mod J & P Rebalance Mod by JonnyH13 and Pandakraut 05/06/2023 1.28.4

[pandakraut]

12 hours ago, Revan said:

Well, that would depend on how exactly "semi" those complex changes are. I tried renaming some things before, more so hoping to bring sharps back to how it was, but obviously failed. Simply changing descriptions however seems only cosmetic.

If you're familiar with any programming language disabling the magazine for the colt should be pretty easy. Use a program like dnspy to open up the assembly-csharp.dll. Then in Rebalance.Methods, edit the method WeaponMagazineEmpty and remove rifle_ColtRevolving54_RF from the return statement. Then in the hex you can copy the relevant stats from the sharps to the colt and then you'll have an infantry version again.

Enabling the skirmisher weapon for infantry units instead of just repurposing an existing weapon would be more complicated.

[Revan]

I guess I was more interested in the 2nd option, but it seems likely to end up being too much. I'll see what I can do, but thanks a lot! Perhaps, I will settle for switching the Sharps stats for another high tier, but still more available rifle (as well as description files), as a simplest fix. Yeah it's a bit of cheating, but what do you do 🙃. Thanks for your attention, even to such a relatively separate and limited scope topic!

[PaulD]

There is some fun intended sarcasm in this post because it describes how I view it.

I assume these are base game related and not the mod. Just wondering if you've run into anything creating the mod that would fix #2.

1) Like most people, I thought that Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile barrier in 1954. But, according to my game play, enemy charging infantry can rundown my 100% condition cav. The fact that they are in full battle gear in the summer heat with whatever passes as footwear at the time... Given the average running speed of a horse, these guys must be doing a 2-minute mile...  Nike's won't even be invented for another 100 years. lol  I'm fine with it overall, because the AI can be an idiot.  Still, I've seen a 1-star CSA INF unit charge across an open field while being lit up by my ART and still route TWO of my 2-star INF units who were in the forest - haven't quite understood how that happened. 

2) This is the one that irritates me to no end and must be a bug that's never been addressed. It always happens to me a couple times per campaign, especially at Union Shiloh.  It is when enemy CAV run THROUGH (not around) my INF unit WITHOUT triggering melee... no nearby unit fire even if manually told to do so.  Then, once they are behind my lines with 0 casualties, they immediately charge my ranged ART.  It's like the AI suspends reality and the CAV officer casts some levitate / immortality spell out of a fantasy RPG to bypass my lines so it can attempt to get the upper hand.  I'd rather it just spawned the enemy CAV in my rear, at least I could justify it by saying it came into the game from some other route. 

Edited July 25, 2021 by PaulD
clarification

[Friedrich]

Not sure why, but despite the UI going higher I was unable to create skirmisher or cavalry units larger than 450 800 men respectively, and artillery are capped at 20 guns. This is despite far larger unit sizes being shown as the maximum. No idea of the cause.

Edit: Looks like it's just a visual bug caused by me having insufficient Army Org. The UI doesn't reflect the true limit of non-infantry units.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Friedrich

[pandakraut]

2 hours ago, Friedrich said:

Not sure why, but despite the UI going higher I was unable to create skirmisher or cavalry units larger than 450 800 men respectively, and artillery are capped at 20 guns. This is despite far larger unit sizes being shown as the maximum. No idea of the cause.

Edit: Looks like it's just a visual bug caused by me having insufficient Army Org. The UI doesn't reflect the true limit of non-infantry units.

Sizes of all unit types are now capped by AO. I thought I updated the displayed maxes everywhere. Can you share a screenshot of where the wrong size is still showing up?

[tuskedkibbles]

I'm a little confused. I'm playing the Union on highest difficulty, major general with the little 'harder' box ticked. And this is honestly ridiculous. On multiple occasions my forces will be completely steamrolled by vastly inferior forces. Only in melee mind, but the worst one I can remember (but there have been dozens relatively the same) is 5 infantry at almost full strength and 2 cav at full. So including their minimal losses roughly 29000 men and 4000 cavalry (all but one inf unit counter charging) completely slaughtered by a single unit of confed infantry that had taken a few volleys to the face while charging, so maybe 5000 men. The rebs were obviously full veterancy, while i had two 3 star and three 2 star inf and two 1 star cav. My men lasted maybe 5-10 seconds before they all routed. MAYBE 500 dead rebs for ~6000 dead feds. This happened a lot too, where its almost like their melee and morale stats are set so high they have stack overflow to become like 999/100 or something like that.

I just wanted to know if this is normal and supposed to happen and if this is unique to the Union campaign or if this is that classic concept of 'cheating ai = higher difficulty' and happens in the confed campaign too. Cuz right now it's giving mad "rebs were inherently better than yankees lost cause hur dur" vibes lol.

Also a couple constructive things. I don't know how much of this is the mod but I've played vanilla and most definitely didnt have these problems. Having the rebs be a revolving door of 3 star vet 100k man armies no matter how bad their defeats are is frankly not fun at all. It's just tedious and falls into the pitfall of the aforementioned cheating makes it better ai. Which is one of the worst and laziest tropes in gaming. I won the battle of gettysburg is a laughably one sides fight, something like 20k to 80k losses. Next with Chickamauga, yep you guessed it, fresh full stack all 3 star. Sure the final battles of vanilla are a little easy with the rebs completely spent, but its definitely realistic.

