pandakraut

September 28, 2022

2-3* isn't unusual at Malvern, may be a bit on the high end for MG though. High kills and captures helps keep AI xp down(see the recon report training stat) but the reinforcement types(messages that pop up on the campaign map after battles) can have a big impact as well. My training value was 37-42 and I faced mostly 2*s a few 3s and a handful of 1s.

I brought nine 2*s and only three 0*s. 6 points in training. Though this was also on a relatively older version of 1.28 so a grain of salt on what I'd end up with if I tried again.

The key to counterbattery is not to be exchanging fire. You'll nearly always come out behind if your rifled guns are taking fire at the same time as your are trying to take out enemy guns. So you either need to stay hidden, stay out of range(you can fire at targets on the very edge of the range cone with the right angles), or have some other unit closer drawing the enemy fire.

Not a lot of good video examples available, but here is how I handled it in the base game(counterbattery fire was on in the UI mod). While there will be plenty of differences to the mod, it does show how I use my artillery against larger units. https://youtu.be/lcjex1iabXs?list=PLNFTAFys32_-N-fIfWJgRSJIhVtOZjEGe

This is the closest thing to a recent version of the mod that I know of https://youtu.be/yljtLWIig7c?list=PLF9w8nYzOAnya5tJqhlB0lYHl-LFC7m-m

Overall, the AI always is larger and stronger on legendary so you have to learn how to find weaknesses in its line and chip away at them until you can push in. I don't actually attack that front until fairly late in the battle. Take out as much artillery as possible ahead of the push and make sure to support the push with smoothbores to help break enemy infantry quickly with focus fire.

Forefall also has a union campaign where you might be able to get some tips, though he has definitely started leaning into more of a brute force infantry heavy approach for getting through fortifications.

September 28, 2022

Scaling is complicated, but the goal is that you shouldn't need to think about it too much. Progress at this goal remains mixed, we're trying though

Rather than try to give a detailed explanation, that would take me all day, I'll try to give some general guidelines. Also there are configs to override most of this if you have different goals or disagree with how this has been implemented.

Since the mod allows for a wider variety of unit sizes, scaling has been adjusted to try to detect what size range the player is using and keep the AI in that range. I think of this like the unit size selections in the total war games, do you want to play on small? Or on huge? The idea here is that if the player is running around with 6k units, the AI should also have similarly sized units, but if the player is only using 1ks, they should never encounter anything larger than 3-4k. The specifics will vary by difficulty selection and by battle(this is where things gets complicated) but that's the goal at least.

Multiple sizes of player units is fine, as long as they are in a reasonable range. This range has been defined as roughly +/- 2k. So 1ks and 3ks units you're fine. 1ks and 6ks and the scaling is going to get a big boost to try to keep up with the 6k.

Scaling takes into account average unit size of each type, as well as total manpower. It also accounts for all units in your army, not just the ones deployed. So if you build a full corps of small units, but go into a side battle with very few of a specific unit type(this happens most often early on in this campaign) you can see a larger jump. Similarly if you build fewer larger units early on this tends to spike scaling as well, though we've added a variety of measures to try to offset that somewhat to allow for players who like playing big to have a more reasonable shot early game on high difficulties.

My general recommendation is pick a size you want to use and roughly stick with it throughout the campaign. Starting a little under that size and gradually increasing to it or past it as the campaign progresses usually works well. You also usually want to prioritize getting or retaining perks over unit size. Though if your veteran brigades get too small, you may need to merge them. 1200 is a little smaller than I prefer these days, but can still work. Just requires a lot of precision since you don't have much ability to absorb losses. Other sizes should be fine.

You usually always want to field the required number of corps and as many brigades as allowed early on. Once you get into battles that allow 3+ corps it becomes a little harder to say for sure, as you often don't get units in those extra corps until late in the battle, and it's not worth diluting the units in your initial corps too much to be able to field the extra units.

Not sure what difficulty you are on, but for comparison here is what I faced on legendary for Malvern. I brought 41 brigades, 3rd corps is only there for the extra wagon. Hill https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/737699144478621706/881777943305662504/unknown.png

My standard setup is to have my rifled guns and some guarding infantry setup in the north. They will start picking off enemy artillery units that I can hit without taking return fire and any AI units that come out to attack me. The rest of my army will flank around to the SE corner of the map and attack across the bridge/fords. I'll then slowly compress the AI position from the south and eventually the north to take the point.

What were your numbers on your first attempt? My first instinct is that your army needs a very good set of artillery to be able to get through this battle as 1200 man infantry brigades will have a hard time trying to press through without significant support. But overall your numbers look decent.

That was a bit all over the place, but hope it helps and if you have more questions just ask.

September 28, 2022

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

There is an interesting thing you can do if you get the horse artillery perk on the reinforcements from the West – deploy an artillery brigade on the lookout hill to the southeast. It’ll confuse the AI and delay their storming of the city noticeably.

