'Historical' Submod of J&P Rebalance mod, release thread

[Fabio]

Hi,

Very good mod.

 

I have two questions about the reputation:

  is there a cap like the 5x engagements for officer traits?

  does it add points only for regiment/corp officers? I realize the brigade(/division) commander's doesn't go up after fighting a battle like with regiment/corp officers, then I need to train their reputation as regiment officers before putting them in command of a brigade(/division)

 

 

 

[adishee]

On 12/23/2020 at 3:13 PM, Fabio said:

Hi,

Very good mod.

 

I have two questions about the reputation:

  is there a cap like the 5x engagements for officer traits?

  does it add points only for regiment/corp officers? I realize the brigade(/division) commander's doesn't go up after fighting a battle like with regiment/corp officers, then I need to train their reputation as regiment officers before putting them in command of a brigade(/division)

 

 

 

Hi @Fabio, thanks for the message.

The officer traits don't work with the 5x cap, no.

Actually I didn't originally intend for corps (or brigade/division) comm to get xp. Is your corps commander gaining xp your starting character?

 

I didn't post this yet on the forum, but here is v1.3.2 which I just finished a couple days ago : https://www.dropbox.com/s/plbm11yvp85miw4/1.3.2 release.zip?dl=0

 

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by adishee

[Fabio]

Yes, the same with 1.3.2 (using a 1.3.1 save before the first battle ends). Only corps officer, not for the brigade/division one.

I prefer if they get it, to don't stop the progression of the corps and brigade/division officers (and the need to rotate them as regiment officers to get exp).

I like to promote good officers over the campaign (traits works good here, and some random exp boost for some officers could be a good idea), but also I like to have some commanding brigades/divisions from the start without loosing exp potential (or having a specialization specific reward/trait for brigade/division and corps officers, doing them better commanding at the level they did previous battles).

 

 

[adishee]

3 hours ago, Fabio said:

Yes, the same with 1.3.2 (using a 1.3.1 save before the first battle ends). Only corps officer, not for the brigade/division one.

I prefer if they get it, to don't stop the progression of the corps and brigade/division officers (and the need to rotate them as regiment officers to get exp).

I like to promote good officers over the campaign (traits works good here, and some random exp boost for some officers could be a good idea), but also I like to have some commanding brigades/divisions from the start without loosing exp potential (or having a specialization specific reward/trait for brigade/division and corps officers, doing them better commanding at the level they did previous battles).

 

 

@Fabio I have started building an xp system that works with brigade and corps officers, as well as cleaning up the xp system in general. It rates bgd (so far only bgd) commanders in terms of how well brigades under their command performed throughout the campaign. It is partially implemented already. So that will be coming in 1.3.3. (If you feel like testing the alpha releases, hop on to the J&P discord -- I live in the 'submods' room.)

Also, there is in fact some slight randomization in how much the traits affect regimental units, although it is definitely not displayed clearly enough.

So, overhauling the xp system is pretty much what 1.3.3 will be. Thanks for the feedback as always.

 

Edited December 27, 2020 by adishee

[Admiral Sudsy]

Hey, loving the new update, really fun having to place my commander at critical positions as the battle unfolds. Just two quick questions- 1) do you know where I would go to modify the reputation and recruit/equipment values? I want to try simulating the flow of the war by being able to lose battles historically without the campaign ending early due to reputation loss. 

2) while I get your rationale for cavalry mostly fighting dismounted, I am missing the dismount feature, mostly because of how much frontage dedicated skirmish units take up, making them unwieldy, while cavalry, which never really fired from horseback, remains too vulnerable to use other than scouting or limited charges. How do I reenable it?

 

Keep up the work mate!

[adishee]

On 1/6/2021 at 1:42 AM, Admiral Sudsy said:

Hey, loving the new update, really fun having to place my commander at critical positions as the battle unfolds. Just two quick questions- 1) do you know where I would go to modify the reputation and recruit/equipment values? I want to try simulating the flow of the war by being able to lose battles historically without the campaign ending early due to reputation loss. 

