pandakraut

The general surrender algorithm for the game is setup so that the factors you mention increase the chance of a die roll succeeding when a surrender check is made. At least in the base game that chance never goes to 100%, not sure about the surrender mod as the probabilities go much higher there. Not sure what approach you used, but like most battles in the game Mule Shoe can be broken pretty easily. Something Compass recently played it in the base game with 5k losses for 50k kills.

A change this extensive would most likely come with a configuration option to disable it. For the AI, any men remaining in a shattered unit stay in it's army pool and the units will always be back in the next battle. For the player, I'm going to try and get shattered men to return to the recruit pool in some fashion along with officers and weapons. It'd be better if the unit itself would remain intact, but I don't think I can manage that. Maybe think of this more as the unit losing cohesion for the day and falling back rather than dissolving as a unit. This logic wouldn't come into play in that situation. Units start routing between 40-50 morale. Anything I add probably wouldn't even start taking effect until 25 or lower. I think the surrender mod has balance concerns. It is fairly easy to force most of the enemy army to surrender each battle. Variations on several of the changes it makes will be getting added in the next version though. The big changes being that wounded officers and condition now affect the probability and there is no longer a restriction on surrendering when friendly units are nearby.

Was thinking of something like that the other day as well. Something like when a unit hits 0 morale it has some percentage chance to surrender, if it doesn't surrender it shatters. Likely need to build in some kind of system to lower morale damage impact as morale approaches 0 as it's a bit to easy to achieve that state currently. Hoping to have time to look into testing that idea over the weekend. You can find the exact conditions for shattering the the game uses in my hidden mechanics thread.

Not without access to the original unity project. They can be replaced with a formula which I've been trying to limit for a variety of reasons. If swapping the curves doesn't work, as it sometimes won't for technical reasons, then the last resort is creating a new curve in excel.

It's on our list. The problem in both cases is the range degrade curves are terrible for these weapons. In the base game the curves were only acceptable because of the long range(compared to other smoothbores) of the Napoleon and the huge damage range compared to other cannon of the 3in. I'd actually argue that both cannon are bad in the base game as well. Outside of a few very large or early battles where you don't have enough there is almost no reason to bother using them in place of 24pdrs and 20pdrs. As the CSA you'll need to use something else as you won't have enough 20pdrs but the Tredegar and 10pdr parrot are going to perform better in most cases as they share the 3in's huge damage range but have more useful curves. We're probably going to end up swapping curves around to fix this. For example, swapping the 6in and napoleon curves and swapping the 10pdr parrot and 3in ordinance.

AI Supply wagons can retreat off the field when they are empty so theoretically this should be possible to achieve. But I've tried to enable this multiple different ways and nothing has worked. The closest I've been able to get is that I think the retreating units were able to cross the border, but their pathing algorithm just has them run along the edge instead of actually leaving. Hypothetically, if this could ever be enabled I can still see some serious abuse cases. Spawn camping the AI, pinning it in corners, and getting a rolling rout going where you can drive them wherever you like are all currently very easy to do. If you can just drive them off the board I think many battles would become very easy. Larger maps would mitigate this issue a little, but that isn't possible either at the moment. Edit: have a few new ideas to try, will see where they lead.

While very rare, there are a few maps that have enough elevation that they do block artillery fire. Overall the game is incredibly generous in what it lets you fire over though. I only played it a bit myself, but I never really figured out how artillery worked in UGG where artillery required more realistic lines of fire. Though I feel like that was more a UI feedback issue that persists into UGCW where in the few situations where artillery can't fire you get no indication that it's sitting idle or needs to move unless you have a direct fire order issued. Regarding dense forests, all of the damage penalties from terrain are currently not working in the game. So you'll do just as much damage in the open field as in dense forest or the middle of a river. The next version will be fixing these. I'm expecting that sitting in dense woods will still be very effective, but not quite as much as it currently is. Though that also just means the player will sit most of their artillery behind the dense woods and fire at units on the other side of them. At least they will be more exposed to counterbattery fire which I've added logic for the AI to actually try to do when artillery is visible even if there is a slightly closer target.