I wish this battle was longer tbh. You’d suffer more casualties defending the town, but you also would have the opportunity of routing the final attack from the east. Would make it more interesting.

I've generally found that by the end of the timer the AI attack has completely fizzled out and only the cleanup is left. More time would just allow for an easy full clear which is something we were trying to avoid as a general rule going forward.

Since it was the first battle its intended to be relatively easy. It does turn into a fairly interesting challenge if the AI sizes are boosted, just not one really appropriate for the first battle.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

Very fun battle and very stupid AI. I managed to cut of and destroy the CSA element defending Matthews Hill by first clearing Farm Ford with cavalry from the rear and then setting them up as a blocking force a couple of minutes before the timer expires. If you understand how the phase change is triggered, its pretty easy to do. The enemy had a triple split and his units were very small, so they shattered quickly.

I didn't think you could clear the blocking unit at the ford and get the Ohio units across without triggering the phase change. Was this with carbine or melee cav? Did you only try it once or is it consistent across multiple tries?

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

I do like the positioning of the computer-generated Corps in the west, but I think the original version is more challenging since you couldn’t just create a center of gravity on his left basically immediately, or block him all along the river.

Anyway, the next enemy wave spawned in the south only and I had no issues holding, outflanking and counter attacking since he was very focused on my center and didn’t try to outflank my lines. Complete wipe just as the timer reached zero (would have had lots of bonus time too though).

Some improvements to the alternate deploy will be added in the next version. I do agree that this alternate deploy is generally easier to handle, especially once you know it can happen.

Overall this battle seems to have a rather wide range of difficulty depending on what the AI does. If things go well early and you end up in good position on the Hill before the counter attack arrives, it's easy. If you're a little slower and you aren't in control of the hill before the counterattack arrives it can be quite difficult. I think I had a bit of bad luck when I was testing this so the battle is a bit easier than it needs to be.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

The key was for my four Cavalry brigades crush the flank of the southern CSA brigades once they were charging my thin right wing infantry screen. Timing was everything but I managed to annihilate the southern flank by destroying everything infantry and skirmisher unit. A very beautiful sight.

The heavy cavalry setups will be taking a bit of a hit in the next version. As they are clearly being proven too strong at the moment.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

But the greater factor to my success so far is the enemy reinforcement RNG. Even with my campaign going well so far, 36-41k is a very low number to be at from my experience.

I recently discovered a flaw in the reinforcement selection logic where basically if you get lucky early you're more likely to continue to get lucky. But if you get unlucky early you are more likely to continue being unlucky. Will be getting changed for hopefully a bit more consistent experience. This ended up being a bit of a componding problem later on in my testing since it turns out I was hitting the top end of what the AI could have as opposed to something more in the middle.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

Which is the key to battle. Retreat and trade ground for time whenever and wherever possible. In my mind there is no use defending the Nest itself. I set up my temporary line well north of it at the very edge of the map and to the west in the dense woods. This works well since a) the ground is quite favorable, b) the line is very small, allowing for massed musket and artillery fire against individual units and c) reinforcements spawn directly at the front line.

I've gone both ways with this, but when facing larger numbers I've generally preferred to hold the nest for a bit. Gives me one more line to retreat back to once my line eventually collapses. With your conditions I agree it's probably unnecessary.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

The massed small front in the north only worked because the enemy only managed to bring up one whole artillery brigade in 2 hours. The rest was taken out or delayed by some 3000 Cavalry operating in the rear. You also need Cavalry to disrupt and confuse the AI. Merely delaying individual infantry brigades might not seem important and costly, but is vital to prevent the AI from setting up mass charges. It’s a pain to do it right, the majority of actual play time is spent directing individual Cavalry units.

This aspect is crucial and in many cases the difference between a battle that looks easy and one that is a disaster.

On 9/21/2022 at 12:54 PM, ug_might said:

In my game the enemy attacks had essentially passed its culmination point when the map opens up to the final lines at Shiloh. I retreated nonetheless since again more favorable ground and forcing the enemy to set up entirely new attacks is always hugely beneficial. Anyway, the battle was essentially over at that point and I completely wiped the enemy on day two with some 30 minutes left on the timer.

There are some changes coming that will limit the ability to depress the AI numbers this low through the use of mass skirmishers and cav, which should hopefully get the intended difficulty a bit more on track. Feature creep has ballooned a bit while I've been putting off the hard work of updating CSA Fredericksburg, so waiting to get some more testing done on those before a full release.

Sounds like things are going well overall though. Hope you continue to enjoy the campaign and thanks for the detailed feedback.