2) while I get your rationale for cavalry mostly fighting dismounted, I am missing the dismount feature, mostly because of how much frontage dedicated skirmish units take up, making them unwieldy, while cavalry, which never really fired from horseback, remains too vulnerable to use other than scouting or limited charges. How do I reenable it?

 

Keep up the work mate!

Hey @Admiral Sudsy, thanks for the post.

 

On the first point, this is something I also have interest in changing in future versions. If you're asking if you can change this in my config file, you can't, I haven't found that in the code. If you have any thoughts about how you would prefer the system work, please explain them and I can get around to finding where it lives in the code.

On the second point, I understand your frustration. I was having a lot of trouble with dismounted cav, getting them to work well amid all the changes, so I just axed them. But it is a nice feature and I could see re-implementing it after I figure out how I want them to be handled. At the moment it's hardcoded in, though.

If you join the JP discord, I have a much newer version posted in alpha. I didn't even bother posting 1.3.2 here because I feel too busy with things to bother making a post about it, but the alpha branch is by now into 1.3.3 testing.

cheers

[i64man]

hi adishee, I download the submod again, version 1.32. I have been reading some of the threats you and Pandakraut have ponstructions. I remember that I have to disable my firewall to install the assembly cshardsted and when I extracted the mod, I did not found the rebalance/historical submod as one answer Pandakraut, gave some one. Nor, there are any install instructions.

[i64man]

Another question, when the mod is installed, on the lower left corner should be the version, which version should I see if your mod is installed correctly?

[i64man]

On 3/19/2020 at 6:39 PM, pandakraut said:

Do you have a historical submod folder under /Mod/Rebalance after unzipping? Full default path below.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ultimate General Civil War\Ultimate General Civil War_Data\Mod\Rebalance\historical submod

Hey Pandakraut, I trying to installed the submod, but I do not have the folder, and there is some issue copying the assembly file....

[KeithD]

Haven't played this game in ages, wow this mod has come on leaps and bounds since I last looked at it 👍

 

Quick Q what does the flashing yellow unit shield mean?  Flashing red I guess is troops dying?

Edited January 19, 2021 by KeithD

[i64man]

I have another question, on the first two missions, I noticed that you can issue orders to your units unless your general is closed by. Is that on purpose or maybe a glitch? Also, it sems that the units that remains in your control after capturing the train station, if they have less than 1025 unit limit, you can't adjusttheir number.

[adishee]

20 hours ago, KeithD said:

Haven't played this game in ages, wow this mod has come on leaps and bounds since I last looked at it 👍

 

Quick Q what does the flashing yellow unit shield mean?  Flashing red I guess is troops dying?

This is two versions old, 1.3.3 is pretty much ready. I just have to finish the documentation.

Flashing yellow (or blue) just indicates that a brigade report is being generated in 1.3.1. In the latest version it does it every time you click on a unit for that unit's whole brigade.

[adishee]

15 hours ago, i64man said:

I have another question, on the first two missions, I noticed that you can issue orders to your units unless your general is closed by. Is that on purpose or maybe a glitch? Also, it sems that the units that remains in your control after capturing the train station, if they have less than 1025 unit limit, you can't adjusttheir number.

Hi @i64man, both of these things are intentional. Command and control is completely overhauled in the mod.

[adishee]

On 1/16/2021 at 4:45 PM, i64man said:

Another question, when the mod is installed, on the lower left corner should be the version, which version should I see if your mod is installed correctly?

Whichever version you are using, in this case v1.3.2. It looks like you managed to get the mod working.

Edited January 19, 2021 by adishee

[i64man]

thank you so much for the answers... do you know when the ver 1.3.3 will be ready for consumer use?😀

[EA1629]

Adishee, first off; amazing mod, had a ton of fun so far sending them yankee's back to Washington.

I saw in the change log (1.3.1) that US units are unable to add more men after forming a regiment (except in multiday battles.) however, as I'm playing with CSA this also seem to affect their units as well, including the ability to only reinforce during multiday battles. This doesn't seem to effect artillery units, as I can add more cannon and men to them just fine, just not the infantry units. Am I missing something here, or is this a bug?

