UGCW Feedback v0.70+

[Luckybluemoon]

Thanks for the update guys!

Recommendations:

1. Any work on assigning our own groups?

2. I miss the Ctrl-right click interface.  Maybe I just have to get used to it but I liked the other way better.  As part of this, I have noticed that before the update, if I left click I always only select one unit on the map.  Now however I select multiple units even though I wasn't holding crtl or anything.  This has made C&C of my units a headache sometimes.

More later, and keep up the good work.

[Koro]

4 minutes ago, Grognard_JC said:

My first impressions on the new update :

Great work as always.

Morale has somehow changed a bit, as my units tend to surrender more often, almost systematically in bad conditions. Now you have to watch out.

As CSA hard campaign, the small battles are now tougher. It's no longer possible to chase/destroy the AI as it is too strong. 1st Bull Run was harder than previously, though not too hard, the AI did not concentrate on Henry Hill, so I kept her busy here and there forever.

My first win ever on Shiloh as the CSA. I supposed you fixed the Hornest Nest instant battle end bug. It really felt epic chasing the Yankees trying to withdraw.

The CSA new "uniforms" could be a bit more polished I suppose.

Custom battle mode seems to work alright, this is a very interesting feature if you are to go multiplayer.

 

Enemy units stuck behind your lines really need to be dealt with. It's a real pain for the game.

Oh and maybe, you could add a VERY-hard campaign mod next time. I'd really love to lose a campaign. What's more, you have to delete "restart" button if playing in such mode.

There has been clamors for "Legendary mode" since beta :). I think it would be interesting to have a campaign so hard it's to the point of unwinnable, ironman of course too.

[Lif]

6 hours ago, Col_Kelly said:

Yes you can. When you're on the battleS map (not the same as the battle map), the one with a map of North America on it, you can see some tiny squares in the upper right, hover over them to see which bonuses/maluses you can get

I still don't get it where I can see it.

 

 

[Koro]

2 minutes ago, Lif said:

I still don't get it where I can see it.

 

 

It looks like this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=821012380

If you aren't playing a new campaign, perhaps this is why you can't see it

[JaM]

Maybe enemy units that are cut off, should get some morale penalty. Makes no sense for them going all "Commando style"..

[Col_Kelly]

Normally its on the right of the 'Antietam' piece of text. You're probably using an old save and therefore the dynamic logic isnt imported (I was pretty sure it was though, probably cause I was in beta... not sure)

[Lif]

4 minutes ago, Koro said:

It looks like this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=821012380

If you aren't playing a new campaign, perhaps this is why you can't see it

Do you mean I have to quit my campaign and start a new one to see this? That would be a bit frustrating since I thought you can use your old campaign saves.

[Koro]

2 minutes ago, Lif said:

Do you mean I have to quit my campaign and start a new one to see this? That would be a bit frustrating since I thought you can use your old campaign saves.

It will take effect in the new battles you win, it just doesn't go backwards and recount what has happened.

[Lif]

Ahhh, okay. You shocked me there for a second. :-D

[Andre Bolkonsky]

I began a new campaign with the launch of the new patch. 

I filed this through the in game bug reply form, but am following up here as I did not experience this in any other game prior to the patch. Both incidents occur on the Rail Depot map introducing the Union Campaign. 

Two separate units got trapped on the edge of the map: the Union cavalry unit hiding in the woods on the far north of the map got too close to the edge and got trapped there, could not release them and had to restart. Secondly, a Union artillery battery arriving as off-board reinforcements got trapped on the map edge and started walking straight north along the map edge and could not be freed. Both incidents required a game save load to correct. 

[Lif]

I had this issue some weeks ago, I believe it was on the Crossroads Map: Reinforcements kept clipping on the edge, they only could move along this edge. I had to restart. Never happened again since then.

[Caesar15]

2 hours ago, Koro said:

It looks like this:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=821012380

If you aren't playing a new campaign, perhaps this is why you can't see it

268 hours on Civil War goodness man.

