Scaling Based on Total Manpower Pool/Money/Veterancy

[Taqinus III]

Hi all!

This is my first post, but I've been playing this game of and on since the day of release. Recently I started a new campaign with the excellent J&P Rebalance Mod. A thing that I had not noticed before, but now recently really has started to bug me is that the AI armies only scale on the basis of the amount of recruits in your amy. From a couple of playthroughs I've watched that basically means that manpower is not at all a resource you should keep track on. After all, adding raw recruits only adds to army size of the opponent, whereas improving the quality of your army through better weapons and veterans does not. To me, this is deeply unsatisfying as it forces the player on the harder diffeculty into a very particular strategy of smaller hard-hitting units. Also, a player should just forget about new recruits at all and just focus on getting more money etc. To me, this is giving the game a sort of arcade-y, cheesy feel and takes away the feeling of urgency that comes with creating the best army possible regardless of how this might influence your opponents army size.

I was wondering whether there is a mod/submod which makes it so that the AI army scales on the basis of the total amount of manpower (actual and potential recruits), money (value of material in the army + armoury/money in the bank) and veterancy, so the player is awarded for using all materials at their disposal?

Thanks you!

[pandakraut]

For more details on how scaling works please take a look at this post https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/. The Rebalance mod does make a few changes, mostly around average unit size to account for the potentially much larger units available in the mod, but it's still overall applicable. 

The goal of scaling in the mod is to allow the player to have success with whatever size units they want. Whether that's small base game size units, the giant units allowed by the mod, or some combination in between. The AI should mostly stay around your size, though there are some exceptions in certain battles, and the higher the difficulty you play on the bigger advantage they will have. 

I would generally disagree that adding more men to your army is a disadvantage. There are certainly diminishing returns after a point in certain battles, but overall the larger your army, the more experience you can get onto those recruits, and the better off you'll be. Keeping your infantry units at at 1000 men for the entire campaign in fear of scaling is definitely not optimal. I tend to gradually grow my units over the course of the campaign, say from 1k-1.2k in the beginning to 1500-2500 at the end, and there is relatively little scaling impact from doing this even on legendary.

There is also the large unit approach which favors getting every single recruit onto the field as much as possible. This means those recruit stats are always increasing and you can often get away with spending almost no money on veterans at all. This approach lets you eventually overwhelm scaling entirely once you are able to field more max size units of a specific type than the AI. Attached to this approach, is the idea that the bigger the AI is the better it is for the player. Specifically because it means more potential xp and weapons on the field for the player to farm.

In terms of configuration options for scaling, in the /Mod/Rebalance/AIConfigFile there are two values you can change. AIscalingSizeMultiplier and AIscalingExperienceMultiplier. Increasing or decreasing these values will modify the size and experience of enemy units after scaling as already been applied. You will need to restart the game and then start a new battle for any changes to take affect, but they can otherwise be changed mid campaign. So if scaling is kicking in more than you would like, you can try changing the size multiplier to maybe .8 or .85 and see if the result is more to what you're looking for. Or you can drop down a difficulty level and use higher values to keep things challenging.

The issue I see with changing scaling to account for recruits is it would either force players to always follow the large unit size approach, or players would start trying to intentionally kill off their recruit pool to be able to play smaller size units. Scaling veterancy and equipment leads to some pretty weird behavior where the player is incentivized to intentionally deploy bad units to drag down the quality of the AI units. Equipment scaling used to exist in the base game back in beta and it lead to a lot of player armies equipped with nothing but muskets to prevent the AI from getting access to better weapons.

Hopefully the above helps provide some context and that the configuration options are able to move things closer to what you're looking for.

 

[MarkShot]

Here are the conclusions which I have reached relative to scaling:

* The maps are fixed.  As unlike SOW and TW which only does its computation based on flags, UGCW uses unit footprints for cover and such.  Thus small units generally are able to benefit from the terrain more than large.

* 12LB Napoleons do way more damage in canister range than infantry.  Correct management of cannons by the player far exceeds what the AI is capable of.

* The combination of using very large battery brigade with very senior officers eliminates micromanagement while creating a killer like non-other.  When in 99% cover, they hardly suffer any casualties, but 3-5 volleys against close enemy infantry (because one unit one target) concentrates fire and destroys one unit after the next.

* You can get all the cannon you need from the enemy.  Usually, by mid to late fight, the batteries are not too closely guarded and are easy targets for cav.  If not, you should charge guns with a fresh unit as soon as you can get at them due to the damage they do.

So, I have found that it is a game of cannons.  Using small infantry brigades further skews the power of player wielded cannons.  (Pretty much anyone with some heavy weapons background of WWII-modern error should do well with cannons:  Overwatch, bounds, stepping up ...)

Yes, cannon do move quite slow in the woods relative to infantry, but then infantry can only keep up its pace with charging which ultimately results in fatigue delays.  Cannon on the move allow for a slower, but more steady page.

NOTE:  Above all based on the JPRB 1.27.1a mod.