[i64man]

Hi Adishee, I followed a threat here were it shows how to cancel Ironman, which I did by changing the value to false and saving the game. I am getting ready for the 1st Bull run, but I can't increase the number of soldiers on my infantry units. They took casualties and are locked at that number, even though I have available replacement and weapons. Say my one 2 star unit, has 844 soldiers on it, but the number at the end of the slider says i can go up to 1025, but I just can't.

Do that has anything to do with Ironman when I first started the campaign?

[i64man]

@ Adishee, I uninstalled the game, reinstalled it and install only your mod, still, I can't move the sliders.

[pandakraut]

I think one of the changes was that the union can't add men to existing brigades. Either have to create new ones or merge existing units together.

[adishee]

8 hours ago, i64man said:

@ Adishee, I uninstalled the game, reinstalled it and install only your mod, still, I can't move the sliders.

Hi @i64man . As Panda said below, this is an intentional feature. In the current version, this limit is for both sides. It's an added layer of difficulty that is somewhat historically relevant.

Re v1.3.3 -- it is very close to done, I just need to write the documentation for it. I don't know how long that will take, hopefully I can release this week.

Edited January 25, 2021 by adishee

[Vine]

Couple hours in, really liking this submod so far, but I'm curious about a couple design decisions you made:
 

1. So, if I understand correctly, when you are close to the unit, you can give it full range of orders, from a right click with a new rotation, to an arrow drag, and even charge and fall back orders. When you are farther away, you can't give them move-and-rotate orders, nor charge and fall back orders, and finally the furthest you can't even right click move, you have to draw an arrow. So as far as I get it, the intention is for there to be a reduced fidelity of orders the further away you are. But then why is it arrow-drag and not a right click move that is available at the furthest range? The way I see it simply going to a location is a less detailed order than instructions on what exactly route to take to get there, right?

 

2. Also as far as I understand, vanilla brigades, division and corps were changed, and now your basic unit is a regiment, which combine into brigades... (and I guess that makes your corps into divisions, and you entire army is now a single corps?) And you limited a brigade to 3 regiments, but why that number? From my, admittedly, Wikipedia-level search, it would seem like brigades of 4 or 5 regiments were sufficiently common, for example if all the regiments were quite depleted. I myself right now trying to have a sort of "command brigade", which would contain all the division-level assets, such as cannons or cavalry (whereas my other brigades are just line), but fitting all of that into 3 regiments isn't really doable, either.

[adishee]

Hey @Vine

Quote

1. So, if I understand correctly, when you are close to the unit, you can give it full range of orders, from a right click with a new rotation, to an arrow drag, and even charge and fall back orders. When you are farther away, you can't give them move-and-rotate orders, nor charge and fall back orders, and finally the furthest you can't even right click move, you have to draw an arrow. So as far as I get it, the intention is for there to be a reduced fidelity of orders the further away you are. But then why is it arrow-drag and not a right click move that is available at the furthest range? The way I see it simply going to a location is a less detailed order than instructions on what exactly route to take to get there, right?

So yes, the idea is to give a reduced fidelity of orders (well put). The original reason that right click is was disabled at range is, in all honesty, purely technical: it was buggy and caused orders to get mixed up so I disabled it for the delayed orders. BUT, then I realized that the move-and-face order was a valuable thing that I had incidentally nerfed, so it worked out in the mechanics as well, and I added the text popups to seal the deal. But you have a point -- and it's just because of technical problems that I couldn't (afford the time to) figure out.

 

Quote

2. Also as far as I understand, vanilla brigades, division and corps were changed, and now your basic unit is a regiment, which combine into brigades... (and I guess that makes your corps into divisions, and you entire army is now a single corps?) And you limited a brigade to 3 regiments, but why that number? From my, admittedly, Wikipedia-level search, it would seem like brigades of 4 or 5 regiments were sufficiently common, for example if all the regiments were quite depleted. I myself right now trying to have a sort of "command brigade", which would contain all the division-level assets, such as cannons or cavalry (whereas my other brigades are just line), but fitting all of that into 3 regiments isn't really doable, either.

