can scale up to 2 6th rate cerberus here.

I need to go back through on hard, but currently my impression is that the economy is pretty generous on normal. You can get through chapter 2 without bothering with a 5th rate. I only used 6th and 7th rates.

Several of the later battles not scaling much certainly changes the equation. I only briefly started the first mission in chapter 3 and it seemed like fielding a 5th, 6th, 6th resulted in no scaling changes. One thing to follow up on at some point, is what happens to scaling when units are assigned to PoIs? The fleet naturally has to expand to fulfill those while also fighting battles, so if you can dump high rate ships in there to lower scaling while increasing chances of success that could be very useful.

Unless they changed it scaling is based on all ships that are available to be deployed so you'd have to drop the crews on your other ships to get downscaling with the transports to kick in. I was able to keep the ship when I played it on the prior patch, not sure which is intended. Either way, double boarding with a third ship nearby to provide musket fire support seemed far more efficient than actually trying to grind the crew down at range. I never found it worthwhile to field a 5th rate prior to chapter 3. I always tend to chase low to minimum scaling with my play though, I'm sure just maxing scaling out can also be done by someone who is better at naval battles than I am. A comment on both crossfire and snatch regarding defensive AI. I do think there is a fine line with making the AI overly defensive. Anytime this is done and sufficient time is available to the player you can just bombard them out of the position. Whether that's with artillery, mortars, or just moving your infantry so that you can hit a single target with 3-4 and roll up the entire line. But making them overly aggressive results in what you see at Crossfire where you can just hold the bridge. Though if the AI were to bring up the units holding the ford further down the river that position would get pretty precarious. I'm interested to see how Crossfire works now that canister for land artillery is being implemented. If charging artillery actually becomes dangerous that will change things dramatically. Once unit experience becomes meaningful I think it completely changes the campaign. The difference between a well managed army in UGCW and one that is just thrown together is huge and currently in AoS recruit spam seems to be sufficient to solve any problem. I hope when I get to try the hard difficulty it will no longer be the case. Renaming would largely solve this issue. I just miss the extra info from UGCW where a unit was part of X army and Y division or the like. Not really sure how that would work with the smaller unit breakdown here though. I had a 5th rate available to purchase around priority and I think every battle I checked adding it improved the AI strength considerably. I never had any issues using just 6th and 7th rates so I didn't feel like I was ever missing out by not fielding the 5th. Maybe this kicks in more on hard. Once players get good enough, maxing everything out to maximize what you can capture will probably be the best option unless scaling is made very harsh. Are you encountering more 5th rates on hard compared to normal? I don't think I faced a single 5th rate outside of maybe priority with the ships I was fielding. Even hunter was only some special variant of a 6th. I wonder if this is due to all player recruits currently starting with 1 point in each stat. I feel like the entire stat and xp system is still in progress so mostly waiting to with hold judgement here.

Played on normal difficulty Patch 0.5.2 rev. 32553 BB4 Intro battle: Feels like this is in a good spot. Dinner for Admiral: Entirely dependent on what the AI does in that it can be very hard to catch up to them if they go to the right of the fortified island. Otherwise fairly straightforward unless you are going for capturing all 3 enemy ships. Snakes and Powder: Very easy due to outnumbering the enemy so heavily even when only bringing 2 ships. Can basically just charge every unit you encounter. Priority: Scaling seems quite harsh unless the idea is to just avoid and run away from the AI for the mission. Avoiding fighting and running worked fine though. Not being able to use full sails in most cases is a nice touch. If there isn't already a warning that capsizing can occur then it should be added. Second Wave: Decent battle, though the least memorable. Crossfire: Interesting enough, but the delayed ship reinforcements seem like overkill currently. Fireworks: Good battle, fun to play. Hunter and the Hunted: rushing boarding renders this a bit straightforward, but worked fine unless the enemy ship beaches itself while trying to deal with being surrounded. Snatch: A good tough battle, though there are a few exploitable holes currently. The fortification at the mouth of the river not being manned allows the player to bypass all of the units that are supposed to spawn to defend a landing along the sea. Also the units that spawn to defend the Chapel can be spawn camped pretty easily by holding off on capturing the town VP. Overall Campaign Comments: - Unit and officer xp gain is very slow currently. At most one or two stats went up by 1 point after a battle. I didn't have a single unit with a perk by the end of Snatch. 1 point in crew training, so didn't focus on this much since I thought it was bugged until I compared exact stats pre and post battle. - Having to scroll through all ships is going to get clunky late in the campaign. Would be nice to be able to see more of the fleet on screen at once or have some filters to display subsets. - I wish there was an easy way to tell the difference between units from your forces and allied units in battle. Other than memorizing officer names there appears to be no indicator currently. - Renaming officers does not rename land units in battle currently. - More characters allowed for officer/ship names would be nice. - The +money and +rep career point choices seem much better than any other option currently. When combined with infinite recruits and trade muskets any losses can easily be replaced. If units gained experience faster then I could see maybe going for other options. Bonus tech is also a strong contender to reduce the chance that something important doesn't become available. - I found myself holding off on adding new ships so that scaling wouldn't go up. This meant I usually was only fielding 6th and 7th rate ships for Chapter 2. It didn't seem worth facing the larger ships to upgrade to anything larger. - The Points of Interest are a nice addition. They are a bit inconsistent on when they resolve, but once that gets cleaned up they should be fine. While several of my comments mentioned that battles were too easy, they are probably around the right difficulty for normal. I am planning to go back through on hard where hopefully a bit more complex tactics will be necessary.