Also certain missions where you have default units. Namely Chickamauga and Gettysburg's start. You have so few men and the enemy army just plug walks up and charges with their single unit and wipes everyone.

So again, am I doing something wrong? Is this campaign glitched? Cuz right now I have to cheese really hard to win, and it gets frustrating being completely unable to engage head on due to seemingly insane stats on their units.

[pandakraut]

15 hours ago, tuskedkibbles said:

The rebs were obviously full veterancy, while i had two 3 star and three 2 star inf and two 1 star cav. My men lasted maybe 5-10 seconds before they all routed. MAYBE 500 dead rebs for ~6000 dead feds. This happened a lot too, where its almost like their melee and morale stats are set so high they have stack overflow to become like 999/100 or something like that.

In battle, AI units are limited to the same stats and bonuses as the player's. The mod places a much higher emphasis on stats and perks than the base game does. It also uses a much smaller melee vs multiple penalty so that swarming large units with multiple smaller units is far less effective. Low condition and morale also impose much larger penalties.

So depending on the size of the units involved, their condition, weapons, perks, and stats this result would not necessarily be unusual. For example, a fully melee perked and equipped melee unit can smash through multiple similarly sized units that are not setup for melee. As long as the melee unit has the condition to keep doing large amounts of damage, the morale gain from damage dealt can keep up with the damage taken in melee or from other units firing into melee. 

Full shooting spec'd armies with good artillery support do tend to prevent melee units from ever getting into contact. Especially combined with skirmishers or cavalry to hit charging units in the flanks as they can come in. It is however highly recommended to build at least some melee focused brigades as they can be very helpful for counter charging.

The next patch will be making some adjustments to these mechanics, but overall unit specialization through stats and perks is something that we feel is in a decent spot at the moment.

15 hours ago, tuskedkibbles said:

I just wanted to know if this is normal and supposed to happen and if this is unique to the Union campaign or if this is that classic concept of 'cheating ai = higher difficulty' and happens in the confed campaign too. Cuz right now it's giving mad "rebs were inherently better than yankees lost cause hur dur" vibes lol.

Player's tend to run into this more in the union campaign because union recruit stats are much worse than csa recruit stats at the start of the campaign. This combined with CSA AI units generally having higher experience early on in the campaign compared to union units results in the much harder union start. However, once you get past Malvern Hill the Union tends to have access to so much money, recruits, and high tier weapons that the rest of the campaign becomes much easier.

While many of those decisions are inherited from the base game, we haven't changed them because it leads to both campaigns being a somewhat different gameplay experience.

16 hours ago, tuskedkibbles said:

Also a couple constructive things. I don't know how much of this is the mod but I've played vanilla and most definitely didnt have these problems. Having the rebs be a revolving door of 3 star vet 100k man armies no matter how bad their defeats are is frankly not fun at all. It's just tedious and falls into the pitfall of the aforementioned cheating makes it better ai. Which is one of the worst and laziest tropes in gaming. I won the battle of gettysburg is a laughably one sides fight, something like 20k to 80k losses. Next with Chickamauga, yep you guessed it, fresh full stack all 3 star. Sure the final battles of vanilla are a little easy with the rebs completely spent, but its definitely realistic.

The mod was originally created from the perspective of players who found legendary vanilla too easy. So outside of the various mechanics changes, some changes were made to the campaign so that the player was less able to snowball the AI into irrelevance later in the campaign. We prefer to try and keep the AI relevant so that there is a continued challenge because otherwise most campaigns would end when the player wipes out the AI army at 1st Bull Run. 

Some of this does come down to random factors within the campaign. AI experience is determined by specific battle defaults, the recon report training value, and a random modifier. So some campaigns can end up being much easier than others. I've had Union Shiloh's where I'm mostly facing 1*s with a few 2*s and others where it's all 2* and 3*s. A couple of post battle reinforcement reports that are veterans or training can dramatically affect the campaign. Killing and capturing as many units as possible helps, but if you get unlucky it's very hard to keep the training value down.

The mod does provide configuration options if you would like to adjust how this works though. In the mod/rebalance/AIConfigFile there is an AIscalingExperienceMultiplier and an AIscalingSizeMultiplier. You can adjust these up or down throughout the campaign to adjust the size and experience of all AI units. You will have to restart the game and then start a new battle for any changes to take affect though. So for example, if you'd like to see less experienced units after Gettysburg you could set the AIscalingExperienceMultiplier to .75.

16 hours ago, tuskedkibbles said:

Also certain missions where you have default units. Namely Chickamauga and Gettysburg's start. You have so few men and the enemy army just plug walks up and charges with their single unit and wipes everyone.

It sounds like you are using fairly large units in your campaign? 3-4k or larger infantry units? The allied units do not scale at all and their sizes are set for more vanilla sized armies. We haven't come up with a way to scale them based on the player units due to technical limitations, but there is a configuration option that lets you adjust them. In the AIConfigFile you can use the historicalNorthSizeMultiplier to increase the size of allied units.

