[Is ammo needed?]

If you are going to add in ammunition depletion, IMO you also have to add in capturing small arms and ammunition from the enemy.  A significant proportion of all CSA arms and ammunition (from small arms right up to artillery and naval vessels) throughout the entire war were captured from the Union, not only through raids but also picked up directly on the battlefield itself.  It was very common for CSA soldiers to pick up higher quality Union weapons right in the middle of battle and use them.  It even got to extreme levels, such as at Petersburg, where CSA soldiers would run out and dig up (under fire) fallen Union shot and unexploded shells to use in their own artillery pieces.  The lesson to this is that soldiers are inventive and will find a way to kill each other.  Ammunition shortages are certainly realistic, but there were many methods of avoiding it or getting around a shortage other than simply getting a supplies from your baggage train.  If you ignore things like that then you're just adding on another layer of fiction under a disguise of historical accuracy.  If you're going to go for realism on ammunition, you might as well go all the way.  Ammunition should stay with fallen soldiers, and that ammunition should be available to any unit, Union or Confederate, that moves over the spot where the soldiers fell.  The same should apply to captured artillery.

 

At the same time, it's stuff like this that makes me urge caution in going too far towards realism.  You can make this a very realistic game, but doing so might make it a pain in the ass to play and might make the AI completely incompetent.  Please remember that one of the reasons we all loved your TW mods so much was because CA consistently did a poor job on its AI.  I would far prefer a challenging and interesting game with less realism than a realistic game that is not challenging.  If you can achieve both, that would be superb, but make sure you can actually do that.

[Is ammo needed?]

I'd love to see ammo as an option to increase realism, but I also see the risk of having it cause problems with the gameplay.  Ammo and supply depletion in general are of massive importance to campaign movements and multi-battle chains.  However, the reality is that lack of ammo was a less significant issue in any individual battle, and it did not play any significant part at Gettysburg.  People can cite Little Round Top all they want, but it was still the exception to the rule and, at the end of the day, even there they didn't actually run out.  Plus, the hilarious part of that example is that, by modern gameplay-supply standards, the units on Little Round Top should have had a perfectly intact supply line with ammo flowing to them.  In order to properly simulate Little Round Top, you'd have to have units run out of ammo simply due to being involved in heavy combat, even though there is a protected supply line from their rear to the army's supply dump.  I think that adding in a system like that would actually result in units running low on ammo far more often than actually occurred historically.

 

Is it possible to add in ammo, but then have a gameplay settings checkbox where people can turn it off if they prefer to play with unlimited?