pandakraut

We are testing out some higher morale damage changes as well as systems to increase morale while flanked by nearby friendly units and reduce it when nearby friendly units are fleeing. Will be a while before anything is ready though. Potentially also looking at higher experience gain with a much higher cost of veterans.

This config is really more for ease of testing. It does control the numbers of units that can deploy in each battle but it's a bit of a mess behind the scenes for various technical reasons. A lot of smaller deployment numbers are hard coded so not all battles will show changes. killsPerEffectivity = number of kills to gain 1 point of the Effectiveness stat. The others use the same format. Reducing the numbers will result in units leveling faster. Officers level based on stats gained by their units so this will affect them as a by product.

Base game value is 5. I've never tried decimals, unsure if they would work. There is not, this is stored in the assets file. Midway through having mostly colonels is about right for the mod's intended balance. This will vary a bit depending on difficulty(more men to kill to gain xp) and player ability to kill everything available. The closest you can get is changing the xp gain which will have the side effect of increasing officer xp gain. unitModifiers.csv modded values: killsPerEffectivity,350 killsPerMelee,125 movePerStamina,1700 shootPerFirearms,700 timePerMorale,4000 base game values: killsPerEffectivity, 150 killsPerMelee, 25 movePerStamina, 1000 shootPerFirearms, 5 timePerMorale, 1800

These should help. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1398810316 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1396453437

Probably, depending on what the last version that you played was. We reduced the base game speed a while back so the default speed is a little less than half as fast as the base game. A lot of the speed perks got reduced as well. Making frequent use of the fast forward and double fast forward buttons helps until you get more used to it. The gamespeed can also be changed in the configuration files Mod/Rebalance/ConfigFile if you try it out and don't care for it.

I think holding the fort can still work sometimes, but it feels far less consistent and I usually make it to camp in worse shape even if it does work. Going back to the base version of this battle after getting used to the larger unit sizes available in the Rebalance mod was really rough. Being outnumbered 2:1 is much easier to deal with when your units don't start with 600 men.

I still think it might be possible to corral the entire eastern reinforcements into a corner as well. I think more infantry would be needed though, the timing is just to tight to get up to the top edge and then back down to the middle. Definitely way more fun than just waiting out the timer though.

Ambush Convoy: Tips on shifting officers around to maximize their benefits, minor stat optimizations with recruits, and explanation of officer experience gain. Hopefully shown at a more reasonable speed. Losses: 1138(991 of own units) Kills: 7195 Went very aggressive to try and take advantage of the passive AI. Only a partial success, killed all of the northern reinforcements but was unable to wrap up the eastern reinforcements and most of them escaped. Brief discussion of AI routing logic though I need to cover this in more detail at a later point. Stay Alert: Short camp discussion of bonus reinforcement feature and some more officer swapping. Battle is a bit of a mess, but still goes fairly well. Start with a skirmisher screen to block out the enemy cavalry and trap it in the corner, which promptly falls apart when the ghost cavalry bug strikes multiple times. Losses: 2490 Kills: 9252

The closest I think I could get would involve copying the corps commander and renaming him. Same with the supply wagons. Would have to think about possible side effects and benefits to doing anything like that though. Adding new elements into the UI is beyond me at the moment. I might be able to change the message text to indicate it was a division commander. Likely issue is how many characters are displayable, will look into it. Division commanders gain xp based on a percentage of all of the units they command. So if you put them in charge of several units likely to do very well you can speed it up a bit. Honestly in the mod I largely ignore them though, it's worth more to have the better officers doing other things until fairly late in the campaign. I have a long term project to try and make all officers a little more interesting, but my last attempt failed rather spectacularly so it's on hold at the moment. Will see if I ever get it working.

The surrender mod changes definitely greatly reduces the occurrence of units routing through your lines. Regarding division commanders, do you mean you would like them to show up as a controllable unit like the corps commander? If you meant something else can you post a screenshot showing what you are talking about?

Unfortunately this is not possible other than disbanding and recreating the unit. In terms of routing, the games logic is basically run away from the largest concentration of enemy troops. This calculation sometimes determines that behind your lines is the 'safest' area as there is no concept of retreating towards supply lines, headquarters, etc. This does mean that you can largely prevent the issue with troop positioning. If you double up your lines the AI will nearly always try and go a different direction. This can be done with detached skirmishers, artillery, reserves, etc. This is most important when engaging in melee. Once you get used to it and play around it routing through your own lines is very rare.

We do have access to the older versions, but everything between 1.2 and 1.23a has several bugs that can prevent battles from completing. I can send you a link if you want, but if you hit those bugs the only solution is to move to 1.23a. The current version is what I would call a stable release, we're still intending to make significant changes in the future though.

Not sure what your specific setup is, but I can access the speed settings when I watch from the embedded forum link. You can use multipliers of .25, .5, .75, 1, 1.25, 1.5, 2. Very useful for getting through longer videos if not much is happening or trying to figure out what the heck happened in a split second. I'll be putting together another camp video for Ambush Convoy soon and will try to space things out a bit more.

