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Does the Ai Army size scale with you?


LongstreetJohnson

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That's just hard for you Grognard. It's difficult to justify "balancing hard" when it is supposed to be just that.. Hard. 

Your force is really small though, even for hard and you divided it up in to many smaller brigades rather than in to 2 big corps with a minor corps in support which probably isn't the best way to go on hard. You could complain about that too, but you must max out on all levels and hard and it's simple better to have fewer but larger brigades. Also so you can have bigger brigades in 1 corps and consequently more men, rather than spread them out too much so they'll be active on the field longer at Antietam. Brigades from the 3 corps don't participate until long in to the battle and even if the reinforcements weren't bugged, those would come much later so it would have been much better to put those 13.000 men in to brigades from another corps and stack them up bigger. I'm not sure where you got the notion that more brigades are better rather than fewer but more powerful. 

There is a limit to how far the AI scales down on hard and other difficulties, maybe it's 130.000 on hard or maybe it's just the scaling.. See steam forum for other people who beat hard and even complain about it being too easy now. 48.000 to 130.000 is rather heavy though but again, that is hard mode. If you had had all of your army on the field, it would have been easier anyway, but as I said, you've simply structured your army poorly for hard mode. 

 

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15 hours ago, Koro said:

That's just hard for you Grognard. It's difficult to justify "balancing hard" when it is supposed to be just that.. Hard. 

Your force is really small though, even for hard and you divided it up in to many smaller brigades rather than in to 2 big corps with a minor corps in support which probably isn't the best way to go on hard. You could complain about that too, but you must max out on all levels and hard and it's simple better to have fewer but larger brigades. Also so you can have bigger brigades in 1 corps and consequently more men, rather than spread them out too much so they'll be active on the field longer at Antietam. Brigades from the 3 corps don't participate until long in to the battle and even if the reinforcements weren't bugged, those would come much later so it would have been much better to put those 13.000 men in to brigades from another corps and stack them up bigger. I'm not sure where you got the notion that more brigades are better rather than fewer but more powerful. 

There is a limit to how far the AI scales down on hard and other difficulties, maybe it's 130.000 on hard or maybe it's just the scaling.. See steam forum for other people who beat hard and even complain about it being too easy now. 48.000 to 130.000 is rather heavy though but again, that is hard mode. If you had had all of your army on the field, it would have been easier anyway, but as I said, you've simply structured your army poorly for hard mode. 

 

This is TOTALLY NOT my point Koro.

In this same very thread I complained the campaign as CSA was too easy going with full VETERANCY. I completely crushed the AI at Antientam that way ! (By the way, it only got 75 000 men this time)

SO : This fourth run was a TEST to see how ARMY ORGANIZATION was balanced. It's not well balanced compared to other perks.

 

Imho, ALL perks should weight the same in the campaign. You should get equivalent, but not same benefits from them. My test just proved HOW Army Organization is NOT worth the spending in the current game version.

 

I'm very sad I had to clear my point to you Koro. I thought you'd be among those who'd get the point.

Edited by Grognard_JC
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58 minutes ago, Grognard_JC said:

This is TOTALLY NOT my point Koro.

In this same very thread I complained the campaign as CSA was too easy going with full VETERANCY. I completely crushed the AI at Antientam that way ! (By the way, it only got 75 000 men this time)

SO : This fourth run was a TEST to see how ARMY ORGANIZATION was balanced. It's not well balanced compared to other perks.

 

Imho, ALL perks should weight the same in the campaign. You should get equivalent, but not same benefits from them. My test just proved HOW Army Organization is NOT worth the spending in the current game version.

 

I'm very sad I had to clear my point to you Koro. I thought you'd be among those who'd get the point.

Right, so I missed that it was an experiment. To be fair it's not completely clear.

I still don't see the point. To me, it just looks like you build your army purposefully wrong for the engagement by only having 1.000 sized units that won't stand up to the AI in the long run and spread your units extremely thin also on purpose by spreading them in to 4 corps rather than 3 as you could have. And even then, not putting most of the men in to the two corps that will be engaged for the most of the battle and as Lee did, leave the far right  flank lightly defended to be reinforced by men from the north.

