chemical_art
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Posts posted by chemical_art
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A very excellent post.
I wonder if there are curves where increased unit levels eventually overcome the most efficient number for fire damage. For example if a full 50 gun battery churns out more total damage, or if a 1k cav or 4k infantry group, etc. They certainly have other benefits such as being much more sturdy but I still wonder.
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15 minutes ago, limith said:
So for Training in campaign, the tooltip says + stats for rookies, but I don't see the tooltip changing the stats my rookies have even after putting in 2 points of career points into it. Does it only affect manpower gained AFTER I invest points into it? In which case it's useless since I'm sitting on a stockpile of 100k troops which I can't use since I a) don't have army slots and b) don't have weapons in the armory I can buy to use 100k. A few extra points in training later on wouldn't have an impact then, I should have maxed training first then or something.
I can't speak if it actually occurs on that day, but I assure you that it does increase the starting values. Once high enough it will raise your unit stats so they start with one star, which means they don't need a battle to be bloodied. This does save a lot of men and money, and makes medicine less important. I agree medicine is a contender to bottom two stats right now in power, it needs a second perk of some sort like logistics and recon does right now.
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2 hours ago, pandakraut said:
I think the range perks are the best selection in basically all cases currently. Since they all come with +accuracy as well they give you everything you need. I hear speed and reload can be very good as well depending on play style. Currently I feel like there is little reason to take the non generic accuracy damage bonuses.
I go with range for the first perk, but that is because it has accuracy too iirc. It would be a more difficult choice if it was an either/or situation.
For the second perk, I actually go with shell damage. For me it is relatively uncommon to actually use canister, and that additional range is circumstantial while the damage boost is common.
Don't have 3 star artillery, can't comment on that.
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2 hours ago, killjoy1941 said:
I'm well aware of that as well as just how obnoxious you can make dedicated skirmishers with the mod.
I'm simply saying it's become a much, much tighter game with the combination of the removal of dedicated skirmishers and the change to charge range.
There are five factors at work here:
- The AI is generally less interested in chasing skirmishers.
- Your skirmishers are fewer and a finite resource.
- You have fewer infantry brigades.
- The accuracy perks for your generals are less effective.
- Your artillery is less deadly.
The bottom line is there is far less room for mistakes than ever before, which puts Shiloh in particular into the "play it perfectly" category.
I will agree with everything you say.
But a mod that provides greater depth, greater room for success or error, but demands an overall higher quality of skill is not per se an absolute no no. It is up for the creators to decide if that is the direction to go with. I will say to pursue that approach requires an insane demand for quality...but they are the only mod in the market right now. So their word is pretty important 😉.
I speak frankly toward all modders, for I have spent 2/3rds of my life doing it. In my earliest days I made mods just for me, tailoring a game to my taste. I will always thus encourage any modder to pursue what they want. They ultimately sacrifice the most time making the mod. It requires a unique passion, purely for pleasure.
For this mod, I deliberately went down a difficulty value. I thus get the experience I expect. I am not good at early game..so I need to accept the easier difficulty. Sure, I am not always pressed to the absolute limit...but I see the rewards of me doing well. So I have fun.
Still, all data is valuable. All of it, as long as it is explained clearly, preferably with saved games. Saved games are really the gold standard for testing, just because so much already is in flux. Save often. You should be doing that anyways.
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17 minutes ago, killjoy1941 said:
Yeah, it's really just getting past Shiloh. I was already starting to transition to dedicated skirmishers before the change because for actual scouting they can become nearly impossible to spot later on with the right perks. As above, they simply don't have the resilience that detachable skirmishers do, so it introduces a surprising amount of brittleness to your army if you're defending and heavily outnumbered.
That is why I recommend the perk for cover and speed. With both, 200 skirmishers give the durability of 350 detached ones. Remember that in this mod perks are king, and detached skirmishers come with no perks. Even if the home unit has 3 stars, detached ones have none. Detached skirmishers would be routed/broken by 2 star melee from either cav or melee specialists in this mod, because they run twice as fast and have twice the charge value in a worst case. They would just be as brittle, since they have no accuracy , reload, or cover bonuses either. So in early game the detached behavior is superior, but by mid game and later it would not.
To put it in other words, this mod makes early game much more difficult, but soothes the middle and late game. Find a way to push through, it does get better.
Shilo is by far the hardest battle I had so to fight so far as I approach Cold Harbor. If you can somehow not be wiped, you can have breathing room.
If I had to chime in on difficulty modding, I would say ease the path to Shilo for now. The mod has an uneven difficulty curve, in that early game is actually a bit harder then mid game. Once the mod develops things could be finer tuned, but I feel the mod due to the nature of perks hardest early game.
