Antietam- force size

[william1993]

In the Battle of Antietam, does the Union army automatically be double the size of the Confederate army?

[Nox165]

Not sure if double, but from what others have said their is scaling.

[Koro]

4 hours ago, william1993 said:

In the Battle of Antietam, does the Union army automatically be double the size of the Confederate army?

On normal, yes. Usually it's still better to have more troops because you can fill gaps in your lines and have reserves. Your troops will also be of better quality than theirs. 

['Sharpe]

I am on Antietam now and just noticed this as well. When my army was around 40k, it said I would be up against 68k Union troops. I raised my army to around 60k after the prelim battles and now I'm up against 81k Union troops. This is the wrong way to structure the game IMO. Here is why:

-I invested in the reconnaissance trait so that I could see the enemy army size and know approximately what I need before each battle. If this piece of data is scalable and changes magically to enforce some type of historical "accuracy," what is the point of spending career points on reconnaissance? What good is knowing the enemy army size if it's a moving target?

-I was sitting at 100 reputation points before Antietam, but decided to spend 18 points to get more troops before this battle. I figured the extra balance of manpower was worth the 5 point morale boost I'd lose. But now the enemy numbers have shifted to counter-act my acquisition, and I've lost the 5 point morale boost essentially for nothing.

-This is not even mentioning the loss of immersion when you feel the game is essentially cheating you to make things play out in a certain way. I'll never understand the insistence on the "on the rails" experience for this game - in my current playthrough I've had victory in every battle so far, you'd think by Antietam the Union would not be throwing 81k fresh troops at me. Some deviation from historical events is to be expected and I don't think anyone would complain if the campaign were to be branched based on performance, with some alternate history scenarios (or, at the very least, proper scaling of forces based on past battle results) but this is another discussion entirely.

[Fred Sanford]

The scaling also affects the conduct of battles.  I've really slowed down on going for the kill after occupying the objectives in a battle.  Other than getting a few more captured weapons and experience (both offset partially or completely by taking further losses), why bother?  The AI will just magically regenerate anyhow.

Scaling also leads to distortions in the camp phase where there's negative incentive to reinforce your army, which is kind of nuts, IMO.  When in the history of ever has a general said "don't send more reinforcements, it will just make the enemy reinforce as well"?

[Nuvag]

While auto-scaling may be annoying sometimes, whats the alternative? If you bring much more soldiers than the enemy it would be quite easy to win.
It even works to your advantage, if you lost several battles you will not be able to field a large army, the enemy will scales down to your smaller army, too!

And if the enemy would be hampered massivly in successive battles if you managed to wipe out the enemy army completely it would be a cascade of ever easier battles. You wiped them out once and so the next battle you will have a relative advantage, you wipe them out again and get an even greater advantage and really fast there will be no point in playing any further as it would be quite boring.

Branching sounds nice, but i hated it on Ultimate General Gettysburg because you could win the campaign after only half the battles or so. So i deliberatly "lost" some battles just to continue fighting.
So they would need to put many additional battles in the game just to make sure you get enough of them even when playing very good (or bad).

[Strangelove]

I was enchanted to learn that my last Hard Confederate play-through, I managed to get the size of armies within 1,000 of the historical troop count!

Strength
87,164	38,000 "engaged"

From wikipedia, and -

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/101725789676174893/EBC05B22865DECCF12F048352B93F2ED6C1F7692/

Which wound up being 87,908 vs 38,295. Convenient!

And I'd agree with the previous poster, that without scaling you could just wind up having runaway victories fighting a depleted enemy force that only gets worse as time goes on.

[Fred Sanford]

I think they should adjust the game mechanics so that annihilation is extremely difficult. Decisive engagements that resulted in the annihilation of an enemy army-level force pretty much didn't happen in the ACW, but are too common in game. A couple of suggestions are:

