pandakraut

If you prefer the original game balance + some convenient fixes the UI mod is recommended. The rebalance mod tends to up the game difficulty, but if you prefer a slightly less arcady feel it's probably what you are looking for. The surrender mod was made by GeneralWvpm, he is just more active on the steam forums. If the low surrender rates bother you that is the place to go. Hope you find one that you enjoy

We are planning on changing the damage reduction by size curves in a future release. Though players have had success with both large and small units in the current version so it's not as limiting as it seems. We have no current plans to change scaling beyond how we already have. Here is a write-up of how it currently works https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/ We've already made significant changes to the career point system and it seems to have been successful in providing better choices than in the base game. Test numbers may get tweaked a bit, but otherwise try probably won't see more changes. Other changes are in progress but we don't have a release date at this time. If you have suggestions feel free to post them. Regarding brigade splitting, what you describe is the exact intent of that feature. Here is the description of it from the change log: varianceMode config option added in Mod/AIConfigFile. This mode adds additional randomness to the AI and allied units attributes, size, equipped weapon. This can result in units gaining or losing a star. AI and allied units also have a chance to split into two units. Split units start at half the size of the original unit though on higher difficulties they can can grow larger. Depending on chance this mode can end up adding considerable difficulty to battles. It is intended to try and add some variety to battles so that the same old strategies can become more difficult or impossible to execute. Anytime the corps deployment screen is viewed or a battle is restarted everything is randomized again. Size changes but not unit splitting will be shown in the number of men/guns so they are less reliable for scaling manipulation with this mode enabled.

Antietam: Setup prior to Antietam. I end up with three full corps with plenty of artillery. With enough officer swapping all but a few units start at one star. I use a forward defense to wipe out the first set of Union troops before reinforcements arrive. Then I setup a pocket and slowly envelop the second set of reinforcements. While there are some complications with removing the Union artillery, the pocket holds and the second group is wiped out as well. At Burnside's bridge things go poorly but the initial troops are still wiped out. Then I retreat back to a line along the sunken road and allow the remaining Union army to walk into a trap. Losses: 8473(1695 returned from medicine) Kills: 58371 Campaign stats through Antietam: Losses: 79507 Minus allied losses: 48476 Minus medicine: 42915 Kills: 351409 Kill ratio with all casualties: 4.42 Kill ratio with allies and medicine removed: 8.19

Here is an example on MG. Similar strategy can be used on legendary. Also, this is a map where you can draw off units from the VP and then just cap it and hit finish as soon as it's available if necessary.

Are you talking about the random chance that enemy brigades will split into two units? That feature can be disabled by changing varianceMode to false in Ultimate General Civil War_data/Mod/Rebalance/AIConfigFile.csv. If you're referring to some other bug can you provide some additional details? I'm not really sure what you mean by making the mod viable instead of fun?

A minor update to Port Republic from CivWar64: you can actually bring 11 units to that battle. This is the only instance I'm aware of where the reinforcements glitch gets you two units instead of one.

Chantilly: Brief camp phase discussing lvl 3 artillery and skirmisher perks. I push infantry up to the edge of the tree lines before the Union spawns. I also bring 2 cavalry units specifically to drive back a single unit to open up the Union right for envelopment. I push the envelopment a bit faster than I would in most battles because I want to try and get at the over sized artillery units as soon as possible. Unfortunately one of the artillery units retreats to the worst possible place and inflicts almost a third of the casualties I take in the entire battle before I can get rid of it. Losses: 2609(522 returned from medicine) Kills: 17695 Weapons Factory: Brief camp phase on career points, reputation buys, and setups for the battle artillery. I tried going artillery heavy in this battle and setting up across the river but got frustrated with the random behavior of the enemy cavalry unit. Instead I brought my own cavalry and managed to pin their unit in the corner while picking off most of their artillery with my cavalry. Managed to get lucky with the encirclement and just about cleared the map despite the short timer. Losses: 1177(236 returned from medicine) Kills: 10792

I don't think I used it much as the Union, but for the CSA substituting units can be very useful. Especially for battles like Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and Chancellorsville where you are only allowed 2 full corps. You can setup units in a spare corps to fight in specific parts of each battle. At 2nd Bull Run if you are having trouble you can also swap your entire defending force for the reinforcements so that fresh troops start on the ridge. Probably useful at Cold Harbor and Washington as well.

