Does the Ai Army size scale with you?

[dagdriver]

The problem is that the campaign is on rails, and that winning decisevely battle after battle doesnt end the war, but merely forces you through battles with an enemy magically getting strengthend according to the players strength.

IMO the aim of the campaign should be to win the war, that being as fast as possible, or with as few casualties as possible.

(disclaimer, I have not played this game, only seen videos and read comments and discussions on this board, if I have misunderstood something - sorry!)

 

[LongstreetJohnson]

On 22.11.2016 at 4:45 PM, dagdriver said:

The problem is that the campaign is on rails, and that winning decisevely battle after battle doesnt end the war, but merely forces you through battles with an enemy magically getting strengthend according to the players strength.

IMO the aim of the campaign should be to win the war, that being as fast as possible, or with as few casualties as possible.

(disclaimer, I have not played this game, only seen videos and read comments and discussions on this board, if I have misunderstood something - sorry!)

 

You didnt misunderstand. I feel the same way, i dont necissarily want too end it as fast as possible.

As it stands now it is a series of battles where the ratio of the opposing forces is somewhat set no matter what you do.

What you can control is army composition.

I lost all my drive in playing this game the more i discussed the topic.  

If you are a casual player wich love hard battles win or loose and dont care much what the enemy has, you are going to have a great time.

If you are like me who can sit for hours in the camp screen and micromanage, play a battle again just because i made some bad decisions too preserve men.

Then you are going to realise it doesnt matter in the big picture, only in terms of flavor and roleplaying.

 

They need to find a middle ground/some other way to balance this.

As i wrote before it all comes down to how big a portion of the player base feel this way. 

I think most players are just happy fidling away in the camp screen, and dont care that it is for (almost) nothing ,and that the raw numbers and equipment will be the same anyways.

 

[Don't Escrow Taxes]

10 minutes ago, LongstreetJohnson said:

If you are like me who can sit for hours in the camp screen and micromanage, play a battle again just because i made some bad decisions too preserve men.

Then you are going to realise it doesnt matter in the big picture, only in terms of flavor and roleplaying.

 

They need to find a middle ground/some other way to balance this.

As i wrote before it all comes down to how big a portion of the player base feel this way. 

I think most players are just happy fidling away in the camp screen, and dont care that it is for (almost) nothing ,and that the raw numbers and equipment will be the same anyways.

I am with you on this 100%.  

[Koro]

Some guy on the forum arrived at Antietam with 42.000 men and I arrived there with 102.000 men. If the AI has a fixed number or even a varied number of men there within limits that is random, one of is either going to have an impossible mission or a complete walkover. It's a crutch the game has to have as far as I can tell due to it's design without a dynamic campaign map. In Total War, the AI cheats by spawning more men and not paying upkeep to be able to challenge the player but I've seen few complaints about that - that is Total War's crutch.

Here, the crutch is different but still there.

The alternatives I can think of are not much better. It would involve something like fixing a number that the player must have at each battle, perhaps with some variety. Never letting you grow large armies and play larger battles than before. So you'd always have 80.000 troops against 50.000 at Antietam f.x. This would be boring and stale.

So take your pick :). If you've got any suggestions on how the game could otherwise handle a large variance in the army numbers of players at the same stage, then I'd love to hear it.

 

[LongstreetJohnson]

41 minutes ago, Koro said:

 

So take your pick :). If you've got any suggestions on how the game could otherwise handle a large variance in the army numbers of players at the same stage, then I'd love to hear it.

 

I had one suggestion where concecutive battles also attritioned the AI, but when you play in another theatre/date its reinforced . 

Also i cant remember who, but one guy talked about maybe a manpower pool? 

Make it harder to create a huge army for the player.

i dont know. i wont spend all day contemplating it either. Im not trying to start any fires , right now im just answering people in the thread i started.

 

[Koro]

Yes, I talked about the man power pool :).