• Raise the 'shatter' threshold to say 50%, BUT the unit is saved and shows up in camp.  For AI units, these go back in the 'pool' that AI armies are composed of.
• If the AI takes heavy losses early in a battle, have a 'withdraw' trigger that ends the battle early so they live to fight another day.
• Lower the fatigue recovery rate and the morale recovery rate.  This will slow down the attack tempo.
• Adjust AI to reduce single-brigade attacks- will make defending more difficult.
• Lower shock bonus for melee cavalry.  There were very few cavalry charges in the ACW, and even fewer successful ones.
• If things are starting to get lopsided, have semi-random events along the lines of "Western Theater army under another general suffers heavy losses.  Transfer x number of brigades out of your army for service in the West".  Likelihood of this happening is proportional to current imbalance.  (Alternate phrasing: your success results in the enemy having to transfer more troops into your theater to make up losses.  Gain x reputation".
• Related to previous bullet- make a separate camp for East and West Theaters.  Player can build army in each, and assign units as he sees fit, BUT the random events chances are affected by the force balances in each.  Also you would fight the battles in that theater with the army you built there.  The AI would maintain separate force pools for East and West as well.  BTW, I'm ignoring the Trans-Mississippi Theater and far West as those were minor fronts comparatively.

[GeneralPITA]

3 hours ago, Fred Sanford said:

I think they should adjust the game mechanics so that annihilation is extremely difficult. Decisive engagements that resulted in the annihilation of an enemy army-level force pretty much didn't happen in the ACW, but are too common in game. A couple of suggestions are:

• Raise the 'shatter' threshold to say 50%, BUT the unit is saved and shows up in camp.  For AI units, these go back in the 'pool' that AI armies are composed of.
• If the AI takes heavy losses early in a battle, have a 'withdraw' trigger that ends the battle early so they live to fight another day.
• Lower the fatigue recovery rate and the morale recovery rate.  This will slow down the attack tempo.
• Adjust AI to reduce single-brigade attacks- will make defending more difficult.
• Lower shock bonus for melee cavalry.  There were very few cavalry charges in the ACW, and even fewer successful ones.
• If things are starting to get lopsided, have semi-random events along the lines of "Western Theater army under another general suffers heavy losses.  Transfer x number of brigades out of your army for service in the West".  Likelihood of this happening is proportional to current imbalance.  (Alternate phrasing: your success results in the enemy having to transfer more troops into your theater to make up losses.  Gain x reputation".
• Related to previous bullet- make a separate camp for East and West Theaters.  Player can build army in each, and assign units as he sees fit, BUT the random events chances are affected by the force balances in each.  Also you would fight the battles in that theater with the army you built there.  The AI would maintain separate force pools for East and West as well.  BTW, I'm ignoring the Trans-Mississippi Theater and far West as those were minor fronts comparatively.

I like the first bullet point, spares us from the annoyance of brigades disappearing along with their weapons and officer. 

Your second bullet is already in place, Fredericksburg will end early if you're kicking butt.

Cav charges were nerfed in this update.

AI is more aggressive in this patch, should charge with more than one brigade, and not as mindlessly.

Managing the theaters with dynamic effects creates a whole new level of complexity that this game does not need. I'm fine with things as they are. 

['Sharpe]

I'm new to this forum so maybe this is a well-known answer, but the larger question is why historical battles are needed within the campaign in the first place? I understand the concern about runaway easiness if there is no scaling, but that's only if you are trying to enforce the order of battles and locations playing out exactly as it did. That's fun for single-mission players but it makes little sense in the context of a campaign where your force size and equipment stays consistent - but the enemy's does not.

Why not provide two campaign options - one that sticks to the chain of battles as they occurred, and the other where all battles, even starting from 1861, occur purely as a manifestation of moving your forces around a strategic map. This would be a "dynamic" campaign but I can't imagine the coding required would be prohibitive. Basically the map would have cities/areas worth VP, and your army has a certain number of move points per turn. Move to gain VP, the AI will do the same, and eventually there will be a turn you will meet on the same hex. That launches the ability to deploy to a battle. A few random events could be interspersed as well.

This is basically Total War style, nothing ground-breaking, but with this game already having a very nice system for equipment and troop management, and terrain that can auto generate into any "battleground", seems like the only thing needed would be to add the rules for map movement. I wouldn't except a Falcon 4 campaign or anything like that, but basically a simple way to generate battles over time with lasting attrition for both sides. Would solve the biggest problem in this game currently, in my opinion.

[william1993]

that dynamic campaign sounds like a nice idea.  Something like AEGOD's ACW II with the graphics and playstyle of Ultimate General. I'd love it