September 28, 2022

52 minutes ago, Andrew Milnes said:

Hi guys, I'm struggling to make the mod work ... i've loaded the unzipped file into local file

Ultimate General Civil War_Data - i can see the RebalanceModV1.28.2 and inside that file is

Managed

Mod

Resoursces.assets

But if wont run with the mods

I've tried uninstalling and verifying the file and doing it again but same result, I'm sure I'm doing something basic wrong? Can you help

The contents of the RebalanceModV1.28.2 folder need to be copied into the Ultimate General Civil War_DATA folder. You don't want them inside the RebalanceModV1.28.2 after you extract from the zip.

The resources.assets file and the managed/assembly-csharp.dll file will overwrite existing files when you do this copy.

If you're still having trouble please let me know.

September 28, 2022

7 hours ago, fatehunter said:

Thanks Panda,

Good explanation. I am talking about the J & P mod (the only thing I play). For further clarification, I get the accuracy and reload information from the tooltips box that opens when hovering over the weapons.

There the stock Springfield M1855 shows lower accuracy than the Mississippi. For example at long range, the M1855 shows 30% vs the Mississippi at 47%. the basic question is whether I should equip my early campaign troops with the Springfield vs the Mississippi if I have sufficient of either. I getting the idea it should be the Springfield, and I'm starting to field units of the same strength with the two different weapons to see how it plays out in actual battles.

Personally I'd go with the Mississippi. The reload speed is nice, but won't make up for the accuracy difference at long ranges. I'd rather hit harder than slightly more often.

Always best to run your own tests though. Depending on playstyle the faster reload time may be worthwhile for you. Just try to make sure the units you are comparing are in combat a roughly equivalent period of time.

For the J&P mod there is a Google spreadsheet on the discord which has some useful average damage graphs.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E5ZFCAHEY8EyBkEkWIHOfdFlwaYpSDVA00w9a71jq1c/edit?usp=sharing

September 27, 2022

4 hours ago, fatehunter said:

For example, how does the Spring M1855 compare with the Mississippi rifle? The springfield shoots faster with more damage, but with with less accuracy as compared to the Mississippi Rifle.

Are you asking about the weapons in the J&P mod or in the base game?

I generally only put together average damage spreadsheets as I don't think that factoring reload rate yields useful data. It tends to make high fire rate weapons look far better than low fire rate weapons, but in many situations you only really care about the first volley or two of damage rather than damage across 10+ volleys. So when evaluating I'll compare average damage(damage range determined by base damage and acurracy low and accuracy high * the range damage multiplier) and the reload rate.

Higher reload rate is better, but I'll generally value higher average damage. This has as much to do with playstyle as anything else, optimally I'm hitting a single enemy unit with multiple of my own, which will relatively quickly rout and drive off the enemy unit. So higher damage to spike the enemy morale matters more than being able to get off an extra volley after firing multiple times.

September 19, 2022

On 9/16/2022 at 4:01 PM, Simpkin said:

Now I stomped some battles. And encounter 3 bugs. At the supply raid you lose when you kill all enemy before their reinforcements arrive and you did not have all 3 supply wagons. At Shiloh the battle does not end even when you killed the 2 ships you have to wait until the time runs out. And when you save and load a game the enemies sometimes stop charges, stop for a few seconds, or be somehow out of sight etc.

Battles are not always consistent about when they allow you to end early and what outcome you get if you do. Generally if you kill everything you'll either win immediately, or win as soon as the timer expires.

Updating the victory conditions is unfortunately not very easy to do with modding, so there isn't much we can do here.

Saving and loading is another case where there is relatively little we can do. I tend to use in battle saves as little as possible due to all the odd things that can happen. Though at least the impact of most of those is fairly minor.

Your Shiloh result looks pretty good, so seems like your restart has gone well. Happy to hear that you're enjoying the mod overall

September 13, 2022

13 hours ago, ug_might said:

I played up to Thoroughfare Gap before 2nd Bull Run on Union Legendary.

It all went decently enough but frequently timers were too tight for me to wipe out the enemy. As a result at TG he's at 59k in the overview screen and 32k and 56 guns at the battle itself. At this point my divisions are simply to small, i can field 20k and 12 guns or thereabouts. I dont think this will be sustainable even if i win TG.

Going 3 into training at first probably was a mistake. I did end up with an not insignifcant amount of veterans, but to use them you end up with rather small brigades, less than 1.8k. If i had to do it again i'd focus entirely on Politics and start out with TAC/CAV/POL.

On my test run I made it through 2nd Bull Run with a split training and politics setup. Has its benefits, especially once you hit 6-8 training, but definite downsides as well. I had trouble fielding enough weapons eventually, though that was as much casualties as anything. If you want to go bigger than that, politics and recon seems to be the way to go.

I got nonstop veteran reinforcements so I was at 100k on the overview screen. My infantry was all at around 1750.