Well, why that number: this was a bit of a process to arrive at the current configuration. For one thing, a brand new brigade in the union army came out to about 3-4k troops. It says 4k here here, so... whatever, it's not exact. And we have to take into account the CSA's recruiting as well. As for regiments, the number of regiments stuffed into a given brigade fluctuated WILDLY through different parts of the war, as did the number of men in those regiments. Regulation was about 1000 (I read 1025 specifically for the union and thus the number), but in practice regiments could be whittled down to a couple hundred -- or just annihilated into nothing.

In the submod, it is more than likely that you will combine some regiments at some point, which sort of emulates this process of whittled down regiments and stuffing brigades (although I have included an incentive against it, in the form of stat penalty and, also, loss of officer history with that unit). It's pretty much just a cosmetic effect, though. I could probably build some more substantial functionality into that but I don't have any ideas in this regard.

So obviously none of this is super accurate, merely vaguely reminiscent of the brigade organization. But I don't have a lot of options -- at least I don't think I do. It is perhaps possible that I could make the brigade cap higher and dynamically check for max unit sizes in order to have brigades packed with many small regiments. That might be cool actually, although the AI wouldn't be able to do the same, and anyway it would start to threaten the max number of units allowed in the game (which we all think is 256 but frankly I'm not sure). But overall, this system seems accurate enough, and I tend to end up with *experienced* brigades of around 1500 men which seems generally correct. Eventually they small enough and I turn them into skilled skirmishers.

Actually I would say that the missing unit size is the Division -- although, one can make a "Corp" that is more like a division with just a few thousand men. But for the larger armies, I am basically just assuming divisions implicitly within the structure. I tend to still think of a corp as a corp but ultimately it doesn't seem to matter that much. I could maybe do something with hotkeys to isolate divisions but it doesn't seem like it would be that useful in practice, anyway, at least to me.

 

Glad you like it, keep the feedback coming.

Edited February 5, 2021 by adishee

[adishee]

23 hours ago, Vine said:

Couple hours in, really liking this submod so far, but I'm curious about a couple design decisions you made:
 

1. So, if I understand correctly, when you are close to the unit, you can give it full range of orders, from a right click with a new rotation, to an arrow drag, and even charge and fall back orders. When you are farther away, you can't give them move-and-rotate orders, nor charge and fall back orders, and finally the furthest you can't even right click move, you have to draw an arrow. So as far as I get it, the intention is for there to be a reduced fidelity of orders the further away you are. But then why is it arrow-drag and not a right click move that is available at the furthest range? The way I see it simply going to a location is a less detailed order than instructions on what exactly route to take to get there, right?

 

2. Also as far as I understand, vanilla brigades, division and corps were changed, and now your basic unit is a regiment, which combine into brigades... (and I guess that makes your corps into divisions, and you entire army is now a single corps?) And you limited a brigade to 3 regiments, but why that number? From my, admittedly, Wikipedia-level search, it would seem like brigades of 4 or 5 regiments were sufficiently common, for example if all the regiments were quite depleted. I myself right now trying to have a sort of "command brigade", which would contain all the division-level assets, such as cannons or cavalry (whereas my other brigades are just line), but fitting all of that into 3 regiments isn't really doable, either.

Also I should add that the 'reliable' officer trait allows a unit to have mostly full functionality even at distance.

[Vine]

3 hours ago, adishee said:

Well, why that number: this was a bit of a process to arrive at the current configuration. For one thing, a brand new brigade in the union army came out to about 3-4k troops. It says 4k here here, so... whatever, it's not exact. And we have to take into account the CSA's recruiting as well. As for regiments, the number of regiments stuffed into a given brigade fluctuated WILDLY through different parts of the war, as did the number of men in those regiments. Regulation was about 1000 (I read 1025 specifically for the union and thus the number), but in practice regiments could be whittled down to a couple hundred -- or just annihilated into nothing.

In the submod, it is more than likely that you will combine some regiments at some point, which sort of emulates this process of whittled down regiments and stuffing brigades (although I have included an incentive against it, in the form of stat penalty and, also, loss of officer history with that unit). It's pretty much just a cosmetic effect, though. I could probably build some more substantial functionality into that but I don't have any ideas in this regard.