Issue ended up being extracting into Ultimate General Civil War instead of Ultimate General Civil War_Data. If anyone else is encountering issues with installation feel free to message me.

2nd Bull Run: Camp video with a discussion of upcoming reputation rewards, melee cavalry weapons, use of muskets in the mid campaign, and yet more officer swapping. Realized post battle that each reinforcing corps will only deploy 20 units. So I should have moved 4 units from my 2nd corps into my other reinforcing corps so they all arrive in battle. Capture the town on day 1 to be in a better position to inflict casualties. Stay defensive for most of day 2 while picking off artillery and supply wagons. Encircle and wipe out once all reinforcements arrive. Higher casualties than I would have liked. The AI spread out a little more so I couldn't spot some artillery and the infantry were in better shape at the end. This resulted in my enveloping forces taking to much damage. Overall an acceptable amount of casualties and a complete wipe. Losses: 7485(1198 returned from medicine) Kills: 53458

Manassas Depot: Had to switch up my objectives mid battle but otherwise a fairly standard approach. Sit in the woods and bait charges until you can take the forts. Apologies for the audio, still a bit under the weather and not always quite fast enough with the mute button. Losses: 4022(0 of own men) Kills: 10074

Ok, just wanted to make sure that you were aware that those sizes aren't optimal damage wise. 10-15k differences between campaigns is within the range of RNG so that is likely the case. The 39-43k numbers are just part of the scaling algorithm and do not limit the actual battle sizes one way or the other. See this post for more details https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/ Aiming for a new patch around January/February. Not a lot of time to work on it over the holidays.

Cavalry isn't going to be all that useful at Shiloh. Just poor terrain and if they attack any oversized unit that isn't already routing they are going to get mauled. Are you aware that units suffer damage reductions past a certain size? We haven't yet overriden that in this mod so a 20 cannon unit is going to be doing about as much damage as an 8 cannon unit. So you are far better off bringing 2 units of 10 than the single large unit. If you go really big you will start doing increased damage again around 40-45 cannon. Like I mentioned, video just shows the basic example. Executing in the mod will be different since the AI units will be so much larger. Either of the above is possible. You should be wiping out all enemy troops in every battle prior to Shiloh. It also sounds like you are building larger units which could be driving up scaling a bit. I know other players have succeeded with this approach, but I think it is pretty melee focused? I've never really played that way so I can't offer much advice there. I use 1k units because it allows me to bring as many units as possible giving myself the maximum amount of flexibility. It also keeps scaling down a bit, but if I recall correctly with the allied troops being so large I couldn't make scaling move at all anyways. Here is a write up on what affects scaling: https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/

This mod is not compatible with the Rebalance mod. I don't have any plans to add that feature to this mod as it is basically just an unofficial patch + some UI conveniences. The mod should mostly have the same balance as the base game, so adding new features doesn't really fit in.

I ran your save multiple times and was not able to recreate the crash. Given how consistent the crashes seem to be for you I would probably recommend a full reinstall of the game and the mod. You also mentioned some lag on larger battles, it's possible that the larger size and increased units possible in the mod are pushing your system beyond what it is capable of. Given that you are also able to reload saves and then bypass the crashes this being the root cause would at least make sense, though I also have no way to prove that this is the case.

While easier for the CSA, Shiloh is one of the harder battles for both sides in the mod. This is primarily due to the default unit sizes being maxed in the base game so with the scaling cap increased you're facing around 15k more men. The standard approach of splitting the middle and grabbing the landing while it's undefended, then holding for the day 1 victory should still work. Penetrating the line in the first phase is more difficult since if a few of those 4k units stack up you will have a very hard time dislodging them. If I recall correctly, my solution was to advance my forces to the left side of the map. This allowed me to setup in the treeline with the creek in front of me and get several units to try and charge me. This drew off the 'mobile' union units and left the two units in fortifications on the right side of the map exposed. From there I was able to break them and start pushing up along the map edge. If you check my youtube series I recently played Shiloh with the base game numbers. It obviously won't be quite the same as the AI is far more aggressive in the mod, but it should help show the basic idea if my description isn't clear.

The tooltips are correct, these work the same as in the base game. Firearms perk reduces your damage but speeds up your reload. Marksmen increases damage but reduces your reload speed.

Hard to say without doing a lot of estimates. One or two rep buys isn't going to swing anything to hard so I'd just go with whatever appears to be what you will need.