You may want to check out Forefall's videos he's got two attempts, the second on an experimental mode that may help with some tactics suggestions. His second attempt went politics and recon heavy so that will probably be of more benefit if you decide to restart https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF9w8nYzOAnwdUwbUnCY1iEkP4dRBlu4W

August 31, 2022

5 hours ago, ug_might said:

I guess the issue I have is going from one reload to the next and face 20, 30 up to 50% (feels like) stronger enemies just based on bad rolls is bad variance. Random spawn locations are fine but going from easily winning to basically losing without being able to do anything about it is not.

This approach may or may not work fine on lower difficulties (I don’t bother, so no idea), but if you’re not some uber player and are *just* able to play/enjoy legendary with average rolls (like me), you just find yourself reloading until you get lucky.

I get what you are trying to do, but sometimes it feels a bit much. If had to make a suggestion I’d focus more on different spawn points and tone down the maximum increase of the enemy strength through splitting.

In the aiConfigFile there is a duplicateProbability value that is defaulted to .2. This is the chance that a unit gets an extra split. Maybe try lowering it to .1 or 0 for a bit more consistency in difficulty?

Unfortunately we are relatively limited on what we can do with alternative spawn locations and what is possible tends to be fairly time intensive to implement. But as a general rule, as we make improvements, the base size and stat advantages the AI gets are lowered accordingly.

5 hours ago, ug_might said:

About charging, I think your approach has merit but it’s just not to my taste. I was playing Shiloh the last few days and I was basically facing more charges than volleys. This has no basis in reality IMHO and can be exploited to the point of ridiculousness if you know what you’re doing. I had two fresh brigades charging Skirmishers in full rout more or less in parallel to my main line straight into a stream. One shattered, the other surrendered. The best part? Their main army is still miles away and those brigades just charged blindly ahead into the positions of the main union army to try to get some Skirmishers. Yeah. So guess what happened next. Those poor Skirmishers were sent right back out again and lured in the next brigade. They didn’t reach my lines.

So it is playable, sure. But less enjoyable in my book. If I could choose between this charging simulator and the more traditional - blast away until something gives - approach, I would choose the latter.

We tend to lean in favor of increased challenge over strict historical accuracy. Part of our thinking on the charges is also influenced by years of playing the base game where you can effectively force the AI to stop a charge whenever you want and build pure shooting armies, which is every bit as exploitable as the current state.

The running dedicated skirmishers across your line to drag chargers is a known exploit that unfortunately doesn't have a good solution at the moment. If we prevent the ai from charging them it allows for near indefinite delaying actions, and the player could simply replace them with a slightly less effective speed perked infantry units for the same purpose.

Attempts at making the ai stop if it won't catch the target or other similar logic improvements have met with failure so far.

It's high in the list of things we would fix if we had a solution. But past a point there will always be more exploits than we can patch, so it's somewhat up to the player to determine which they will use.

Glad to hear you figured out a method for Shiloh that worked for you. Those look line excellent results. As always there are more things we'd like to improve, no plans to stop trying to making changes yet.

August 28, 2022

52 minutes ago, ug_might said:

About splitting. I give you one example. I played 1^stBull Run. Some of the CSA reinforcements after you take Henry Hill spawned at the new locations in the Northeast. I wasn’t prepared for that, but fine. Legendary is not punishment enough, so some variety is appreciated. Only the two brigades in the north split – into five brigades. Yes, they were somewhat smaller but I couldn’t hold against 6-8k slamming into my rear. At least not with acceptable losses. So I lost and reloaded. No units in the north this time around and zero splits on the reinforcements. I wiped the enemy off the map as per usual. So one game ending loss and one decisive victory. Not because of anything I did. It could have played my best Bull Run effort or far below average, wouldn’t have mattered. It’s just win or loss based on a random roll. As said, not a fan of this approach.

This partially sounds like it was less an issue with the splits and more an issue with the new battle variants that have been added. Though both of these systems were added to address similar issues. In the base game most battles are completely solved, there are one or two optimal approaches and the player can reliably win the exact same way every time since the battles are always nearly the same. We also can't add new battles so variant system is the closest we can get.

Both the split system and the battle variant system mean there is a greater chance the player has to adapt mid battle to an unexpected occurrence. Splits mean sometimes the enemy strength is stronger in a specific area, and the extra units allow the AI to respond better to player movements. The variant system means that sometimes AI reinforcements will attack from different directions. Since we can't actually add new units to the battle, the variant spawn spawn locations do sometimes automatically split units so ensure that the local strength isn't too low.

In battles with variations, it's usually a coin flip when the phase starts if you get the default spawn location or an alternative. There are some where the chances are different since there are more than two options. Some variants are definitely easier than others. Both because the original versions are expected by experienced players and that some of the new locations can be easily defended if the player scouts them out in time. Eventually the player will know what the options are and be able to prepare for all of them again, but we can only do so much within the limits of modding and time

1 hour ago, ug_might said:

But i do think they charge far too often at this point. It feels like the AI doesn’t even want to bother engaging in an actual firefight (which comprised what, 99% of infantry combat during the actual Civil War?), instead its units marching up, firing one volley if that and charging. Against well prepared positions with dug in infantry supported by Artillery. Who in their right mind would do that?

