Efficiency Effects Unclear for New Brigades

[GeneralPITA]

When establishing a new brigade, it is not possible to see the penalty for putting a captain in command of a large brigade until after you've created it. It was my tendency, and I'm sure it is for many others, to create large brigades when possible, but without knowing the severe efficiency penalties that come with poor leadership (or even the importance of efficiency relative to other stats). This realization hit me hard when I played Antietam and created a bunch of 1500 man brigades with captains. They were useless troops.

Make this effect more clear, or allow the efficiency bar to be clearly seen before creating the brigade, not only after. 

The penalty for low ranking leaders should be stressed in the tutorial, imho. You can mitigate this mechanic by creating small brigades and then adding as appropriate, but most players will lack this foresight, and it makes management of rare weapon types more difficult. 

Speaking of rare weapon management, we should lower the minimum recruit threshold to create a brigade. There are plenty of enticing weapons that can only be used by creating a small brigade and letting it get whittled down so you can equip them with fayettevilles, or henrys, or 20 pdrs as CSA, is the only option. There are still four more grand battles ahead, so these weapons will become more common, but it's annoying to be teased in the armory.

 

[GeneralPITA]

A few more things about barracks management. It took me two play throughs to figure out that brigades can be dragged and dropped between divisions and corps. This ability should be made clear for new players. It's a game changer and hardly mentioned. 

Moreover, in the deployment screen for major battles, it's very difficult to assign appropriate forces until you've played the battle at least once. More intelligence to tell the player how best to distribute forces, and over what timeline, would add a level of immersion and add to strategy without making them resort to trial and error. I find myself watching documentaries about these major battles to find a good baseline strategy, and it usually works, but I should not have to do this. 

For example, one day one of Stones River I was only given my first two divisions from the 2nd and 3rd Corps. You only receive your final 8 divisions on day two of battle, which can be avoided entirely by capturing the VPs quickly as CSA. The deployment screen gives no indication that I'll only have about 12 brigades available from each corps, nor the order in which they'll deploy, and you don't figure this out until you've already rolled your left flank up in the first phase. I ended up with way too many infantry in the center and right flanks, and didn't get my snipers at all. If I allow the battle to proceed to day two intentionally, the enemy was awarded an additional 20k troops and digs in deeply. By then my snipers would not be useful. 

It's war, the enemy should not be predictable so this can be chalked up to a fog of war, but I should have a timeline for availability of my own forces and the order in which they deploy.