[Koro]

32 minutes ago, Caesar15 said:

268 hours on Civil War goodness man.

I had about 1½ month start on you guys in beta and two weeks vacation in the same period, so yeah. 

Did a lot of testing in that time :).

[Nox165]

Found some bugs and historical mistakes:

 

1) battle of Shiloh ( historical), None of the generals have their historical names, if you mouse over them you will see they are just named corps # rather then having a name.

2)) battle of Antietam, Burnside is  attacking from the north I am pretty sure he is in the wrong position(historically) he should be replace with Mansfield.  Burnside should be leading the force that is trying to cross on the rebels right flank..

 

Fredericksburg - first of let me say, wonderful job darth/team, I have noticed a few issues :

1) When you move the camera around you are going to see that the river is going to have graphic bugs, ( white, patch spots, with a checker pattern)

2) General Stuart - is missing in action( he is not in the battle at all)

3) when you get to control Longstreet, there are no unit markers for the reserve corps, only thing that shows up is corps 1.

 

Combining Jackson and longstreet never happens, which is a shame. It makes the battle feel a lot smaller then it should be. I know there are issues with performance but surely there is a way to make this possible?

possible answers:

1) in the last phase of the battle divide the map into two parts, Make it so  player can switch between those parts. Maybe allow the ai to take over the other side that the player is not currently on. I know there are concerns over performance, I think if something like this is possible you would be able to maintain the scale of the battles, but would make it possible to reduce the impact of having tons of units at the same time. 

Note* would also need to allow units to move between the two parts  

2) high performance mode - reduce graphics and effects, reduce graphic of units(bridges) to maybe increase performance. 

 

I have so far played about 80 hours of this game, its wonderful. However, if this the route that is going to happen for future battles I cant help but be a bit disappointed. One of the things that really made me like this game was that battles felt massive, with the changes that were made to Fredericksburg it makes the battle feel more like two smaller battles rather then 1 big one.

 

keep up the good work. 

 

[Lif]

Now I fought a battle and still can't see the battle effects on the map afterwards.

Or will I see the effects only after Antietam?

 

268 hrs is really sick. :-D

 

Edited December 21, 2016 by Lif

[drewww]

Super enjoying UG:CW. A few comments from my first few hours with it. Much of this isn't 0.7 specific, but hopefully it's still useful. Mostly UI stuff.

