Should buying experienced troops be allowed?

[JohnReynolds]

I find it strange that you can use money to replace or add veteran troops to your army. Not realistic in my opinion. What if all troops came in as full size, raw brigades. Fighting would increase experience but also result in gradual attrition. At some point you would have to decide whether to keep using an experienced, but small, brigade or to merge it with another brigade. This actually happened in the Union army in the last year of the war. Some loss of effectiveness would result to the merged brigade due to loss of cohesiveness. I don't think adding raw recruits to existing units happened much early in the war. Some new recruits would be obtained from the home area where the unit originally came from but I think most new recruits joined, trained, and were deployed as a new unit. But in the last year of the war the Union was conscripting and paying bounties to get new recruits and adding them to old units because that was the only way the the new recruits could be made to fight.

[Aetius]

It's not realistic, but it does allow the player to recover experienced brigades. I think restricting the hiring of veterans could be a feature of Hard or Legendary difficulty levels. I'd also like to see the Training attribute affect the stats of recruits, rather than the cost of Veterans, which would eliminate that problem entirely and add to the roleplay (as a commander focusing on training).

[Andre Bolkonsky]

5 minutes ago, Aetius said:

It's not realistic, but it does allow the player to recover experienced brigades. I think restricting the hiring of veterans could be a feature of Hard or Legendary difficulty levels. I'd also like to see the Training attribute affect the stats of recruits, rather than the cost of Veterans, which would eliminate that problem entirely and add to the roleplay (as a commander focusing on training).

The question I had was where was this unlimited pool of veterans coming from.

Your suggestion that Training affects recruits rather than the cost of veterans would work nicely. 

If, and when, Camp includes a full Replacement Depot where you can bleed off veterans from one unit and apply them to another, would balance that out nicely. 

[GeneralPITA]

Think of them as mercenaries, like Blackwater. lol

[Andre Bolkonsky]

3 minutes ago, GeneralPITA said:

Think of them as mercenaries, like Blackwater. lol

And you wonder why we Southerners look at the damn Yankees like Romans view the Vandals. 

 

Can these Mercs come with Hessian uniforms, we can get a lot of mileage out of the whole 'I fights mit Sigel' thing that way. 

Edited January 24, 2017 by Andre Bolkonsky
OK, I had a better one liner. Sue me.

[Wandering1]

Several things to consider here:

1. Since the army is not really considered to be devoted to one theater (since we fight Western Campaign and Eastern Campaign battles), what it really could be described as is paying for the veterans of one theater to go fight in another theater (whether that's 'bribing' commanders to 'loan' their soldiers or not), or it's paying for re-enlistment bonuses of current soldiers.

2. Strangely enough, given what I was looking at the logs, veterancy of your units does not affect the veterancy of the enemy units. Which means as Union, if you're fighting against 2* or 3* squads practically always, veterancy is a way of making life easier without suffering any scaling because the enemy is already as high as they can be.

3. Similarly on the flip side, if veterancy is practically speaking fixed for the computer units, they will always have more veterans than you if you didn't have a way of replacing veterans. Which makes the game even harder if we remove basically buying veterancy.

4. I'm not sure if recruit stats are assigned at a per-stage limitation, or if it's related to medicine for increases in stats (in the form of recruits coming back from injuries).

See screenshots below:

Pre-Chancellorsville -> Post Stones River -> Pre-Stones River -> Post-Fredericksburg.

In this max-size playthrough, I have medicine 10 and training 0 for these stages.

 

Edited January 24, 2017 by Wandering1
Ordering of the images really sucks.

[Hitorishizuka]

1 hour ago, Wandering1 said:

2. Strangely enough, given what I was looking at the logs, veterancy of your units does not affect the veterancy of the enemy units. Which means as Union, if you're fighting against 2* or 3* squads practically always, veterancy is a way of making life easier without suffering any scaling because the enemy is already as high as they can be.

3. Similarly on the flip side, if veterancy is practically speaking fixed for the computer units, they will always have more veterans than you if you didn't have a way of replacing veterans. Which makes the game even harder if we remove basically buying veterancy.

The game systems basically break if you removed the ability for the player to buy veterans. The AI already gets the benefit of free stats and as many people as it needs without regard to what happened in the past. Punishing the player even more for losses double dips the harm for adding more troops since the player only effectively gives the AI more experienced men to work with while they've only weakened their units. You'd pretty much be forced to use the Combine Division exploit to make any headway after a certain point since it's basically impossible to get above 2 star and have a unit that won't die in a single volley.