I would still prefer being challenged throughout the campaign rather than the AI running out of men though 

[Don't Escrow Taxes]

10 minutes ago, Koro said:

Yes, I talked about the man power pool :).

I would still prefer being challenged throughout the campaign rather than the AI running out of men though 

I thought about this a lot and i remember a mechanic the game PTO (Pacific Theater of Operations, an on Koei title) had, with GNP . GNP basically made everything easier (or harder) - in the context of UG:CW here is how I would see it working.  If one side is really whipping the other in the campaign, the armies would still scale to each other, but that extra recruitment to fill lost men would put pressure on the overall economy.  Perhaps veterans and guns would be more (or less) expensive, in the context of UG:CW

Edited November 24, 2016 by Don't Escrow Taxes

[Hitorishizuka]

On 11/23/2016 at 1:23 PM, Koro said:

Some guy on the forum arrived at Antietam with 42.000 men and I arrived there with 102.000 men. If the AI has a fixed number or even a varied number of men there within limits that is random, one of is either going to have an impossible mission or a complete walkover.

 

IMO that's basically the point of a campaign. If you husbanded your army correctly and have a huge army by the end of the campaign, you should be able to walk over the enemy. And yes, that should probably tie into a more dynamic campaign where if you achieve full victory enough you can short circuit large parts of the campaign and end things early. And early on, a commander who focuses on Army Org should have an advantage over one who did something else as opposed to have actually just made the game harder for themselves.

 

 

[JJPettigrew]

from my point of view the campaign is not designed as an strategic/operational game  we leading the war , but a tour of duty of our force through the war, testing our tactical skill. To that end I like IA being able to keep pace not making dull the rest of the war after some early succeses (unavoidable against any IA that does not cheat) .

[dowdpride]

I think the ai could handle it just fine so long as they had an larger pool of manpower and cash than the player, especially depending on difficulties. it wouldnt make it that much different balance wise from now, except the union could magically replenish 4 veteran units back to three stars in the span of one battle, despite 3 of those units surrendering the battle before. 

[Hitorishizuka]

Attempting to staff up the Union side for 2nd Bull Run and I wanted to cry when I looked at the Deploy screen. 4 Corps, 20 Brigades/Corps? Umm...yeah, I got my AO high enough, but I'm way, way, way short on funds to actually equip that many brigades. (And the store just ran out of 1842 Springfields, so that's fun too.)

Eyeing my reputation right now and thinking how much I can get away with burning in order to just get rifles, sheesh.

And naturally I don't have any points in recon so I can't check what my efforts are doing to the enemy scaling.

Edited November 26, 2016 by Hitorishizuka

[Koro]

4 hours ago, Hitorishizuka said:

Attempting to staff up the Union side for 2nd Bull Run and I wanted to cry when I looked at the Deploy screen. 4 Corps, 20 Brigades/Corps? Umm...yeah, I got my AO high enough, but I'm way, way, way short on funds to actually equip that many brigades. (And the store just ran out of 1842 Springfields, so that's fun too.)

Eyeing my reputation right now and thinking how much I can get away with burning in order to just get rifles, sheesh.

And naturally I don't have any points in recon so I can't check what my efforts are doing to the enemy scaling.

The deployment is misleading. You only need to bring two corps. 

[Thorn438]

Could not agree with LongstreetJohnson more. The battlefield game play is really good, but without the consequences of your victories (or defeats) affecting future events (supplies, weapons, manpower, etc.), there is no point to fighting battles in any way other than using half of your troops as cannon fodder to complete your objectives.

[bonsainut]

On 11/22/2016 at 7:45 AM, dagdriver said:

The problem is that the campaign is on rails, and that winning decisevely battle after battle doesnt end the war, but merely forces you through battles with an enemy magically getting strengthend according to the players strength.

Yes and this is the problem I am having...

It isn't playing like a strategy game at all.  Win/lose/draw you will still fight the same battles.  There is no strategic game play whatsoever.