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1 hour ago, killjoy1941 said:
Now you have to play a very delicate dance, which I prefer. The downside is the lack of detached skirmishers, so you're flirting with disaster if you don't micro them very carefully.
This is true, but it eases considerably once you get both economy and training to level 5ish. Once you do that, you aquire captains and later majors cheaply, and you can train 1 star skirmishers from scratch (they start with one star). One star skirmishers are vastly better then old detached ones because they get a perk. It is true the unit can break relatively easily compared to standard infantry, but the perk that gives speed and cover will make them very, very hardy. And even if they do break you lose perhaps 75 - 125 skirmishers and a captain/major? If you give them fairly standard equipment then the lost is not that significant. I regularly lose a two or three of 1 star skirmishers in a major battle, and it is really chump change in the grand scheme of things. Occasionally the officers live long enough to get their silver (Lt. Col) and then and shipped off to standard infantry as a bonus.
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Oh wow that is a lot! When I did mine a few versions ago I faced half that number at Philippi, so I wonder what has changed...
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14 hours ago, madmatg said:
definitely feeling the burn on the ammo at 2nd bull run haha ammo has run out with 3.5 hours to go haha, hope I can hold out!
Yes logistics is really a thing! It is for that reason I keep a 4, that extra ammo really comes in handy for me.
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12 hours ago, killjoy1941 said:
Sorry, I should've said infantry-heavy focus, as in using a lot of infantry brigades. I think the organizational aspect is probably only valid through Fredericksburg, since after that I nearly always have a significant recruit surplus. That discourages disbanding. Instead, I usually keep an open corps with one or two incidental division commanders for brigade and division shuffling.
Good point about the skirmishers, though. I hadn't thought of that.
Gotcha. I only keep a minimal amount of Army organization, in that for a major battle my corps can field enough units to take advantage of slots. As a result I do not have a spare corp slot for shuffling so I have to get creative in my methods. I enjoy how they are multiple solutions to manage the shuffling challenge.
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3 hours ago, killjoy1941 said:
Ah...
It's great for a heavy infantry focus, so I might try to break the mod with it later since infantry is my thing, but I'm still trying to see what I can break with artillery.
It actually is cool for more then just heavy infantry. Being able to create and shred 1 star units at will makes for easier strategic shuffling. It has been said that the life expectancy for officers skirmishers are low and I agree. But when majors are cheap and plentiful and I can create (and disband) adequate skirmishers at will the result is that I can still recreate the disposable nature of detached skirmishers. This principle could even be extended to any unit: Being able to reorganize units on the fly as slot conditions change eases many problems.
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Yes the intelligence numbers regarding army size on the battle select screen are mostly meaningless, although the concepts behind the scenes are still valid. The equipment and training values are still valid though. The value given after you select a battle is correct, but only for an early phase of the battle. Recon 4 naturally gives you the exact number on the field.
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1 minute ago, pandakraut said:
Spotting changes in the mod are only for the player. Sometimes you can get in a scenario where a unit will flip in and out of cover. If a unit triggers its firing animation that will continue even if you immediately stealth again.
I have had situations where players units will fire into the shroud because they autotargeted the nearest unit. I don't think it is the mod in particular, just the nature of the AI autotargeting logic.
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1 hour ago, drhay53 said:
Would love to hear some thoughts on 2-3 infantry builds that people have in mind. They're a little less obvious to me. It seems to me like it's generally better to have infantry be 'pretty good' at everything, otherwise the micro needed might get in the way of fun for me.
Two kinds of infantry for me:
Charging infantry:
-Stacks speed and charging bonus combined with weapons that have high melee values. The objective is land control in pushing enemy units away with a single grand charge. 1v1 they will come out on top despite long odds, and if two or three charge from two directions they can overrun several artillery batteries at once.
-They start with muskets and so are cheap and plentiful, but by mid game they have to move on to rifles to at least give some fire aid which in turns makes them much more difficult to maintain the high melee values.
-They move from being 1:1 ratio to 1:2 ratio due to this.
Fire infantry:
-Stacks accuracy to the extreme, at two stars they can fire outside of effective range (425ish) and still deliver grievous damage. In cover they can only be removed by charging units.
-Rifles aim for either high damage or high reload speeds at the cost of melee strength. Vulnerable to a charge since they lack speed bonuses although a general with lives in the saddle can mitigate a lot of this.
-They start difficult to form but by mid game are easy to maintain and form a larger portion of forces.
These two classes can be mixed and matched in pairs and complement each other well, so it isn't absolutely necessary to micro them. Pairs of charging infantry can still do the fire role using their speed to flank and pairs of fire groups can hold ground with one counter charging will the other fires into the scrum. One of each class naturally allows fire infantry to soften up the enemy with the charging unit securing terrain advantage.
