pandakraut

That's quite an increase, but mechanically possible with how the variance and splitting works. I'll have to try and get one of those increases on Legendary so Jonny can have a challenge for a change

It's more about bringing it back in line with the campaign in general. Brandy Station, Supply Raid, Union Salem Church all just don't play well with the mod changes. Some of them you can cheese some of them you can't, but they all need to be adjusted eventually. Video added to previous post.

Here is the result of my playing up through Shiloh on MG. Video below. First half or so will hopefully be useful in terms of charge management. The AI wasn't terribly aggressive so pulling back to the hornets nest was much easier than on legendary. The battle was basically over by the time the landing opened and I got real lazy, so don't put to much stock in the second half. You can watch me suicide half a cav unit and chase routing units all over the map if you like though. My cavalry play in general was not great. Edit: I didn't take the time, but for maximum benefit leave something alive and go to day 2 so you can kill forest as well. On legendary I would have started with 2 more skirmishers in phase 1, but the extra cannon worked so well while I was working out deployment slots that I didn't change it. If you only care about maxing the units you get in phase 1 you can choose to only go up to 5 AO. But 6 gives you an extra unit in phase 2. I played distress call with 8 units and Bull Run with 10. Starting with 2 logistics/2 medicine would have allowed me to field a unit of whitworths, 20pdrs, and siege units but I'm not sure if it's worth what you lose in econ and training. The biggest benefit to having those cannon is that you would have enough counter battery units to easily clear out the mass of CSA artillery in the later phases. Would have saved me several hundred casualties as I ended up having to shoot them out of the woods. Still, only 4k casualties from my own units and a good chunk of them are on the skirmishers with 1842s which will be getting disbanded anyways. The AI has muskets or terrible rifles all the way through Shiloh which makes it really easy to beat them with firepower as long as you avoid getting charged. This does mean that melee usually ends badly for me and it felt much harder to force surrenders. Oddly legendary is easier in terms of AI equipment since better rifles have lower melee values. It's much harder in terms of size, rewards, and far more 3 star units. @BCH Some of your earlier screenshots showed the AI with over 70k troops. That's more like what I normally see on legendary. Are your kill ratios around the same as me and @lightningg? Or are you just getting incredibly unlucky with the variance stuff?

Probably a vanilla issue. Any chance you have a screenshot? If not don't worry about it, I don't know how to fix that kind of thing anyways.

No, most of the units are near or at the maximum vanilla sizes and the scaling cap was removed so they can go up to the same limits as the player has with max AO.

How much of an army do you feel you need to make it through Shiloh with? For myself if I get past Shiloh with even 5k remaining the rewards of that battle are more than enough to rebuild and beat the rest of the campaign. On legendary I took 50% losses and had about 7k men remaining and had no issues afterwords. Since I don't build big units, Shiloh is the last time I see giant AI brigades and the rest of the campaign is relatively easy. This in itself is a campaign progression issue since the difficulty peaks so early, but that's a larger issue to address.

I'm not entirely sure what the root cause is of how much trouble you are having with it. When I've tried on my old MG saves I can largely win the first two phases in place. They are fairly outdated though so I'll try and get a run through on MG in over the next few days.

Short answer, yes. Non deployed units always affect scaling. This matters more on side battles because the AI only considers the units it deploys for that specific battle. The details of how all that occurs gets complicated.

Now that the AI can actually use most of the weapons in the game this kind of thing will happen. While the AI's weapons will not scale based on yours, their skirmisher unit sizes will. Having 3 star skirmishers to help find and kill theirs seems very useful late game, but keeping those units fairly small might be preferable in many circumstances. One the upside, if you can spot and kill those units lots of good weapons to recover. We probably will have to go back through and rework the modifiers that determine which weapons the AI chooses. Some of the choices seem very odd currently. Though not constantly facing sharps 55's even late in the campaign is an improvement.

I never spend the money on the officers for a 2nd corps until Shiloh.