Army organization allows you have a lot of units sure but if you don't have the men to fill it, you've just wasted the career points? That can hardly come as a surprise. You take the career points you need to build the best army and not just go all in on it. Later in game, who knows, 10/10 AO might be useful but having 6 or so at Antietam is plenty to get you through it and allow the army necessary.

All choices can't be equal as such, it's not just a matter of putting them all in to a few categories. 

Recon is not useful though, not past 4 points, that I agree with.

If I missed the point again, I am sorry in advance.

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1 hour ago, Koro said:

Right, so I missed that it was an experiment. To be fair it's not completely clear.

I still don't see the point. To me, it just looks like you build your army purposefully wrong for the engagement by only having 1.000 sized units that won't stand up to the AI in the long run and spread your units extremely thin also on purpose by spreading them in to 4 corps rather than 3 as you could have. And even then, not putting most of the men in to the two corps that will be engaged for the most of the battle and as Lee did, leave the far right  flank lightly defended to be reinforced by men from the north.

Army organization allows you have a lot of units sure but if you don't have the men to fill it, you've just wasted the career points? That can hardly come as a surprise. You take the career points you need to build the best army and not just go all in on it. Later in game, who knows, 10/10 AO might be useful but having 6 or so at Antietam is plenty to get you through it and allow the army necessary.

All choices can't be equal as such, it's not just a matter of putting them all in to a few categories. 

Recon is not useful though, not past 4 points, that I agree with.

If I missed the point again, I am sorry in advance.

It's not purposely wrong built. It's about the possibilities the game gives me about the perks.

If the game was perfect, it should be a very hard choice whenever you'd have to spend 1 perk point, that's all. As you said it, now AO is only about keeping up the pace with the battles getting bigger. So what about disabling AO anyway ? Army scaling screws it altogether.

Last but not least, my experiment shows the army scaling is more about the number of brigades you bring than the number of men you bring. So the worst choice you'd make with army sclaing, in its current state, would be :

  • Not to max each of your regiment
  • to max your number of regiments
  • to max Army Organization

 

Take that ! Koro ! :P

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Another note on maxing brigades being bad--saw an insightful post in another topic about ammo making me realize that problem. The more men you bring, the more guns and the more killing that needs to be done in order to win. However, supply is hardcapped per Corps, which means that in order to have a chance at lasting through the battle, you now need to actually start taking a lot of points in Logistics, yet more career point tax because of artificial limitations and game design.

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Just to flog a dead horse, posting to give an example of what happens when you game the AI auto-scaling and bring bare minimums to avoid triggering it. The AI doesn't have enough of a manpower advantage in multi-stage reinforcement settings to allow them to trigger charges on the offensive and push you out of cover so they get viciously mauled sitting out in the open basically for free. The smaller manpower pool on the field also magnifies the effect of artillery brigades whose size are limited simply by the number of guns available in the shop up to that point. (The two top performers below were given 24pd Napoleons which I had taken care to purchase all shop offerings of up to this point. Even if I had wanted to expand them both past 6 guns I wouldn't really have been able to.) It also makes it far easier to use cavalry to sweep the field because enemy units gets to a small enough range for 750 man Cavalry brigades to run them over trivially much, much faster.

 

Union2_GainesMill_Results.jpg

Union2_GainesMill_Brigades.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

Overall, I like scaling and the addition of dynamic effects, it just needs a tweak. 

My primary concern: There's a constant amount of cover available. If you have a large army, they're more prone to being cut down by virtue of this. You could argue that I should keep them in reserve, but the enemy will scale up with me and attack with full force, which extends the battle lines in all directions.

Secondary concern: I played on hard as CSA starting with .72 patch and I've only accrued 90k CSA troops by the time I get to Stones River. Eventually, finding cover for all those men becomes a problem. I imagine for those on easy difficulty this is more problematic. I've seen a screenshot where the defender had 260k troops at Antietam. I wouldn't know what to do with so many men. 