Maneuver infantry:
This is a theorycraft unit. If accuracy perks get nerfed then reload speed can become more important for smaller units. If this happens then maneuver focus can become more important at 2 stars. These units would thus become hybrid units, able to move and shoot fast, kind of like meatier skirmishers. One caveat of this class is that the units would need to stay small because as units get larger reload speed falls off due to longer volleys. With the current meta it is often better to just pick up some skirmishers and shove the saved men and guns to beef up proper infantry. However if a unit is planned on being three stars as a commando 750ish unit then this concept might shine.
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On 6/6/2018 at 5:57 PM, pandakraut said:
Most rifles have melee values around 65 though they are some specialized rifles with higher values.
I do not know if this was intentional or not, but a very cool thing about this mod is that logistics is important due to this fact. At the start of the campaign units might be given melee perks because muskets are cheap. But things turn around eventually and suddenly a melee unit is a fragile creature, needing special "rifles" that have better melee stats which are not common nor cheap. Melee units may need extra special care on the strategic level to give them rifles with good melee values, but you as a leader have to accommodate them. Why? Because there will always be a time where you need to send 2k hard hitting chargers to:
Take.
The.
Point.
Now.
You can only get enough guns if you invest in logistics. Otherwise, your poor melee chargers will be gimped by their equipment.
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Supply depot is really out of whack on the Union side. Stuart rolls in with 1.5k 3 star melee Calvary which alone is enough to wipe out the entirety of the player's forces, let alone the struggle that it takes up to that point.
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Having completed Fredricksburg as Union, the increased timers combined with slower speeds are starting to become more noticeable. The battle took me the better part of 4 hours, with the last hour me being AFK because I had already accomplished my objectives.
The major battle after, stones river, took about 2 hours with the last hour being AFK. The ability to micro with slower default speed is nice, but it makes battles where as a player you have already won drag on.
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Playing through this mod I am having a great time. The scaling as a few outliers (Shilo to Gaines Mill on Union) but usually it is on point.
Great work 😀
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24 minutes ago, HKO2006 said:
Arty moving speed is slower if it is right click drag a line to move, in other words, right click each arty units will make them move faster. <- figured this out, one arty doesn't have horst arty perk so move slower, other two have so faster.
This is a quirk in general of units with different speeds. It also occurs if you have infantry with different perks and thus different speeds, but the horse perk with its massive speed increase is most noticeable.
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Next video is up! I have no voice (as soon as I get this posted I am going back to the doctor to fix this). But it does a good job of showing how I manage to take ponderously large units and use their strengths to still win and in the process can valuable xp so they are much more effective. Once I get my voice back I promise I will do audio commentary, I have already worked out how to do it.
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Due to the great fun I have with the new J & P rebalance mod I made a video featuring a battle. It is my first video of this and thus does not feature audio commentary (I have no voice due to illness). However, all future videos will feature it and I will explain what's new about the mod as I show the battles.
If you enjoy the video please like and subscribe. I am doing this just for fun and will happily make more if there is interest.
Further down you will see additional videos of mine. Once the next mod patch comes out I will start a new thread and have things much more organized by reserving posts after the first one.
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This would explain why I have not traditionally felt Shilo to be as hard as others have described. I have always gone with "# of units first, then fill" attitude, so this would benefit me a lot compared to someone who used a smaller number of units
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The spotting bonus from recon is beneficial and can ease many battles with more time for positioning. Just 4 points makes a large difference in the big picture. Also knowing when the perfect time to counter attack is one less guess to make. In addition every once in a while you get a free volley because you are aware of the enemy presence and they are not.
It would seem one would need to invest in either 2-4 recon or skirmishers (of literally any kind) to get the most common bonus spotting range of 1000 totalish. Dedicated micro and money can get you more stars for your skirmishers so they can get a little more kills for the unit slot they occupy. Or you can burn a career point and have everyone see 50 more. Some strategies benefit much more for more extensive spotting then others but all benefit to at least an extra 200 bonus range I think.
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Excellent to hear on many fronts. Within a few weeks there will be great refinement on what was already a great start.
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Yes i think cav are better then skirmishers right now. Another knock against them is that due to how the weapon stats are set up now skirmishers tire while firing, while infantry hold steady or even ever so slightly can condition while firing (due to how firing occurs and units get larger). However with a bit a of irony i see myself getting a group eventually, those hunter rifles in my armory are free, and it is still rifle range...which meana by the last battle i can have one two star skirmisher group. Ha.
Hidden mechanics and weapon damage degradation
in General Discussions
Posted
Gotcha, although what is base game max unit sizes? Sorry for my ignorance, I want to learn!