pandakraut

Keep in mind the combined mod is not entirely up to date or balanced. The surrender changes + the increased melee effectiveness are probably to strong in situations like you described. Artillery surrendering was added in a later version of the Rebalance mod so it is not available in the combined mod. We're currently in the process of reworking weapon and morale damage. Having artillery convert to skirmishers when their guns are destroyed is not something that is possible to support for various technical reasons.

Great, glad you found a combination that feels better. For myself, I think it goes a bit to far, but we'll be using some similar ideas in 1.3 to try and push a bit more in that direction.

Just to check, are you buying up weapons before every major battle? The stocks reset completely after major battles and anything you didn't buy up ahead of time vanishes. For weapons with limited stocks if you start buying them all up early you'll eventually be able to field a few units worth depending on how large those units are. If you're not already taking advantage of it, using up your reputation to buy weapons before every battle can also help. The negative morale hits are pretty minor. There is no way to increase the amount of stock available in the armory in the base game. The Rebalance mod does add this feature to the logistics stat, but that mod is also generally focused on making the game more challenging. Some of the difficulty changes are toned down on BG, but it's hard to say if you'd enjoy it or not. The other two options are the UI & AI Customizations mod or the Surrender mod. The first just fixes a bug with the weapon recovery rate of captured units so you'd get a few more weapons. The 2nd has that fix along with making it much easier to get units to surrender which allows you to both get more recruits and collect more weapons. Neither of those directly address what you're looking for but figured I'd mention them as options.

Those are some impressive surrender numbers. You're playing with the Surrender + Rebalance version right?

Nice work! Feel free to post on how you got through it. Lots of players have had trouble with that battle.

There's a lot more going on than what I described, it's just very hard to determine what parts have what affects with the limited access we have to the game's systems. With enough experience many battles become fairly easy. At this point I consider 2:1 odds as a nearly assured win and 4:1 or higher can be won in the right circumstances. If I'm remembering right the the opening phase of Union Shiloh is something like 6 or 7 to 1 odds and that attack can be stopped in place if you've built up a strong enough army by then and have a little luck. That's a pretty extreme example though.

Regarding officers I make it a point to be able to buy up everyone in the barracks by the time of Shiloh since this enables the ability to generate new officers. If the barracks is empty you can create an infantry unit and a new officer with 0 xp will generate for that position. A unit on the field with low efficiency due to a major is still better than no unit at all. About 15 of my units at Shiloh have red efficiency, but they do well enough. While the stat is important, the lack of it doesn't cripple a unit like low morale or exhaustion would. Sorry, if you answered this in a previous post and I've forgotten, but are you using reputation to buy weapons and sometimes officers? Going negative morale is not that big of a penalty and can be well worth it. For some numbers to compare against here are my K/D rates for the battles leading up to Shiloh. You can definitely make it through with worse numbers, but with these the battle was fairly easy. I usually get most of my allied units killed to acquire their weapons. Phillipi: 7k losses, 14k kills Distress Call: 2.6k losses, 9.6k kills 1st Bull Run: 6k losses, 20.5k kills River Crossing: 900 losses, 11k kills Crossroads: 500 losses, 10k kills In terms of corps setup. I would recommend front loading your 1st corps. The way the deployments at Shiloh work you get more units on the field earlier if you have a 1st corps with the largest number of brigades. Anything left over goes into 2nd corps. I would normally recommend giving up the VPs in phase 2 early on to be able to go to the next phase. Especially if you don't have many or any units in the 2nd corps you need to rush to phase 3 so you can pull back and consolidate your lines.

There is a lot of code in the game for judging the strength of unit compositions in terms of when to charge, fallback, etc. There are also various AI defaults for how aggressive or passive to be. We've made some progress at improving it, but it's simple figuring out which variables affect what.