Hopefully the above provides some useful context and some options if you'd prefer the mod to function differently. If you have more questions please ask

 

[tuskedkibbles]

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

So depending on the size of the units involved, their condition, weapons, perks, and stats this result would not necessarily be unusual. For example, a fully melee perked and equipped melee unit can smash through multiple similarly sized units that are not setup for melee. As long as the melee unit has the condition to keep doing large amounts of damage, the morale gain from damage dealt can keep up with the damage taken in melee or from other units firing into melee. 

Full shooting spec'd armies with good artillery support do tend to prevent melee units from ever getting into contact. Especially combined with skirmishers or cavalry to hit charging units in the flanks as they can come in. It is however highly recommended to build at least some melee focused brigades as they can be very helpful for counter charging.

Yeah this is weird. I'm materially vastly superior to them, and the units I swarm with are most definitely not smaller than theirs. This particular example was I think the Stonewall brigade at Malvern Hill or maybe a little after (might've been a sub battle?) charging into the teeth of my 1st Division, which is the best I have, extremely well equipped and painstakingly maintained at high veterancy while still being 6k man doom stacks (feed recruits into the meatgrinder and let the elites sit back and farm xp with minimal casualties). My men's morale isn't really an issue either. The aforementioned first division generally performs very well and can USUALLY stand their ground, especially if they are in fortifications, even 1v1. Though they will still be broken by charges occasionally, but my other brigades don't stand a chance. But that makes sense as the fully spec'd reb units have what, like a +75% charge modifier and -30% morale damage if they've gone full charge build? I don't mind the 1v1's at all, that makes total sense, it's when like 4k men absolutely slaughter 4 times their number. It's just a little ridiculous, it's not like they're armed with battle axes and claymores. It's just not feasible to kill that many men in a bayonet charge, taking into account how bayonet charges were utilized in the war, more as shock and morale breakers instead of sustained fighting. 

It's not like it's hopelessly broken or anything, it's just irritating having an entire battle line (charged unit, the 2 adjacent and the 1 behind) shattered by one charge that is completely unfazed. As for the reply about gun lines putting the charges down. Not really to be blunt. It's really only my elites that can hope to turn away a full charge. Outside of my 1st corps, no one else really stands a chance if they don't have crushing numerical superiority. Around 100 guns in support and anywhere from 4-12k men firing on a charging unit of say 4k will kill only 1k? Maybe? Not even that half the time. It's also not uncommon for like 600 man skirmisher units to turn away a charge from 2k cavalry (armed for melee), and that one IS absolutely broken. Doesn't always happen but it shouldn't even be possible.

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Player's tend to run into this more in the union campaign because union recruit stats are much worse than csa recruit stats at the start of the campaign. This combined with CSA AI units generally having higher experience early on in the campaign compared to union units results in the much harder union start. However, once you get past Malvern Hill the Union tends to have access to so much money, recruits, and high tier weapons that the rest of the campaign becomes much easier.

Yeah that makes sense. I definitely expected the vet difference at first, it's just gotten tedious as the campaign has gone on and they have an endless supply of elite troops. Not to mention you can't train men to be battle hardened veterans. In game terms, without modern special forces training you could only get like 1 star through training. 

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

The mod was originally created from the perspective of players who found legendary vanilla too easy. So outside of the various mechanics changes, some changes were made to the campaign so that the player was less able to snowball the AI into irrelevance later in the campaign. We prefer to try and keep the AI relevant so that there is a continued challenge because otherwise most campaigns would end when the player wipes out the AI army at 1st Bull Run. 

Fair enough, can't really blame you guys/gals. If I'm remembering correctly, my vanilla Cold Harbor (or whatever battle with the forts at the end) was like 160k Union vets armed across the board with M1863's vs like 20k green rebs with like Mississippis. It was pretty pathetic, half the forts were empty lol.

That seems to be more of an issue with the game devs themselves. I get wanting content, but it makes no sense for the war to last that long when I'm shattering every battle. They should've made it harder to win battles/less decisive (ai retreats in early phases if they're getting wrecked) but the campaign ends if you can truly destroy the AoNV or the AotP. Hopefully their new game with the "dynamic campaign" addresses this.

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Some of this does come down to random factors within the campaign. AI experience is determined by specific battle defaults, the recon report training value, and a random modifier. So some campaigns can end up being much easier than others. I've had Union Shiloh's where I'm mostly facing 1*s with a few 2*s and others where it's all 2* and 3*s. A couple of post battle reinforcement reports that are veterans or training can dramatically affect the campaign. Killing and capturing as many units as possible helps, but if you get unlucky it's very hard to keep the training value down.

It sounds like you are using fairly large units in your campaign? 3-4k or larger infantry units? The allied units do not scale at all and their sizes are set for more vanilla sized armies. We haven't come up with a way to scale them based on the player units due to technical limitations, but there is a configuration option that lets you adjust them. In the AIConfigFile you can use the historicalNorthSizeMultiplier to increase the size of allied units.

