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My Union Campaign: Wrapped Up Georgia Railroad: Nearly There


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On 8/4/2017 at 6:27 AM, Meagre Heart said:

Keep on goin' PLF! It's very encouraging for me as a new player to learn from so many people.  

These guys have been super helpful the whole time.  I need to go rename a whole pile of brigades for you guys as I lost so many in the last few battles.  

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56k going into Cold Harbor is not that much.  I forsee immense difficulty in the later battles.  You might not have enough men to successfully take Richmond as you need 3 relatively powerful Corps there minimum to even have a chance.  Even then I wish you luck.  

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Why were my battles much harder on Colonel difficulty?

I had a much larger army and the manpower pool of the CSA was a lot smaller.

Currently I try BG difficulty, and again my battles are much harder than the battles shown here by PegLegFatty.

Multiple times I completely destroyed the AI army, and still it came out stronger.

e.g. Antietam: I surrounded the CSA and completly wiped it out, killing 37k troops. Then it got reinforced with 59k new troops.

 

The inscrutable scaling of the AI is the most annoying thing so far in this game!

 

For me it seems the AI downscales in PegLegFattys battles, making it easiers than it should be.

 

Anyone tried to make the smallest army possible and still beat the game?

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The scaling is there so that you will not have to face armies of extremely small sizes all the time as that would not be fun.  Also enemy brigades have a minimum size in every battle independent of the army reserve (the size is determined by difficulty).  

Anyways PegLegFattys has suffer major casualties without killing much of the enemy to invoke the emergency enemy army reserves.  Basically the more you kill the more reserves they get to an extent.  It is quite possible to utterly demolish the enemy reserve completely down to 0 but you need to destroy +80% of the enemy army in every battle to overcome the influx of reinforcements.  The enemy army you destroy also must be very large in order for you to break even.  

EDIT: I am working on a mod (thank Tokiedian for the valuable modding info) and I might be able to change scaling if I find the right places to edit.  

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Yes, I know what they want to achieve with this scaling.

But getting punished for success is not fun.

If the difficulty level is too easy, then I can choose to increase it and make things harder.

But if I play good on Colonel I got harder battles than PegLegFatty on BG, then there is something wrong.

My point is, that the game does not tell me, that my army is already big enough for that kind of difficult level and increasing my army would increase the overall difficulty.

 

I did some experiments on BG and Battle of Shiloh (all minor battles won, recon 4):

Initially the game told me I am facing 44k enemy troops. My own strength, including what is already on the board , was 27k.

I pumped as many men I could muster into my army, and my final troop count was 40k.

The AI numbers for the battle was suddenly 41k. Why was it going down? 

This is completly not understandable for me. The game gives absolutly no explanation.

The absolute numbers were then:

Union:

46575 Inf

174 Cav

1666 Art

CSA:

38798 Inf

2100 Cav

3000 Art

 

If I want a harder game, I want to make that decission, not the game in some artificial way that I can not understand.

 

Edited by Mindfield
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Skimmed through mule shoe, I will note that this kind of wide frontal assault is not recommended against the very powerful and layered fortifications you find in the Overland Campaign and beyond. Part of the army should be holding forces and pin the enemy down, only engaging under cover and right before the assault begins, and a large portion of the army should be striking in attack columns to penetrate the weakest point in the defense, and then rushing in and exploiting that gap to overwhelm the defenders and generate an advantageous position. In the case of Mule Shoe, I believe the optimal place to strike is the bottom left of the Confederate lines. In real life this would obviously be terrible as the rest of the Confederate line would be able to cover for the extreme left of the Mule Shoe, but in the game it doesn't exist so you can easily penetrate this part of the line and exploit it, rolling the Confederate forces into the center where your holding forces and flanking forces can catch them in a crossfire.

 

Rookies should spearhead the attack and engage in meele combat to soak up the fire and heavy casualties that come with this kind of assault, with veteran troops right behind them to provide powerful volleys into the meele, and then get into position to defend the ground you've gained and push heavy flanking fire into the remaining defenses. Artillery should be constantly on the move behind your offensive and pushed into canister or at least shell range to guarantee their effectiveness and allow you to hold your ground or keep pushing the defenses until you either go for a total encirclement and annihilate the enemy army (not enough time in mule shoe for this really) or reach the optimal defense point where you can massacre the enemies trying to retake the VP.

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18 hours ago, maniacalpenny said:

In the case of Mule Shoe, I believe the optimal place to strike is the bottom left of the Confederate lines. In real life this would obviously be terrible as the rest of the Confederate line would be able to cover for the extreme left of the Mule Shoe, but in the game it doesn't exist so you can easily penetrate this part of the line and exploit it, rolling the Confederate forces into the center where your holding forces and flanking forces can catch them in a crossfire.

I didn't find this to work so well. It took so long to get into position that they had multiple layers of of defenses in the woods behind the main trenches and I got bogged down on a narrow front with my outnumbered but veteran enemy in the woods attacking with tired troops.

I had more success attacking the apex of the line in an attack column, breaking the first two lines quickly before their reinforcements came up, seizing the supply depot and destroying a large chunk of their arty, and having two fronts to use to roll up the enemy, allowing me to bring my numerical advantage to bear.

That said, maniacalpenny is right - no broad frontal assaults. That will kill you at Cold Harbor and Richmond.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The reason why its 25 brigades as you can get 1 free brigade per campaign, and if you don't have space this can "extend" the size of a division. This means you can have a 7 brigade division, and it also means you can have a 25 brigade corps.

 

I skimmed through the fight, seemed fairly reasonable. My big suggestion would be when you have a 2 layer defense, to let your less veteran troops (preferably with good meele guns) stand behind the trenches and switch out with the men that are shooting when the enemy hits your lines. This will conserve your veteran troops a little better if properly timed. If there are a ton of enemies shooting at you like on the left side of the battle this can be risky though, and with so many enemies concentrating on one place I'd rather actually just cycle through less experienced troops and let my veterans man the trenches on either side of the hot zone, as they are best off shooting enemies rather than engaging in meele combat.

 

Another small nitpick, on the right side of the battle you had a unit outside the trenches inbetween the gap between the salient and the far right (your left flank). You moved this unit up too aggressively, he should be staying in the woods unless he can move forwards to get free flanking shots. Otherwise he is just taking more damage than necessary due to lack of cover, or even worse is getting hit by the river penalties.

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