There are a few things going on here. Generally we view charging as what causes players to lose battles. If the AI successfully leverages its larger and more experienced units and pushes the player out of a good defensive position, that's the highest chance it has of winning. While sometimes the AI could sit back and grind out more total casualties by firing, it is also not very strong at positioning and maintaining cover. So if the player knows the AI is unlikely to charge they can easily manipulate the AI into bad firing positions and take the AI apart with long range fire and artillery. On the other hand, if the player knows the AI will charge 100% of the time then that also forces specific army setups to counter it, so we've tried to go with a balance.

The AI is also more likely to charge in certain scenarios that the player tends to setup on legendary. AI units on legendary will generally always have a stat and perk advantage early on, so it's very likely their melee strength is much higher than the players. The player also tends to setup in good cover, and many players primarily take accuracy perks and equipping units with rifled guns that have lower melee values.

While effective, this has the side effect of encouraging the AI to charge more. Because the AIs calculation looks at the situation, sees that it has worse cover than the player, that the players range damage is higher than its melee damage, and concludes that it should try to get into melee instead of sitting back and firing. If you take melee perks on your units or general and equip most of your units with muskets you'll generally find that the AI charges quite a bit less as it sees the situation as more favorable to sit back and shoot. There are certainly flaws in both approaches for the AI, but within the current limits of what we can do, I don't see a good way to improve the AIs performance.

I know you mentioned you didn't want to change configs, but in the AIConfigFile you can try changing advancedChargeLogic to false and see if that gets you a more firefight focused experience. That disables the chain charge logic which greatly increases the chances of nearby units to charge when another AI unit is charging. The goal being to get charges by groups instead of isolated units, but definitely has the side effect of making the AI more charge happy.

1 hour ago, ug_might said:

If I had to make an suggestion it would be that after a unit reaches to broken status it should take much, much longer for moral and condition to rebuild itself.

Broken just represents morale, so potentially a unit could still have fairly high condition in this state. As a player I generally feel that it takes forever for units to recover from exhausted and broken. For AI units, it will be faster due to their generally higher stats. CSA units also have less condition drain for actions, and union recruits stats start off lower, so this feels particularly bad at the union start.

I'm a little hesitant to make this take much longer as it enables chain routing units easier, but morale regen at low levels could probably use another look.

1 hour ago, ug_might said:

I guess I lucked out on camp reinforcements, the enemy infantry was armed with Muskets and Rebored Muskets and did stupidly little damage.

We're currently testing out a version where the reinforcement types will be a little more consistent. Test versions are available on discord if you want to take a look. If you're facing a lot of muskets that was probably also contributing to lots of charging. Once the AI has more rifled weapons it slows down a bit.

Hopefully the above context helps a bit. The first few battles can often be pretty rough and once you get past that it can get easier. Though Shiloh and Gaines Mill can be a bit of a beast at the moment. Good luck and if you have more questions or feedback please let us know.

August 27, 2022

5 hours ago, ug_might said:

I still think charging is way overpowered and i'm no fan of unit splitting. Some variance and randomness is fine, but units tripling paired with random spawn locations more often than not tend to devolve the game into a you win/lose now because of good/bad roll situation, no matter what you achieved on the field. I don't like that.

On legendary group charges are very dangerous, but individual charges tend to be an opportunity. Isolated charges give you a chance to focus fire on a units, particularly with flanking fire(cavalry excels at this) and with canister.

You want to take actions to prevent the AI from massing up to be able to make a group charge whenever possible. Detached skirmishers or other units can be used on the AI's flanks and in their rear to distract and slow down the advance of some units so that they don't hit you all at once.

The split mechanic is a 20% chance for an extra unit to be created, the new units will be smaller than the original. In some battles specific units auto splits and have the normal 20% chance of creating a third. This is the only case where a units can split twice.

In the aiConfigFile there is a duplicateProbability value which can be changed to 0 of you want to turn off or reduce the 20% chance for units to split. The system is intentionally designed to add variety and force the player to adapt. This can lead to can battles being much harder or easier. You may also want to consider an alternative of adjusting the aiScalingsizeMultiplier and/or the aiScalingexperienceMultiplier down a bit to maybe .85 for a slightly easier version of Legendary when getting used to it.

6 hours ago, ug_might said:

Anyway. Whats the meta on career points?

The patch is new enough that there isn't a clearly defined one yet. 1-2 points in logistics and 2 points in recon tend to be a fairly common default. Past that you need a way of getting weapons(pol, econ, or recon) along with the standard investment in AO to be able to field units. Points in training will make it easier to field more 1* units but as you've found does cut into you ability to get more weapons. For training you want to hit even numbers where possible to get that extra stat point for recruits.

