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


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On 8/9/2021 at 10:47 AM, Raymond Sebastien said:

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

Is there a way to change this?

There is a curve that determines the size for the base game and these values are reduced slightly in the mod. This is currently only modifiable in the dll. Method name is ScoutModelInitData(BrigadeModelInitData initData) and search for skirmishersCreationSizeDependency

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I'm curious, is there a benefit of the melee perk that isn't listed on the tool tip? Obviously, the perk says 25% to charge and 15% to speed (lvl 1). So, the implication is that the only melee bonus would come from pressing "Charge", but from my game play observations there seems to be more to it.  Mainly, I've found that my units with a melee perk do much better tanking/resisting a CSA infantry brigade WITHOUT pressing charge.

Originally, if I was in a situation where CSA infantry is charging one of my units, and I can't stop the charge or avoid it, I would "charge" them too, in order to get the 25% bonus. This would result in my unit doing more initial damage, but they would burn through morale and condition so fast that my unit would route. However, if I don't charge, and the CSA unit is of similar size, my melee units don't inflict as many casualties initially, but they often outlast the charging CSA unit, then when the CSA breaks and routes my unit continues doing damage and holding their ground...  whereas my units with accuracy perk usually can't do this, so it just seems to me more is going on with that melee perk than the tool tip is indicating.

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3 hours ago, PaulD said:

I'm curious, is there a benefit of the melee perk that isn't listed on the tool tip? Obviously, the perk says 25% to charge and 15% to speed (lvl 1). So, the implication is that the only melee bonus would come from pressing "Charge", but from my game play observations there seems to be more to it.  Mainly, I've found that my units with a melee perk do much better tanking/resisting a CSA infantry brigade WITHOUT pressing charge.

If you are not in the charge state, then the speed bonus is the only direct benefit you are getting from those perks. The charge perk is taken into account by the AI when determining if it should charge, so you are getting some indirect deterrence though.

In a future patch we are planning on having these perks apply a reduced bonus to melee damage so that units with the perks get more of a benefit when they are not charging.

There are a couple of things that I suspect are actually the cause of the performance difference you are seeing when you don't charge. Most likely your melee perked units are equipped with better melee weapons and have better melee stats than your shooting units which would account for their better performance even when not charging. The other option is that the condition burn when you charge was applying a penalty that rapidly outweighed any charge bonus. If you're charging at close to the last second that isn't the case in my experience though. There is no windup time to gain a charge bonus if you were playing that way.

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With the replacement officer system of the mod, it is extremely rare that I merge units, unless it is a prolonged battle, and a unit takes heavy casualties early. So, this might be a known issue and I just happen to notice it for the first time.  That is, merging two units that both have detached skirmishers causes skirmisher morale to rapidly countdown negative, without stop. Granted, this was with two allied units.

Playing Seven Pines on MG with the most recent mod files. In both the mod and base game, the two small INF allied units in the center are terrible, so I usually merge and park them behind my troops and keep them in reserve. Since the AI skirmishers are great at remaining hidden in this battle, I will deploy a few detached skirmishers to take advantage of the increased spotting. In this play through, I decided to deploy detached skirmishers from those two allied INF units. 

After detaching the two skirmishers, I clicked on the "merge" for those two INF units.  I then clicked on each detached skirmisher to deploy them to my desired location. I happen to have unit stats revealed rather than the default condition screen and as the detached skirmishers were moving into position (and at the moment the two INF units merged) I realized the morale for each detached skirmisher was furiously counting down negative - into the minus several hundred in seconds - even with the game paused.

I did a quick save and reload to see if they would reset. Well, when the game loaded, the two detached skirmishers were flashing white as if they were rooting even though they had not taken damage - assuming from the negative morale.  They sat there flashing for about 20 game minutes. At some point, when the action had calmed down, I went ahead and did a save and load again to see if they would reset. This time the detached skirmishers were gone - I assume the game assumed those units had rooted, so it removed them from play.

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6 minutes ago, PaulD said:

With the replacement officer system of the mod, it is extremely rare that I merge units, unless it is a prolonged battle, and a unit takes heavy casualties early. So, this might be a known issue and I just happen to notice it for the first time.  That is, merging two units that both have detached skirmishers causes skirmisher morale to rapidly countdown negative, without stop. Granted, this was with two allied units.

Thanks for the detailed report. There have been multiple issues around detached skirmishers due to giving them access to their parent's perks. I would generally not recommend merging units in battle because the merged unit has no perks and this results in a significant loss of power. 

