How does the Union run out of resources????

[Just the Fax]

First off want to say I LOVE this game, great job done with the historical accuracy and overall game play. With that said I have a couple of complaints, two of which I would love some help on. I have played through both Union and Confederate campaigns numerous times and am pretty good at the game, but I still continue to play through them trying out different details.

One thing I keep running into that makes no sense to me is I constantly run out of weapons, specifically infantry weapons, while playing as the Union. When I play as the Confederacy I often have tons of weapons from prisoners that I usually run out of recruits before I run out of guns. This makes sense from a historical point of view and I am not at all surprised that I normally can't get as many men in my Confederate army as I can in my Union ones. But with the Union I have tons of recruits to spare but can't use them because I ALWAYS have a shortage of weapons! A sub category of this is there needs to be a larger supply of the high level weapons like your Henry and Spencer repeaters. I understand that the supply should be relatively small but I can almost never use these because there is never enough through the whole course of a campaign to outfit one full brigade of any type!

Is there anything I can do? Or is a patch possible that loosens up the purse strings on the armory????

For info I always play on BG, just not really into adding headaches for fun. I normally max out my army organization and politics as fast as I can so I normally have quite a bit of money. I generally focus on Medicine next and then Economy. Would raising my economy level sooner help with this? The tool tip description only talks about this giving me a discount, it doesn't say anything about it increasing the supply or number of weapons....

Any ideas? would love to take more advantage of the industrial capacity advantage the Union had historically.

[Defacto]

Did you check the requisitions tab? AFAIK during some of the later campaigns, you have the opportunity to buy advanced weapons for reputation. I remember seeing Spencer Carbines, at least.

If you don't mind using cheesy tactics, making sure that the Lightning Brigade 'fights hard' during the initial part of the battle of Chickamauga will allow you to salvage a lot of Spencer weapons. The infantry regiments use Spencer Repeaters, and Minty's Cavalry units use Spencer Carbines.

[pandakraut]

Just to check, are you buying up weapons before every major battle? The stocks reset completely after major battles and anything you didn't buy up ahead of time vanishes. For weapons with limited stocks if you start buying them all up early you'll eventually be able to field a few units worth depending on how large those units are.

If you're not already taking advantage of it, using up your reputation to buy weapons before every battle can also help. The negative morale hits are pretty minor.

There is no way to increase the amount of stock available in the armory in the base game. The Rebalance mod does add this feature to the logistics stat, but that mod is also generally focused on making the game more challenging. Some of the difficulty changes are toned down on BG, but it's hard to say if you'd enjoy it or not.

The other two options are the UI & AI Customizations mod or the Surrender mod. The first just fixes a bug with the weapon recovery rate of captured units so you'd get a few more weapons. The 2nd has that fix along with making it much easier to get units to surrender which allows you to both get more recruits and collect more weapons. Neither of those directly address what you're looking for but figured I'd mention them as options.

[Just the Fax]

I will try to buy up more weapons before the reset and see if that helps. I'm a total rookie when it comes to mods so not really want to mess around with those. Just to confirm, the Economy stat has no effect on the quantity of weapons correct?

[pandakraut]

On 3/22/2019 at 2:18 PM, Just the Fax said:

I will try to buy up more weapons before the reset and see if that helps. I'm a total rookie when it comes to mods so not really want to mess around with those. Just to confirm, the Economy stat has no effect on the quantity of weapons correct?

Correct, economy only reduces the cost of buying weapons and increases the price to sell them. It has no effect on the number of weapons available.

[Gael]

Also, realize that the Yankee War Department officials thought that multi-shot weapons were a "waste of ammo", and that single-shot muskets were the way to go.  This is some of the reason why Wilder outfitted his regiment by himself with magazine weapons.  It is also the reason why the "Gray Ghost" Mosby and Nathan Bedford Forrest's commands were so effective with their six-shooters versus Yankee cavalry when using their sabers (similar to Indiana Jones' pistol versus the whip-wielding bad guy).  😊