pandakraut

This is intensed, though there is no good thematic explanation other than skirmishers aim more. We've gone in circles on a better name for this weapon that fits the stats better, but nothing has come of it yet. Weapon names and descriptions are all controlled in config files in /mod/Rebalance if you'd like to change it. Regarding scaling and unit sizes. The mod allows the player to choose what size units they want to make and tries to keep the AI units around that size. So if you build 1k units you mostly face 1-3k enemy units depending on battle and difficulty. If you like giant battles and build 6ks then the AI fields similarly sized units. This does lead to cases where simply adding more men to your units does not actually improve your odds. This is a compromise between adjusting to how the player is doing in the campaign, maintaining a standard of challenge, and allowing the player to build to the size they like. So in the case of this battle, adding more men to your units is likely just lowering their stats. If your goal is to play with larger units this may be acceptable. The larger your units the more you face, but also the more you can kill for weapons and XP. But if you're planning on using smaller units then sticking to a smaller size may be more effective. All that said, if you would prefer if this system worked differently the mod provides several options. In the /mod/Rebalance/AIConfigFile you can change the max size of enemy unit types to limit scaling, or you can use the aiScalingsizeMultiplier to directly adjust the size of all enemy units up or down. Every time you restart a battle any updates you have saved will take affect, so they can be adjusted throughout the campaign. Hope that helps provide some context and options, feel free to ask more questions.

Updated to 1.28.1 Battle Changes - Modified CSA Bull Run to improve reinforcement spawn locations and timer interactions in the first phase. - The following change has been disabled. It can be enabled using the equalizeRewards value in the configFile: Recruit, money, and career point rewards are now static across win/loss/draw. This is to allow players more leeway in accepting a loss or a draw and continuing the campaign. - Corps commander xp gain rate was higher than intended and has been reduced slightly. UI Changes: - difficulty now displays next to battle date on post battle summary. Bug Fixes - Fix multiple bugs that were causing damage to be lower when setting artillery to canister only or canister/shell only. - Fix bug with endOfDayMultiplier for specific battle/value combinations. - Fix bug with lt colonel officer prices on easy and normal difficulty. - Fix bug with custom save files on mac - Fixed bug with hotkey groups - Fixed bug with running not applying an increased reload speed penalty. - Fixed bug with a manually routed unit losing less condition than a unit that is routed from combat. - Data folder for custom saves is now created if not found.

Have fun! And if you have more questions feel free to ask.

Should be, though I very rarely play the historical battles. Technically possible, but would require dll changes so it is not something that is easily configurable without programming knowledge. Adishee's submod took the opposite path and increased damage considerably for example. My guess is that if this kind of damage reduction were implemented you would see a very high focus on counter charge units. The AI tends to clump a bit, and with that much damage reduction you could pretty safely throw melee units at a unit on the edge of their formation, then use it to draw the fire of all nearby AI units while you either setup more charges or fired at the exposed flanks as they turned to fire at the melee. Would also provide a major bonus to cavalry as one of the main risks of using those is catching volleys while in melee. Screenshot #1 is basically the worst case scenario with both a river and a fortification involved. While visually it's on the outer range of when they should charge (remember the ai cannot account for having to charge across bad terrain for 3/4 of the path) if you look at the fortification firing arc you can see that the unit is charging only a little bit out of infantry firing range which is what we want to happen when the distance calculations are working normally. In screenshot #2 I think this is less an issue of charging from too far away and more that the ai doesn't account for speed differences and doesn't know to stop its charge when it's clear they won't catch the target. Dedicated skirmishers are a tricky problem for the charge logic. They need to be chargeable so that the player can't just make max size skirmishers and out shoot(or infinitely delay) the ai without any chance of charges. But if they can be charged then the player can exploit this with speed perked skirmishers. Small speed perked infantry could still enable this kind of exploiting, so the trade off fixing that one isn't currently worth the cost of what it would enable. I've tried adding more complex logic to get the ai to not charge units faster than it, but have not yet figured out how to make that work in a way that is a net improvement.