Yeah, the combination mod appears to be 1.2 not 1.21 so the officer changes are missing. The upside here is that 1.2 is considerably more stable than 1.21. Sorry for the confusion. That was the last time I tried to update 3 different mods at once. Not doing that again, to easy to get things mixed up. If you don't want to use the surrender stuff, then I would just go to 1.23a.

It's possible will have to check the dll in the download package.

This is starting to sound like some part of your install isn't correct. I'll verify that the 1.21 officer replacement works in the base install when I have a chance after work.

@TechnoSarge you may also want to consider making use of the youtube slowdown and speed up functions if you aren't already. If you click on the gear in the bottom right of the video you can reduce or increase the speed of the video. Very useful if you're trying to track down some small details or burn through a section where not much is happening.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try and slow down a bit. I usually do a prep run through the camp changes prior to recording so I'm not wasting time, but I guess this does result in going through a bit quicker. I'll also try and put in a view of the barracks and armory so that the overall state is easier to see.

This only works to a certain point. If a low enough rank officer is killed or wounded they will not be replaced as there are no officers in the unit to step up. I'd just turn off the setting and restore the size cap and get through the battle. Can try removing the size cap again afterwords and see how it goes.

I think you would be getting pretty similar results in 1.23a, there haven't been any scaling changes recently. In the base game this is much less of an issue because AI infantry maxes out at 2950. But in the mod this cap is raised to 6k and the way melee works these units can be very difficult to deal with. I am a bit surprised that you are hitting units that large with your own infantry units being at 2k though since if I recall you are playing on BG difficulty and scaling doesn't tend to be as much of an issue there. On your campaign map screen, can you share what the intelligence report shows the enemy for size as? One of the features of the surrender portion of the mod is that captured units aren't removed from the AI's force pool. This is to balance out how much easier it is to force surrenders in that version. It's possible that if you've been capturing a lot of men that the AI Size is snowballing a lot and that is partially why you are hitting 6k units. The combined version of the mod is unfortunately also the least tested, so balance issues like that would not be unexpected. There is an option to turn off the captured units being returned to the AI if that turns out to be the problem.

I forgot to mention it in the video, but I strongly considered taking the logistics/medicine trait but it just doesn't really fit in with the recon points. I end up with 3 logistics which is overkill or start with 1 recon and have to spend the first point on it. Just couldn't figure out a way to fit it in. Getting sniper and artillery units online as soon as possible is critical for my play style. I skip straight to whitworths and can get a unit setup for Ambush Convoy and usually have that unit at 2 stars around Shiloh. Hunters are just not worth the unit slot I've found so I skip them. Going to see if I can replicate your success at Ambush Convoy, though I'm a little short on infantry so will see how it goes.

3 corps is more than you need at that stage of the campaign so that is likely driving up numbers a bit. Lots of other factors affect scaling as well, but one solution is changing removeSizeCap to false in the AIConfigFile.csv. That will restore the base game size limits for the AI.

1st Bull Run: Again fairly straightforward with the AI being surprisingly passive. Hold the bridge, retreat to Henry Hill a bit early, hold the river line, and then make a mess of cleanup and run around for 10 minutes. Losses: 6950(1214 of own units) Kills: 22248

Newport News: Camp video showing how to disband units without losing their stats, discussion around when to use lower ranking officers and initial perk choices. Battle was pretty straightforward. I start with 2 infantry and a cavalry unit to take out the Union artillery as soon as possible. Losses: 2024(385 of own units) Kills: 6058

Watching LAVA's campaign gave me the urge to show my own approach, so I've started recording a campaign. I will be using the UI and AI Customizations mod since playing without the usability improvements is just frustrating. While there are some minor balance changes it's still mostly a vanilla play through. The main balance impacts are from several bug fixes. Surrendering units will return the correct amount of weapons, 3* artillery will deal a bit more damage, cavalry with charge perks will deal more charge damage, and there is no longer a damage reduction for units over certain sizes though diminishing returns still apply. While this is a minimal campaign my goal is to avoid having to use small units to reduce scaling. With small enough unit sizes, 1k for a large part of the campaign, there is no need to take advantage of scaling looking at average unit size in side battles. Or at least this is mostly true for the Union campaign, this is my first attempt applying that idea to the CSA so we'll see how it goes. I will also be using the campaign to discuss a lot of the behind the scenes mechanics that I've come across while working on mods. If there is a particular topic anyone would like me to cover or look into just let me know. Potomac Fort: What started as a normal battle turned into a scenario I've never encountered in dozens of attempts. All of the Union Infantry completely abandoned the fort. My response to this could have been better and it disrupted my planning for the second phase but things turned out OK in the end. The recording also tried its best to get corrupted, so there is a bit of stuttering and poorly done video editing to piece it back together. Losses: 2770(800 of own units) Kills: 5826