Does the recon value make it worse? I like the recon trait so I max it out pretty early. I'll just go in blind tho if that's whats making them have a constant 70-80% training level. The most decisive victory I've had was Antietam where they lost about 80-90% of their army killed, wounded, or captured. Back up to full strength by next battle. Also if the reports are part of what's building them up, the small battles in between aren't really worth fighting right? Like 5 rep isn't worth the thousands of casualties I take and giving them 20k free troops for like a 5% army reduction in the grand battle. That's kind of ridiculous.

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

It sounds like you are using fairly large units in your campaign? 3-4k or larger infantry units? The allied units do not scale at all and their sizes are set for more vanilla sized armies. We haven't come up with a way to scale them based on the player units due to technical limitations, but there is a configuration option that lets you adjust them. In the AIConfigFile you can use the historicalNorthSizeMultiplier to increase the size of allied units.

Yeah all brigades on both sides are huge, do the enemy armies scale to mine as well? I noticed how massive their armies were at the start (first mission, distress call I think, they had 6k stacks) so I started going predominantly quantity. If that started essentially an arms race for numbers that explains a lot. I'm at 1864 now and the rebs have ~100-150k in each grand battle (also annoying as thats twice the size of the IRL AoNV and I've killed or wounded literally a third of the white south at this point). Their armory seems to be about the only thing right, a lot of Lorenz rifles sure but no Whitworths and only a few Richmonds. Mostly the small reb manufacturers or Enfields.

8 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Hopefully the above provides some useful context and some options if you'd prefer the mod to function differently. If you have more questions please ask

Yes, thank you so much for the assist. I personally prefer realism even if it sacrifices difficulty, so I'll probably take you up on that xp modifier. I'd prefer to float around the IRL sizes of the AotP and the AoNV instead of the titanic Napoleonic battles I'm having to deal with right now. I'm on pace to hit 200k men in my army soon, which is ridiculous.

Thank you again for the response to all that stuff.

Edited August 1, 2021 by tuskedkibbles

[tuskedkibbles]

Oof. Yeah I don't know why I never though to look, but I checked their stats on a captured brigade. Literally every single unit is 100 in everything. One of them even has a command of 104. That just completely killed any desire to play honestly. Now I'm just kind of bummed. That's not fun at all.

[pandakraut]

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

It's just not feasible to kill that many men in a bayonet charge, taking into account how bayonet charges were utilized in the war, more as shock and morale breakers instead of sustained fighting. 

This is an area where we lean more towards gameplay choice than realism. With the way battle mechanics are setup, kills need to be achieved for melee to have a chance. With lower kill rates the units just exhaust themselves and then you get shot to death while trying to recover. Perhaps it'd be possible to completely rework this system into something more historical, but it would be a very large amount of effort to change it that dramatically.

We have tried pushing the damage to be more morale focused in recent patches, but large and very experienced units can still rack up a lot of casualties very quickly in the right situations.

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

It's not like it's hopelessly broken or anything, it's just irritating having an entire battle line (charged unit, the 2 adjacent and the 1 behind) shattered by one charge that is completely unfazed. As for the reply about gun lines putting the charges down. Not really to be blunt. It's really only my elites that can hope to turn away a full charge. Outside of my 1st corps, no one else really stands a chance if they don't have crushing numerical superiority. Around 100 guns in support and anywhere from 4-12k men firing on a charging unit of say 4k will kill only 1k? Maybe? Not even that half the time. It's also not uncommon for like 600 man skirmisher units to turn away a charge from 2k cavalry (armed for melee), and that one IS absolutely broken. Doesn't always happen but it shouldn't even be possible.

This is something that gets pretty hard to analyze without being able to watch the gameplay and see how the units are equipped/perked. What I can say is that the majority of the feedback we get is that a well setup shooting army can very reliably stop charges before they ever make contact. Or at least when they do make contact it'll only be against a single unit and then you just shoot into it until the enemy routs. The majority of players do tend to play with smaller unit sizes (1000-2000 men infantry) so this might be something that becomes more of a problem when unit sizes are maxed out.

If you have the ability to share saves from before a battle that tends to be problematic, or upload any video I'd be happy to take a look. Saves are located here C:\Users\Erik\YOUR USERNAME\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate General Civil War\Save\CampaignBattle

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

That seems to be more of an issue with the game devs themselves. I get wanting content, but it makes no sense for the war to last that long when I'm shattering every battle. They should've made it harder to win battles/less decisive (ai retreats in early phases if they're getting wrecked) but the campaign ends if you can truly destroy the AoNV or the AotP. Hopefully their new game with the "dynamic campaign" addresses this.

It seems like you're looking for a fundamentally different type of game. Something more like Grand Tactician or UG:AR. While there are certainly advantages to more dynamic games, I think the upside that this design brings is the ability to take your own approach to the originally historical battles. With more dynamic campaigns you most likely will not end up in the same historical situations so you never get to see the battles play out in that way. 

If you're limiting to a historical recreation of battles, then progression gets tricky. For example, we've considered making more changes so that losing or drawing battles has more effect. The problem is most players just restart battles they have lost, so spending a lot of time on mechanics that only ironman players see doesn't have a ton of benefit. Similarly, we could add some kind of campaign victory condition where you win upon getting a certain number of kills, but this seems of limited benefit when the player could add their own roleplay conditions more effectively than anything we could force in.