Are you on the latest patch 1.27.4.3? The current stopgap fix is that any detached skirmisher that can't find it's parent will get shattered so that worse bugs don't occur. Merging effectively results in the parent not being found. The next patch will have a much cleaner for this entire issue, but that is coming along with some major changes so it won't be out anytime soon unfortunately.

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2 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Are you on the latest patch 1.27.4.3? The current stopgap fix is that any detached skirmisher that can't find it's parent will get shattered so that worse bugs don't occur. Merging effectively results in the parent not being found. The next patch will have a much cleaner for this entire issue, but that is coming along with some major changes so it won't be out anytime soon unfortunately.

I updated to 1.27.4.3 in June right after Jonny posted the files. I then moved my old saves to a separate folder and started fresh. Admittedly, I am a bit later than most to UGCW, as I didn't start playing until a year ago. Had fun with the base game and then started playing your mod in April. Played Union and CSA through on BG to get a feel for the changes. Now, I'm trying to master MG difficulty.

I've been experimenting with different career stat and perk builds to see what fits my playing style. In BG you can make any stat combination work, it doesn't really matter what you pick if AO is high enough to field your army. I can't say the same for MG. So far, I've taken six builds through Shiloh and five of them had similar results - going through all phases and winning, but with a large number of casualties. My last build cleared the board on day one with half the casualties, so I either got lucky, or found the right combo that fits me for MG difficulty.

It is interesting how much individual playing style impacts the battles and people's perceptions of the battles. For example, it seems that most people have a much easier time with Shiloh phase 1 (Union right) than they do with phase 2 (Union left), whereas I am the exact opposite - to the point that I give my troops on the left flank my worst equipment and most of my green units and they still do better than my union right in regard to holding ground. Most people just despise Philippi, but I love Philippi it in both the base game and mod even though I play them extremely different. In the base game, if you take the objective with less than 10 game minutes left it will cut off early, so you never face the CSA counterattack (thus having fewer casualties to start the campaign). The mod doesn't allow early cut off (that I know of), so I avoid tripping the objective to prolong the battle and do a full clear of phase one CSA units to allow my starter units to rack up as many kills and captures as possible - killing the last CSA unit will start the counterattack phase whether you take the objective or not, then I full clear phase two.

The whole experience is just interesting and challenging, while being frustrating as hell when things don't work out, but extremely satisfying when you realize you've figured out an optimal strategy for each battle that fits your play style.

Edited by PaulD
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Dumb question time!

Quite new to the game and mod so excuse my ignorance. Really loving the slower pace of Rebalance so cheers for the hard work :)

1.
How are stat increases from battle calculated?
I see on the vanilla wiki melee is 1 point per 25 kills, and firearms is 1 point per 5x reload cycles.
Is this still the case in Rebalance?

2. 
How does the Career skill Training perk work? 
The description and comments in this thread seem to indicate new troops will come with +10 (or whatever bonus based on skill points), but buying new vets on a rookie unit doesnt do anything to the unit stats for me and new units also appear (might be wrong) to not come with increased stats. 
Some of the comments also seem to indicate high training will let you recruit 1 star units - ive not found this to be the case, everyones at 0 exp. 
I reckon i have the wrong end of the stick on how this perk works. I dont have screen shots but ill see if i can remember tot to take some next campaign, last time i focused on training and got to 10 and felt like it was a total waste in terms of improving my units or giving them a head start - all it did was give me a discount on vets to maintain my units at their current level. 

edit:
3. Is there a way to influence Corps and Division commander exp, or is it a set number per battle? I.e. its gonna just take 6 battles (or whatever) to get to the next rank. I ideally dont want to swap em out and have them risk their necks on line units + lose or have to build up Battles Lead bonuses, for whatever reason unit commanders seem to level up way faster.

4. How do detatched skirmishers bring their exp and stat changes back to the parent unit. Multiplied down based on skill difference vs parent/detatchment man power at end of battle?


Thanks in advance!
 

Edited by Edward Reynolds
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On 8/18/2021 at 1:33 AM, Edward Reynolds said:

How are stat increases from battle calculated?
I see on the vanilla wiki melee is 1 point per 25 kills, and firearms is 1 point per 5x reload cycles.
Is this still the case in Rebalance?

Melee is point per x melee kills, efficiency is point per x ranged kill, firearms is per completed reload cycle(length of cycle does matter so this can't be cheesed), stamina is per total distance moved(mod also adds a small bonus for reloading), morale is total time spent in battle.

The values required per point are generally higher in the mod than in the base game.

On 8/18/2021 at 1:33 AM, Edward Reynolds said:

How does the Career skill Training perk work? 