The 7 training start that was popular in 1.27 has fallen off in popularity. Seems like an even split between people going recon and economy.

The discord is also a good place to get input from more players if that's something you are interested in.

Legendary is quite hard at the moment, but stick with it and you should make progress. And definitely feel free to adjust the config files to preference. Not everyone wants the same level of difficulty and better to keep the game fun

August 25, 2022

14 hours ago, TankHUnt3r said:

So, I am truly enjoying the challenge this mod is giving, as I was so set in my gameplay rut that I repeated the first battle of bull run something like 7 times before I could win.( As confederates, for referance)

My Question here however is what is the relative time frame for the Joslyn to first appear in the armor (I know its likely only a Union weapon, but my curiosity is getting the better of me here...). I didn't realize there was a trapdoor rifle (carbines I knew of) that technically served in the war, and I can't figure out a more concrete time frame for its introduction during gameplay. It technically existed in 1863, but from research most units delivered were in 1865. I would assume it would show up during '64-'65 on the union side, mostly looking for confirmation here for future playthroughs.

The Joslyn only shows up in 1864-65 in the mod. The version in game is a later model variant so it doesn't show up as early as it could have potentially if we could add more weapons rather than just renaming existing ones.

Glad to hear you're enjoying the mod

August 19, 2022

18 minutes ago, TFL117 said:

The experience of all reserves can be improved in the past by disbanding troops.
Now the reorganization after disbanding the veterans has to pay a huge price, which is very uncomfortable.

One of the goals of the new veteran and casualty system was to add a cost to breaking up experienced units into multiple smaller ones. The higher the stats of the veterans, the higher the cost. Investment in training still greatly reduces this cost though.

The new veteran system does make it much easier to do this since you don't need to clear out your recruit pool to transfer veterans anymore. This also makes it easier to add smaller amounts of veterans to multiple new units to raise their stats.

The goal is that there is a trade off for dividing up your veterans early on, and that higher investment in training is needed to regularly move around high stat veterans.

I've generally found that the veteran cost isn't a big concern early on, even with no training, since your average stats aren't high enough to drive the price up too much.

Is there something specific you are trying to do that isn't working anymore?

August 17, 2022

On 8/11/2022 at 11:03 AM, Gregoriusalter said:

Compared to the previous versions of the mod, which made the game much, much indeed, better than the ordinary version, my impression is that the latest update makes the game more difficult. That's fine, after all. The only issue imho is that even when I replace the lost men in a unit with veterans, the efficiency and the morale fall quickly, much more than in the previous versions, perhaps too much. Eg, an expert artillery unit with 12 pieces, reduced to 7 after a battle, shifts its capacity down to more than one half if brought back to 12 pieces, independently of being veterans or not the replacements. I like that enemy reinforcements enter a battle at new places and also with little changes in their timing. But to be frank, in the whole, I prefer the previous version to the last one. So if there were a chance to find also the 1.27 again (in order to choose), it would be a good thing. Anyway, I greatly appreciate the quality of your mod (Sorry for my English.) Thanks.

One of the goals of the new version was to make the game more difficult as all of the new features we had added resulted in the previous version easier than intended. I definitely recommend making use of the config options if you'd prefer to make the current version easier. Either by reducing the size and quality of AI units or increasing battle timers.

The new casualty and veteran systems will make mass replenishment of units less efficient than previous versions. In general we've found that it's easier to maintain 1* units now, but harder to maintain 2* and 3* units. Investment in medicine and training will help here, but overall to keep a units stats growing you'll need to keep the ratio of casualties to kills high. The goal is that even though replenishing reduces your stats, you have gained enough in battle that there is a net increase. As your army grows overall, the quality of your veterans will tend to increase which will also help.

If you are taking near 50% casualties on a unit, instead of replenishing with vets or recruits, sometimes it can be better to merge with another unit of similar experience. This can be done by moving units with the same weapons into the same division and dragging one unit on top of the other.

If you'd prefer to switch back to the previous version links are available below:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w0neimnw0et3ebv/RebalanceModV1.27.4.3.zip?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/690b1qv2k2v56wj/RebalanceModGoGV1.27.4.3.zip?dl=0

August 1, 2022

21 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

retried the 1st bull run and got 6kloss and 18k kill , much better.

by the way , I'm not sure how to train troops' skill efficiently for a long time , any suggestion?

Good to hear you are making progress.

Points in training to improve your recruit pool and in medicine to reduce losses and improve your rate of return of casualties will help. Overtime as your army grows and its average stats increase, this also leads to having more and better veterans available to keep up the stats of key units.

Good officers in charge of units for a bonus towards the next perk, with higher battles led will also help. In some cases you may also want to merge units that take too many casualties to refresh with veterans or recruits.