So obviously none of this is super accurate, merely vaguely reminiscent of the brigade organization. But I don't have a lot of options -- at least I don't think I do. It is perhaps possible that I could make the brigade cap higher and dynamically check for max unit sizes in order to have brigades packed with many small regiments. That might be cool actually, although the AI wouldn't be able to do the same, and anyway it would start to threaten the max number of units allowed in the game (which we all think is 256 but frankly I'm not sure). But overall, this system seems accurate enough, and I tend to end up with *experienced* brigades of around 1500 men which seems generally correct. Eventually they small enough and I turn them into skilled skirmishers.

I get that the intent is to represent the feeing and spirit more than the exact 1-for-1 numbers and regulations, but I don't quite see how 3 regiments emerges to that end? 4 regiments per brigade seems like a closer representation to me, with maybe high army org increasing that to 5. 4k troops in 4 regiments seems to be about the ideal authorised strength from what I understand, and particularly once you account for overstuffing or auxiliary units having 4 regiment slots per brigade seems like about the right representation to me. Also allows for more reasonably combining all command-level assets into 1 brigade, which also seems reasonable to me. Just a thought, though.

 

3 hours ago, adishee said:

Actually I would say that the missing unit size is the Division -- although, one can make a "Corp" that is more like a division with just a few thousand men. But for the larger armies, I am basically just assuming divisions implicitly within the structure. I tend to still think of a corp as a corp but ultimately it doesn't seem to matter that much. I could maybe do something with hotkeys to isolate divisions but it doesn't seem like it would be that useful in practice, anyway, at least to me.

Why would you say the Division is missing though? A division is a unit comprised of multiple brigades, usually 3-5 or so, and that is exactly what a player's "corps" is. Manpower-wise, the "corps" in the submod seems to come out to something like 5k men upwards, perhaps dipping into low double digits for some of the biggest ones. That also seems to about match the link you provided (12k authorised, up to half as much in practice), and if we look at, for example, Wikipedia article for 1st Bull Run, most divisions there ranged around the numbers of 6-9k men (with the notable exception of 2nd (Hunter's) Div. at 2.5k). Even the commanding officer for in-game "corps" is brigadier-general, at least when you form them, and that's about the rank for division command, at least in the Union. 

All of this to me seems like a really strong case that vanilla corps are in the mod now divisions for all intents and purposes, and are rather accurate representations at that.

 

Then, since a unit that you get when you combine 2-3-4 division is a corps, I think it follows that the player is now on the whole in charge of a corps, as opposed to a whole army. This last distinction is mostly academic, though, since there isn't much impact on gameplay, and I imagine by the late game you would be able to have 4 or 5 divisions and the border between "a really small corps" and "a really big army" is blurry one anyways.

 

3 hours ago, adishee said:

Corp

Just a minor note on grammar btw - as far as I know, "Corps" is both the single and multiple form of the word.

So you write "1 corps, 2 corps, 10 corps" even though you read "One core, two cores, ten cores"

That's what you get when you borrows words from the French I guess

[adishee]

On 2/5/2021 at 4:36 PM, Vine said:

Manpower-wise, the "corps" in the submod seems to come out to something like 5k men upwards, perhaps dipping into low double digits for some of the biggest ones. That also seems to about match the link you provided (12k authorised, up to half as much in practice) ...

I would agree with you, except for the fact that in the submod you can get up to eight or nine (I don't remember) brigades in a corp (corps!), and easily above 12k troops. I mean, the size is literally as flexible as you want to make it: you could have 20 guys in it if you want, the game can't stop you from fielding it. And since you can name it whatever you want, it can be a division if you want a division. 

Quote

Just a minor note on grammar btw - as far as I know, "Corps" is both the single and multiple form of the word.

So you write "1 corps, 2 corps, 10 corps" even though you read "One core, two cores, ten cores"

That's what you get when you borrows words from the French I guess

I think you are right but I like to take off the s. I just think it should have no s in english. It's not like anyone else knows their grammar innit.