When you add a veteran to a unit, a recruit is consumed but instead of averaging the recruits stats into the units stats, the recruit is instead added with identical stats to the unit. The higher the stats of the unit, the higher the cost. So this can be used to maintain experience but not actively increase the experience of a unit. Adding veterans to a newly created unit will charge you even though the stats will be the same as if you added recruits.

In the mod, training increases the stats of recruits gained from a battle. So you won't see any immediate benefit when you assign the point, but when the next battle is completed, the rewarded recruits will have higher stats than what you would normally receive. So for example if you start the campaign with 7 points in training, all recruits you will have received when you enter camp will have +20 to all stats. You can see your current stats using a tooltip on the total recruit number.

When a unit is created, whether or not it has access to the first perk is determined by the average of all its stats other than command and a bonus based on the xp of the commander. So if you have a unit with 20 in all stats it would not normally get a perk, but if you put a MG in charge of the unit the commander bonus will push it over to 1* status.

The mod also adds a battles led system which decreases the xp bonus for an officer that has never completed a battle with the unit and increases the xp bonus for officers that have served with the unit for multiple battles. You can see these bonuses through a tooltip on the officer xp bar.

On 8/18/2021 at 1:33 AM, Edward Reynolds said:

Is there a way to influence Corps and Division commander exp, or is it a set number per battle? I.e. its gonna just take 6 battles (or whatever) to get to the next rank. I ideally dont want to swap em out and have them risk their necks on line units + lose or have to build up Battles Lead bonuses, for whatever reason unit commanders seem to level up way faster.

Xp gain is static per battle type for these commanders. Brigade commanders xp is based on the stat increase of their controlled unit. When minmaxed you can get very high xp gain by putting an officer in charge of a brand new unit with low stats. However, there are diminishing returns on more experienced units with higher stats. For example, if it took 25 kills to gain 1 point of efficiency when that stat is 10, it may take 100 kills to go from 99 to 100. Additionally, the officer ranks are skewed towards colonels and BGs, so it will take much longer to get enough xp to exit those ranks than it will to progress from MG to LTG or from LT colonel to colonel.

Since the flat xp does not suffer from diminishing returns, it can be effective to move fairly experienced BGs into division command to get that last bump. Since unless you are sticking them on a new unit with low stats, their xp progression will slow down. For instance if you have a BG on a unit with 100 morale, firearms, stamina, 75 efficiency, and 25 melee xp gain will be much slower because 3 of those stats are capped out and one takes a lot more to gain a point. Dumping high level officers into recruit brigades is still technically more efficient, but as you noted its far riskier. Various adjustments to this are planned in the future to balance it out a bit.

On 8/18/2021 at 1:33 AM, Edward Reynolds said:

How do detatched skirmishers bring their exp and stat changes back to the parent unit. Multiplied down based on skill difference vs parent/detatchment man power at end of battle?

Averaged back in basically, so the benefits are transferred but when it's only 10% of the units those benefits are very diluted.

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Bloody fantastic, thanks for the response :)
Answers everything perfectly, other than the skill point per X - is the number a secret sauce or are you willing to spill the beans on how many points per each action is required for each skill?
edit: nevermind, found the values in the unitModifiers.txt config. 

Really enjoying all the wee gotchas of the game and mod, flippen great work!

Another question:
What is the relationship between a units Stars and its Stats. Seems to be some kind of generic bump to all Stats as a unit kicks up from 0-1, 1-2 etc stars. 

Edited by Edward Reynolds
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Question regarding Corps Commander Perks in 1.27.4.3

1) In the base game, some Corps Commander Perks are unit-type specific (INF, ART, CAV). I assume the perks in the current mod apply to all unit types. True?

2) Do any of the Corps Commander perks function outside the commander's area of command / aura? Or must units be within the displayed command radius.

3) I've noticed with supply wagons, units closest to the supply wagons will resupply faster, and units close enough to gain resupply, but farther away will resupply slower. Do the Corps Commander perks have less effect on units that are on the edge of the command radius versus having the commander standing right next to them?

4) Do all Corps Commander perks stack when two or more commanders are on the field? Do they only stack if they are different perks, or if they are the same perk? 

Thank you!

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21 hours ago, pandakraut said:

In the mod, training increases the stats of recruits gained from a battle. So you won't see any immediate benefit when you assign the point, but when the next battle is completed, the rewarded recruits will have higher stats than what you would normally receive. So for example if you start the campaign with 7 points in training, all recruits you will have received when you enter camp will have +20 to all stats. You can see your current stats using a tooltip on the total recruit number.