And so the game comes down to being as conservative as possible (tactically) so that you save resources so that you can increase your army strength faster than the AI scaling (whatever that is).  From that perspective, the game is starting to feel very uni-dimensional (after 20 hours).

I just played Shiloh for the first time (as the Union) and even though I had 8 brigades in 2 divisions, the AI only game me four for the first phase of battle - two 1000 man infantry and two 300 man artillery.  Objective: protect Shiloh Church.  Ok.... well this is going to be interesting.  Encamp my two brigades on a creek bank in the best possible cover with skirmishers forward and on the flanks... when the AI advances a 300 man cavalry unit that outnumbers my skirmishers by more than 2 to 1.  So I pull back my skirmishers... and here they come - wave after wave of infantry, over 9000 strong.  No strategy - no flanking - they just charge straight ahead into melee one after the other - outnumbering me by more than four to one.

This was normal difficulty, after winning every single battle prior to Shiloh.  What the heck is going on? 

And if the AI simply scales based on your Army size and strength, where is the rationale for having smaller optional battles prior to a larger one?  I would think the purpose would be for you to fight the optional battles to gain resources so you could win the larger battle... but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Edited November 26, 2016 by bonsainut

[bonsainut]

So out of curiosity, I replayed Shiloh to see how it scaled.  I doubled my forces to 16 brigades...

First phase (Shiloh Church) the AI let me have 4000 infantry, 300 artillery, and 1 general to start (an increase of 2000 troops from when I started with 8 brigades).  Halfway through I was reinforced with 300 additional artillery and 1 additional general.  No supply wagon entire battle - and I was running low on ammo by the end.

The AI, instead of attacking with 9000 troops, "scaled" and attacked with 16,500, with at least two units of cavalry and at least four units of artillery - plus at least one supply wagon.  So the odds were 4 to 1 on the infantry, and 2 to 1 on cav and artillery.

Second phase (camp), was even worse.  AI started me with 5000 infantry, 300 artillery, and 300 cav - no general, no supply wagon.  Halfway through the battle I was reinforced with 300 artillery, 1000 infantry, one supply wagon.  These were all green troops I had just purchased for this battle.

The AI scaled and attacked with 20,000 troops, 500 cav, and at least 4 units of artillery and supply wagons.  At least three enemy generals.

The final phase (Hornet's Nest) was a joke with a final reinforcement of 1000 infantry (one unit) and one supply wagon.  I missed one unit somewhere, but it is close enough to get an idea of what is going on.

So it appears on "normal" difficulty, the AI is scaling to at least 4 to 1 odds on the infantry.  It seems strange (given what we know of the history of the Civil War) that I am marching 1000 unit full Union brigades while having to fight off waves of 2500 unit Confederate brigades... particularly after winning all the battles in the campaign to this point.

Because of the way the game has been designed (almost more as an RTS than a wargame/strategy game) it is really critical for them to get this game balance right, because it represents the core of the game.

 

Edited November 27, 2016 by bonsainut

[Hitorishizuka]

22 hours ago, Koro said:

The deployment is misleading. You only need to bring two corps. 

As I found out afterwards, only if you can win fast, at least. If you got bogged down and the game started bringing in more and more reinforcements then those extra Corps would actually matter. Thankfully, I was able to push in and take the point for the early end shortly after the first timer (right as CSA reinforcements seemed to be hitting the field) so it didn't matter. I ended up staffing up 3 Corps and ignoring the Reserve.

3 hours ago, bonsainut said:

Yes and this is the problem I am having...

It isn't playing like a strategy game at all.  Win/lose/draw you will still fight the same battles.  There is no strategic game play whatsoever.

And so the game comes down to being as conservative as possible (tactically) so that you save resources so that you can increase your army strength faster than the AI scaling (whatever that is).  From that perspective, the game is starting to feel very uni-dimensional (after 20 hours).