I'm not certain, but I thought you could start with 1 point in AO as the Union and still hit the brigade caps for every battle if you keep spending points in it? At least on the harder difficulties the only reason to go up to 24 units at Shiloh is to maximize the number of units that get deployed in the first phase. You are very unlikely to be able to fill out the 2nd corps. In some ways I like that the CSA and Union points progressions are different. The union needs points in AO and training early and has to try and make do with what it can elsewhere. The CSA is much less limited in where to put its points but is very limited in equipment. It also runs into issues later on in the campaign where it rarely gets to bring more than 2 corps to most battles. Careful with keeping to many extra brigades around. Scaling will punish you on higher difficulties for that if you go to far with that. I do think the 5th corps should come back, will discuss with Jonny.

Rifle damage starts out at around half what it is in the base game. With perks and experienced units you can get back to around base game levels. Melee is intended to be more viable and effective early on, but if you invest in accuracy you can absolutely make it through the early game with a focus on fire. Recovering condition is always good, there are severe penalties for low condition and morale in the mod. Artillery can be very strong currently, you will need points in logistics to get access to larger numbers of them. It will take longer to get access to the best cannon either way. Lt Colonels can lead divisions now in the mod. Better officers are preferable, but early on they are perfectly serviceable. Efficiency has an affect on most stats. Damage, reload, melee, etc. It is important but can be ignored at times though this is really a feel thing. I can't give you firm set of rules for when, but using a 3k rookie unit for melee is definitely one where a major is fine. Probably wouldn't recommend doing much shooting with them though unless it's at point blank range or you're just trying to level up their firearms at the end of a battle.

Adding a capture condition to the destroy unit goal turned out be very easy. Will probably patch sometime this weekend, will have to see if anything else can go in along with it.

I'll see if I can turn off surrender for just those two units. This is probably an issue on nansemond river as well as I think that is the only other battle that uses the 'destroy x unit' victory condition. Or maybe I can figure out how to turn off that victory condition. It's fairly pointless as it's basically always completed when you capture the fort.

That is an interesting idea. I would have to see if there is any possibility of adding a separate pool for veterans. The big inhibitor is likely to be displaying that information in the UI without some horrible workaround. The issue I see with just giving the units is that they could always be used as is, potentially giving the player better units than they had, and that disbanding can get very expensive if you have a lot of extra recruits. Definitely some potential there though. If nothing else it would likely be possible to have the player receive different amounts of recruits with better or worse stats. Could go extreme and clear out the unused recruit pool between major battles or something and have the reinforcements be randomized like the AI does. Unsure how that would work out, but worth thinking about.

Increasing veteran cost is very easy. Reducing the recruit/gold rewards is fairly easy or easy and time consuming depending on the method. Giving additional reward units like the iron brigade/Forrest is speculated to be possible though it hasn't been tried. I don't think we're likely to move in a direction that reduces customization outside of expense. Reworking reputation rewards and potentially adding additional unit rewards is on the list, though not very close to the top.

First try likely not, especially on the higher difficulties in the mod restarts will be common. I'm still more likely to mess up and need to restart the intro missions than most of the rest of the content in the game. Especially if varianceMode is on you can get screwed if the AI moves the extra brigades to your crossing point. You can push through eventually but the reinforcements will show up and you're usually to beaten down to make it through phase 2. You really should have near infinite time to take the city though. Once the timer starts you should have nearly 6 hours. The end of day timer cutoff shouldn't be preventing you from using all of it anymore. I don't think waiting out all of the reinforcements is the best option as you'll probably run out of ammo, but it might be possible. If you can kill them all and capture a few the weapon haul would be impressive even if you take additional casualties. Some of the officer costs are reduced on BG and Col. Good officers are much harder to build up than in the base game. Career point bonuses have been changed from the base game and will significantly lower costs though. The modded campaign has been completed by multiple players on Legendary, so it's definitely possible.

More or less, though little round top has the VP flag. That's my preferred option as well. Bypass the Peach Orchard entirely, walk around the base of Big round top, and take the VP from behind. Then just hold them from the waves of reinforcements. Just don't forget about the division that spawns directly in your rear.

I wonder if Chickamauga day 2 also works this way in determining what shows up when? Though I guess the corps are usually maxed out by then anyways. If the brigade deployment numbers are not percentage based in that battle then you could save money/recruits by not outfitting the brigades that only show up on day 3. Or shift your damaged day 1 brigades into those slots.