5th rates currently sell for 5 rep points. Which would be useful since they require a lot of rep points to buy and depending on random chance you may or may not have any available for purchase. Have you experienced being short of money with the way the campaign currently plays? I've generally found I have more than I need but am relatively short of rep points. Given that recruits and trade muskets are cheap and infinite I've been happy to be able to trade money for another resource. The economy in general seems like it'll need more adjustment before more analysis makes to much sense.

My main point was focused on units that you control in battles but you do not get to carry over into the campaign. For units that carry over into the campaign you want to take as few casualties as possible because while you do recover weapons, for land units at least, it's such a low percentage that it's only a minor compensation. There is currently no incentive for the player to keep units that don't carry over alive. Regarding capturing ships, being able to sell them for reputation seems fairly strong given that otherwise rep can only be acquired from winning battles. It also allows you to almost entirely skip spending money on buying ships since you can buy trophy ships with rep and then sell the rest to keep that chain going.

In the intro battle of the campaign the player is provided with units that will not be part of their navy going forward. However, the player does recover a percentage of weapons from any losses these units take. This results in a situation where the player is encouraged to get as many of their units killed as possible so that they receive the maximum amount of weapons going into the campaign. Possible solutions: 1) Remove weapon recovery from units not assigned to the player's forces and increase battle rewards to compensate. This would mean the player has no reason to spend time taking extra casualties, but there is also no particular reason to keep them safe either. 2) All remaining units in the intro battle stay under the players command. This gives the player plenty of incentive to take as few casualties as possible, but it also makes success in the first mission more mandatory for a successful campaign. It would also currently give the player access to far more units and men than they would under the current system which would probably require other aspects of the campaign or the intro battle to be changed to compensate. 3) Add weapon recovery rates for surviving units that will not be part of the player's forces. This recovery rate would be higher than the recovery rate for taking casualties. This would encourage the player to keep their units as intact as possible, while not noticeably impacting the resources available in the campaign. An additional step could also be lowering the recovery rate for any dead men from these units would add further incentives to treat them well. A separate but related issue, is that there does not appear to be any weapons recovery from ship crew casualties on ships that have not surrendered or been sunk. There is also no crew weapons recovery from enemy ships that have been captured. Both of these would be nice to have added.

It has some positive side effects in terms of overall game flow and makes it easier to manage larger armies in real time for players that don't use pause. I'm mostly just impatient and spend so much more time testing than actually playing that the faster I can get through the battle the better. I'll frequently set the 3x fast forward to somewhere between 30x to 80x speed. Gets me in trouble sometimes, but when you're waiting to drive off the unit guarding the bridge at Phillipi for the 100th time...

Just to confirm, the wounded officers are they in your barracks in a non-wounded state? Or are they missing entirely? There is no chance to die mechanic for wounded officers, but multiday battles count as time passes so wounded officers can recover without having to wait for the next grand battle.

Union Shiloh always goes to the second day, it's not possible to skip. Forrest is the only extra CSA unit that spawns on day 2. The AI had 27k left for me on day 2. One issue that does mess with the numbers is that 2nd Brigade units from splits do not get added up correctly in multiday battles. I'll have to see if I can find a way to fix that.