The base game was coded in unity. I'm not sure if the level0 - level 28 files actually correspond to the battles, those numbers don't line up with the number of battles in the game. Could be though, I don't know enough about unity to know where it stores that kind of thing. The mods hex changes are all in the resources.assets file currently. I tried changing the map size when it gets set in the unity code itself, but if that works I haven't found the right place or places to change it yet.

Understood, in that context the 3in is the better choice. Happy to hear the camp videos are proving useful.

Those numbers are fine for 2nd bull run. That's around what most players are bringing to the battle on legendary. Unless you are buying lots of cheaper rifles early on you just won't have the rifles to equip more. More men is also wildly unnecessary, you'd have trouble fitting 85 brigades onto the field in any meaningful way unless half of them were artillery units.

Tried it and failed unfortunately. If it can be modded I haven't figured out how yet.

Are you sure you have the right cannon here? The 3in ord goes to nearly 0 damage at maximum range making it terrible for long range work. The 10pdr parrot works very well in this role though as it gets better at maximum range. I am certainly biased against the 3in as I value base damage more than firing rate, but others have certainly made good use of it as a short to mid range weapon. 6pdrs, 24pdrs, 14pdrs, whitworths, 20pdrs, and siege tend to be the only cannons I really use as the Union. Though for Shiloh I'll field whatever I have available. I seem to keep guessing wrong on what could be improving performance for you Hopefully some of my rambling helps a bit.

For myself, on the higher difficulties I view taking advantage of the AI tendencies as normal. On legendary its probably necessary. But I understand if you prefer to not play that way. On MG at least I do think it's possible to make it through without needing to take advantage of that kind of thing to much. Especially if you made it through Shiloh you should be set. There are definitely some exploits that I don't like to use either, though disabling detached skirmishers covers most of those. Getting the AI to perform better is something we keep trying, but it has proven difficult. Past a point whatever it tends to do the player can notice and take advantage of since it's a relatively static system. If the AI were better the massive advantage in men and experience that the AI gets could be scaled back a bit. Something occurred to me, when you describe units taking fire for extended periods of time, this may just be an aspect of the game speed being slower in the mod. The mod game speed is slightly slower than half speed in the normal game. So in terms of real time it will take more than twice as long for a unit to break under the same volume of fire. I tend to spend a lot of time on 2x or 3x speed to speed things up. Not sure if this is the actual cause of what you're describing, but figured I'd mention it. Rifle damage in the mod overall is lower so units do tend to be able to stick around longer. This is one of the reasons I go very artillery heavy. On the topics of artillery, the napoleon and 3in are two of the worst cannon available in the mod currently. This isn't really intentional or historically accurate, but if you compare the damage percentage at range of those two cannon to other cannon available at the time you'll find that other options are just better. There are actually quite a few different valid paths for career points in the mod. I like to have some econ for cheaper officers and weapons(I setup multiple cavalry units and buy lots of good cannon and scoped rifles early which is not cheap). Training is nice for the bonus stats, and some points in recon and logistics for the extra weapon availability and the bonus spotting is very useful. Politics also offers very good rewards in general. Through Shiloh AO takes up most of the points if you are planning on fielding as many brigades as possible though.

Not much I can do about the phase resets unfortunately. I can turn them off so the units already on the battlefield stay where they are, but any new units would spawn directly on top of them which isn't any fun either.

The player units use the same values as the AI for everything but infantry. Infantry would have to be modified in the resources.assets file using a hex editor since the values change as you increase in army organization. Guide to the hex editing if you want to give it a try, though just limiting yourself to smaller units get the same effect with way less work https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26225-weapon-and-perk-modding-guide/