Addressing supply amounts and allied units in general is on the list of things to adjust. Shiloh is definitely one of those battles where both sides are starved for supplies. There is no cap on accuracy as far as I know, it's just a straight multiplier so the more you have the better. Firearms has a comparatively small effect on accuracy low and reload speed. So you can pick perks based on what you'd like to do rather than worrying about anything hidden. I tend to go with a balanced selection of perks to make my infantry more generically capable, but stacking one stat is incredibly effective(will be changed in the future). See my comments on perks vs firearms in terms of the reasons that 0-1* units have issues. For a more general answer, our opinion is that rifle fire is to strong in the base game and artillery to weak. However, in the mod rifle fire only really becomes effective once accuracy perks are added. Artillery by contrast does pretty well even without accuracy, but once you stack the accuracy it will win battles by itself as long as you have enough supply. My current opinion is that the low end of rifle damage needs to come up and the high end of artillery damage needs to come down a bit. We are currently experimenting with higher morale damage and lower actual damage across the board. Fun as it can be, if we can bring down the ridiculous casualty rates that experienced players can inflict(base game and mod) a bit I think that would be a positive change. While we want melee to be effective, it's current ability under optimal conditions to mow down men faster than point blank canister certainly has an odd feel to it. The big question in both cases is does the game still feel good to play if we take steps to reduce casualties. Just for an example, I'm not sure the game gets better if instead of full clearing maps every battle ends with the AI bottled up in the corner infinitely routing but dieing very slowly. Will have to see how it turns out. Yes, import pricing is the idea behind the current costs. The current pricing structure we are using does not always result in a direct relation of price and performance. Thanks for the feedback. Hope you continue to enjoy the mod

In UGCW only artillery ammunition types apply additional properties to the damage calculation. For non-artillery weapons any inherent differences in the effects of different calibers are included in the base damage values.

This matches my experience as well. Where the AI really falls apart is when you break the sequence of the battle and it doesn't find units where it is expecting them. Even if you follow the script, if you get to a point where your units are all hidden that's when you'll see the AI standing around or scouting for you with their artillery. Rather than bothering me I look at it is another aspect of player skill. Can you play the AI against itself so it's logic breaks and you can take advantage of it. The same tricks don't always work from battle to battle so there is enough variety to stay interesting. The basics is that once an attack animation starts the attack will hit. Base damage is set by the weapon * then everything else applies a multiplier to that base. Cover, size, range, firearms, efficiency, unit type, etc.

Great, glad you were able to get around the issue.

Hardin Pike: Exact same setup as Halls Ferry for a very similar result. Losses: 3072(614 returned from medicine) Kills: 36690

I've never encountered that bug so perhaps it was fixed since Col Kelly recorded.

It would be really nice to have a UI option to change the color of firing arcs of land units to something more visible. With the new graphics they are even harder to see on dark terrain than than they are in UGCW. Looking very promising, keep up the good work.

I've tried to reproduce this multiple times, but I'm fairly sure this is a display only bug. The numbers are correct when the post battle results are calculated.

I've seen this complaint multiple times but every time I've tried to reproduce it the cavalry is faster unless you're in a scenario where perks, terrain, condition are not in your favor. I'd call this working as designed out side of the larger issue that it's possible to stack speed bonuses to many times so that you can get pretty big disparities in how fast units move. However, if you'd like to reduce skirmisher speeds the unitModifiers.csv has a skirmishSpeedModifier that can be changed. Maybe try 1.45 or 1.4?

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with most of your criticisms of the current state of the mod, especially those around perks and 0* units. Many of these will hopefully be getting resolved in the future. Getting the difficulty right for all players has certainly been a challenge. We've got players who are struggling on BG and others who can mostly cruise through on Legendary so past a point we've just tried to provide configurable options to adjust the difficulty to player preference. The variance mode is definitely intended to generate situations that are not winnable if your RNG is bad enough. I went back and forth a lot on enabling it by default or not. I ended up enabling it because I think the positives in mixing up the battles a bit is worth the trade off of the occasional ridiculous situation. You can also tweak the probabilities as well if you don't want to disable it entirely. For battles other than Shiloh I would probably recommend increasing the duplicate chance a bit if things are to easy. The extra brigades seem to bring out the most positive improvements to AI performance compared to anything else we've tried. I wouldn't recommend going above 50% though. Some of the larger battles will crash if to many units end up on the field. My goal at CSA Shiloh is always to manipulate the battle in such a way that the landing can be taken almost unopposed. I tend to end up with fairly stretched out lines in an effort to keep the AI spread thin and unlikely to charge. Unlike in the base game I'm not sure you have the ability to actually surround and destroy the AI units and still take the landing in time. Maybe someone can pull it off though. In some ways Shiloh is the worst battle in the mod due to having to deal with huge AI brigades when you haven't had a chance to build your own. In other ways it's the best battle in the mod, because the player can't just rely on completely rolling over the enemy force. Because of this there is actually a chance of barely getting a win, getting stuck with a draw, etc. I'm not really sure what the solution to the full force destruction is. That is also possible in nearly every battle in the vanilla game as well, though you'll take pretty heavy casualties in a few of the CSA battles trying it. The route we are currently experimenting with is lower damage but higher morale impact. Early results are promising, but still needs a lot of work to see if it will actually improve things. We would probably make AI units rout off the field if we could, but that isn't something that I've figured out how to implement. Making units shatter or surrender easier sort of accomplishes the same thing, but each comes with it's own downsides. If you're interested, something you could try is reducing the battle timer changes. Perhaps endOfDayMultiplier set to 1.05 and timerRecommendedMultiplier and timerMandatoryMultiplier to 1.2. The defaults are set towards allowing players more time than they need to play the battles at the pace they want, but this also allows experienced players plenty of time to clear the map. The topic of the AI logic is a tricky one. It's one of the most complex systems in the game and we've only figured out how parts of it actually work. I usually deliberately influence the AI to bunch up as that works best with how I build my armies. But I've also heard Jonny complain that they spread out to much and he just punches straight through them with his setup. 1.3 currently has a few changes to cannon AI so that the AI should be a bit less incompetent with them in most cases. We could make the AI a bit more likely to charge all at once, but that leads back to the problem of if the AI just mass charges you every time newer players will get overwhelmed and frustrated while an experienced player will just change the type of traps they set up.