Can you try to get me a screenshot of an example of them starting the charge from too far away? I want to compare what you are seeing to the distances I normally see to make sure there isn't something slipping through. The mod does have some increases to the damage dealt to your own units when firing into melee. In a lot of cases I find that when I do this I usually end up routing my own unit in the process, though this is more a opportunity cost than actually preventing me from doing it in the first place. Given that the AI will always fire into melee when given the option, we're hesitant to increase this damage too much as the player would have plenty of ways to abuse it. Did you start a fresh campaign? If so, just surprised to see you at Antietam already on a new campaign. That's a lot of UG over the last few days Looking at the screenshots some more, is this the custom/historical battle rather than the campaign? We basically don't touch those at all, so they tend to be all over the place with balance. I'm pretty sure the AI calculates straight line distance for charges rather than pathing distance. That's probably not something I'll be able to change though. Which is unfortunate because there is a lot we could do if I we were able to check pathing and terrain between the unit and a target. If this was the historical battle, definitely give the campaign a shot. Some fun surprises in the battles up to Antietam. Either way, definitely try lowering the those charge values a little bit and see if that gets behavior closer to what you are looking for.

These are modifiers to the max range that units can charge. Note that units do not all have exactly the same default max range. It varies a bit through some formula I haven't gotten around to figuring out. In general in the mod you should very rarely ever see units charging much further than from 500-700 distance. In my experience the upper end usually only occurs when fortifications or impassable terrain are involved, as these do weird things to the distance calculations. This is most likely what happened in your second screenshot. This setting enabled custom chain charges logic for the mod. This increases the chance that ai units charge when a charging friendly unit is nearby. It will never be perfect but it increases the chances that the ai will make a coordinated charge with a better chance of overwhelming the player. This tends to be more effective on higher difficulties where the AI has more experienced units. From your screenshots you have mostly 2 and 3 star units facing mostly 1 and a few 2* units. In this scenario the AI is unlikely to be very aggressive and will probably only charge sporadically. Switching to a higher difficulty or using the config files to increase the ai's experience would probably help here. I can't tell for sure from the screenshots but it looks like you haven't yet switched over to the new version that just came out? Quite a few changes in there that should increase the challenge including a small reduction in charge distance along with other changes that will make them more effective. Best results when starting a new campaign though.

Interesting optimization, if training weren't already getting nerfed that would certainly convince me that it needed to be

Thanks for the report, will fix once I get to that one in the battle rework.

Morale damage is directly related to damage dealt to the unit. If you are flanking or rear flanking the damage increases slightly and the morale damage increases significantly, but the base amount of damage still matters. The easiest example I can think of is putting a detached skirmisher on an enemy flank compared to a full unit. The detached will slowly degrade the morale, but an actual unit will deal significantly more. Stacking reload potentially improves your sustained dps if you can get off extra volleys, but in terms of spike damage accuracy nearly always wins. Higher spike damage also becomes important in terms of bypassing the morale damage resistance to actually force a unit to rout as well. One of the problems with stacking reload speed is you eventually come up against the limitation of aiming and volley time, as those can't be reduced and the only way to increase the damage dealt during the volley is through accuracy.

In general the damage modifiers are all ordered such that there is no particular benefit to one or the other. In the current version the only advantage of stacking an excess of cover is it allows you to turn far more of the map into 100% cover. I'm not sure if it's possible to stack enough to turn open ground into 100% though. This should be a more relevant stat in the next version.

A units cover is capped at 100%. Modifiers to a unit's cover stat can go above 100% because those apply to the base amount of cover provided by terrain. So if you had +150% to cover this would do little to nothing in dense woods, but would be very useful on open ground. Cover values will be getting changed up in the next version so that cover perks are more generally useful. Modifiers do have a set order, but I can't think of any case where the order matters to any decision making. I haven't written those up anywhere as it's spread across multiple areas so it'd be somewhat time intensive to put together. Is there something in particular you were concerned about with the calculation?