Panda, I believe you meant +16 to stats at level 7 (not +20). Unless the display is wrong in-game. Right now, taking all 7 of the training perks at campaign start gives +16 to the recruits you receive after Philippi. For example, base efficiency for new recruits with no training perks would be 8. With level 7 training and the +16 to stats the new recruits are now start with 24 efficiency.

On 8/18/2021 at 1:33 AM, Edward Reynolds said:

Some of the comments also seem to indicate high training will let you recruit 1 star units - ive not found this to be the case, everyones at 0 exp. 

There are several variables that go into being able to create 1-star units from the new recruit pool.

CSA vs Union - The CSA campaign starts the game with much better recruits (worse weapons quality), so they don't need as many points in training to start creating 1-star units.  The union has inferior new recruits to start the game, so even having 7 in training will be hard to get 1-star with a new recruit unit.

Level of Officer - Higher level officers give a unit greater starting xp, creeping closer to 1-star. Of course, officers are expensive in the mod and usually scarce at the beginning. 

With that said, if you have 7 in training playing the Union, you can usually get them to 1-star in a single battle - assuming they are actively killing things and not just sitting around - even when lead by low level officers.

I can recommend some strategies for getting 1-star units to start the Union Campaign.

Take all 7 training selections at the start of the campaign. During the first battle, ensure that the units that you get to keep get 500+kills each (this would be INF units Scales, Walton, and Loomis, plus ART Woods). It's not hard to get 1200 to 2000 kills for each of them if you full clear this battle (depending on the difficulty level since higher difficulty puts more enemy units on the field to kill). When you go to camp, disband all four units.  Sending these "seasoned vets" back into the recruit pool boosts the stats of all the recruits CURRENTLY in the pool as the stats get averaged out. Optionally, you can decide to only disband Walton and Scales since they have the highest stats at the start of the game. Disbanding Loomis after Walton and Scales will only result in a few additional stat points, same with Woods. I disband Woods because doing a 7 training build results in a scarcity of weapons in the early game (another reason to do full clears and get captures to boost your weapons recovery with this type of build), so I don't want 13 guns in one ART battery.  With 0 logistics perks, you'll usually get 4 more Napoleon's (plus 4 Ordnance rifles, and some 6pd Field guns) in the armory when you finish the first battle, and I can divide those guns into two smaller units - even with your lowest experience Captain's leading them they will start with 1-star and be 2-star going into Shiloh.

If you don't want to spend any money on higher ranking officers to start the game (no Economy means you pay full price for officers and equipment), I would recommend that you leave yourself as the Corps Commander, buy General John Gibbon using reputation points and give him 1st Division, and then bump Colonel Luis Wagner to 2nd Division (he will get to BG fairly quickly). With that setup, and if you disbanded all the starter units, you will make 1-star units immediately, even if you use Captains with as little as 30 to 40 xp. However, I would recommend using at least Majors for your INF units due to the fact that a unit's efficiency cannot be greater than its command rating. Units in Gibbons division will be fine, but units in Wagner's division might start with efficiency equal to command - so efficiency in battle can't increase any faster than the officer gains experience to boost command. By using Majors (or higher) you can get a buffer between the starting efficiency and command rating, so you don't slow down your unit gaining efficiency. 

Opportunity cost is huge in this game, so just as taking 7 training to start the game means you won't have much (if any) logistics, economy, or politics. Disbanding your starting veteran units means you are giving up having some good units now in order to have better starting units throughout your army. Also, you are giving up the +1 battles-led bonus for those brigade leaders. However, the battles-led bonus is capped after 4 battles and you will fight exactly four more battles before you get to Shiloh, so you still have same battles-led bonus level going into Shiloh - and these newly formed units will level like crazy leading up to Shiloh.