I like the dynamic effects, especially after the hotfix to cut the bonuses in half, but I don't like that certain side missions reduce enemy weapons quality in the grand battle. That hurts you in the long run, since capturing weapons is a big part of the game, even with this mechanic having been nerfed, it's a leading source of advanced weapons for my army. 

And as I've said in other threads, the AI should have fewer 3 star brigades. It's overkill.

 

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Some points.

I agree it's really frustrating to shoot up an enemy brigade very heavily only to see them magically come back bigger than your own brigades are in the next battle. It's especially galling to lose a lot of veterans and feel like you're really punishing the enemy -- makes it worth it, maybe -- only to see them yet again come back. 

On the other hand, ANV did fight IRL heavily outnumbered, and it would make the game boring by late game. So it seems to me that there should be a mix of a default AI army size (based on the battle) and then an extra % of troops they have depending on how many men they've lost so far. So for example, the Union had 87,000 men at Antietam. In the game give them 50,000 men and then the extra must depend on how many casualties they've taken. If you beat the absolute crap out of them then they will have less, but they will have an absolute "floor" that the game sets for them. 

The other problem is that the casualties seem disproportionate. In my last game, the Union lost 50,000 men at Fredericksburg. In real life the Union lost 12,000 men and this was considered an absolute massacre. I've seen screenshots on this forum where people were able to inflict a staggering number of casualties on an enemy. The casualty rates are too high, and it effects the outcome of the next battle for the player but definitely not for the AI. 

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I agree with the casualty point, but I also feel that it's nearly impossible to solve correctly.  On the attack, human players rarely stop for mercy or realism purposes (also farming xp) so the only solution to solve that on a defending ai would be to have it retreat after a certain percentage of casualties... but then why as a player would I ever play objectives?  Much easier to force casualties under my conditions than to try to take a difficult objective.   

Contrarily, if the ai is attacking you could either program a retreat after casualty percentage... which could lead nanny battles to be super short and disappointing (I barely would have fought Shiloh as the union if the confederates would have retreated at 25% casualties) or attempt to make the AI very cautious and careful... which risks making an ai that doesn't feel challenging because it's too passive. 

 

I'd also like to point out that the troop count numbers going into the battles are very ahistorical as well. 

 

Respectfully, 

Dave

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So after reading this forum and completing my first play-through as the CSA I wanted to add what I thought.

I agree with most of what the OP has said. I find the AI scaling very distasteful. I only lost one minor battle, drawed a second minor battle, and I won every other engagement and yet I was continually outnumbered.by about 1.5-2x on every major battle. Each individual battle was fun and challenging, but the campaign felt wrong. It felt like I was being cheated, which is not fun. I suspected and was disheartened to find that the AI was in fact auto scaled.

The devs have been listening and have implemented some of the changes that have been pushed for (minor battles affecting the Major battles, victories at major battles giving awards for the next major battle) and I feel like these are good steps (especially the minor battle one) but they do not solve the problem of AI scaling. AI scaling still ensures that building and maintaining your army feels worthless because the AI just adjusts to whatever changes you make with your army. It also ruins the immersion of the game in that there are specific strategies which are much better against the AI scaling. These strategies have little or no contextual reason for being so effective and break you from the historical "feel" of the game. This also reduces the replay-ability of the game. I agree with OP that it makes some of the Army Management options useless and/or actually detrimental for no good reason.

Some ideas which have been posted which I thought were good/interesting:

- Desperation meter

- AI manpower limited

I also thought that maybe you could keep AI scaling, as long as it didn't scale with the player. For example, for every engagement, have a preset army size which can be based on historical information. Then scale THIS number based on how the campaign is going (i.e if the AI has lost more battle scale up, if the AI won more battles scale down). The scaling down part is very debatable I will admit.

I am glad this post is still alive as I believe that AI scaling is still a problem.

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Maybe a way to fix scaling and the relative uselessness of Recon would be to make the AI scaling factor inversely proportional to your Recon.  So the higher your Recon level, the less the AI army scales.  This could be justified by saying better Recon allows you to plan for battles with better force ratios in your favor.  Also, maybe higher recon could allow more brigades/corps for battles for much the same reason.