[JJPettigrew]

6 hours ago, Hitorishizuka said:

The game systems basically break if you removed the ability for the player to buy veterans. The AI already gets the benefit of free stats and as many people as it needs without regard to what happened in the past. Punishing the player even more for losses double dips the harm for adding more troops since the player only effectively gives the AI more experienced men to work with while they've only weakened their units. You'd pretty much be forced to use the Combine Division exploit to make any headway after a certain point since it's basically impossible to get above 2 star and have a unit that won't die in a single volley.

      In fact up to my knowledge unit experience  was a real problem along the war , specially in the north with its no replacemnt politic.

     Revisiting the rate at which skills are reduced due to incorporate new recruits would help to avoid extreme experience reduction due to (moderate) losses,  and  allowing merging units on camp (representing veteran brigades being rebuilded from veteran regiments remnants)  

[Aetius]

19 hours ago, Hitorishizuka said:

The game systems basically break if you removed the ability for the player to buy veterans. The AI already gets the benefit of free stats and as many people as it needs without regard to what happened in the past. Punishing the player even more for losses double dips the harm for adding more troops since the player only effectively gives the AI more experienced men to work with while they've only weakened their units. You'd pretty much be forced to use the Combine Division exploit to make any headway after a certain point since it's basically impossible to get above 2 star and have a unit that won't die in a single volley.

I played my first Confederate Legendary Ironman buying very few veterans due to the cost. It might have made it more difficult, but I made it all the way to 2nd Bull Run doing that so it'll be hard to convince me that it breaks the game systems. What ends up happening long-term is that the unit skills creep upwards but the star bonuses become harder to get (and keep).

 

 

Edited January 24, 2017 by Aetius

[JohnReynolds]

The changes I suggested in the original post would not work unless some other unusual features of the game were changed. As mentioned above, the players veteran brigades would rapidly be depleted the way the morale and damage is currently structured. My opinion is that the morale is set way too high. They should give way long before their casualties reach the levels they do. Lee's casualties at Gettysburg were about 33% and the Union about 25% which is about a worst case scenario.  The Union suffered 12% at Fredericksburg before giving up.

[P*Funk]

Well the AI definitely doesn't seem to care enough about his casualties to ever retire from the field with a unit intact it seems. My last major battle as Union I took over 25% casualties and inflicted like... 80% on the enemy because despite being routed repeatedly he stayed on the field to fight until all his units were blown to bits and ran off the map on their own.

[GeneralPITA]

18 hours ago, Wandering1 said:

Several things to consider here:

1. Since the army is not really considered to be devoted to one theater (since we fight Western Campaign and Eastern Campaign battles), what it really could be described as is paying for the veterans of one theater to go fight in another theater (whether that's 'bribing' commanders to 'loan' their soldiers or not), or it's paying for re-enlistment bonuses of current soldiers.

2. Strangely enough, given what I was looking at the logs, veterancy of your units does not affect the veterancy of the enemy units. Which means as Union, if you're fighting against 2* or 3* squads practically always, veterancy is a way of making life easier without suffering any scaling because the enemy is already as high as they can be.

3. Similarly on the flip side, if veterancy is practically speaking fixed for the computer units, they will always have more veterans than you if you didn't have a way of replacing veterans. Which makes the game even harder if we remove basically buying veterancy.

4. I'm not sure if recruit stats are assigned at a per-stage limitation, or if it's related to medicine for increases in stats (in the form of recruits coming back from injuries).

See screenshots below:

Pre-Chancellorsville -> Post Stones River -> Pre-Stones River -> Post-Fredericksburg.

In this max-size playthrough, I have medicine 10 and training 0 for these stages.

 

I love your highly specific and quanfitied posts that you support with evidence. No conjecture outta you, very scientific. Keep em coming. I had a feeling my veterancy didn't affect scaling but you've made it clear. Thanks.

[Wandering1]

1 hour ago, GeneralPITA said:

I love your highly specific and quanfitied posts that you support with evidence. No conjecture outta you, very scientific. Keep em coming. I had a feeling my veterancy didn't affect scaling but you've made it clear. Thanks.

More specifically, now that I think about it, in the other thread I showed you how the unit stats scale with the difficulty level in question. If the unit stats are a direct correlation to the amount of veterancy, then that would explain where the 3* brigades actually come from; in the form of units with insane statistics. It probably just picks random skill perks when it calculates veterancy under the hood after loading initial unit data.