If we had more freedom to mod in new battles and such, I could definitely see a combination approach of UGG and UGCW working well. Where between battles or during battles, you get choices on how to proceed and this impacts how the next stage of the campaign would go. 

That said, the recent morale and shatter changes have made it far to easy to wrap up battles long before the timers expire. This leads to all kinds of cheese opportunities. The longer timers were set in older versions of the mod when it took much longer to grind enemy units down before they would shatter, and just aren't necessary anymore. The next version will include a balance pass on every battle(that's why it's taking so long to complete) and one of the goals is to hopefully have more battles where just slowly wiping every single unit out is no longer possible without super aggressive play.

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

Does the recon value make it worse? I like the recon trait so I max it out pretty early. I'll just go in blind tho if that's whats making them have a constant 70-80% training level. The most decisive victory I've had was Antietam where they lost about 80-90% of their army killed, wounded, or captured. Back up to full strength by next battle. Also if the reports are part of what's building them up, the small battles in between aren't really worth fighting right? Like 5 rep isn't worth the thousands of casualties I take and giving them 20k free troops for like a 5% army reduction in the grand battle. That's kind of ridiculous.

Recon has no effect on this at all. We've considered adding that kind of benefit, but that leads to a weird minmax situation. As long as the player can kill everything with acceptable casualties, the best possible options is for the AI to be as big and as well equipped as possible. So putting points in recon that say reduced scaling, would actively be a negative in that situation. Certainly that isn't all players, but that's one of the reasons we've held off on that kind of change.

So there are a couple things going on here. The number of AI units and their default sizes are predetermined for every battle. Scaling does affect this though. However, one of the changes the mod makes to support multiple playstyles is more aggressive average size scaling. So if you're using a lot of 4 and 6k units the AI units are going to get scaled up that big regardless on legendary. This is done because otherwise the player will be running around with 6k units and facing 2ks which is a complete walkover. But we also don't want players using 1-2k sized units running into 6ks regularly. 

To describe the system a bit more, the numbers you want to keep an eye on are your total casualties + captures inflicted in a battle compared to the post battle reinforcement report numbers. This affects the AI recon report army size. That army size is a snowball factor for scaling. It will go up over the course of the campaign, and it does have minimum values. This is why you can kill 80k at Antietam and the army size will go back up to around 50k for example. This snowball factor tends to have a fairly small impact as long as you keep it close to the minimum, which as long as you are killing 60%+ in battles you will tend to. This also means that when they 'get' 20k troops that actually might mean that the scaling factor goes up 0.005% and you see almost no change. The 5% will nearly always outweigh any gains they made from the snowball factor, even if you retreat from the side battle without inflicting a single casualty. The next patch will be adding some UI tooltips to try to give the player a better indicator on if they are close to the minimum.

What this means is that the reason to play side battles is more about the state of your army than the state of the AIs. Side battles = more rep, more xp, more weapons, and more career points. The only time I think they are worth skipping is if you think you can't come out ahead compared to your casualties.

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

Yeah all brigades on both sides are huge, do the enemy armies scale to mine as well? I noticed how massive their armies were at the start (first mission, distress call I think, they had 6k stacks) so I started going predominantly quantity. If that started essentially an arms race for numbers that explains a lot.

I think I covered this up above, but essentially yes you started a race to max size by accident. Think of it kind of like setting your units sizes to extreme in the older total war games if that is a useful reference. Players have completed the entire campaign using units around 1-1.5k and in most cases they never face anything bigger than 2-3k(some exceptions I won't get into at the moment.) This is something that has always been a struggle to communicate. You can go big if you want, but it's not required. And if you go big we try to let the AI keep up. We also try to provide extra resources at the outside to give people leeway to mess up or go big if they want, but this can prove a trap for players who aren't looking for that.

On 8/1/2021 at 1:17 PM, tuskedkibbles said:

Yes, thank you so much for the assist. I personally prefer realism even if it sacrifices difficulty, so I'll probably take you up on that xp modifier. I'd prefer to float around the IRL sizes of the AotP and the AoNV instead of the titanic Napoleonic battles I'm having to deal with right now. I'm on pace to hit 200k men in my army soon, which is ridiculous.

While limiting your unit sizes will help a lot with this, to go even further you may want to look into this submod https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/34966-historical-submod-of-jp-rebalance-mod-release-thread/ 

It hard limits the brigade/regiment sizes to more historical levels and takes a completely different approach to scaling and such. It does also go down the path of limiting the players ability to issue orders in a more historical fashion compared to the perfect control the base game offers.

19 hours ago, tuskedkibbles said:

Oof. Yeah I don't know why I never though to look, but I checked their stats on a captured brigade. Literally every single unit is 100 in everything. One of them even has a command of 104. That just completely killed any desire to play honestly. Now I'm just kind of bummed. That's not fun at all.

