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


JonnyH13

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3 minutes ago, Dauntless07 said:

I don't actually, I was saving every 10 minutes or so, and almost all of the crashes happened on Day 2. A similar crash occurred in the follow-up battle of Bayou Fourche. This time, it happened after I captured a unit of skirmishers with some cavalry. Anyway, I suspect it'll probably occur in Chickamauga, so I'll follow-up with the save file if it does.

That is very odd. The potential crashes caused by the mod usually only occur in very large battles. Gettysburg Day 2 could make sense but Bayou Fourche shouldn't have that issue at all.

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17 minutes ago, Dauntless07 said:

Just had another crash, and I have the save. It occurred about 1 minute after. What do you need exactly, and what directories are they in?

C:\Users\[Insert User Name]\AppData\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate General Civil War\Save is where the files live. The filenames aren't readable so just make sure the one you want to send is the last save you made and sort the folder by date. Each file represents a save.

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I won. Once I found the most effective weapons, (and got past that tutorial level,) it was super easy. I only ever lost the levels that take away the Army I built, and replace it with a predetermined and crappy outnumbered one. (I have always hated that about the campaign in general.)

Final thoughts, infantry are too weak at shooting. I understand you wanted to portray melee as more important, (as it was,) but shooting is practically a waste of time without all the perks and the best guns, while a charging rookie brigade is now very dangerous. So, it basically skews the inaccuracy in the opposite direction. It's kind-of ridiculous to see a 4000 strong brigade equipped with 1863 Springfields kill only a couple dozen enemies with a volley at point-blank range, even if they are rookies.

The attrition rate on corp commanders is atrocious for whatever reason, (maybe because they are under fire for far longer by the weak gunfire? IDK.) Generals are not worth their now exorbitant price, as they die, die, and die. I think they would actually be safer commanding single brigades than they are over corps. I got by just fine placing Colonels in command of everything instead, even with corps of five 4000 strong brigades. The small efficiency drop was negligible so long as they had good guns. But hey, maybe the game has always been like this, and I just didn't notice because Generals were cheap.

I struggled to find much use for cannons, excepting 6 lb field, 12/24 lb howitzers, 10 lb ordinance/Parrot, and 14 lb James. (Can't attest to the ones Confederate exclusive.) Everything else felt useless due to their high cost, slow reloads, marginally higher damage and range, but far worse accuracy to take any advantage of said traits. In other words, it's more or less the same as vanilla, at least, it wasn't clear to me at what each gun was supposedly good at. The guns end up being more powerful only by virtue of muskets being terrible at shooting.

I can't deny it was fun, but is this better than vanilla? Well, I'd say even though the pathetic shooting is annoying, the mod has far more to offer than vanilla, like multiple viable army specializations, and compelling reason to invest in career traits other than Politics and Medicine. I did experience substantial lag and CTDs in major battles, but that's the trade off for so many sprites on screen.

Victory.png

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Thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoyed it overall even if some of the changes didn't appeal.

3 hours ago, Dauntless07 said:

Final thoughts, infantry are too weak at shooting. I understand you wanted to portray melee as more important, (as it was,) but shooting is practically a waste of time without all the perks and the best guns, while a charging rookie brigade is now very dangerous. So, it basically skews the inaccuracy in the opposite direction. It's kind-of ridiculous to see a 4000 strong brigade equipped with 1863 Springfields kill only a couple dozen enemies with a volley at point-blank range, even if they are rookies.

I think this may be due to your perk selection or play style. Fire only setups can be extremely effective. I effectively never use melee with my infantry outside of some of the early battles.

3 hours ago, Dauntless07 said:

The attrition rate on corp commanders is atrocious for whatever reason, (maybe because they are under fire for far longer by the weak gunfire? IDK.) Generals are not worth their now exorbitant price, as they die, die, and die. I think they would actually be safer commanding single brigades than they are over corps.

Do you mean division commanders? Corps commanders can't even be wounded as far as I know. I'm not sure if you had very bad luck with the wound/death rolls or if this was play style related as I haven't experienced high rates of either. If you play as melee focused as it sounds that could do it, melee has always had higher casualty rates and with the additional damage melee does in the mod that could explain a bit.

3 hours ago, Dauntless07 said:

I struggled to find much use for cannons, excepting 6 lb field, 12/24 lb howitzers, 10 lb ordinance/Parrot, and 14 lb James. (Can't attest to the ones Confederate exclusive.) Everything else felt useless due to their high cost, slow reloads, marginally higher damage and range, but far worse accuracy to take any advantage of said traits. In other words, it's more or less the same as vanilla, at least, it wasn't clear to me at what each gun was supposedly good at. The guns end up being more powerful only by virtue of muskets being terrible at shooting.