One very important point to make about disbanding units the starting units!!! Understand that when we disband a unit and send the vets back to the recruiting pool, mathematically we are getting an average. For example, 7 in training gives +16 to all stats, so our new recruits are starting with Efficiency of 24 (8 pts base + 16 training bonuses). Let's say that after Philippi (capture the train station) you have 10,536 new recruits with these stats (recruits given for winning the battle plus prisoner exchange for anybody you captured). 10,536 recruits x 24 efficiency points each is a total of 252,864 efficiency points. Let's say Scales has 1200 men when we disband his unit and their efficiency is 40. 1200x40 gives 48,000 efficiency points. We will also say that Walton has 1050 points (he always has the smallest starting brigade but with the highest stat points) and his efficiency is 55. 1050x55 = 57,750.  Now, to average this out we add up the three efficiency numbers. 252,864 + 48,000 + 57,750 = 358,614 efficiency points divided by the total number of men, which is 12,786. That means the "new" efficiency for the recruits is 28.04. The game rounds off to the nearest whole number, so efficiency is now 28, which is 4 points higher than it was before we disbanded Scales and Walton. HOWEVER, you must realize that you are given more recruits at the conclusion of each battle - those recruits are coming in with the +16 from your 7 to training perks and they are then averaged in - driving down that +4 to efficiency you gained originally. THEREFORE, I recommend you build as many new units as you can after disbanding the starting units. You can take 10 units to Distress Call, 12 into 1st Bull Run, and 14 into Logan's Crossroads and River Crossing. So, even though you can't deploy 14 total brigades for a bit you'll be further ahead building as many units as you can with whatever weapons you have for no-cost in your armory and just "parking them" until you can use them all. For this reason, I would put my 2 career points from winning Philippi into AO, for a total of four, so I can build up to 15 units.  If you don't do this, you need to understand that winning all the battles leading up to Shiloh will reward you at least 23,000 new recruits on MG difficulty (not including prisoner exchange or perks in politics) and all of them will dilute the benefits you gained from disbanding your units.

There are few ways to manipulate the numbers. Understand that the only discount you receive from 7 to training is in buying vets. So, even if you don't have enough weapons at the first camp to build full size units, you can create smaller ones and just let them sit while you build up your money and then "buy veterans" to fill them out when you are ready to use them, since buying vets gives you the same stats as the existing units and being low-end 1-star units won't make you go broke to fill them out later.

If you don't mind spending some money on vets right at the start, you can also buy vets to fill out the starting units before you disband them. This actually manipulates the numbers in two ways. First, you are adding more veteran troops to the starting units, so their stats are diluted down less when they return to the recruiting pool. Second, even though you are buying veterans, they subtract from the number of recruits in the pool when you add them - the idea being is that you took a recruit out of the pool and spent money to bring him up to the level of your existing unit - so as the vets you buy goes up, the number of new recruits goes down.  You'll have to play with this some to figure out how much tolerance you have for burning through your starting funds.

Another method to boost recruit starting stats would be to buy better officers (assumes you disbanded the starting units and have 7 training (might be able to do 6 training so you can get a point in logistics at the campaign start to boost the number of weapons availability). Keep in mind that without any career points in economy you are paying full price for officers. There is also some luck involved in regard to how many of each type of officer spawns in the barracks at the start of the game. But, assuming you have at least one high ranking general in the barracks, you could decide to bite the bullet on the cost and take him. Make him the Corps Commander - he will get to MG faster for that second command perk than if you keep yourself in there. Then, buy John Gibbon with reputation points and put him and yourself in as the division leaders. This will put BG's leading your divisions through 1st bull run and that will allow you to just use captains (plus reuse the Colonels from the units you disbanded) to build all of your new units.  You could also decide go the opposite way and use John Gibbon or yourself as the Corps Commander and 1st Division officer, and put Wagner in 2nd Division, then spend up for Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels to build your units - either way you are spending money to buy better officers to improve the starting unit xp.

As you can see there are several variables to getting 1-star units early on. It's not a "one solution fits all" type of thing.

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That was very enlightening PaulD, thank you very much. 

Now that Panda pointed me to the recruitpool stat tool tip (i had no idea that was there :D), ive just had a play around with some of the ideas you mentioned and have a much better understanding of how Training and the recruit pool works. 
Time to restart my campaign!

Using your disband method this morning I was able to pop out 1 star units with a captain. This is fantastic! I Also added Rookies with my boosted recruit pool (disbanded all my high skill units) to a garbage unit with crap stats and noticed that the units stats actually increased by a couple points.

Starting to feel like I aaaaallmost know what im doing.

Edited by Edward Reynolds
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17 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

edit: nevermind, found the values in the unitModifiers.txt config. 

Sorry, thought I responded to this earlier today, but I guess I didn't click submit or something. Glad you found the numbers.

17 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

What is the relationship between a units Stars and its Stats. Seems to be some kind of generic bump to all Stats as a unit kicks up from 0-1, 1-2 etc stars. 

When a unit has an average stat of 25/50/75 they gain the corresponding star. The commanding officer does provide a bonus so it's possible to get the star early with a good officer. Unless the perk specifically mentions a stat bonus there is no bonus to stats from selecting one.

8 hours ago, PaulD said:

In the base game, some Corps Commander Perks are unit-type specific (INF, ART, CAV). I assume the perks in the current mod apply to all unit types. True?

