pandakraut

I've tried multiple times to allow units to rout off the map with no success. The engine definitely supports it, but I can't figure out how to make the pathing happen. A workaround we are exploring is having units shatter or surrender at 0 morale. This requires a rework of morale damage as it would occur far to often currently and finding the right balance has been difficult.

By HA I meant that I don't take the horse artillery perk very often. I tend to field a lot of rifled artillery, but I use the t1 canister damage perk on my 24pdr howitzers. In general you will find that infantry units do not stand up to close range canister fire. If the artillery is unsupported the infantry can drive it off, but they will usually take more losses than they would doing so in the base game.

HA is actually my least used perk for artillery. I have it on a few napoleon units but the majority of my artillery uses the other perks. While convenient, taking that perk will definitely slow down your damage progression until you get high enough firearms/efficiency. Getting to 2*s is also essential for a unit with that perk to deal effective damage. Units with horse artillery really need to be getting in close and preferably hitting units in the flanks or in concert with several other units until they level up a bit.

The ranks of officers in the barracks is semi randomized. Depending on the campaign you may not see to many officers of a specific rank. Training up lower ranked officers is often necessary. Officer promotions are based on the officer's xp. Officer xp is gained based on the increase in stats of the unit they command. Corps and division officers gain a flat amount of xp per battle. Since units gain stats slower the higher those stats are if you want to train up a specific officer faster it is often better to place them in command of a unit of recruits and then place that unit in a position to gain lots of stats. Division commanders apply a larger percentage of a units command stat than in the base game. If you put higher xp/rank officers into divisional command you should see a significant jump. A good division commander will allow lower ranked officers to command larger units. The xp necessary for an officer to gain a specific rank has been changed in the mod because of the strength of corps commander perks. Colonels now take up a much larger section of the xp spread, so you will find that you will end up with a lot of colonels. But high xp colonels will be just as effective at commanding units as a BG would be in the base game.

What perk choices did you have? Napoleons can be used to great effect in the mod. More work is definitely needed to balance artillery, but I don't think making them strong is the direction they need to go in. Here is an example of how utterly ridiculous artillery can be currently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G5WWMUvsE0

Yes, graphs of the base game values are available here: https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/

This works as a quick solution, but if you want to optimize you actually want to adding the veterans first. You'll be paying the same amount for veterans whether you add recruits first or second, so it's better to save the higher stats by adding them first and then diluting the stats with recruits. Requires more trial and error to find the right balance though.

Happy to hear that you're enjoying the mod Part of the damage calculation is base damage * range damage multiplier. The range damage multiplier is actually a full curve that covers a weapon's entire range. Based on how far away the units' target is, the given multiplier applies to the unit's damage. The tooltip will give you a decent indication of how well a weapon will do in a given range, but you won't see a 1:1 relationship with casualties inflicted because there are lots of other things going on behind the scenes(morale, condition, cover, etc). I can't display the full curve in the tooltip as space is very limited, so I'm showing what the multiplier is at 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and max range. Artillery also displays at 100 range since they tend to have spikes at close range. While not perfect it gives at least a decent idea of what the curve looks like.

Have you tried using decent guns with experienced gun crews? It can be very effective. As mentioned, unit perform improves considerably as the units gain experience. Also make sure to check the range damage multiplier section of the tooltip to know which ranges the artillery is particularly effective at. In general the mod has increased artillery damage and decreased rifle damage. This does create some problems on high end units which we would like to solve with a more morale focused damage system, but overall it means that it is much harder to just mass infantry and shoot/melee your way through everything in your way. It can certainly be done, but compared to the base game where a volley or two will rout an artillery unit, it's going to be more difficult.

The perk bonus only applies when the unit has 2*s. Good camp management can drastically alter a campaign. In many cases I spent as much or more time in camp than I do on the battle screen when figuring out how to optimize my setup. Additional options would definitely be nice. Things like being able to type in the number of recruits or set number of veterans, in addition to what you mentioned. Nothing I can really do to improve the UI experience in this way though.

For some context, I wouldn't really consider the mod balanced on any difficulty below MG. You just get to many resources and the AI's units are so bad that you can get away with just about anything. However, the mod does need to be playable by a wide variety of players, so what is too easy for some will be too hard for others. The very large units definitely do lead to some odd gameplay at times. We may lower the player sizes a bit across the board in the future so that the AI units can always be larger and make up for the poor usage. I had to completely relearn distress call in the mod. It's fairly easy in the base game, but the experience disadvantage on MG and above requires a different approach to keep your army intact. This came up recently on the discord and here are the basics: There are two key points for supply depot and two basic options off of that. You want to give up one fort as early as possible to trigger your reinforcements sooner. You also want to send the skirmishers to the right side of the map to guard the fords and delay those reinforcements as long as possible. Depending on if you send units to both ford, or only the north or south one you get different AI responses, so may want to experiment there. Past that you can either choose to hold the north or south fort. If you abandon the north fort, put most of your units into the tree line to the left of the southern fort and bait the AI into charges. Tricky part is you need one or two units to the right of the southern fort to try and get flanking shots to keep the fort clear. Retaking the north fort sucks since most of the interior gives 100% cover. If you abandon the south fort, you want to either cram everything into the forts interior cover and try to survive the charges, or you put a few units inside the fort along the right side, and the rest outside of the fort to the right of it. The second option is fairly complicated but can get really good results. I'd recommend checking out my video of the battle as it'll probably make more sense than a description if you want to try that option.