With 80 training late in the campaign, many CSA units will end up with perfect stats. Not all of them will however. The way this tends to be setup in the defaults is that some units get very high stats so that they will tend towards 2 or 3*. Then difficulty, training and such gets added on on top. If you drop the AI experience multiplier enough you should definitely be seeing a mix of 1-3* units though. Alternately, playing on a lower difficulty and cranking the multipliers back up to a desired amount might get closer to what you are looking for.

Thanks for putting up with my essays, hope this or the submod works out for you with some modifications. Also if you haven't seen it yet, definitely check out Grand Tactician for a dynamic campaign. Still in EA and working through issues, but incredibly ambitious.

 

[tuskedkibbles]

3 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Thanks for putting up with my essays, hope this or the submod works out for you with some modifications. Also if you haven't seen it yet, definitely check out Grand Tactician for a dynamic campaign. Still in EA and working through issues, but incredibly ambitious.

 

No thank you! It may seem like I was ranting a lot, but this mod is a ton of fun for an already great game. I appreciate the work you guys put in and even with my small gripes, the game is definitely better with the mod. Thanks for replying to everything and in a very timely manner, I appreciate it a ton. Keep up the great work! Oh and thanks for the submod link as well as the game recommendations, they look really good.

[PaulD]

Just a minor thing I've noticed when playing Distress Call and holding the northern ammo dump/fort from the start. I've had a lot of success with putting 3 INF units and 1 ART in the northern supply depot, some units in the woods to the left, sending the 2 units in the southern depot to intercept CSA coming from the south bridge, and then SKM and CAV to intercept CSA from north bridge.

Anyway, with four units in the northern supply depot, I will get messages saying that CSA has taken the northern depot (Supply Depot 1) even though CSA isn't inside the depot, and sometimes not even engaged yet.  I could understand if CSA was charging and actually in the depot, but that is not what is happening.

I've tried to duplicate it to determine the trigger. Although it has happened each time I use this strategy, it isn't consistent in regard to the AI CSA action.  One time it happened with CSA INF units just standing outside exchanging volleys, another time it happened when CSA CAV ran up and fired then fell back, the third time nothing was actually happening because all CSA units were tied up engaging units away from the depot.

[Clone103]

First of all I would like to thank you, Pandakraut&JonnyH13, for amazing work you have done. I really enjoyed almost all changes.

Especially i enjoyed first part of the game. Second part still rapidly becomes boring meatgrinder by arty behind infantry lines.

 

Your mod inspired me to try some cheesy tactics different from ordinary "max arty+infantry enough to cover". But there is one complication with AI. AI is at the same time mix of absurdly passive and aggresive. I know it sounds strange, but...

If you take really low amount of infantry to battle, AI will know it and charge you down. He will do it even without direct contact with your army, which is completely out of sight. So I always had to define minimal amount of infantry for every battle.
On other hand AI instantly starts to act passive and unreasonable if you don't follow historical flow of battle. Just turning defensive battle into offensive drasticcally changes AI behavaior. Thus AI becomes completly helpless.

For example 2nd Bull Run by Confederates. Casualties are almost 50:1.

2 tuskedkibbles

I got trapped with similar issue at my Union campaign. I tested build with focus on Logistic&Eco (with AO for maxed unit limits) and got run down by Confs due to low skill of my troops. All my fresh units were 0 or 1 star because of low Training. While i faced high skilled opponent. That was brutal.

I think it is the result of min/max approach. If you know what to do game will be easy, while if you do something wrong or expirementing campaing becomes  progressive harder. 

Edited August 3, 2021 by Clone103

[pandakraut]

On 8/3/2021 at 8:38 AM, PaulD said:

Just a minor thing I've noticed when playing Distress Call and holding the northern ammo dump/fort from the start. I've had a lot of success with putting 3 INF units and 1 ART in the northern supply depot, some units in the woods to the left, sending the 2 units in the southern depot to intercept CSA coming from the south bridge, and then SKM and CAV to intercept CSA from north bridge.

Anyway, with four units in the northern supply depot, I will get messages saying that CSA has taken the northern depot (Supply Depot 1) even though CSA isn't inside the depot, and sometimes not even engaged yet.  I could understand if CSA was charging and actually in the depot, but that is not what is happening.

I've tried to duplicate it to determine the trigger. Although it has happened each time I use this strategy, it isn't consistent in regard to the AI CSA action.  One time it happened with CSA INF units just standing outside exchanging volleys, another time it happened when CSA CAV ran up and fired then fell back, the third time nothing was actually happening because all CSA units were tied up engaging units away from the depot.

There are some VPs whose control is based on a local hp strength. The Shiloh landing VP being on of the more noticeable ones. This can sometimes result in control being taken if many large enemy units are nearby despite the player being more directly on top of the point.

If the ghost cav bug happens where the game thinks the unit is not in the same place as the sprites this can also cause points to flip unexpectedly.

So if you drive them further back the VP should fix itself. At least at distress call you have enough time that this shouldn't cause any problems with the victory conditions. 

If you run into this elsewhere, or it seems like it's impossible to flip a point back no matter what you do, make a save and let me know. I ran into this once the other day and I'm not sure if that was a one off or not.

[PaulD]

1 hour ago, pandakraut said:

If you run into this elsewhere, or it seems like it's impossible to flip a point back no matter what you do, make a save and let me know. I ran into this once the other day and I'm not sure if that was a one off or not.