I just played Shiloh for the first time (as the Union) and even though I had 8 brigades in 2 divisions, the AI only game me four for the first phase of battle - two 1000 man infantry and two 300 man artillery.  Objective: protect Shiloh Church.  Ok.... well this is going to be interesting.  Encamp my two brigades on a creek bank in the best possible cover with skirmishers forward and on the flanks... when the AI advances a 300 man cavalry unit that outnumbers my skirmishers by more than 2 to 1.  So I pull back my skirmishers... and here they come - wave after wave of infantry, over 9000 strong.  No strategy - no flanking - they just charge straight ahead into melee one after the other - outnumbering me by more than four to one.

This was normal difficulty, after winning every single battle prior to Shiloh.  What the heck is going on? 

And if the AI simply scales based on your Army size and strength, where is the rationale for having smaller optional battles prior to a larger one?  I would think the purpose would be for you to fight the optional battles to gain resources so you could win the larger battle... but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Smaller battles are there to give you more Career points so you can both afford the necessary AO to meet Grand Battle requirements and to give you basically free funds/manpower to reform your poor limping armies from the last Grand Battle. In your case, what probably happened was your AO was lagging or you had only small Elite brigades in your first division so you had nothing to catch bullets with. It's possible to hold the first point with the cover given, it's the second that's very difficult. Near as we've been able to gather, the AI autoscales based on what you're allowed to bring, but will also only downscale so much.

Edited November 27, 2016 by Hitorishizuka
typo

[karacho]

This reminds me of a really old game Fantasy General.

It had a very nice campain. You had to take care for your units and if you would lose too much you had no chance in the next mission or in the mission after.

It was hard, but also really rewarding. I had to play the campain a few times from the beginning to get finnaly to the end. I learned a lot :-)

 

Edit: I add a link to a nice campain report that is resulting and only possible if you have no scaling army AI.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/351373

Edited November 28, 2016 by karacho

[LePanzer]

I think this is a realy bad idea, this is not a strategic game, i mean i won all the batles till siloh 40k vs my 20k. The scaling should not be presents come on. 

[Grognard_JC]

I have to take back my earliest points.

 

It's my third run as CSA and I went FULL VETERANCY, while tryning to maintain my army as small as possible. This makes the game way way easier.

 

My conclusion is that the perk system in the game has not been built acknowledging the impact of army scaling. It looks like they've been put in the game independently, while they should work together. This is a huge flaw IMO.

[LePanzer]

Can you give me tips Grognard, how to deal with this army scaling

[LongstreetJohnson]

On 19.11.2016 at 11:37 AM, LongstreetJohnson said:

 

The most viable strategy with scaling is to keep your corps as small and elite as possible. Wich i believe is not the devs intention, everyting else will be from a roleplay point of view and not the drive to win. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Grognard_JC said:

I have to take back my earliest points.

 

It's my third run as CSA and I went FULL VETERANCY, while tryning to maintain my army as small as possible. This makes the game way way easier.

 

My conclusion is that the perk system in the game has not been built acknowledging the impact of army scaling. It looks like they've been put in the game independently, while they should work together. This is a huge flaw IMO.

Its been good to have you in the thread as a drive to counter some of the points regarding negativity around scaling, it makes it a discussion not just a wall of complaints.

But at the same time i am glad that you also identify this as a problem now. 

[bonsainut]

3 hours ago, LongstreetJohnson said:

 

Its been good to have you in the thread as a drive to counter some of the points regarding negativity around scaling, it makes it a discussion not just a wall of complaints.

I don't think calling peoples' valid feedback "a wall of complaints" is particularly constructive.  If you look at the Steam feedback on this game, you have people rage-quitting and giving the game the lowest possible feedback score because of this very issue.