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The aspect of managing my army to make it better than the enemy (sorry Gen. Lee, those people) was the main feature that made me want to play this game. As it currently is I guess I will just play the historical battles and forget the campaign element of the game.

Maybe they could not scale the AI and let the player eventually build an army that wins the war (or loses). At that point, do a reset. Force the player to disband a certain number of brigades or corps (or add recruits and supplies if he lost), the enemy would be reset, and player gets the option to change difficulty levels. Then the player can finish the campaign.

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On 5/1/2017 at 8:33 AM, GeneralPITA said:

Overall, I like scaling and the addition of dynamic effects, it just needs a tweak. 

My primary concern: There's a constant amount of cover available. If you have a large army, they're more prone to being cut down by virtue of this. You could argue that I should keep them in reserve, but the enemy will scale up with me and attack with full force, which extends the battle lines in all directions.

Secondary concern: I played on hard as CSA starting with .72 patch and I've only accrued 90k CSA troops by the time I get to Stones River. Eventually, finding cover for all those men becomes a problem. I imagine for those on easy difficulty this is more problematic. I've seen a screenshot where the defender had 260k troops at Antietam. I wouldn't know what to do with so many men. 

I like the dynamic effects, especially after the hotfix to cut the bonuses in half, but I don't like that certain side missions reduce enemy weapons quality in the grand battle. That hurts you in the long run, since capturing weapons is a big part of the game, even with this mechanic having been nerfed, it's a leading source of advanced weapons for my army. 

And as I've said in other threads, the AI should have fewer 3 star brigades. It's overkill.

 

The 260k must because they are using a trainer. Otherwise this is not achievable. You barely get this many men in rewards and reputation.

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  • 1 month later...

Hi again guys, i have  been away for a while, just wondering wether people still find autoscaling as a problem? I just started a new Union campaign and have inflicted 245 000 casualties on the CSA up until after Fredricksburg, yet they keep coming :) 

 

Im not gonna start up the same discussion again, just curious, wether there has been/going to be any changes regarding, difficulty settings,game mechanics wich adress this.

Any answers are much appriciated thank you.

 

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1 hour ago, Don't Escrow Taxes said:

From where I sit, scaling is necessary to keep the game challenging, and I think the devs made a solid compromise by making the game partially dynamic impacting army size, morale, or weapons quality at grand battles depending on your successes in minor battles. 

I agree. I'm in my new CSA campaign I was playing with min army (2 div per corps, 4 brigades per div - AO 2) up to 2nd Bull Run.

Union army is scaling accordingly, never more than 25k in major battles. Interestingly, that lead to much more 2* and 3* enemy brigades present (almost whole Union army at Malvern Hill was 2* and 3*), with some strange captures (no Springfields 1842, almost all Palmetos and 1855s).

A bit strange (if you compare it to historic troops) but making battles challenging and very fun to play :)

 

Edited by Slobodan
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7 hours ago, Don't Escrow Taxes said:

From where I sit, scaling is necessary to keep the game challenging, and I think the devs made a solid compromise by making the game partially dynamic impacting army size, morale, or weapons quality at grand battles depending on your successes in minor battles. 

Agreed, i have yet to think about any viable alternatives, and despite my rambling about this i think the game offers a fine experience as is.

One suggestion i have is about the scaling in small battles where you can only bring a limited amount of divisions. These battles are extremely easy if you max out a few divisions in one corps, and difficult if you spread your manpower over more corps/divisions, because it scales with your total manpower not the divisions you are bringing. 

I find myself never spending my reserve manpower before these battles, just maxing out the divisions i will use there, since its such an obvious choice.

This could perhaps be fixed with a preset amount, since the numbers wont differ that much in playtroughs.

 

Example mission: 7 divison are allowed, scaling X 0.2 of total manpower

My army :50 000 total

Enemy army: 50 000 X 0,2 = 10 000.