Will do. Of the three times that it happened; the control switched back to Union fairly quickly.  The one time when no CSA units were close to the depot, control switched back and forth between Union and CSA 3 or 4 times within a few game minutes before settling on Union.  I do think the ghost CAV thing is at least part of it. 

[pandakraut]

21 hours ago, Clone103 said:

If you take really low amount of infantry to battle, AI will know it and charge you down. He will do it even without direct contact with your army, which is completely out of sight. So I always had to define minimal amount of infantry for every battle.
On other hand AI instantly starts to act passive and unreasonable if you don't follow historical flow of battle. Just turning defensive battle into offensive drasticcally changes AI behavaior. Thus AI becomes completly helpless.

AI willingness to search you out and find you does very depending on the battle AI assigned to a given phase. Brock Road and Union Chickamauga day 3 are the two most notable shifts where even tiny AI units will aggressively find and attack you.

Shortcutting the intended battle progression does definitely mess with the AI pretty frequently. There are several 'attacked from all sides' battles where you can vacate the point and hide. Then the AI just sort of sits around and never really responds even when you start attacking individual units.

In others the aggressive path is definitely the better play, CSA Antietam being the most common example. If you just overwhelm each detachment as it arrives then the entire battle can become very easy. We are working on adjusting the worst examples of this, though I'm sure players will find new ways to take advantage.

21 hours ago, Clone103 said:

For example 2nd Bull Run by Confederates. Casualties are almost 50:1.

Could you comment more on what you did to achieve this result? Also, what difficulty you are playing?

Even with very aggressive spawn camping I'm surprised the casualties are so low. Did you perhaps add men to units between days? That messes up the post battle casualty numbers.

[Clone103]

5 hours ago, pandakraut said:

AI willingness to search you out and find you does very depending on the battle AI assigned to a given phase. Brock Road and Union Chickamauga day 3 are the two most notable shifts where even tiny AI units will aggressively find and attack you.

I'm talking about difference at one battle. For example I tested different unit compositions at Cross Keys (Confederates). When i brought only 4 infantry units AI decided to make deep flanking from North and South directions. Also he just charged at me from the start. When i bring 6 infatry units AI cames back to classical strat - take middle and slowly approach across the river. And i had the same thing recurring at different battles (for example Battle of Chantilly/2nd Winchester).

 

Quote

Could you comment more on what you did to achieve this result? Also, what difficulty you are playing?

Even with very aggressive spawn camping I'm surprised the casualties are so low. Did you perhaps add men to units between days? That messes up the post battle casualty numbers.

No, I didn't add any men to units after farm part.

It's BG diffculty.

First of all i checked Forefall campaign, you mentioned before. He noticed that agressive aproach to 2nd Bull Run makes it much easier. So i decided "what if I will do the same thing, but even more agressive and do better micro". General setup was: infantry units 1 100, arty 4/6/8 guns (depends on amount of guns), ranged cav 500, melee cav 750. I definitely reduced Union forces by splitting my reserves to 2 parts. 1st reserv corp was only 3 cav units, second some art, inf and skirmishers. I have other campaign where different composition of reinforcements increased Union forces by almost 15k.

I decided to take fortifications at the middle between forest and railroad. At couple of first tryouts i had normal losses at northern part of map, so i decided to concenrate almost all my artillery here (except of 2 artillery units). It were 24pows, 20pdr parrot and some rifled arts. I had 3 cav units from start (melee - lemats, ranged with maynards and sharps). One of them is 3 star unit from Shiloh, i got lucky and rolled all 3 ranged perks here. Second also 3 star range cav with maynards.

Basicaly you know that Union forces are coming from 3 main directions - north, west and south. So you bring you cav at center around vision point and wait till spawn. You should also send some dedicated skirmishers to the forest at north part, south vision point and at forests at the middle. You need them just for vision. Tactic is simple - skip spawn of nothern group and let them almost approach woods. When attack slow arty with cav units, fall back. Do the same trick with middle group. So 1st group is freezed around woods, 2nd decides to stop near the wheat field/farm. Send one ranged cav to south group of units, kill arty and take agro from infantry. And other ranged cav plus melee cav should go to the river near the city. Hide melee cav at small forest and take agro from Union cav on hill by range cav, fall back to the city direction and fire when Union cav will be crossing the ford. Charge them by melee cav then they will low on morale. After that fall back, so southern Union group will freeze between forest and city.And go for nothern group. They probably would come to the woods. Till this moment you almost don't need to control all your army except 3 cav brigades.
Don't fight with skirmishers you need them just for vision, so you arty could fire from max range.You should bring all three cav units here when Union will decide to charge at you. Kill remaining arty and start flanking fire on infatry by ranged cav to rout them one by one. You should have enough time.

 

I think that AI logic breaks somethere here. Agressiveness of southern group seems to be tied to attacks at the middle, so they just stay at the forest near Groveton almost till the end. They moved out from forest almost when i got reinforcements. At the same time agressiveness of middle group breakes if you attack them at wheat field and continue to harras them here. While nothern group is so harrased by cav and arty, so they just coming under fire and rout before reaching your defense lines.