Corps perks in the mod apply to all units in the corps rather than being unit type specific.

8 hours ago, PaulD said:

Do any of the Corps Commander perks function outside the commander's area of command / aura? Or must units be within the displayed command radius.

The tier 3 perks are auras, indicated by the aura tag in the description. T1 and T2 perks apply to all units in the corps.

8 hours ago, PaulD said:

I've noticed with supply wagons, units closest to the supply wagons will resupply faster, and units close enough to gain resupply, but farther away will resupply slower. Do the Corps Commander perks have less effect on units that are on the edge of the command radius versus having the commander standing right next to them?

I'm pretty sure the supply wagon thing is a placebo and the rate is constant as long as you are in the aura. Same for the corps commander. The mod does add a much larger morale boost for corps commanders in melee contact with one of your units.

8 hours ago, PaulD said:

Do all Corps Commander perks stack when two or more commanders are on the field? Do they only stack if they are different perks, or if they are the same perk? 

Duplicate aura perks do not stack, but you can multiple different aura bonuses. Morale regen bonus stacks but applies at reduced effectiveness past the first commander.

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6 hours ago, PaulD said:

Panda, I believe you meant +16 to stats at level 7 (not +20). Unless the display is wrong in-game. Right now, taking all 7 of the training perks at campaign start gives +16 to the recruits you receive after Philippi. For example, base efficiency for new recruits with no training perks would be 8. With level 7 training and the +16 to stats the new recruits are now start with 24 efficiency.

Yes, the +20 was assuming 10 points. With 7 points you'd be getting a bonus of 14. The bonuses displayed by the tooltips on the career tab are the benefits you'd gain from adding one more point which is why 16 displays when 7 points are currently assigned.

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Ive just save scummed a Grand Battle to try a different strategy, this time i drained by recruit pool and ran with lower quality equipment...is it just me or do bad guy units get bigger along side your own units?

I was hoping to swamp some areas of the battle with human waves while running my existing elites as is, but it seems like the bad guys now just have way more soldiers. I want to say they might have 20k+ (totally guessing, could be much less)more men this time then my previous save.
Are their units random or have I done something to influence this where the AI gets bonuses as my own army gets 'bigger'? 
Their star levels appear the same, facing off generally every unit as 1-2 stars on their side, they just have a weirdly large number of lads all of a sudden.

Edited by Edward Reynolds
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11 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

Are their units random or have I done something to influence this where the AI gets bonuses as my own army gets 'bigger'? 

The size of enemy units is determined partially based on your own. This allows some adjustment based on player performance, if you are doing well and field lots of big units the ai gets a boost. If you are behind and build small the ai will be smaller. There are also other systems in place to provide variety in sizes.

In the mod this is taken further due to the ability of the player to decide to build much larger if they want. So average unit size is weighted more heavily. The goal here being that if the player builds 1.5k units they face 1.5k to 3k units. If they build 4k units they face 4k to 6k. Some battles are outliers where you can end up facing larger units than normal.

So depending on the difficulty you are playing and how you setup your units, adding a lot more men into your army can make the ai units considerably larger.

There are configuration options available if you don't like how this system works and want to adjust the size of ai units.

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On 8/20/2021 at 6:20 PM, Edward Reynolds said:

Using your disband method this morning I was able to pop out 1 star units with a captain. This is fantastic! I Also added Rookies with my boosted recruit pool (disbanded all my high skill units) to a garbage unit with crap stats and noticed that the units stats actually increased by a couple points.

Starting to feel like I aaaaallmost know what im doing.

I've found that if I use all captains and go with Gibbons and Wagner as my starting Division leaders (doing a disbanding of starter units with +7 training) I end up  with 1-star units all with 90+ XP when I go into camp before Shiloh. I've played through a bunch of ways to try to get them to 2-star for Shiloh and with captains the INF fall short - though ART units with captains get there with no problem.

If I use majors or higher for my starting 1-stars I can get at least 10 to 12 of them to 2-stars for Shiloh.  That's 10 to 12 of my initial units out of the 14 or 15 created after Philippi.  It's also worth mentioning that your existing Colonels (Scales, Woods, Walton, and Loomis) from the units that you disbanded - they can get a unit to 2 stars in just 2 to 3 battles. I've done it in two battle with them fighting heavy at 1st Bull Run and either River Crossing or Logan's Crossroads. I've had them do it in 3 by fighting the 3 side battles - Distress Call, River Crossing and Logan's Crossing because I sit them at 1st BR to let me younger units/officers get experience. It just takes some experience to know what is possible. Same thing if you decide after 1st Bull Run to spend up on a few Colonel's from the barracks or via reputation points - if they are higher XP than Scales/Walton/Woods/Loomis - and Sherman and McDowell always are - they can push a unit to 2-stars if they are heavily involved at River Crossing and Logan's Crossroads.  Be sure to give your units that are fighting the best accuracy weapons - anyone not deployed for a battle can sit around with muskets or SP42's.