A setup of 20pdrs, whitworths, and siege guns can win battles by themselves as long as you can spot targets. Though if you're just constantly pressing and using them for canister then might as well stick with what you selected. With the right perks experienced units deal far more damage than they did in the base game. I'd need to double check the accuracy values, but the average damage of those guns when the damage calculation is applied is definitely better than the earlier cannon. In terms of understanding which cannon are good at what you really want to check out the graphs in this post https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/. The curves shrink to fit the modded ranges, but those explain which cannon are good at what ranges far better than any text representation that I can add to the tooltips.

 

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Ah, I did indeed play a melee focused Union. That’s probably the reason; melee does indeed do a lot of damage when you get charged. Yes, I meant Division commanders. I forgot the levels of Army Organization.

My 1st Corps got the bayonet training. The 2nd Corps focused on fire, (both with 2000 brigades,) but the 3rd Corps I filled with 4000 strong brigades, and I gave them all the speed/rotation buff. (I wanted to test all the 2 star buffs.) I planned to send the 3rd in first to overun breastworks, but ended up using it to do the most of the fighting, since they tanked way better than my fragile 1st/2nd, especially in melee. By the time I stormed Richmond, the 1st Corps was wrecked, most Brigades being under 1000 men after the day 1 bloodbath, and storming just 1 fort on day 2. It was up to the 3rd to take the city.

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@pandakraut I've ran multiple campaigns but I've never seen numbers as such. Is this just poor recon or Shilol legendary is a legitimately hard battle? These guys came in super stacked 4k 800men arty units I can't even hold the line let alone push. They use 2x4k infantry units to push positions, on multiple points, simultaneously.

 

image.thumb.png.7960e2d29cfe8abc4e68d0633c4f5511.png

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40 minutes ago, Waidizss said:

@pandakraut I've ran multiple campaigns but I've never seen numbers as such. Is this just poor recon or Shilol legendary is a legitimately hard battle? These guys came in super stacked 4k 800men arty units I can't even hold the line let alone push. They use 2x4k infantry units to push positions, on multiple points, simultaneously.

While easier for the CSA, Shiloh is one of the harder battles for both sides in the mod. This is primarily due to the default unit sizes being maxed in the base game so with the scaling cap increased you're facing around 15k more men. The standard approach of splitting the middle and grabbing the landing while it's undefended, then holding for the day 1 victory should still work. Penetrating the line in the first phase is more difficult since if a few of those 4k units stack up you will have a very hard time dislodging them.

If I recall correctly, my solution was to advance my forces to the left side of the map. This allowed me to setup in the treeline with the creek in front of me and get several units to try and charge me. This drew off the 'mobile' union units and left the two units in fortifications on the right side of the map exposed. From there I was able to break them and start pushing up along the map edge. If you check my youtube series I recently played Shiloh with the base game numbers. It obviously won't be quite the same as the AI is far more aggressive in the mod, but it should help show the basic idea if my description isn't clear.

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On 11/30/2018 at 10:37 PM, Dauntless07 said:

x03c7dsh.kq2 Brock Road. Loaded it again, and no crash.

I ran your save multiple times and was not able to recreate the crash. Given how consistent the crashes seem to be for you I would probably recommend a full reinstall of the game and the mod.

You also mentioned some lag on larger battles, it's possible that the larger size and increased units possible in the mod are pushing your system beyond what it is capable of. Given that you are also able to reload saves and then bypass the crashes this being the root cause would at least make sense, though I also have no way to prove that this is the case.

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I went through the video. The problem is, i bring more infantry and cavalry. My brigades are beefy and they are beefy because I have some solid commanders I can use for that purpose. And my arty isn't 7pieces per brigade either, those badbois need half of Bavaria's horses to draw 20 pieces per brigade. I cap out at around 46.5k total troops but AI is capping out 85 to 90k. That is a lot of troops. I mean, taking position is not a problem I've played that battle so many times I know exactly how to isolate them on day 1 and prevent the reinforcements from encircling me.

 

But in this particular run, I did not get there. I did not even get through the individual flanks I pushed the objective, and when they got the reinforcements there was nobody lower than 3k per stack. You are facing some puny 1.5k men brigades like my arty has more troops than that lmao please. When they counter-attacked at the left flank, 16k troops broke through 2 points and I couldn't even juke them out with some coordinated F and arty. On the right it was even worse these fat stacks just went through the poor AI units like it didn't matter.

 

So what is it, did I not destroy enough of their troops in the battles proceeding? Am I too beefy? I tried some variation and at one point predicted enemy force went up to 89k and at that point I tapped out and started a non legendary campaign. is not exceeding 1k troop per brigade the meta or smth?