Main trick here is simple. Don't even try to charge with cav and forget about rifles or other weapons. You need sharps/maynards only for morale damage. Split you cav, so one will fire from rear, one from flank. Then enemy brigade will rout bring your melee cav with lemats (lemats is a must for higher melee damage, so your cav will spent less condition) and switch ranged cav to next infantry brigade. So your melee cav will attack routed units and won't take losses. After that just look out for outside units and do the same thing. Stay with melee cav near enemy (let them rest) and just take down routed units. 1st ranged cav take agro, but you should continue to move around, so infatry will try to rotate to the left/right to make a volley, while 2nd range cav firing from flank/rear. 2 and 3 star range cav spends almost no condition on moving, so they are over 85% almost all time. Just leave one or two captured supply wagons somewhere near center of the map, so cav could refill their ammo. Melee will provide a lot of captures and early shatters. Basicaly you fight morale threshold to shatter/capture.

You can practice carousel trick on charged infantry units. You easily see which cav unit is the target of charge and just kite back. Infantry strangely won't change the target at 95% probability.  While other range cav doing flanking/rear fire. When infatry's flag start to throb just send in melee cav. Yeah, it's really micro intensive and requires a lot of your attention. But you can do it because you almost don't need to control the rest of your army. 
To cut a long story short, did the same thing with all enemy groups and get them one by one with cav. You just need to force them to freeze at the start of the battle. It's very similar to Antitaem. But it's like having three separated mini battles instead of one big battle.

Thus my main cav units finished 2nd Bull Run like this, while enemy had almost similar amount of killed/captured.

Edited August 4, 2021 by Clone103

[pandakraut]

2 hours ago, Clone103 said:

You easily see which cav unit is the target of charge and just kite back. Infantry strangely won't change the target at 95% probability. 

Sounds like you're a on a slightly older patch? Infantry charging cav units shouldn't be something the AI does anymore.

Thanks for the description, this should be at least somewhat more difficult to pull off in the next patch.

[Clone103]

43 minutes ago, pandakraut said:

Infantry charging cav units shouldn't be something the AI does anymore.

Prob some old version. Sometimes it's hard to follow updates at the theme. I'm gonna check for a new version and give a new try in a couple of next weeks. Just bit bored after experiments on last campaign.

Main thing still was carousel of rotating infatry by two ranged cav units. Even with rotation speed perk on infatry i could outrun rotation speed.
Also tried to pull similar trick with skirmishers brigade. Thing also worked. Enemy infatry blindly chased skirmishers (scoped rifles) for a good part of the map, while ignoring my cav units near them. Probably valued them too much.

Edited August 5, 2021 by Clone103

[pandakraut]

18 hours ago, Clone103 said:

Prob some old version. Sometimes it's hard to follow updates at the theme. I'm gonna check for a new version and give a new try in a couple of next weeks. Just bit bored after experiments on last campaign.

Main thing still was carousel of rotating infatry by two ranged cav units. Even with rotation speed perk on infatry i could outrun rotation speed.
Also tried to pull similar trick with skirmishers brigade. Thing also worked. Enemy infatry blindly chased skirmishers (scoped rifles) for a good part of the map, while ignoring my cav units near them. Probably valued them too much.

Ok, sounds like you're a couple minor revisions back. The cavalry carousel should be much harder to pull off in the latest version due to various changes.

[The Soldier]

Judging from the LeMat still using the old, vanilla icon, I'd say he's more than a couple minor revisions back.

[PaulD]

Regarding the second artillery perk in the mod, trying to decide between 25% increased shell/shot damage or 25% accuracy, what is the math behind the 25% increased accuracy? Normally, I would typically pick accuracy but from my limited understanding of how accuracy works in the game I'm not how it is applied.

[pandakraut]

12 minutes ago, PaulD said:

Regarding the second artillery perk in the mod, trying to decide between 25% increased shell/shot damage or 25% accuracy, what is the math behind the 25% increased accuracy? Normally, I would typically pick accuracy but from my limited understanding of how accuracy works in the game I'm not how it is applied.

Accuracy is basically a damage multiplier as there is no actual 'to hit' chance in the game, just lower and higher damage. Functionally accuracy and shot/shell damage provide the same bonus, however accuracy also applies to canister damage while shot/shell only applies to those two shot types.

[PaulD]

 

10 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Accuracy is basically a damage multiplier as there is no actual 'to hit' chance in the game, just lower and higher damage. Functionally accuracy and shot/shell damage provide the same bonus, however accuracy also applies to canister damage while shot/shell only applies to those two shot types.

Thanks Pandakraut. I do build dedicated anti-battery rifle units, but with my smoothbores, I may swap them for rifles at times if cannister won't be used much in a given battle. So, accuracy is always useful because it doesn't matter which gun that battery is using.  Much appreciated.

[Raymond Sebastien]

Quick question to which there is probably a written answer in the topic, but which I cannot find, sorry. 

👉 How is the percentage of detached skirmishers from a brigade calculated? 

Is there a way to change this?

Have a nice day and take care. ☺️