• I find the whole movement UI to be somewhat regressed from UG:G. My main frustration is around the drag selection system colliding with the "giving an order to a currently selected unit" system. If I have a unit selected, and I go to drag select other units, there seems to be some delicate timeout boundary that decides whether I get the drag selection mode or if I give an order to the selected unit instead. This causes me to order brigades from one part of the map to a totally different part of the map all the time, and I'm constantly having to cancel these orders.
  • It's been > a year since I played UGG, but I dimly remember double clicking on units being a better way to get logical groups of units. Like, double clicking on an artillery battery got me all "nearby" batteries for giving orders. That seems to be gone, but I would prefer that to drag selecting if that would make the UI easier to wrangle. Perhaps put drag selecting on a modifier, give us better shift clicking (which also seems gone), double clicking unit types, and make more use of divisions as logical groups to units to get around this.
• The "draw a line of battle" feature is really cool, but never works for me right now. Knowing which way to draw the line to put my troops on the right side of it just doesn't feel intuitive. Maybe I will learn over time, but I'm not super confident about that. If the camera rotated, I think this would be a non-issue because on a given part of my lines, I would probably always have friendly units at the bottom of my screen and enemies at the top and I'd learn to go, e.g. left to right. But in UG:CW's fixed orientation my lines are always different angles relative to the camera and I have to transpose in my head to figure out which direction to go and I guess wrong 50% of the time and have to cancel it. Per the previous point, this system also collides with drag selection if you have greater than one unit selected when you try to drag select. That's another strike against it. It also collides with the right-click-and-hold system to simply orient brigades manually. Overall, I think you're trying to fit in too many modes onto various left/right button, mouse up/down states and it's not working. I know mobile friendly-ness is a goal, but I think something needs to get dropped or moved to another button or in some way unloaded. 
  • The mapping of brigade to position on a line is also pretty wonky and can cause tons of unnecessary movement in some situations. That also undermines using it if you're anywhere near the enemy.
• I think the flanked/rear flanked indicators pop up for artillery fire. Does this have an actual effect on damage? I like having those notices and they're high signal quality most of the time, but there's a collision between "I'm flanked by an infantry brigade that I don't even see" which is a really scary and somewhat confusing proposition from "a distant battery is shelling me from the side.
• The indicators in the upper left are really useful too. Could we have a notice when a brigade totally breaks? That's even more important to me than officer wounded/killed, but happens pretty invisibly; the icon disappears from my bottom bar and the unit badge on the field disappears. There isn't even a word thing that pops up like when they are exhausted or rout. 
• The end states for defensive scenarios are unclear. How long do you have to hold for?
• Love the weapon management stuff, but in-battle it's hard to remember which battery has which specialization. I know I can swap into the weapon screen with the 'i' button, but all I really want to know is short/long range for artillery, ranged capable or not for cav, and maybe whether an infantry brigade is melee specced or not? Initially the weapons were pretty overwhelming because model years aren't something I just know off the top of my head. But it seems like there are basically straight upgrades to balanced weapons (e.g. the 6lb -> 12lb pieces, generally) and sidegrades (don't remember the names, but rifled cannon for range versus smoothbore for short?). Exposing that schematically with icons in both the weapon management screen and on the battlefield would be so so helpful. 
• Is it possible that range indicators on artillery batteries don't show while they're mounted? I've struggled sometimes to tell whether a piece is in range of enemy lines while positioning them. I had lots of troubles with artillery LOS in UG:G. It's basically gone here and I don't really know how you did it. They don't move into enemies anymore and they don't sit behind trivial LOS-breakers and not fire for long periods. Love it. Still miss my elevation indicators somewhat, but the visual design of the maps seems to be doing a better job at showing elevation now than it used to. Or is it that the map is actually 3D now versus trying to fake it with color + shaders in UG:G? In any event, it's working!
• Maybe this is just a design constraint, but you can't ever have your army in an inconsistent leadership state. I've had situations where I have brigades without leaders and I need to have leaders in reserve to swap into other brigades to get the leader I want into the empty brigade. This is usually fine at the brigade level but at the division/corps level I've occasionally run out of money and then have to do dumb games where I move every brigade between corp commanders when what I really wanted to do was simply swap corps or division commanders. This would be smoother if you could simply move any officer to the reserve and put them in the leaderless state (like when an officer is wounded/killed) and just not let people go into battle if they don't have a full chain of command. 
• It would be awesome to have the battle brigade constraints on the actual campaign map. I learned pretty early that I need to micro my corps to fit those constraints and have to load into the battle every time to see what my limits are and then go back to camp and back to battle when ready.
• Using the scroll wheel on the help screen also moves the camera.
• Click targets are generally funky. There's clicking on the badge itself (which I think you can't click and drag?) and there's clicking on the unit sprites themselves (which you CAN click and drag). This causes lots of minor click-target misses that are frustrating. Not really sure what to do about this; you're sort of screwed either way.
• Clicking on broken (flashing) units does absolutely nothing. I think that's probably weird for new players. I think you should perhaps be able to select them while broken but if you issue orders perhaps pop a "broken" notice near the cursor? Or just put a more explicit "broken" or "fleeing" notice on the unit? I generally like how you're using words in this game ("exhausted", "ammo", "rout", etc.) to communicate status explicitly, and I like that they're not ALWAYS up. But I think for new players having units on the field that you can't select at all is a little frustrating and not necessarily the right way to say "you can't issue orders to this unit right now."