That's some terrible luck on facing that many James. I think in the version I recorded I only faced two 3" units which limited how much counter battery I had to worry about. Lowering the size of those units would help a bit with scaling, comparing to my numbers you brought an extra 10k men and faced an additional 25k because of it. Either way, you are correct that the ratio is probably a bit too harsh. It'll probably get lowered slightly in the next version. I also plan on including a config option that lets the player adjust scaling on a per battle basis. This should help even things out a bit for players on a wider spectrum of skill/desired challenge. Very interesting innovation here. I would have thought the AI cav would have scaled up enough to smash you, but definitely has promise if you got it to work. Expensive to lose that cav, but if you can trade them for keeping the rest of your army more intact that seems like a good deal. About 20% of the size of these units is added post scaling so they are not as big of an impact as it might seem. The scaling ratios on this battle are just extremely harsh for the union(with the unit size caps increased). Additional comments mentioned above. I'm not quite sure why this phase works the way it does, but several of the timers have been reduced considerably from the mod defaults for this battle. I'll take another look at it though. Skirmishers will actually take less damage from the artillery than infantry will. Though they also need to be tuned down a bit which will mess with the battle balance so will have to see how things go. As I mentioned above I think you got extremely unlucky with variance giving the AI multiple James units. Working as intended for the variance part, but the James is a bit over tuned as well and will be getting looked at. Thanks for the detailed feedback and good work getting through the battle. It's extremely challenging at the moment, which while fun for me is probably a bit much. You should be in fine shape to proceed through the campaign though.

Some fortifications are just not enabled for the player. They could probably be enabled but that would also open up some weird exploits in terms of occupying fortifications without being in them.

Here are the exact locations of all the files the mod uses. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Ultimate General Civil War\Ultimate General Civil War_Data\Managed\assembly-csharp.dll C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Ultimate General Civil War\Ultimate General Civil War_Data\resources.assets C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Ultimate General Civil War\Ultimate General Civil War_Data\Mod\Rebalance\(all the config files live here) If you're not seeing the version number change that usually means that the assembly-csharp.dll is not in the right place. Let me know if this helps.

I would definitely recommend starting a new campaign after installing the mod. While technically existing saves can be used, a lot of features don't really kick in properly unless you start fresh. It'll definitely be a play style adjustment, but if you have questions there is plenty of help available here or on the discord.

The main check to see if the mod is working is to look at the version number in the bottom left on the main menu. The end of the version number should have J&P Rebalance V1.25.2 listed. A secondary check is to look at weapon tooltips and see if most infantry weapons are now range 400. All of the units in the first battle should be larger than what you would see in the base game as well if everything is working correctly. The larger units in the starting battles generally make them a bit easier than in the base game despite facing larger enemy units as well. There is an exploit to make the starting battles easier which is save the battle immediately and then load that save. This will cause all of your reinforcements that come in to be around double the normal size. Legendary is currently quite difficult, so don't be surprised if it takes some restarts to get past Shiloh, especially if you are still learning the mod's changes.

Base game speed has been reduced to about half what the base game uses. It takes a bit of getting used to and you may want to use the 2x and 3x speeds more than you might in the base game(I use them for the majority of battles). If after a few battles it's still bothering you it is possible to change these settings in the config files.

Did you end up capturing many siege guns throughout the campaign? The 24pdrs are rather difficulty to use offensively currently unless you are screening them with some cheap cannon or clearing out enemy artillery ahead of time. I've had decent luck with them on defense though. Agreed on the CSA sniper weapons being a bit too good. Glad you liked it overall, several of the issues you described are ones we're looking at and will try to fix if we can.

Darth has been willing to take the time to answer several of our questions in the past. We try not to bother him unless it's a question on what the original intent was with a system that has an issue.

1) In Steam, right click UGCW and select Properties. 2) Click local files, then select browse local files 3) right click 'Ultimate General Civil War' and select 'show package contents' 4) Select the Ultimate General Civil War_data folder and copy the downloaded zip file here. 5) Extract the downloaded zip into the Ultimate General Civil War_data folder. You should be prompted to overwrite Ultimate General Civil War_data/Managed/assembly-csharp.dll and Ultimate General Civil War_data/resources.assets.

Weapon recovery rates are not currently configurable. The values are definitely in the assets file somewhere but that would involve a decent amount of hex searching to find. The rates do change by difficulty. One of the features I'm testing for the UI mod is a config option to adjust AI unit sizes. This would allow players to play on lower difficulties while generically increasing AI unit sizes to whatever they feel is appropriate. This would likely get included in a future release of this mod as well. None of the difficulty modifiers are currently configurable. These values are also in the assets somewhere. Battle rewards can be changed in the assets. Theoretically additional officers or units could be gifted but it's unknown if it would end up breaking something as we haven't actually tried it yet.

The system was designed around players optimizing xp gain for their officers and has some issues when players are not utilizing those methods. Officer xp gain is based on unit stat gain during a battle. Stat gain naturally slows down the closer to 100 the stat gets. This means that the fastest way to level an officer is to place them in command of a new unit with low stats an then put that unit in position to gain as many stats as possible. Using this method along with other small optimizations it is reliably possible to raise an officer to MG by Shiloh and LTG around 2nd Bull Run. With some good luck you can even manage to have a LTG by Shiloh. There are some changes planned to make this a bit more accessible, but both Jonny and I have had very little time to work on the mod recently.

This happens sometimes and is very annoying. Saving and reloading should stop break the unit out of the glitch.