July 29, 2022

4 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

I don't know what went wrong , maybe the difficulty is different ?(I 'm in legendary mode), my enemy is stronger than this video.In the video CSA has 2* troops as it's main force and 1* troops as it's support unit.And they seldom use wave attack(first brigade charge , take damage to protect the following brigade charging).

If you're referring to the video I linked from Gonzo Gamer, that is on MG difficulty not legendary. If you want to see legendary videos this channel has a few https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIAbOKe584tVAmj0rUtLfvA/videos

Forefall is trying to do ironman or variants on it, so he's lost that battle more often than not. You can also see a partial attempt of mine while discussing the battle with him here https://youtu.be/O3Icr9Zzbao

4 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

Now we came to 1st bull run , it's not as hard as before ----then I found I need use the exhausted troops wipe out the henry hill -----It'll take them 20 minutes just to walk there, let alone charge. So I have to order a bloody attack , take the vp at last 5 minutes (again). The result is not very good (again)---14k loss and 20k kill. At least I won(again).

You really want to try to manage your condition better. Exhausted units should be rotated out and rested whenever possible.

4 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

I checked some video about legendary MG Union , only find two video in 2021 , and at that time something seems different from now. For example the deploy zone was different in crossroads . So those videos has very little reference value.

The latest patch changed up a lot of the battles so many of the old videos are no longer too useful unfortunately. Forefall's channel is the only one with Legendary videos up currently. He does have at least one crossroads attempt on there.

4 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

I began to think about giving up the legendary mode . Tomorrow I will retry the 1st bull run and try to get a better result ,maybe I can get more weapons by saving the friendly force this time ? If the weapon number has a big different it maybe save this campaign from restart.

Legendary Union as your first attempt at the mod is definitely quite the challenge. Depending on what level of frustration you're willing to put up with you might want to give MG a try instead until you are more comfortable with the mod.

July 28, 2022

29 minutes ago, LAVA said:

Better to fight them in the woods than in the open, no?

😉

Generally I'd agree, but in this case I prefer to keep the units I would need to send close to the forts to help defend them. I'll send some detached skirmishers to delay the eastern reinforcements so by the time they reach the forts I can re-orient to deal with them.

In some cases it can actually be better to fight with both units in the open rather than both units in the woods in my opinion. Yes your targeted unit will take more damage, but if you can rapidly position other units on the enemy flanks you can rout them much faster than if they were in the woods. Easier to chase them down with cav afterwards as well in the open.

I've been seeing players handle this in multiple different ways though, so probably mostly down to preference.

July 27, 2022

2 hours ago, LAVA said:

Actually, there is a bridge, and 2 brigades of Reb infantry and an artillery brigade cross there as reinforcements. It is on the far right bottom of the map and a skirmisher unit is deployed there. Immediately move 2 infantry brigades (you will need to run them most of the way) and your cavalry to the area and set up an ambush. If you catch the Rebs moving across the bridge you can wipe them out and this will give you the advantage in winning the battle.

In the latest version we added a random chance for AI units to spawn in different locations in that battle, so catching them on the bridge isn't always an option. So as long as you don't get that deployment the bridge still works, though the spawn times have also been adjusted so you usually have to fight them in the woods instead of on the bridge

July 26, 2022

8 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

But it's too hard for me. I spend almost 4 hours to take the train station. My troops always be surrounding by the second wave of CSA counter attack.

Are you trying out the mod on BG or MG? MG in the mod is generally harder than in the base game. Though there are also configuration options to adjust things.

8 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

It's not like the vanilla , you just need to back off a bit and the charging enemy will gave up,now they can charge a really long time and catch up my troops,they can't even outrun them.

Most of the charge cancel exploits in the base game have been fixed. The ai will still stop sometimes, but you usually need a strong concentration of multiple supporting units for this to happen.

Unit perks matter much more now, so if the AI has speed perks and your units don't running away will be difficult.

9 hours ago, CCCP_Admiral said:

I wonder if there is something wrong with my way of playing . My usual tactic is draw a line to delay the enemy and put skirmishers，cavalry and elite troops on the side, then let enemy enjoy a revolving door. Is this tactic has less effective in this mod ? Or i need to play in a more classic way , put elite troops behind the line as a reserves to counter charging enemy?

There are a lot of changes in the mod and it can take some time to adapt to. It may help to watch a more experienced player to see what they are doing. There aren't many battles available yet but this one might be helpful https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzAEAwFpGOR-YlpdTTs6BdChJ5DjKAylS

Good to hear you are enjoying it overall, and hopefully with some tips we can get you progressing further.

July 18, 2022

13 hours ago, o Barão said:

Is it possible to change the perks values? I am asking this to know if it is possible to nerf the accuracy bonus and also maybe add some penalties, to balance them. The issue is stacking so much accuracy bonus completely makes the game unrealistic.