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Ah, that feels abit too much like punishing the player for either doing well, or for going with a high number low quality strategy for my tastes - so ill go fiddle with the config options and see what I can come up with to suit my tastes. 

Bloody good of you to have those options available, much appreciated and thanks for the advice yet again dude :)

On the unit size for the AI point, does the AI get a compensatory drop in equipment quality or its all upsides for the AI all around as their sizes increase?

 

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9 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

On the unit size for the AI point, does the AI get a compensatory drop in equipment quality or its all upsides for the AI all around as their sizes increase?

No, only size scales. Equipment and experience have defaults that are modified by various factors. The only one the player can control is by inflicting as many casualties as possible in prior battles. Scaling equipment and experience based on the player causes all sorts of bad gameplay loops.

9 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

Ah, that feels abit too much like punishing the player for either doing well, or for going with a high number low quality strategy for my tastes - so ill go fiddle with the config options and see what I can come up with to suit my tastes. 

This is a pretty much unending discussion even in the base game that doesn't try to support both normal and extra large unit sizes. To sort of summarize, I would generally disagree that the scaling punishes the player overall. However, the way the mod handles stats and unit sizes it is absolutely possible to build your army in such a way that you are adding more power to the AI than the player. This is much more likely on higher difficulties. Perhaps it would be better to say that it punishes the player for increasing the size of their army in less than optimal ways.

Part of the problem is we're being pulled in a lot of different ways here. We're trying to support a lot of different playstyles and battle types with a generic solution which has its edge cases where things break down a bit. For example, we've got players who don't build infantry larger than 1k and players who build 6k units. Those two types of armies should not face the same size opposition as it would either trivialize or make the content near impossible respectively. 

There are also incentives for taking on the largest possible enemy army that you can manage. The bigger they are the more xp and weapons you can farm, it's just a question of can you also keep your casualties down while doing it. Player's have definitely figured out ways to make high number low quality setups work, it's just a very different playstyle than smaller high quality units.

Anyways, I've rambled enough so I'll just encourage you to give the defaults a shot and if a specific battle is giving you more trouble than you want for your current setup then start tweaking with the configs. They are definitely there because even with 4 difficulty options there just is no way to get the numbers in a good place for everyone, so I wouldn't be hesitant to use them. Some players have also opted to use them to create in between difficulty settings. For example, .75 or .85 size and experience multipliers on legendary or 1.5 to 1.75 on BG to create a legendary lite or BG plus respectively and just use those settings for the entire campaign.

One final note is that the overall balance of some battles is just not in a good place and that is something we are currently looking at smoothing out a bit.

Edited by pandakraut
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(@pandakraut You may already realize this, but the current mod version (1.27.4.3) does deploy 12 units at Distress Call even though 10 units is indicated on the display screen. I only realized this when I was playing around with +7 training builds and getting 4 in AO to build max units after Philippi and just happen to realize that I had two extra units on the field - which brings me to the main point - there is only one way to get AO 4 after Philippi. You must use your 2 career points from Philippi on AO, plus have previously selected the 2 AO options when making your campaign/career selections at the start.  Everyone gets +1 AO at the first screen, along with either Training, Recon, or Logistics. The second AO point can only happen if you select +3 Training / +1 AO on the third screen. 

Since the game says you deploy 10 at Distress Call, I'd guess most people don't even realize that 12 units is an option because if you take +3 Econ or +3 Politics, you'll never discover it.

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2 hours ago, PaulD said:

(@pandakraut You may already realize this, but the current mod version (1.27.4.3) does deploy 12 units at Distress Call even though 10 units is indicated on the display screen. I only realized this when I was playing around with +7 training builds and getting 4 in AO to build max units after Philippi and just happen to realize that I had two extra units on the field - which brings me to the main point - there is only one way to get AO 4 after Philippi. You must use your 2 career points from Philippi on AO, plus have previously selected the 2 AO options when making your campaign/career selections at the start.  Everyone gets +1 AO at the first screen, along with either Training, Recon, or Logistics. The second AO point can only happen if you select +3 Training / +1 AO on the third screen. 

