pandakraut

Linked summary in main post. So one of the pieces of advice I remember hearing early on was that as the union, it is better to buy Lorenz's than Springfield 1855s. But that once you could buy Harpers Ferries it was worth upgrading. The reason for this is that the stat increase between the two is small enough that the increased price is not worth it. From looking at your data, it looks like the biggest differences between the two are the higher melee of the Lorenz and the faster fire rate of the Springfield. The HF is only a minor upgrade over the 1855. So with the new data it seems like if you are melee focused the only reason to move on from Lorenzs is when you run out of stock. But otherwise there is little difference in deciding to upgrade to the 1855 or the HF. The cost and increase in fire performance is about the same. Thoughts?

Ahh good. Not another bug at least

Based on the infantry kills of 14,488 you should have recovered around 1.4k rifles. Was that not the case? The split units should be giving weapon recovery.

You don't have to hold the flag at cross roads, you have several hours after that timer expires to recapture it. It's probably possible to win that setup with almost no casualties if you have the right army comp and get lucky with the AI.

The value that looks off is in the skirmisher spreadsheet, analysis tab, column J. Every other weapon has values in the double digits except that one which is <1. Is that one really that much worse when compared to the others? Anytime a unit shoots damage against the target is calculated. Damage dealt can be <1 so it can appear that no damage was dealt. Maybe the artillery animations that seem to miss only happen when the damage is low? Agreed, that's why I only briefly mentioned the range and didn't bring it up further. When range is added to the equation the ranking of all of the carbines go down considerably. My main point was that, at least the way I play, fire rate just isn't something that I value very much. Either in a new comment or in one of your previous ones could you combine your updated explanation of your data, conclusions, and spreadsheets? I'd like to link them in the main post.

Rates are from the rebalance mod. Rates vary by difficulty. Colonel: .5 BG: .375 MG/Leg: .25 The extra recruits, career points, etc were not included as part of the merged changes. We were unsure how the balance would work out so mostly just the surrender algorithm changes were applied to the rebalance mod.

Yes, detached skirmishers were disabled due to the many exploits they allow. Deployment slots for all battles were increased so the player can bring roughly 1 extra dedicated skirmisher unit per division to compensate. In the Mod/ConfigFile.csv there is also a disableSkirmishers setting that can be changed to false if you want though.

On the skirmisher spreadsheet analysis tab, it looks like the colt m1855 values might be wrong? The 1855 showing so well is why I am hesitant to weigh this kind of analysis to heavily in my own weapon choices. The lack of range and it's impact on the ability to deliver damage is fairly obvious so I won't comment further on that. My main issue with valuing rapid fire dps is that it relies on being able to deliver multiple volleys. While a sniper unit can somewhat reliably stand and dps, most other unit types rely on very optimal conditions to be able to do so with any consistency. Flanking units and artillery are probably the next two most likely situations where you can somewhat reliably hit those conditions. In most other cases by the time a unit is delivering it's 2nd or 3rd volley it will potentially be performing far worse than on the 1st volley. As a unit takes damage its damage per volley falls and its morale decreases. The morale decrease also negatively impacts unit efficiency further reducing damage. If a unit drops to wavering its ability to deal damage is even further reduced by the lack of volley fire. Because of this the unit that hits first and hardest tends to be in a better position for all future exchanges. Unless a weapon fires fast enough that it can get off two consecutive shots before the enemy can reload and fire, it will take multiple volleys before the faster firing weapon has a chance to catch up. Because of the above, in nearly all cases I prefer to deal more damage per volley rather than relying on damage over multiple volleys. The harder I can hit in a single attack the more likely it will be to lower enemy morale to the point where they are ineffective. I do think that this is at least somewhat play style dependent. I've had very similar discussions with other players and they value fire rate far more than I do and are equally successful in the game. I would guess this is more in the game balance over realism category. It gives those guns a very specific niche that is difficult to represent since the ability to be 'accurate' doesn't exist in a game where all shots hit their target.

Thanks for putting this together. Still looking through it but some initial comments: - I'm not sure if it affects your results but the tooltip displayed fire rate is actually 3000 / weapon.baseReload. - Checking the pistols at a shorter range could be considered relevant, they tend to fire off at the end of melees in effectively melee range. - You also may want to consider that for non artillery, at point blank range the degrade of every weapon is basically the same. Edit: It looks like you are applying accuracy twice. The damage low and damage high are from base damage * AccLow and base damage * accuracy high. Then you are taking the average of those two values and multiplying it by the average accuracy value again. That is going to make the lower accuracy weapons look a bit worse.