Playing through the CSA campaign again has been a good reminder of how much stricter the battles are than the Union's. As the Union the majority of battles you are given at least semi favorable terrain and plenty of time to completely wipe out the enemy army. But as the CSA you frequently have to just go for the objective and getting as many kills as you can on the way. Arguably this means the CSA campaign is just better designed as it actually forces choices on you. Though it'd certainly be interesting to see some stats on which campaign the people complaining about the timers in the game primarily played. Personally I like to buy rifles as long as they are available as that is the limiting factor for the size of my army. I don't recall exactly when but after a few more battles men and cash are the only rep buy options anyways. You have had a few battles with higher casualties, but it seems like you are still mostly limited by weapons not men. You may want to review your casualties in some of the battles coming up. If there are enough that you are worried about keeping casualties down and you think you have enough weapons then go for the men. The other upside of buying some of the later rifles is how much you can sell them for. Anytime you can pick up fayetvilles you can sell them off for more decent rifles if you need to.

In the future we are looking to out more of the current power into unit stats. Perks will still allow specialization, but experienced units will be generically better at all roles.

Thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoyed it overall even if some of the changes didn't appeal. I think this may be due to your perk selection or play style. Fire only setups can be extremely effective. I effectively never use melee with my infantry outside of some of the early battles. Do you mean division commanders? Corps commanders can't even be wounded as far as I know. I'm not sure if you had very bad luck with the wound/death rolls or if this was play style related as I haven't experienced high rates of either. If you play as melee focused as it sounds that could do it, melee has always had higher casualty rates and with the additional damage melee does in the mod that could explain a bit. A setup of 20pdrs, whitworths, and siege guns can win battles by themselves as long as you can spot targets. Though if you're just constantly pressing and using them for canister then might as well stick with what you selected. With the right perks experienced units deal far more damage than they did in the base game. I'd need to double check the accuracy values, but the average damage of those guns when the damage calculation is applied is definitely better than the earlier cannon. In terms of understanding which cannon are good at what you really want to check out the graphs in this post https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/. The curves shrink to fit the modded ranges, but those explain which cannon are good at what ranges far better than any text representation that I can add to the tooltips.

Thanks, will take a look when I get a chance but it will be a bit as I'm travelling until next week.

C:\Users\[Insert User Name]\AppData\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate General Civil War\Save is where the files live. The filenames aren't readable so just make sure the one you want to send is the last save you made and sort the folder by date. Each file represents a save.

With the damage fixes in the mod I think this is going to be even more critical. I'm really starting to appreciate how good the 10p parrot is when you keep it at the right range. I am already dreading Cold Harbor though. A unit's target routing definitely causes the unit to drop targeting most of the time. Very annoying for keeping your counter battery units focused. As best I can tell the rout notification itself is not tied to anything other than a unit triggers the retreat action. The surrender probability goes up based on the units hpratio, current morale, ratio of allied hp and enemy hp in the area, and if the units officer is wounded or dead. There are also some factors that I'm guessing are based on gaps in the line or something like that, I'm not sure. There's almost certainly more to this, but that's what I've managed to figure out so far. Surrender requests occur whenever you pass a damage threshold in a given frame. So the more damage you can hit a unit with at once the more frequently they get asked to surrender. These requests all require that no allied units that aren't also routing are nearby. So what seems to work well is isolating a unit, surrounding it with as many units as possible and then hitting it in melee. Ranged surrenders should also occur in this scenario but it seems much much rarer. I think your plan for stopping breakthroughs should work well as long as there is sufficient space opposite your units for the AI units to rush that direction. In terms of dealing with routing blobs I think the key thing is to make sure to hit them with completely overwhelming force if you do go in. Preferably after all units have been weakened considerably. Focusing your fire on units on the edges also seems to make sense. Maybe target the artillery on the middle units(if that's even distinguishable). Breaking the AI pathing in pockets seems to rely on the unit having enough space to ping pong back and forth. Once you compress them so much the AI decides it can't go back the other direction and just stays determined to go one way no matter how many units are in that direction. Good to see that you're back and looking forward to more of your campaign!

Cedar Mountain: Due to the strength of the 24 gun Union artillery units I had to find a different approach to this battle. I found a way to kill off 2 of the 3 artillery units and then go with a delayed surround like you normally would from the start. I don't have enough infantry units to really pull it off but still come out in good shape with an acceptable number of kills. Losses: 2452(392 returned from medicine) Kills: 13626