Which day? I think the full first corps only shows up on day 3.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out how to get ai units to do this. Seems like it should be trivial given that routing and shattered units can, but has proven a difficult technical challenge. Easiest way to deal with units at the map edge is to give them more space and not go into melee. This lets them bounce around a bit which avoids the worst of the issues. As we are reworking battles we're removing many of the instances where catching units at the map edge comes up.

You would need to use a program like dnspy to open the assembly-csharp.dll included with the mod download. That program decompiles the dll so you can search for the class names.

Have to go through camp, between days in multiday battles works. It doesn't in any meaningful way because there are so many layers of modifiers between the base damage and final damage dealt in a given frame. There is no miss chance. Base damage is rolled, modified by cover, stats, perks, distance to target, number of men, unit type, shot type, etc. If total damage dealt ends at > 0 you'll see hp go down. All else being equal the 4.5-7 is always better because it will on average deal more damage.

Theoretically possible yes, but I have no idea where they are or how to locate them. Any time adjustments I do are through the editing the dll where I can adjust them by phase of a battle. So anything more specific than adjusting the config values as you go would require using dnspy or something similar.

They will gradually get better throughout the campaign, exact stats change based on the current timeline. There are not good ways to achieve this currently. If the AI is significantly weaker in size and especially veterancy then it will get very passive. But both of those methods also result in the player being able to easily steamroll the AI without any tactics. There are different general AI's assigned to different phases of battles. Unfortunately we currently can't assign those and only know which ones are used in certain places. So while something silly like making every single AI insanely aggressive(actively hunt for you if you are hidden no matter what) is possible, anything more granular is not. That accidentally got included in a patch once, no one could make it past the opening battles. In general, I'm relatively opposed to making the AI more passive. While it does make certain attack battles easier, we have plenty examples of battles where the AI is completely passive. Those just turn into the player slowly picking the AI apart one unit at a time while the AI stares around blankly. The nuance in decision making that is needed just isn't really possible here. Another option is to severely limit the player with timers to prevent the player having time to bait out the AI, but that approach doesn't tend to be well received. In the next version I'm trying to find a decent balance between enough time to do what is needed, but not enough to take a very low casualty approach. Though I'm also balancing that against legendary, so on lower difficulties better results will definitely be possible.

Charge speed would need to be changed in the dll. GOAP.Action.Move is the class, UpdateSpeed is the method. Unit base speeds are in GOAP.UnitModel in the BaseSpeed method. spriteSpeedMultiplier modifies the speed that the individual sprites move in certain scenarios. Basically they get accelerated to try to catch up with the unit center sometimes. I was experimenting with this to try to improve cavalry sprite behavior but it didn't end up working. Feel free to post any localized files, I can include them in the next version and credit you if you would like. There are some bugs around how that is working currently. Will be fixed in the next version.

Sorry, missed the question here. The timers are using an internal value that is related to the current frame. I don't have anything exact on this though.

This is an excellent overview of the common config options as well as a summary of the career point changes and unit perk options.

That unfortunately involves hex editing. An example from the base game is linked https://www.dropbox.com/s/4zqo03letdgpkvk/AOGuide.png?dl=0 The offsets will be different in the mods asset file since we've recompiled it to make sprite changes.

The Henry appears in small numbers relatively early on in the campaign. The store stocks reset after every major battle, so some weapons have to be bought up over time before you have enough to use them. I don't think anyone has documented the amounts of weapons available after each battle.

This is already possible in the base game. In the main menu under options you can remap the standard controls.

All artillery move the same speed, limbered or not. Pushing up for canister with cheap artillery can work, I don't usually play that way so I don't have specifics to share though.

On day 2, you either want to just end the day with the two VPs you start next to, or capture all VPs along the Lafayette road. The victory conditions are a bit weird so you will lose if you only have some of the Lafayette road VPs. If you only hold your two starting VPs at the end of the day you'll go to day 3, where the union gets minimal reinforcements and another easy to take VP be ones available. If you're having trouble with the battle, I'd recommend defending south of the two starting VPs. You only have to hold them at the very end of the day, no need to have them the entire time. This means you can defend in cover while the union attacks you in the open which makes the battle much easier.