You can find my guide to modding perks here: https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26225-weapon-and-perk-modding-guide/

Anything more complex than changing values or swapping existing bonuses requires programming ability to modify the dll. Swapping some bonuses might also result in needing to do dll work to get all the descriptions to be correct. I don't think the perk values are the real source of the problem here, but by all means feel free to experiment.

I'd also suggest checking out the config file guide in the mod/rebalance folder. There are some morale impact values you may want to increase as you drop kill damage via perks.

13 hours ago, o Barão said:

My 1 Virginia Brigade had 12k kill counts. Historical speaking, the entire union had 12k casualties in Fredericksburg (killed, wounded, missing)

A few things here. The balance of all battles past Antietam is not in a good spot currently. We have not yet had a chance to update them, so the timers are generally far too long and a variety of other issues exist that need to get fixed.

While we have tried to reign in casualties somewhat, the way this game is setup chasing historical casualty rates is not something we are particularly focused on. In my view, the games battles are abstracted enough from how historical battles worked that there is no real expectation that casualty numbers will be the same or even close. Perhaps with enough work someone could try and get the numbers closer to historical, but there are a lot of followup issues that would need to be resolved to keep everything running. The economy and xp systems are all designed around large numbers of casualties, so that would need to be addressed.

13 hours ago, o Barão said:

+35% accuracy / -5% reload time. Ok, I would prefer to be something like +10% accuracy / -5% reload time.

We moved a lot of units power out of base weapons damage and into unit stats and perk bonuses. We prefer that the perks and stats be much more impactful than they are in the base game. In general we're fairly happy with the potential damage output of units, though implementing a full custom perk system that gives us a lot more flexibility is something we'd like to get to.

13 hours ago, o Barão said:

Not only pickets perk give the same accuracy bonus without the reload penalty, but also 50% bonus to stealth and spotting. Completely OP.

-5% reload time is a bonus not a penalty. Any penalties are highlighted in red. For what it is worth, some players swear by Musketry drills over pickets as they don't make use of the spotting or stealth.

13 hours ago, o Barão said:

And then we have the campaign experience. When in the beginning I am fighting and having around a 1-3 in casualties in comparison to the AI and sometimes struggling to win battles if I am not careful. An interesting game. When we reach around the middle campaign experience, my troops with 10 training and 10 medicine are already well-trained and also stacking crazy perks' bonus. They will melt the AI brigades.

Through Antietam we are decently happy with the experience so far. Past that it's definitely a mess as most battles are far too easy. Something that we hope to improve over time. A core issue with difficulty in this game is always how much can the player snowball be slowed down. The player will basically always perform better with equivalent units than the AI will, so the longer it takes the player to reach that point the longer the difficulty is maintained. Past that the only question is will there be enough attrition on the player, which definitely isn't the case currently.

It might help to increase the AIsizeScalingMultiplier and AIexperienceScalingMultiplier in the second half of the campaign so the AI can keep pace with you more.

I'd also believe that the lategame training and medicine systems need some adjustment. When implementing new systems we tend to aim for being a bit too generous over too punitive. Especially in the endgame which we just don't have the ability to do much testing on in any reasonable timeframe. As more data comes in, these will likely get adjusted, but it's good news that the first half of the campaign seems to have held up decently.

July 16, 2022

8 hours ago, KeithD said:

I don't want to drop any spoilers, but if you do find yourself on day 2, 28.1 fixes a major annoyance with the vanilla game

Nice one Panda

This is a pure vanilla playthrough, so no involvement from me

For context, in the latest version of the J&P mod some of the resets of unit positions were disabled between days. Doing this required resolving additional technical issues and moves the battles away from the historical starting states on later days, so I can understand why the base game doesn't do this.

July 13, 2022

Cool to see you back and getting the full campaign in the bag this time around as well!

Looking forward to watching.

July 10, 2022

46 minutes ago, KeithD said:

Unless I'm misreading it, the hover over text box states 'current army strength during battle' on 4 bars, which is why I thought it was supposed to show on the balance bar.

You're correct, the tooltip is wrong. I thought I had changed it, but I guess not. Will get it fixed in the next patch.

July 10, 2022

1 hour ago, KeithD said:

Hi Panda

I have 4 points in recon but the current army size just shows 0/0 for both armies in 1.28

Is it fixed in 1.28.1?

Do you mean the balance bar at the top of the screen in battles is not displaying? That would be intended as the bar was moved to unlock at 6 points. With recon now providing weapon recovery bonuses, having the balance bar at 4 was too much concentrated value.

If I'm misunderstanding just let me know.

July 10, 2022

9 hours ago, o Barão said:

Here, both choices cost the same. Maybe is possible to make Mississippi rifles to cost more?

Rep buy costs are somewhat intentionally not priced directly by value. Sometimes the deals are better than others.

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