The intro missions are currently the only battles where the troop sizes have been edited. Though there are several other battles where removing the AI's scaling has significantly increased their troops. Base game Phillipi on MG still has you outnumbered about 2:1, the numbers are just higher in the mod. To give some context, this mod was originally intended to make Legendary more difficult. In some ways the new tools given to the player make it easier, but in many others it will be more difficult. The weapon damage, perk and condition changes also make it play rather differently than the base game. There is definitely a bit of a learning curve to get used to what will work and what won't even for experienced players of the base game. Our default recommendation is to start on the difficulty below what you would normally play in the base game. Units are severely penalized for being exhausted in the mod. If your units are exhausted when the second phase of Phillipi starts it means you need to play the first phase a bit differently. Timers have been extended so you have plenty of time to let your units rest up before assaulting the bridges. It's often possible to end up taking the VP with little to no melee in the town which will save a lot of condition. There are also a few settings you can disable that may make the mod more enjoyable for you. In the Ultimate General Civil War_data/Mod/Rebalance folder there is a ConfigFile.csv and an AIConfigFile.csv. In the AIConfigFile you can change removeSizeCap to false to restore the base games size limits. The unit sizes in the intro missions will not be affected by this however. You probably also want to set varianceMode to false. That setting can be a lot of fun, but can also result in being outnumbered more heavily than normal if you get unlucky. Also, in the ConfigFile you can change disableSkirmishers to false to enable detached skirmishers again. Thanks for the feedback and hope you end up finding the mod enjoyable. If not, definitely check out the other mods linked in the forum. They both have a much closer to base game experience.

Yes, if flip which corps is deployed where it would be reversed. In my example I corps refers to the corps in the left deployment slot. II corps the right deployment slot.

Did they bring more total brigades in each corps than you did? If Gettysburg is configured similarly to the Union Shiloh deployments and you had fewer brigades in your corps that would explain the difference. At Union Shiloh the first deployment phase doesn't use a set number of brigades. Instead it takes half of I corps and then you get reinforced by 25% of II corps. This means that bringing more total brigades in I corps gets you extra units in the first phase. For example, if you have 20 units in I corps you will start with 10 units in phase one. If you only bring 16, you start with 8. I didn't do very much testing around this so I don't know what happens if you don't bring a 2nd corps or if any other battles are setup this way.

This has been on the list for quite a while. Will see about getting it into 1.23. Along with some small size reductions. This part is still a ways off(1.3), but we are looking to transfer a bit more power out of perks and into unit stats. More experienced units will still have a large edge, but at least through some battlefield performance a unit will improve more noticeably and getting stuck just below the next cutoff point won't be as significant. The problem with going a more historical path in terms of rookie units sometimes performing very well or becoming veterans very quickly is that the game mechanics break down. Since the player can always just generate veterans as long as they have money units just don't get worn down the way they did historically. Have some ideas for 1.3, might be able to do more if we increase veteran costs. Will have to experiment.

I'm not really sure how to describe things better through text. Might have to see if one of us can get a play through recorded. You really have to avoid melee in almost all cases at Shiloh. There is just no way to get big enough and experienced enough units to matter, especially on MG and higher. Even Jonny mostly avoids it and his answer to every problem is charging it But seriously, a lot of our time in that battle is spent getting big units to charge after skirmishers, or exposing their flanks to canister, falling back to cancel charges, and such. You are just outnumbered so much early on you have to abuse the AI on the higher difficulties currently. For an example of what is possible, you can cut the AI numbers in half in the first phase. The 2nd phase the best I've done is maybe a quarter, but even that makes the later phases much easier. On legendary it still takes me at least half a dozen restarts to get that first phase to play out well though and one well played charge by the AI can end the battle at pretty much any point. Thanks for sticking with it as long as you did and all the feedback you have provided. Enjoy your break, hopefully I can lure you back with the next release. Individual officer's should be a bit more unique soon...

If you decide to give it another try you may want to try turning off the varianceMode, that will be an extra layer of difficulty on top of an already tough battle. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about the phases at this point. The sizes for Shiloh should probably come down a bit. I'm sure the battle is still winnable on MG but the initial bar for clearing it is probably higher than it should be. There is a new feature that I'm pretty excited about that I'm trying to get working. If it goes well I can get that in and we can look at Union Shiloh a bit as well.