pandakraut

Agreed, we're working on a solution to make them worthwhile. Stat and thus experience gain is going to be reduced considerably across the board. Early melee cav weapons will be getting some small nerfs and later weapons getting some small buffs. Cavalry cleaning up routing units is intended, they are just a bit too effective at it currently. Artillery really take off with 2-3 star units and when the shot/shell perk and accuracy multipliers start stacking. They are probably a bit too weak early and a bit too strong late. With some exceptions. Unless you reduce the morale and stamina of the larger unit first, numbers will have a significant advantage. Drawing out the enemy charge duration and then counter charging can also help. You can definitely play without them but it requires careful management of the charges so you don't get caught in an unfavorable melee.

Updated for the 1.10 hotfix. Applied the skirmisher AI fix to infantry and added canister and shell range indicators to artillery units.

Nope

Comparing Union Bull Run and Shiloh, the difference is that at Bull Run if you bring fewer units your initial units are front loaded. At Bull Run you have two reinforcement blocks, a set of 5 and a set of 6. If you bring 8 units you will get 5 in the first wave and 4 in the second(supply is included in the unit count in this scenario). The way Bull Run works this barely matters, but it's what I have data for. At Shiloh the right flank deploy takes your total units in the first corps, divides that value in half and places that number of units on the right flank. So if you bring 10 units you would expect all 10 units to spawn in on the right flank if the battle worked the same as Bull Run. While you wouldn't get any reinforcements, you would have the maximum amount of units available to hold off the initial phase. However, instead you would only get 5 units in the first phase. This would obviously cause problems on the left flank if it worked this way but it helps illustrate the point. I haven't checked all of the battles to see if any others are setup like Shiloh, but it does seem beneficial to always bring the max number of units in the primary corps. I tend to try and do this anyways so it doesn't really change much, but it makes some early army setup choices more interesting since it may be more beneficial to have 20 ok units than 12 or 18 strong units.

I found something interesting related to this, the closer to the max of 20 units in each corps you bring the more units will get deployed in the initial stages. For example, on the Union right if you only bring 12 units in your first corps 6 units deploy. But if you bring 20, 10 units will deploy.

Check the general perk tooltips. The perks should basically all be renamed and have new bonuses.

It may have changed at some point, but it looks like you can select legendary immediately on a fresh install. After the hotfix the artillery logistics perk is definitely working now. The general strategy perk is also working and applies army wide now. I'm not sure yet if the other lvl 1 general perks are also army wide. Without modded values the impact is so low that it's hard to test reliably.

Steam probably auto updated. Check your career screen to see if the base game infantry size is showing. To reinstall you can just copy over the assets file and the dll again.

With the new patch the oversized brigades on Bull Run are mostly gone even on Legendary. As the Union you get about 7k fewer allied troops but face about 6k less enemy troops. Considering that's trading 0 star for 3 star that battle will now be much much easier. As the CSA you get about 8k fewer troops and face 10k less on Legendary. Depending on your army setup you can still end up facing 3.5k - 4k units. So overall Union now probably has the easier Bull Run, but they have the much harder version of Shiloh. Mod update probably won't be for a few days at least. There will be a few AI and balance updates rolled in however.

I tested the artillery logistics trait repeatedly on 1.09 and never saw it work. It does appear to be working on 1.10 though.

Taking the update and then reinstalling the mod appears to work. This will overwrite any hotfix changes though. Not updating is probably the best solution for now though. It'll take us some time to reapply the changes on the new patch. Updates to follow once we have a chance to see what was modified.

Playing without pausing is almost a different game. At the moment I think you're right to choose cavalry over skirmishers. They are still micro intensive but at least they are in or out, no sitting in range of enemy units waiting to get charged. If it was possible to force manual deployment zones in all battles I would. I'm not sure that's achievable through modding though.

Not what I was thinking of but interesting. Downside is that you'll still be screwed on maps with wonky line of sight limitations no matter how good your spot is.

I think on MG you still have a decently wide array of setups available, your margin for error just gets smaller. Everyone I've heard of who has played MG so far has gone through with a completely different army setup. Once you've gotten a good ways through BG I think you may find that going back to the early missions will be entirely manageable on a higher difficulty. There are all kinds of tricks you will start to pick up that can let you deal with even overwhelming odds. Glad to see you experimenting with the career points. There is a starting point setup that no one has even talked about yet that might be actually be the strongest start.

Big brigades are overrated I've gone all the way past Chickamauga using nothing bigger than veteran units at 1.1k and rookies at 1.3k on Legendary and most of the army is at the Veteran size. May have had to bulk up slightly for Cold Harbor and those last few battles of storming fortifications, got distracted by learning how to mod the game though. With the current strength of artillery in the mod you'd probably have to go slightly larger since you'll take more casualties before you can kill them off.

