Does the Ai Army size scale with you?

[Ned Cookson]

Discovering that the enemy army scales has ruined the game for me.  Please scale the reward not the enemy army.

I enjoy strategy games at higher difficulty levels because mistakes are costly.  By playing well, I don't gain an advantage, I just do enough to stop "myself" from falling into failure and destruction.  So I set difficulty levels to determine what level of performance I need to consistently achieve to avoid destruction.

If destruction isn't a threat, because the enemy army will just be weaker the weaker I am, then what am I fighting to prevent?  Getting through each battle should be an achievement.  If people are not finding the battles challenging enough when they are succeeding, then the answer isn't scaling, it's optimising your difficult levels vs reward.  If it's possible to become too powerful before a grand battle then reduce the players income.

Similarly, if I choose to spend lots of money outfitting a unit with expensive guns, then that should be punished by my poor use of them, or because I lack troops elsewhere, not by upgrading the enemy.  By upgrading the enemy, all you've done is nullify my decision.  If you nullify my decisions then the experience is no longer personal.  You may as well just give me a standard army.

So, please don't make my decisions pointless, put some work into setting the difficulty level by scaling the reward, the enemy army should be fixed.  Ask players to test the different difficulty levels and measure the number of games in which players are defeated. For example:

Easy = 10% defeated, Medium = 50% defeated, Hard = 80% defeated, Legendary = 95% defeated

[veji1]

So sorry to unearth this thread but I just got clobbered at Antietam by a massive Union army. Probably due to scaling as compared to previous campaigns where I had fielded only 40/45k or so CSA army, I had a 65k CSA army as I had better understood when to stop going at the ennemy and risk losing more men for little extra gain once objectives were achieved, etc.. The issue was that as I started Antietam with 3 big corps my left corps, the one in Nicodemus and the church got gangattacked by brigade after brigade of close to 3000 union soldiers and the woods became a blood bath and that corps ended up virtually wiped.

My question is again about how scaling works just to make sure I understand (I respect the need for scaling, it's part of game balance). The AI scales up to taking into account number of brigades and men, just one or the other, or those 2 plus some extras say it scales up in guns as well for example ?

Second is the scaling linear in a battle as in if I bring 3 CSA corps at Antietam with 25k for the first and 20k for the 2 other, will the AI scale its army for the 3 subcomponents of the battle (original assault, Burnside's stuff, Porter's stuff, etc...) or will the scaling be less linear because I really had the feeling that I could have spared 2 or 3 brigades in the 2nd corps and 4/5 in the second but in the first was completely and utterly ovewhelmed.

Again not a criticism of scaling, I understand the need, but just the feeling that having too big an army for certain scenarios makes the game less fun to some extent because then manouvering seems less important and it turns into a grinder. Having 8 or 10 3k union brigades charging into the woods made me feel we were in Verdun not at Antietam !

Thanks for the great game anyway.