1. My army 50000 men dispersed in divisions of 1800 = 12 600 men to bring               12600 vs 10000

2. My army 50000 men dispersed in divisions of 3000 =  21 000 men to bring               21000 vs 10000

 

 

So it might be a bit to easy to manipulate the game mechanics to your advantage.

I would say a fixed amount is better then the alternative in this scenario, and that you have to use your army compositions as means to break the mission,

and not manipulate it to your advantage. 

It might just be me that "exploits" or thinks about this, but i will post it anyways. :)

 

Thank you for your answers.

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5 hours ago, LongstreetJohnson said:

Agreed, i have yet to think about any viable alternatives, and despite my rambling about this i think the game offers a fine experience as is.

One suggestion i have is about the scaling in small battles where you can only bring a limited amount of divisions. These battles are extremely easy if you max out a few divisions in one corps, and difficult if you spread your manpower over more corps/divisions, because it scales with your total manpower not the divisions you are bringing. 

I find myself never spending my reserve manpower before these battles, just maxing out the divisions i will use there, since its such an obvious choice.

This could perhaps be fixed with a preset amount, since the numbers wont differ that much in playtroughs.

 

Example mission: 7 divison are allowed, scaling X 0.2 of total manpower

My army :50 000 total

Enemy army: 50 000 X 0,2 = 10 000.

1. My army 50000 men dispersed in divisions of 1800 = 12 600 men to bring               12600 vs 10000

2. My army 50000 men dispersed in divisions of 3000 =  21 000 men to bring               21000 vs 10000

 

 

So it might be a bit to easy to manipulate the game mechanics to your advantage.

I would say a fixed amount is better then the alternative in this scenario, and that you have to use your army compositions as means to break the mission,

and not manipulate it to your advantage. 

It might just be me that "exploits" or thinks about this, but i will post it anyways. :)

 

Thank you for your answers.

this is what I have been curious about - if the scaling is to whole army or just what is fielded. do reserves come into play at all? can someone lay out clearly how it currently works?

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8 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

There is a bug we found that causes very large AI armies especially in small battles. We will offer fix as soon as possible.

I think it's also in major battles. I've just finished 2nd Bull Run and I had faced 69k Union troops compared to mine puny 25k in 2 corps

Man, that was one tough and bloody battle :)

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I agree with squadronHQ the ai army should have a baseline based on the historical army size and then it should increase to maintain the historical ratio if the player army is bigger than historical. Bonuses for winning battles can be added on top of this. I don't think it is right to use scaling as an exploit by playing minimum size and players should face some difficulty if they choose to not bring a large army.

In practice I expect my suggestion to work in the following way. Take the battle of antietam historically union had 87,000 and CSA had 38,000, so 87,000 is the baseline. If as CSA I bring 50,000 then the scaling would take union up to 114,000 (ratio of 2.29) if you win proceeding battles lets say union is reduced by 10%, so the total union army would be 103,000.

I won't go in to why I think the bonuses for victory should be bigger or the current system of career points as that is for a different thread.

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Game with a great potential, but the "scaling" system needs a major rework. 

To make the game more challenging, when you get more experience, troops and better weapons, the AI also get them proportionally (scaling). The problem is the system lacks transparency. The player should know how much troops he is allowed to have before scaling gets under way. Also scaling should be based on the troops your send in one specific battle, not in your entire army. That would be really interesting if scaling was included in the difficulty level setting so each player could customize it to his liking. The ideal would be three sliders for troops, weapons, experience.

As for now, you are punished for building a better army as the so-called campaign progress. Which gets me to another problem, even if you win consistently battle after battle and kill tens of thousands of foes, the AI gets stronger, so it's not really a "campaign". You get no reward other than better troops and weapons, but as the AI also gets them anyway (because of scaling), that is not a real reward. I do understand that is intended to keep the game challenging, but that breaks immersion and some sense of fulfillment. So a balance must be found to make the game both immersive and challenging.

A special dislike mention for the Rio Hill battle, battles that you cannot win without (unhistorical) gamey tactics are not challenging, they are highly annoying.

The good news is the game is already quite good and we are still in early access. So we may hope most of these problem will be adressed and, at least partly, solved.

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