I tend to try and grow wide instead of tall and get the experience that way. I've found I usually can field more total men that way. Also helps you rank up more officers which is super important in the mod, though you spend a lot of money getting them. Jonny tells me my units are too small every time he sees me play The side battles being fun with the larger brigades is good news as that is likely going to be the case in the future, at least on the harder difficulties.

If you were using brigades in the 1.2k - 1.5k range at bull run and had more than 2 infantry units you definitely added several thousand men due to scaling. I'm nearly certain you triggered it for the side battles. I checked my old saves and even on legendary I'm not facing anything much bigger than 2k in the side battles before Shiloh. I play a bit on the smaller end but hitting 4k would have required adding a ton of men. Though again, could be you just got super unlucky with the reinforcement types. 36k to 64k at Shiloh is in the right range for Shiloh MG in the mod currently. The unit sizes should probably come down a bit though. I've gotten so used to seeing 3 or even 4 to 1 odds that 2:1 seems normal in most cases. Dealing with the huge brigades is definitely a giant pain with the limited resources you have initially. At Bull Run you can take them apart with cavalry, but that's not really feasible at Shiloh. Though once you get some 2 - 3 star artillery I've found you can start wrecking just about anything currently. I actually kind of like the random side battles with allied troops is it gives you a bit more variety. Especially with the cavalry focused ones it gives you a chance to try using large numbers of those units without dealing with the cost of setting it up. With the impact of perks in the mod currently, pushing at least some of those units up to 1 star is probably a good idea.

I'm surprised to hear that you're facing 5k+ brigades on MG. I checked Legendary CSA and while there is one 5.7k brigade and around eight 3.5-4k brigades the rest are 3k or smaller. I'm sitting at 38.5k vs 85k These are mostly 1-2 star so they were managable. On MG the AI capped at 72k for me and I can bring up to 45k if I use up all the muskets. The cap will change a bit based on your previous battles but in my case I'm only seeing 6 units over 3k and only one of those is 4.5k. Once you get past Shiloh unless you're building very large you probably won't see any AI units over 2.9k on MG. What is your average infantry brigade size? The allied units largely determine the scaling at Bull Run and Shiloh but you can definitely push it up if you go overboard. Though in my experience that only really happens on Legendary. How did your earlier battles go? Did you largely kill off most of the enemy forces? It's also possible you had bad luck with the reinforcements randomization. I've seen that push the AI up an additional 6-10k early on. Your issue with weapon availability, specifically were you low on money or low on weapons to buy? Can you post your career setup? I'm a bit confused about the supply raid comment. Supply Raid is the union battle pre Chancellorsville were the player has all allied cavalry units. If the player has a large enough army it can cause the AI troops to scale far past the size of the allied troops, though it seems to be less of an issue in that battle than at Brandy Station.

I'd be interested in reading whatever you have time to put together, but at the point it might be better to move the AAR into it's own forum thread. Not that it isn't relevant here, but it would help keep things a bit more organized.

Just to make sure, by skipping the second day of Phillipi you mean the second phase where you have to hold the city against a new set of attacking units and the train? I had no clue it was even possible to skip that. Things are still in the planning phases, but currently the idea is that the campaign changes that boost difficulty will start to take affect at MG or higher. I agree that less experienced players have enough to learn already, and don't need any additional tricks thrown at them. It definitely sounds like you're on the right path to adjusting to the mod. For me, the most enjoyable part of the mod is that it requires coming up with new solutions to battles that I've already 'solved' in the base game. So it's nice to hear that others are getting a similar experience.

I haven't seen any yet. The two people who I know of that might are either finishing up another campaign at the moment or very distracted by BattleTech

Just wanted to say, thanks for all the feedback people are providing. The more people who can share their perspectives the better. So please feel free to post any thoughts you have even if it's on a topic that has already seen some discussion.

We released with the knowledge that on Legendary some of the battles with allied units would be absurdly difficult if not impossible. Things will be smoothed out a bit in the campaign release. Some of the issue is the size scaling, but as you noted the experience gap is very difficult to overcome with how strong perks are. Restarting battles until the AI gets a bad perk selection can work but it's clearly not a long term solution. Ranged cavalry and skirmishers are in an awkward place at the moment, partially because they share weapons. If we make the carbines better to make non sniper skirmishers stronger then ranged cavalry becomes ridiculous. We're working on some alternatives to improve this. It's good news that a variety of cannon continue to be useful though clearly there are some outliers and the upper end probably needs to come down a bit or at least take much longer to reach.

While accepting any compliment intended, I'm now going to be self deprecating about my programming abilities Modifying the dll basically requires knowing how to program already. Learning unity would be the big step. Changing existing game mechanics is comparatively easy compared to writing the AI, UI, and such from scratch.

The changes to the officer experience mean that even on MG and Legendary you don't start with a MG and the reward MGs will only be BG. As the Union on Legendary you can get a MG by Bull Run if you push for it. Not sure if you can do it as the CSA though I also haven't tried. As the CSA rushing the MG feels less necessary. The ability for the player to create massive brigades is probably completely overpowered even on Legendary once you get them online.