The way the designers designed this game, it is more about learning how to "game the system" than about playing the game well.  Right now because the game scales to the number of troops, but ignores the quality of those troops... you are better off having fewer, more veteran troops with better gear.  That has nothing to do with your skills as a gamer - and everything to do with a one-dimensional game balancing system.

When you have a strategy game that balances content difficulty based on how well you have played the game to that point you have to be REALLY careful that you have not just killed the entire reason for playing the game well.

In my personal opinion, because this game is a set-piece series of encounters, you would be better off having fixed encounter difficulty throughout that assumes a certain level of unit/Army development and progression.  Want to win?  You have to play the game better than "average" and conserve your resources.  Find the game too easy?  Dial up the difficulty slider. 

Nothing worse than destroying the enemy in one battle... and the next battle you find they are twice as strong because you beat them so badly and got too many resources for the next fight(?) What?

If you are worried about people "steam-rolling" the content, you haven't made it hard enough.  Additionally, there are tons of ways you could cap how quickly someone's Army could grow without breaking the system.  You could limit the numbers of veterans available, for example, or put constraints on how quickly you can unlock higher levels of perks and training, so that as long as you stayed within 110% (or whatever) of progression the cost would be reasonable, but increasing beyond that point and the costs become prohibitive.

 

[Hitorishizuka]

2 hours ago, bonsainut said:

If you are worried about people "steam-rolling" the content, you haven't made it hard enough.  Additionally, there are tons of ways you could cap how quickly someone's Army could grow without breaking the system.  You could limit the numbers of veterans available, for example, or put constraints on how quickly you can unlock higher levels of perks and training, so that as long as you stayed within 110% (or whatever) of progression the cost would be reasonable, but increasing beyond that point and the costs become prohibitive.

 

An alternate solution might simply be to remove Army Organization as a stat and instead just flat out give the player army size increases every so often that match dev expectations. Combine that with fixed enemy size amounts for each battle. Then it's on the player to staff up to the necessary size moving forward however they choose. They either have managed to have a core of vets from winning past battles or they've got masses of rookies and have a hard fight ahead.

---

As a side note, it should also be noted that in the current system making an effort to rear flank enemy units in order to capture them (as opposed to overwhelming from the front to shatter or just letting them rout from fire near the end of a battle) is pretty worthless compared to the risk to your flanking units. Getting captives, which you only got at increased risk, for manpower which is completely useless. I don't think anyone is really at risk of running out of manpower compared to money for veterans given the way you currently want to not grow your army mindlessly because of scaling.

[LongstreetJohnson]

10 hours ago, bonsainut said:

I don't think calling peoples' valid feedback "a wall of complaints" is particularly constructive.

 

This is not how my comment was intended too be perceived. Was to highlight the importance of having two sides on a matter. 

 Thank you for your detailed and tought trough feedback on the subject.

[Grognard_JC]

I finished my 3rd run as the CSA.

 

10 veterancy perks, 8 Medicine (and 1 reco I suppose). Always tried to keep my army as small in corps as possible. Corps 1 being elite stuff of infantry/cavalry/artillery Corps 2 being only infantry and lot of canons (the goal of this corps is defensive - the anvil). For Antientam I was obliged to develop a 3rd Corps : which was completely newb.

This campaign was way easier than the 2 previous one (1st : logistic, army org, politics, economy... Chaotic choices / 2nd campaign : Politics and Army organisation)

(You really need to use charge cavalry to win tough. It will buy you canons and muskets for which you'll have no money whatsoever.)

 

 

As the AI scales, and as some perks are clearly less useful than others, I'm going to play my next CSA compaign in REAL full difficulty, that is :

Max perks in reco (which I find pretty useless) and max perks in army organisation. This way, I will have a huge army of very very bad recruits. This will be very very fun against the Union that has an average 2stars/unit from Gaine's Mill on !

Meanwhile, reco will help me realize how strong the ennemy.

I'm not so sure I'll win this time !

Edited November 28, 2016 by Grognard_JC