Economy builds OP?

[Jamesk2]

Hey guys I'm a new-ish player (my best achievement in UGG was 7900-1900 casualties as Confed in the 1st battle). Today I want to discuss with you a build I think is pretty solid.

As the name suggest, in this build you will go full Economy when possible, with points into Army Organization as needed and disregarding Training, Politics and Recon. 

At the start of the game, choose Logistician - Artillery - Business. Then spend career points as mentioned above. I've gone as far as right before Confederate Gaines' Mills (completed the 3 skirmishes but not the grand battle) and I'm having 8 points in Business, 2 Medicine, 4 Army Organization and 4 Logistics (I think I misplaced one point into Logistics after having my 2500 wagon ran out of ammo in 1st Manassas).

So why would you choose to build this way?

1. The benefit of Recon is completely negated by the fact that you're human and after several replays you would get to know on average how many opponents you're facing in any battle.

2. While Army Organization and Politics sounds good in theory, the fact that putting points in each requires you to increase your army's size will hurt you as AI get scaled up correspondingly.

3. Having points in Economy and keeping your troops strength low means you can purchase ALL of the best guns in the shop. At the start of Gaines' Mills, my 16 brigades of infantry (all 2000) are armed by the following:

- 2 Springfield M1855

- 1 Pattern 1853 Enfield

- 2 Lorenz

- 1 MJ&G type II

- 4 M1841 Mississipi

- 3 Palmetto M1842

- 3 Springfield.

I've done this by buying almost EVERY single gun from the Springfield M1842 up in the shop (in the period between Shiloh and Gaines' Mills I've raided the store clean; but earlier in the game it's harder to do so), and taking a healthy amount of Mississipi and Palmetto from the Union army. In my armory I still have 577 Fayetteville, 389 Henry, more than 1000 each of Lorenz, M1855 and Enfield. My 5 arty brigades - 8 guns each - are no slouch either (not a single gun smaller than 10 pdr), and I even have a full strength shock cavalry (with the basic gun though, I don't see a point of buying the more expensive ones).

4. While in return, you cannot afford to spend money on veterans/generals in the early stage (I've only being able to spend some money on veterans since the last battle before Gaines' Mills), the massively increased firepower ensures that your troops will lose less and kill more in gunfights, making your troops and generals leveling faster to compensate. The increased manpower from Politics is not missed, as I still have 9k spare recruits. Also, having better guns make your beloved detached skirmishers much stronger.

So in essence, this build geared your army towards being slightly smaller but having much stronger firepower to compensate. I think that with the way AI get scaled up in the moment, this build is much better than putting points in Medicine or Politics. Thoughts?

Edited December 26, 2016 by Jamesk2

[Hitorishizuka]

No, you misread Politics. Politics is superior to both Econ and Training since it gives only a slightly smaller benefit effective but does it for both. Politics doesn't force you to grow your army size, it just gives you more money and recruits and you can choose to do with it what you want. No matter what you will need to spend money on veterans as your small units, artillery, and cavalry take incidental casualties, so even if you want to focus on buying guns it's still superior.

Medicine equally is generally held to be better than other choices because it saves both men and guns--this is actually somewhat competitive for this specific build since you're trying to pre-buy guns so much and aren't as concerned with losing guys.

Honestly any other benefits in Econ are outmoded by Gaines' Mill anyway since by that time you get given enough free guns in captures and so on to have moved everyone to Springfield 1855 so long as you kept your army small, since that was already stated as a goal in this. I put a screenshot of my camp screen in one of the Fredericksburg topics and you can see I was buying all the Artillery (and every other good gun) pretty much willy-nilly but I had 800k left sitting around right before I was about to start that battle.

Recon 2 is still recommended anyway so you can ride the line of how big to make your army in each battle before scaling kicks in.

(Also, as a sidebar, giving melee cavalry more expensive weapons is actually worth it. The starter pistol+saber is single shot only, the others are 6 shot revolvers and it's definitely an upgrade that works for them. You can also tell the difference if you raise a couple units at the same time with different weapons and track their Firearms stat growth, it shows up.)

Edited December 26, 2016 by Hitorishizuka

[Jamesk2]

Are money going to be that plentiful late game though :-/ What a shame.

[Hitorishizuka]

21 minutes ago, Jamesk2 said:

Are money going to be that plentiful late game though :-/ What a shame.

Well, as noted, Politics build, so yes I do have more cash, but what I'm saying is that the early mid-tier guns you bought (Lorenz, etc) quickly become unnecessary because of captures. You just need a spare bit of extra cash for picking up some of the early expensive ones like 24pders but after that the majority of your money is going to go towards rebuilding cavalry (15k+/brigade after every Grand Battle usually).