A few small gameplay things:

• Brigades find themselves behind enemy lines way too much. I've seen this mentioned elsewhere on the board, but wanted to re-mention it. Had a CSA elite brigade that I broke decide to flee into pittsburgh landing and then reform and be an epic pain in my ass for the rest of the battle. Perhaps a stronger morale penalty to being extremely distant from friendly units? This happens for me, too; my units will flee away from my lines and then end up being alarmingly-strong harassers from behind after their condition recovers. Doesn't seem quite right to me. 
• Love the new skirmisher detach/attach system! Might need to underline to folks that they have greater sight range. I was very surprised to learn early on that they saw further than cavalry, which was a surprise to me. They're so critical to have out to spot for artillery and spot enemy movement. There's also a funny overloading of skirmisher since you can create dedicated skirmisher brigades (which until I read the forums today, I thought were totally useless; why lose a slot when you can make them on the fly?) but have since learned are more like specialized, well armed snipers or harassers that you can afford to give fancy equipment to. That's pretty distinct usage from how I use skirmishers broken off from a normal brigade. Perhaps give them different names?
• I learned from the boards today that the shop resupplies at some frequency and that you're supposed to be purchasing stuff piecemeal (e.g. 24lber guns) that come up for sale rarely. Def didn't understand that. Sort of assumed shop stocks only went up over time. Perhaps a "new in the shop" dialog box when it resupplies that shows what arrived/left to remind folks other people are "buying" stock too?
• Cavalry are ... weird. I still have no real idea how to use them. I think it's partially because of the melee-only versus ranged+melee variants and their different uses. Not sure how to help teach about this. Perhaps start with melee only cavalry because they're simpler to think about and treat ranged+melee as an upgrade? The ranged ones are just really finnicky to use well.
• Unit statuses are really weirdly conflated. There are skills a unit has, like "efficiency", "melee", "firearms", "stamina." These seem to feed into a second level of actual unit capabilities like "firepower", "reloading speed", "accuracy", etc. And finally there are actual current levels like "condition", "morale", and "cover." Maybe players who have totally internalized the help system have worked all this stuff out, but the relationships between all of these is totally unclear to a new player. When you add men to a brigade it has impacts on, e.g. efficiency and (I think?) diminishing returns on the actual firepower of the brigade. But perhaps less diminishing returns on melee performance? And then there's equipment changes, too. Basically, I think that intermediate layer needs to be exposed somehow. If I can see how an increase in efficiency trickles down to reloading speed and ultimate DPS (though I can understand if you want to shy away from such a game-y way of presenting it) I can much better build a consistent mental model about what's going on. As is, when faced with choices like "do I want -5% reload time or +5% accuracy?" I have no way to reason about it. And reading the boards, there are all these concepts like "middle sized elite brigades are better; massive brigades are just bullet sponges" which is really important but not something I could glean from the systems itself. I can see efficiency go down when I add people, and I can read in the manual that efficiency is connected to "shooting" (which I guess is accuracy?), reloading and melee. But there's also a melee top level skill; does this change that? Or is actual on-the-field melee a combination of melee skill + brigade size + efficiency? Or are larger brigade penalties only represented via efficiency? Anyway, hopefully you see my point here. The system seems basically good, but I think it needs more consistent naming or more transparency or more tutorialization or something. Perhaps for many players they're just bars and bigger is better and you don't need to understand the connections. But the system seems well constructed and I think a lot of the pleasure of the army management layer is manipulating that system skillfully. I'd love to see it exposed more so I can feel like I'm really doing that.

One big thematic thing that I think is missing is making divisions more visible logical units on the battlefield. I love organizing my divisions and their leadership upgrades and (eventually) specialization in different disciplines. So good. But once I hit the battlefield, the actual OOB mostly falls apart. It's minorly supported by the UI in the bottom, but the unit placer at the start doesn't care about it and there's no real incentive to operate with logical divisions or corps versus micro-ing brigades all the time. I'm not sure what to suggest here. The decision not to have divisional commanders on the field makes sense to me, but in every battle my divisions get totally scattered and it feels like a missed design opportunity to really recreate that sense of personalities covering different parts of the line and the army organization you do early on really having stakes. It might be as simple as different divisional or corps insignias on the brigade icons and letting the player maintain cohesion if they like? Or putting making divisional commander names more prominent and brigade commanders less prominent somehow? The game fundamentally cares about and operates on the brigade level, but as battles get bigger that breaks down and I feel like something needs to happen (and I think it's probably just visual, not balance) that lets you operate more effectively at a divisional level.