Economy has no effect on the numbers of weapons available in the store. You need points in logistics for that. Every point in logistics will increase the stock of weapons by 25% after a major battle. Base amount of weapons is now 50% less with 0 points in Logistics. Logistics stock modifier is only half as effective for artillery. The bonuses from economy reduce the buy price of weapons in the shop and increase the sell price of weapons in the player's armory.

Thanks for the feedback. Several of those criticisms are the same or similar to my own of the mod's current state. We've definitely sacrificed historical accuracy in a few places for more challenging game play. I think the weapon changes went the right direction, but minmaxing the perks definitely causes some problems since you can stack the same attribute multiple times. We're currently working on taking some of the power out of perks and attaching it to firearms and other stats so that there are less extreme differences in performance between 3* units with different perks. The perks should specialize the unit in a role, not be required to make them functional and then stack multiple times to make them ridiculously better than a unit without. I will say, that for my own play style I do like to have a mixture of perks. I usually take accuracy at rank one for acceptable performance shooting and then take melee and speed for rank two. This gives me a bit more of a buffer from the charging AI units as I find that double accuracy units are just to slow and get overrun to easily. I play with very small units and let my snipers and artillery do most of the killing so utility is more important to me than firepower for the infantry. While the numbers definitely need some work, I still think we're headed in the right direction compared to the base game where there is barely a choice to make. Hopefully we can get closer with the next version. I think balancing out the perks as above will reduce the issue with random perks causing difficulty swings. For some context, I like the variety that random perks provide as you don't know more or less exactly what you are facing every time. Jonny would prefer most units have optimized perk patterns to make the units as effective as possible so this is a topic we are continuing to look at. We're completely redoing the perks at the moment as well, so will have to see how that settles out first though. Past a certain point there is only so much we can do with the AI. It definitely seems to handle certain situations better with more men and extra brigades, but an experienced player tends to be able to run circles around them no matter what you do. We have a few small tweaks in the works around trying to get the AI to use it's artillery more effectively, but that is more patching over the exploit of the AI always targeting the closest unit. The larger part of the AI logic is more or less impenetrable to me unfortunately. Large chunks of it are moddable, but figuring out what to change to result in a positive outcome has been difficult. There are changes that we could make to make the game significantly more challenging, but in most cases that would boil down to the AI has more and stronger units, so it should just mass charge you off the field if it really wanted to win. From what I understand the game used to work this way back in beta and it pretty severely limited how you had to play.

In the mod Recon adds 50 spotting per point to your units in addition to the normal bonuses. So you can use them to make it easier to spot enemy skirmishers and artillery. The last campaign I went through with 4 points, but I've also seen players push it all the way up to 8-10 after getting the other stats to around 5 or so. With the mod changes to the career points I don't think an optimal setup has really been found yet. What you want really depends on how you play and how you build your army.

That's a bug from the base game that gets reported every now and again. Unfortunately once it happens your save file is basically broken. Going back to a prior save and replaying the last battle before the bug occurred is probably the only solution. I've also seen it suggested that the game needs to be reinstalled to fix this issue, but I don't know for sure if that's the case. If you find a way to resolve the issue, please let me know.

Correct, economy only reduces the cost of buying weapons and increases the price to sell them. It has no effect on the number of weapons available.

Halls Ferry: Taking advantage of the AI's static defense to win what can be a brutal battle with nearly no losses. Losses: 2607(521 returned from medicine) Kills: 38949

Yes, that's the most recent version. We're working on 1.3 but not eta at this time. The older videos are using version 1.5 of the UI mod which has the same tooltips as Rebalance mod v1.23. The newer tooltips are actually more detailed than the old ones the data is just displayed differently. Accuracy goes away because I multiplied it by the base damage to show the damage range the weapon has. The shell type ratings were really vague and subjective so I replaced them with the actual percentages at different ranges for each weapon. Happy to hear the videos are useful. Just let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks for the feedback. Glad you're enjoying the mod.