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9 hours ago, Waidizss said:

I went through the video. The problem is, i bring more infantry and cavalry. My brigades are beefy and they are beefy because I have some solid commanders I can use for that purpose. And my arty isn't 7pieces per brigade either, those badbois need half of Bavaria's horses to draw 20 pieces per brigade. I cap out at around 46.5k total troops but AI is capping out 85 to 90k. That is a lot of troops. I mean, taking position is not a problem I've played that battle so many times I know exactly how to isolate them on day 1 and prevent the reinforcements from encircling me.

Cavalry isn't going to be all that useful at Shiloh. Just poor terrain and if they attack any oversized unit that isn't already routing they are going to get mauled. Are you aware that units suffer damage reductions past a certain size? We haven't yet overriden that in this mod so a 20 cannon unit is going to be doing about as much damage as an 8 cannon unit. So you are far better off bringing 2 units of 10 than the single large unit. If you go really big you will start doing increased damage again around 40-45 cannon.

9 hours ago, Waidizss said:

You are facing some puny 1.5k men brigades like my arty has more troops than that lmao please.

Like I mentioned, video just shows the basic example. Executing in the mod will be different since the AI units will be so much larger.

9 hours ago, Waidizss said:

So what is it, did I not destroy enough of their troops in the battles proceeding? Am I too beefy? I tried some variation and at one point predicted enemy force went up to 89k and at that point I tapped out and started a non legendary campaign. is not exceeding 1k troop per brigade the meta or smth?

Either of the above is possible. You should be wiping out all enemy troops in every battle prior to Shiloh. It also sounds like you are building larger units which could be driving up scaling a bit. I know other players have succeeded with this approach, but I think it is pretty melee focused? I've never really played that way so I can't offer much advice there. I use 1k units because it allows me to bring as many units as possible giving myself the maximum amount of flexibility. It also keeps scaling down a bit, but if I recall correctly with the allied troops being so large I couldn't make scaling move at all anyways.

Here is a write up on what affects scaling: https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/

Edited by pandakraut
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Yes I am aware of all up-to-date information on all elements. And I must admit, I don't really care, I take those 2.5k stacked infantry brigades I roll with and boy do I have some fun. This is legitimately the first time I just couldn't get through that battle any way I redesigned my army. I mean, 90k?? The campaign stated 39-43k union army so I assumed they'll roll in with around 80k but the numbers I did encounter were absolutely unstoppable.

I've done a few runs where I did not destroy union army and they still bore lesser numbers. Was I just at the really bad end of RNG? Last time I had total 47k troops (barely enough weapons to equip them all) and the AI still managed to muster bare +80k like are their recruitment offices even trying?

 

Also, cavalry are incredibly useful that map due to you being outnumbered so largely and AI routing units tending to get lost somewhere behind your lines. Cav deals with them easily, also cav deals with initial skirmishers easily and is basically free kills.

 

I guess one last thing, when are we getting a fresh new patch I'm hooked and stellaris can entertain me for so long.

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4 hours ago, Waidizss said:

Yes I am aware of all up-to-date information on all elements. And I must admit, I don't really care, I take those 2.5k stacked infantry brigades I roll with and boy do I have some fun. This is legitimately the first time I just couldn't get through that battle any way I redesigned my army. I mean, 90k?? The campaign stated 39-43k union army so I assumed they'll roll in with around 80k but the numbers I did encounter were absolutely unstoppable.

I've done a few runs where I did not destroy union army and they still bore lesser numbers. Was I just at the really bad end of RNG? Last time I had total 47k troops (barely enough weapons to equip them all) and the AI still managed to muster bare +80k like are their recruitment offices even trying?

 

Ok, just wanted to make sure that you were aware that those sizes aren't optimal damage wise. 10-15k differences between campaigns is within the range of RNG so that is likely the case.

The 39-43k numbers are just part of the scaling algorithm and do not limit the actual battle sizes one way or the other. See this post for more details https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/

Aiming for a new patch around January/February. Not a lot of time to work on it over the holidays.

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Hey pandakraut, Having trouble getting the mod to work... Using steam version 1.11.... Ive tried unzipping to the game folder doesn't work. It seems to always default back to original. Ive tried to manually put the mod files in and it still doesn't work. Please help.. Thanks!!! 

Edit.. I have tried both mod files GoG and other..

Edited by Chris G
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1 hour ago, Chris G said:

Hey pandakraut, Having trouble getting the mod to work... Using steam version 1.11.... Ive tried unzipping to the game folder doesn't work. It seems to always default back to original. Ive tried to manually put the mod files in and it still doesn't work. Please help.. Thanks!!! 

Edit.. I have tried both mod files GoG and other..

Issue ended up being extracting into Ultimate General Civil War instead of Ultimate General Civil War_Data. If anyone else is encountering issues with installation feel free to message me.

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40 minutes ago, Waidizss said:

What are the chances that the brigade duplication will be fixed? I mean are there plans on making this mod viable instead of only fun?