The army sizing is somewhat flexible, though there are minimum amounts set for each battle so that the campaign has somewhere to progress through. The more skilled you get at the game, the easier it becomes to completely wipe out enemy armies(even in the base game) so most campaigns would probably historically end at 1st Bull Run. The normal difficulty also tends to have the problem that it rapidly becomes possible to build such a large army that the AI can't compete at all and the later half of the campaign is just a formality. The higher difficulties allow the AI to scale more so it takes longer to reach the point where the campaign becomes easier. If you'd like more detail on how the AI army sizing works you can check out the scaling section of this post: https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/ Unfortunately having the campaign be truly dynamic is outside the scope of this game and isn't something we can mod into it. Would probably need something more like an active campaign map like you see in the total war games. Their next game Ultimate Admiral looks to be a step closer to that, so maybe one day we'll get a more dynamic campaign map in a sequel or similar style game. This is one of the areas where we've decided to sacrifice historical accuracy for gameplay benefits. The brigade size increase allows the AI continue to scale even when the player brings a very large army. In the base game you could max out what the AI could field due the lower caps on unit size and the inability of the game to increase the number of AI brigades. Allowing the player to use larger units as well brings it's own issues, but some players really enjoy that style, so we've enabled it and leave it to each person to decide how they like to build their army. I rarely play with anything over 2k myself and outside of one or two outlier battles never face anything larger than 3k. As the game currently plays, the other benefit to larger units is the AI just plays better with them. When the AI has units between 800 and 1700 it tends to be less aggressive and easily pushed off. As much as the gameplay style isn't something I really care for, doubling the number of units on the field for both sides and increasing their size into the 4-6k range does make it much harder to take advantage of the AI's shortcomings. There are also some configuration options that might help bring the mod to a point that you enjoy it more. In the Mod/Rebalance/AIConfigFile you can change remozeSizeCap to false so that the AI uses the same maximum sizes as the base game. There are also AIInfantryMaxSize, AIArtilleryMaxSize, etc values that can be changed to your own preferences instead of going back to the base game sizes entirely. Another possibility is trying the base surrender mod itself instead of the combined version. WVPM has it setup so that the larger AI units split up into smaller regiments. This has it's upsides and downsides, but I figured I'd mention it in case that sounds appealing. Hopefully this helps explain some of the settings we are using and you can find an option that you enjoy.

@Minas Moth Thanks for the feedback. I'm a bit surprised to hear that the AI isn't charging skirmishers, that tends to be one of it's favorite things to do in my experience. Are you investing in accuracy perks? Based on your described play style it seems like you really want to be focusing on them so your fire is effective. Here is what I do for Shiloh on MG for comparison: ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AWu7RP5E5c While it mostly doesn't prove necessary for me on MG, on Legendary I try and hold each line for a while to inflict casualties and then will fall back to a more defensible position before I get overwhelmed. The large amount of skirmishers I bring is largely to cover the infantry as it falls back and counter charge as necessary. On MG I barely use them at all.

The mod was originally designed for the legendary difficulty. Finding the right balance for players of different skill levels has proven difficult, so several of the changes that would increase the challenge aren't turned on or are limited on the normal difficulty. MG or Legendary should mostly solve your issue of the AI being to passive. In the next version we are trying out a new damage system that should hopefully result in more surrenders and less sky high kill rates. Progress has been slow at the moment so no release date for that at the moment though.

Cold Harbor: Going all the way through Cold Harbor with a decent result. Winning in the third phase is probably the better option though. Losses: 13146(2629 returned from medicine) Kills: 72781

What difficulty are you playing on? Given the numbers you have by Antietam it looks like you probably need to bump up the difficulty one or two ranks. Infantry weapon damage is generally much lower than what is available in the base game unless you are taking nothing but accuracy perks. Usually feedback is that they don't do enough damage.

The mod is up to date with the latest patch, 1.11. The earliest version I have played is 1.09 and the weapons have not changed since then.

It looks like there is a side bonus for melee, but it's not the same as ranged and the way it's written I can't get you specifics.

The weapon stats should not have been changed at all in this mod. Can you provide details on what is different? Edit: Do you mean that in 1.5 there were damage and accuracy stats and in 1.6 there is only a damage range? If that's the case I'm just combining those two stats to better show what the weapon actually does.

Glad you got it to work.