Sorry for the wall of text, just thought I would dump my feedback in the most recent version thread! Hope it's useful. Great work so far - really loving the game!

[Hitorishizuka]

6 hours ago, Grognard_JC said:

Morale has somehow changed a bit, as my units tend to surrender more often, almost systematically in bad conditions. Now you have to watch out.

Are you only seeing that for your units or also the enemy? I don't feel like I've been seeing more enemy surrenders FWIW.

[Grognard_JC]

Just now, Hitorishizuka said:

Are you only seeing that for your units or also the enemy? I don't feel like I've been seeing more enemy surrenders FWIW.

For my units. You're right. The enemy hardly surrenders. Fine.

[Hitorishizuka]

2 hours ago, drewww said:

And reading the boards, there are all these concepts like "middle sized elite brigades are better; massive brigades are just bullet sponges" which is really important but not something I could glean from the systems itself.

FYI, this is actually more of an economic issue. It's very expensive to keep veterans going for elite brigades so it's better to let them draw down to a manageable level and create new massive brigades solely for the purpose of learning and eating bullets so your veterans don't have to. If you had the money to use max size veterans and you didn't have anything else to spend it on you're welcome to do so.

[A. P. Hill]

On ‎12‎/‎20‎/‎2016 at 0:56 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

... - Improved AI in its ability to flank ... .

Sorry but I think the AI already has way too much ability to do this, if anything it should have been hampered, and possibly a focus on the commando style of skirmishers behind your lines.   Yesterday I was playing and I ended up with a single skirmisher unit behind my lines and they chased down every supply wagon they could find.   Can't like it. 

 

BUT!

Thanks for the update, can't wait to upload it.

Edited December 21, 2016 by A. P. Hill

[berwatchey]

I've noticed the AI triple stacking brigades on a single spot of land post patch. its crazy to have 6000 confederates in a one brigade size block all firing at you. posted with the bug reporter as well. 

[Don't Escrow Taxes]

14 hours ago, Col_Kelly said:

It's because a unit will always deploy in line if given an attack order, which kinda makes sense as they need to be ready for a fight. Only moving orders will make them move in column. 

Also sometimes you will feel ur unit is excessively slow but its because terrain speed modifiers have been added for swampy/muddy areas, just hover the mouse on the map to see the speed bonuses/maluses for each part of it.

So you're saying right-click is actually a different movement order than drawing a line? 

[Grognard_JC]

Ahaha I almost lost 2nd Bull Run because of the new winning conditions !

[James Cornelius]

I'm going to assume that it is a known issue that there are numerous grammatical errors in the text during the Battle of Fredericksburg.

[Grognard_JC]

Just won Antietam in my current CSA hard campaign.

Just a thought. At one point, the AI could have pressed its advantage and crush me, but it did not. I really get the feeling the AI is way way too cautious now and will pull back whenever it is faced with the slightest flanking threat, prohibiting it from taking actual BIG actions that matter, like taking a Victory location. This said, the AI now redirects its troops here an there to test where you have the least resistance, so there's good and bad in the change.

I'm just a bid sad the AI does not seize the advantage of overhelming superiority when it can. At Antietam center, I should have lost, had the AI dared to charge. IThe battle felt a bit like in previous to patch 0.68 game, when units would stack forever in front of an obstacle.

Aaah, anyway that's just an AI (though a very good one) and not a human player. This would be crazy against a human!

 

Oh, and I keep winning and winning. The new system seems to make me snowballing, the more you win the easier it gets to win each next fight. Well, that's maybe not that bad, I can't imagine what I would have face at Antitetam if I had not won the previous fights before... LoL !

Very hard game mode, where are you ?

Edited December 22, 2016 by Grognard_JC