Repeater fire rate is relatively low because the damage is quite high. Each volley represents multiple shots fired. It's not a great solution but it's what we went with in the current implementation. It's possible we go with something else in the future. The issue here is the game is designed to have all weapon types fire in volleys. In the base game high fire rated were used to represent revolvers or repeaters, but all weapons still reloaded in the same way. A guide to weapon modding is available on the forum if you want to try your own changes. The mod will pick up all the new numbers for you. Reload speed is particularly annoying to change since it's not a linear change like the other values. Waivering fire at will was removed in the mod because it was pretty easy to get a unit stuck in that state and then inflict large amount of casualties before they ran. In the mod the unit will fire off a single volley and then rout. Switching skirmishers to always fire this way is an interesting idea. Not sure if it's possible from the technical side, but I'll look into it.

https://forum.game-labs.net/forum/151-ultimate-admiral-age-of-sail/ https://forum.game-labs.net/forum/93-ultimate-admiral-dreadnoughts/

Infantry and carbine damage has in general gone down in the mod. The damage is also much more stat and perk dependent than in the base game. If you were firing at a 2-3* unit with 1* units it is very possible that their morale wouldn't drop enough to prevent a charge. Standardizing the range curves across weapon types is the current plan. This would result in carbines being considerably worse at rifle range than rifles. Remains to be seen if that will end up being the final result, lots of testing yet to be done. Player skirmisher sizes are likely to drop a bit. There is also the potential that detached skirmishers may return in a limited fashion. The upper end of those sizes is more intended to allow the AI to not hit scaling caps and let players to build ahistorically large if they want to. I haven't seen anyone go all out with 2k dismounted cav units to any real effect, but perhaps that is something that is open for abuse. If someone figures out a way it will probably get adjusted. Melee cav drops off really hard in bad terrain and is quite expensive to field and maintain. Numbers and stats have a very large impact on melee damage, so AI cav can be very dangerous early on. If you're using very large units are you having trouble with the more experienced AI cav units? This is a side effect of reducing the artillery ranges, providing the horse artillery perk, and some AI changes designed to force the AI to bring smoothbore artillery into effective range. Sometimes the AI will end up sending it's artillery ahead of it's infantry making it an easy target. While this screws over the AI sometimes, overall it seems to result in a net improvement. It is possible to change how much morale damage is done. Long term we would like to try a more morale damage focused system that lowers the overall casualty rates more towards historical levels. Lots of issues to work out with this though, so it has been slow going.

Carbines are in a bit of an odd spot at the moment and are on the list for an overall balance adjustment. In both the base game and the mod, their shorter range than infantry weapons makes them fairly hard to use well. We're considering upping the range a bit in the future. One concern on upping the range is that if cavalry carbines have equal range to infantry weapons a scenario opens up where you can pop in and fire without taking counter fire fairly easily. The mod also applies a considerably larger penalty to reloading while moving which hurts skirmishers more because of their default fallback while reloading logic. It also makes it harder to chase units while continually firing at them than it is in the base game. Hold position can help with this, but slightly higher fire rates across the board for carbines is also probably a good change. Thanks for the feedback and I hope you continue to enjoy the mod.

I can't add UI elements or new hotkeys which is the main issue with improving the load game interface. That rules out any kind of search or mass delete options. Is there any other functionality you can think of that would help?

This is getting a bit beyond me, but what the game appears to be doing is generating 1024 random values between 0 and 1. Then it randomly chooses one of those values and applies it in the following calculation. min + randomValue * (max - min). Hopefully that helps?

Added surrender mechanics section.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Both the AO increase tooltip, career points summary, and create/update unit sliders all correctly indicate the allowed infantry sizes in the mod? This is not really possible through modding. There is little to no ability to change the UI so among other issues there would be no way for the player to assign points in this way. The issue is not that they are useful, it's that they are so incredibly useful that they remove almost any challenge in the game. It is possible they may be enabled by default again in the future with greatly reduced sizes and other limitations so that they are actually restricted to a limited support role and dedicated units need to be used for any sustained fighting.

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate General Civil War There is nothing I can do about the save/load interface, definitely outside the capability of modding.

This is one of the changes where game balance concerns overrode trying to emulate history. Detach skirmishers are disabled by default because that feature allows a ton of exploits. Charge cancelling, unit teleporting, charge baiting, machine gunning, double stacking, etc. Even outside of these, being able to double your line length is extremely strong though that part is more effective in the base game than in the mod. To compensate for this extra unit slots were added to each battle so that you can bring approximately one dedicated skirmisher unit per division. These dedicated skirmishers can now also equip infantry weapons so they can fulfill many of the same roles as detached skirmishers did. It is possible to turn the skirmishers back on though. In Ultimate General Civil War\Ultimate General Civil War_Data\Mod\Rebalance\ConfigFile.csv you can change disableSkirmishers to false and they'll be available again.

1855s are not particularly good in the mod as they are the union equivalent to the rebored musket. They have a range advantage over muskets, but otherwise their damage is fairly bad, especially at max range. Do your units have accuracy perks? Those have a very large effect on units damage output. On legendary the AI unit probably has a much better efficiency stat than your units, and if it happens to have multiple accuracy perks(general could be adding accuracy as well) or it has better weapons it could start outperforming you even through cover. Given the kill rates you are describing it's unlikely that even flanking fire will do enough morale damage to overcome the morale it is getting back with every volley.

The two long term changes we'd like to make are making a balance pass on all the battles and trying out a damage system that is more morale focused and brings casualty numbers more into line with the historical rates. No eta on either of those though. Jonny is also worked on a unique version of the campaign where everything is scaled up to ridiculous levels to make things as difficult as possible. Other than that there are always lots of small balance issues to address. Skirmisher strength, artillery strength/availability of supply, etc. I also need to do a pass on the union campaign to fix all of the deployment and reinforcement number issues.

Yes, that would work.

An interesting limitation, hope you have fun with it.