Are you talking about the random chance that enemy brigades will split into two units? That feature can be disabled by changing varianceMode to false in Ultimate General Civil War_data/Mod/Rebalance/AIConfigFile.csv. If you're referring to some other bug can you provide some additional details?

I'm not really sure what you mean by making the mod viable instead of fun?

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So I don't understand why are brigades splitting when we can have the brigades not splitting? One time potomac i had the 3 enemy brigades all split they just overran poor siegfried and kemper.

I mean what are the plans, will there be actual point for brigade size instead of weird small optimum numbers. Will scaling make sense one day? Will there be a rework of point investment system? I see a lot of potential here.

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10 hours ago, Waidizss said:

So I don't understand why are brigades splitting when we can have the brigades not splitting? One time potomac i had the 3 enemy brigades all split they just overran poor siegfried and kemper.

I mean what are the plans, will there be actual point for brigade size instead of weird small optimum numbers. Will scaling make sense one day? Will there be a rework of point investment system? I see a lot of potential here.

We are planning on changing the damage reduction by size curves in a future release. Though players have had success with both large and small units in the current version so it's not as limiting as it seems.

We have no current plans to change scaling beyond how we already have. Here is a write-up of how it currently works https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1744479698803347392/

We've already made significant changes to the career point system and it seems to have been successful in providing better choices than in the base game. Test numbers may get tweaked a bit, but otherwise try probably won't see more changes.

Other changes are in progress but we don't have a release date at this time. If you have suggestions feel free to post them.

Regarding brigade splitting, what you describe is the exact intent of that feature. Here is the description of it from the change log: varianceMode config option added in Mod/AIConfigFile. This mode adds additional randomness to the AI and allied units attributes, size, equipped weapon. 

This can result in units gaining or losing a star. AI and allied units also have a chance to split into two units. 
Split units start at half the size of the original unit though on higher difficulties they can can grow larger. 
Depending on chance this mode can end up adding considerable difficulty to battles. 
It is intended to try and add some variety to battles so that the same old strategies can become more difficult or impossible to execute. 
Anytime the corps deployment screen is viewed or a battle is restarted everything is randomized again. 
Size changes but not unit splitting will be shown in the number of men/guns so they are less reliable for scaling manipulation with this mode enabled.

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Many thanks for the work and ideas,

I tried the mod  a few hours and find the shotting is quite inefficient, since the mod use very large scale, it got me a bit frustration to see a 5000 men brigade, open one round volly fire only inflict less than ten.  the orginal ideas of the game is to show the brutal and high casualties due to the new weapon technology and old line tactics on the battlefiled,  like in Gettysburg, march in the open field, attack fortification with heavy artillary support will easily cost half of division.

so it encourage player to choice the assault route more wisely and use recon and preparatory bombardment to soft enemy artillary, use  skirmisher to find the weakness of the line before push on the main force and player still need to pay considerable toll to win.   

I like the scale increase a lot,  through 2000 cavalry got a very long line when dismount,  I'm very keen to see the small battle with more unit, more man Involve and longer time. 

It will be much appriciate you sir can teach us how to modfy the .dll file,  I can modfy the asset file, big thanks for the tutorial but got no clue on the .dll

or can we get a simple scale increase mod (more man more unit) . 

Many thanks

Edited by saintpietro
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On 12/25/2018 at 7:33 PM, saintpietro said:

Many thanks for the work and ideas,

I tried the mod  a few hours and find the shotting is quite inefficient, since the mod use very large scale, it got me a bit frustration to see a 5000 men brigade, open one round volly fire only inflict less than ten.  the orginal ideas of the game is to show the brutal and high casualties due to the new weapon technology and old line tactics on the battlefiled,  like in Gettysburg, march in the open field, attack fortification with heavy artillary support will easily cost half of division.

so it encourage player to choice the assault route more wisely and use recon and preparatory bombardment to soft enemy artillary, use  skirmisher to find the weakness of the line before push on the main force and player still need to pay considerable toll to win.   

I like the scale increase a lot,  through 2000 cavalry got a very long line when dismount,  I'm very keen to see the small battle with more unit, more man Involve and longer time. 

It will be much appriciate you sir can teach us how to modfy the .dll file,  I can modfy the asset file, big thanks for the tutorial but got no clue on the .dll

or can we get a simple scale increase mod (more man more unit) . 

Many thanks

Shooting can be extremely effective but you really need to stack the accuracy perks at the moment. You can check out my video on Shiloh to see how effective it can be.

I haven't been able to figure out how to change how many pixels get assigned based on unit size. If you want to increase the unit sizes I think that is currently configurable in the mod config files but I'd have to verify if everything is tied to that or if that's only in the newer version I'm working on.

For editing the dll you want to look up dnspy and decompiling Unix games. Feel free to message me with questions, but I'm currently traveling so it may be a few days before I can get back to you.

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