Since the game says you deploy 10 at Distress Call, I'd guess most people don't even realize that 12 units is an option because if you take +3 Econ or +3 Politics, you'll never discover it.

This is a known issue that I will probably clean up in the next patch. For the union campaign going a bit under on AO and having fewer, but stronger units is also a viable option up through Shiloh so not too worried from a balance perspective. I do want to make sure the deploy numbers actually match though, so that will get fixed.

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@pandakraut
It may be placebo, but it seems to me the more casualties I inflict as Im getting better at the game the better weapons and stars the bad guy units are, Im on whatever the 2nd difficulty is called and im coming up against what appears to be a 50-30-20 mix of 1/2/3 star bad guys all with guns Texas or higher (current Mission is Winchester 2nd). The Grand Battle and 3 previous side missions all had no 0 star bad guy units, which seems weird to me. Although to be fair this is quite deep into the campaign so might be nothing. 
I havent touched the config files yet, but given the ramp up in bad guy quality of men and equipment, im suspecting after this one Im toast and gonna have to start again with a new campaign haha my little trick to boost some unit sizes to swamp a flank on a particular Grand Battle has come back to bite my ass big time! All learning anyway, still loving the mod over vanialla so much. 

Latest question, is it even possible to use melee cavalrys ranged attack effectively on the offence? 
I might have seen 2-3 instances of it triggering ever naturally, and any time i try stop the unit up close for a couple of volleys they get shredded. Other wise i see it popping some times (quite rarely still) when mopping up routing units. Finger in the wind I reckon the range should be doubled to 120 - at least considering how ive managed to trigger volleys. I may be mishandling them badly!

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8 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

It may be placebo, but it seems to me the more casualties I inflict as Im getting better at the game the better weapons and stars the bad guy units are, Im on whatever the 2nd difficulty is called and im coming up against what appears to be a 50-30-20 mix of 1/2/3 star bad guys all with guns Texas or higher (current Mission is Winchester 2nd). The Grand Battle and 3 previous side missions all had no 0 star bad guy units, which seems weird to me. Although to be fair this is quite deep into the campaign so might be nothing. 

This is most likely just the late campaign. You can nudge the numbers up and down but the defaults determine a lot of it. With very high training values of 80+ you can be facing nearly all 3*s for the later parts of the campaign.

8 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

I havent touched the config files yet, but given the ramp up in bad guy quality of men and equipment, im suspecting after this one Im toast and gonna have to start again with a new campaign haha my little trick to boost some unit sizes to swamp a flank on a particular Grand Battle has come back to bite my ass big time!

It occurred to me that maybe the better values to change in the ai config file is the max unit sizes for the ai. This is probably easier than trying to find a good size multiplier value and would also let you better try to overwhelm them with low quality units.

8 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

Latest question, is it even possible to use melee cavalrys ranged attack effectively on the offence? 

Yes, though it's hard to do well and the controls aren't the most intuitive. With carbine cav you can just right click on your target to fire. But if you do that with melee cav they will move into melee.

So to get melee cav to fire reliably you want to move them close to the target and then hit space or give them an oblique movement order near the target. This causes them to fire if they are reloaded. You can either charge right after the first shot or keep holding position to fire multiple. Firing multiple without getting shot in return requires either another unit to distract or the ai unit to be routing/charging/firing at something else already.

Increasing the range a bit is something that is planned. I've tried improving the controls but my attempts thus far have caused more problems than they have solved.

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Yeah right OK, thats what ive not been doing well is the distracting for the second shot :D Getting the unit inplace for the initial volley is fiddly enough. A single shot then right into a charge is the best ive managed.
Trying for multiple shots ive been attempting on 1v1 situations with an isolated enemy unit of infantry, pop out of concealment and keep circling the unit so they keep rotating and cant get a shot off - goes poorly once i try stop and shoot as you might imagine!
Generally Ill keep cav units in bunches of 2-3, have a go at charging with the first unit then blasting shots into the melee with the second.

Only reason I upgrade cavalry above the Palmetto is for the better melee stats so the other 5 shots are a bit wasted for now. 

Starting new campaign :D big battle went poorly. Most of my units are 500-1000, baddies are popping up with 2k plus and I got steam rolled. Well, lesson learned!

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2 hours ago, Edward Reynolds said:

keep circling the unit so they keep rotating and cant get a shot off - goes poorly once i try stop and shoot as you might imagine!

This was intentionally made almost impossible to pull off. It used to be very easy which made cav of all types incredibly strong against infantry.

Maybe check out the sawed offs? Longer range, harder hitting power, 2 shots and still decent melee though worse than the palmetto.

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