I think that means you are on 1.21? That sounds like the end of day timer bug which is fixed in the current version. I would recommend updating as you are very likely to hit that bug on other battles. The 1.22 changes should not cause any problems with being added mid campaign. Regarding Salem Church, if it helps at all that battle is currently effectively unwinnable as the Union, so technically this is just adding parity to the campaigns... Bad joke, it's on the list of things to fix

I'm going to have to add a special feature in the next version where if your General is named BCH 10 trains spawn

Spreadsheet updated. That carbine is terrible apparently...

This sounds like it'd be very easy to exploit the AI and abuse since they will just stand around and ignore fire from an unknown source most of the time. This isn't to say that they shouldn't be changed, just looking to provide an explanation for why stats might be the way they are currently. In the rebalance mod for example we generally have two sets of rifles at every tier. One with good melee values, one with lower melee values. Part of this is based around the AI preferring the melee heavy ones which tends to lead to better AI behavior. But it also provides a trade off for the player in terms of deciding which type of unit needs which weapon. Does this really come up unless the cavalry is tired? I don't recall running into it very often. There are some interesting possibilities here for both the player and the AI. Will discuss with Jonny.

Cavalry speed and rifle melee values can be changed fairly easily. Though with the cavalry speed that's more of an overall unit speed issue. Just giving cavalry a speed bonus when they are at high condition causes issues because the faster a unit moves the less time it spends in terrain that drops condition. It's very easy to boost their speed to much and then they just zip back and forth across the map until they engage in melee. My guess is that rifle melee values have more to do with game balance than any actual realism. Anyone with more historical knowledge please correct me here, but unless the rifles in question are different lengths or significantly different weights one will serve as a club or spear just as well as another. If you want to change the melee values see this link. I can see if it's possible to enable a run button for units other than infantry, but unless the UI automatically adds the button when it's enabled this won't be possible. Might be able to hack something together if you're willing to add functionality or re purpose the hold fire or limbering buttons or something like that. The difficulty here would be getting the movement rate to update as guns are lost, though I think it's still workable. Increasing stealth for small units in cover is possible. The not moved part I'm not sure how to code. Would need to experiment and see if I could get anything to work. This would really only work for the player, the AI will start firing as soon as a unit enters in range. I also suspect the AI would respond to this very poorly. It does not handle getting shot from hidden units well at all. The big restriction here is available weapons. One of the carbines would have to get re purposed as the mortar. Your options are basically to have skirmishers with very slow reloading cannon stats or to rework an existing cannon into a mortar with a move speed bonus. If you want to have any kind of setup time you'd have to go with the artillery base. How do you see this as differing in terms of gameplay from a faster 6pdr or 12pdr? This is possible though it's mostly dependent on how many bugs are you willing to put up with or spend a lot of time trying to fix. A unit that size would likely die to anything that fires at it as well.

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Clearly we need to have BCH be our tester prior to releasing next time around

I am surprised that actually worked. The brigade is still controlled by Walton in that case?

I thought I had added a check to prevent those units from being split, but I must have missed something. Will have to fix it in a future release.

There seems to be an issue with the pathing in that area. Same issue exists in the base game. You can usually get around this by holding down right click and angling the unit where you want it to fall back to. No, any units that go to camp shouldn't get split.

Added comments on how the AISize works.

This is definitely a testing 'how far can we push this setup'. Any sort of actual implementation would see significant changes. Thanks for giving it a try though

Apparently I shouldn't try to work on 3 different releases at the same time... What you are experiencing is that we found how to change some of the generic AI behaviors. There is a suicidal AI setting that results in the AI ignoring everything else and searching out the player units. This works less than well on several battles where the AI is supposed to be defending. The solution for Bull run would probably be to setup a defensive position on one of the rivers, destroy the AI defensively and then push the objective. Not sure if you have the time to pull it off though. Anyways, this change was clearly not intended to be included at this time and we're working on getting this corrected.

There shouldn't really have been any changes to the surrender probability. Perhaps there were bad rolls in terms of melee perks and melee rifles.

Figured out the likely cause. Will have a fix up soon.

Nothing so far. I just tried a new campaign and it loaded without issue. No problems loading in battle or old save either. I would recommend reverifying your game files and reinstalling the mod and hopefully that will clear up whatever the issue is.