what about massive brigade destruction ?

[Spruce]

Well I've suggested this already at another place, but it might not have been the right place to do so. So I repeat...

I have problems with the "easy" destruction of units. Like destruction of a brigade or artillery or div HQ. After series of intense battles it seems to happen more often.

Basicly I would like to have the option to manually disband a unit (to gain conscription points if you wish) ... more important = tweak the way "destroyed" units are working.

I don't think that units where destroyed that easely during the war. OK, you have complete surrenders "en masse" like Vicksburg. But during meeting engagements in the battlefield - complete destruction is a bit off. Actually destroying a unit means less "troop capacity" for the army. And for the CSA, unit availability has its limits.

During Gettysburg - after Picketts dreadfull charge - general Lee was anticipating for a Federal counterattack and was preparing to fend off the attack - in the meantime officers were granted the needed time to salvage their brigades or what was left of it. But those units were not "destroyed" like saying every last man is dead.

Another way to motivate this is to point to the fact that brigade surrender is less likely cause regiments or companies surrendered - not the brigade itself. The brigade itself is large enough to lose a few legs and limbs - but still flee the battle. If you take a look at MMG's Take Command Second Manassas game - you'll get the picture. You can really trash a brigade - so that's it unfit for further battle - and even capture an enemy regiment - but taking out the entire brigade is not logical imho.

Now nevertheless, I can concur that under some conditions - entire brigades were in peril. Let's say that general Lee panicked and did a "hasty" retreat from Gettysburg and there wasn't really time to salvage wounded and restore command.

So basicly - why do I see so much unit destruction during these battles and shouldn't we tweak this ? So first of all I would like to understand what is going on.

I give an example - I build up the ANV and it has 4 corps and the 4 corps go North and clash with the Union. The first impression is that I'm doing well - and then after some days - I start losing and half my corps retreated and the other half remained to fight.

The result = 2 of my corps are completely destroyed - so many sub-units destroyed in so little time ( a few days). this means after one week, the ANV has halved its max. Capacity - and the remaining corps are nearly full - so this is somewhat dreadfull to see if you have taken so much time to build up that army.

Where they trapped or what ? What happend ? What can I look for ?

[McNaughton]

I have lost an entire corps worth of troops in a second engagement, leaving one empty shell of a division left over. Maybe this was a fluke, but, the army was fighting in the field. It is really easy to lose an entire brigade, and reading up in most civil war battles, the destruction of an entire division was rare (Shiloh was an example where this happened), while in most cases the unit was savaged beyond combat ability, but not totally destroyed.

While possible, it should be very hard to annihilate large forces.

[Spruce]

I have lost an entire corps worth of troops in a second engagement, leaving one empty shell of a division left over. Maybe this was a fluke, but, the army was fighting in the field. It is really easy to lose an entire brigade, and reading up in most civil war battles, the destruction of an entire division was rare (Shiloh was an example where this happened), while in most cases the unit was savaged beyond combat ability, but not totally destroyed.

While possible, it should be very hard to annihilate large forces.

yeah I can understand your feeling - I lost 2 of my 4 corps of the ANV. That's a little harsh isn't it ... and my remaining corps were "midly scratched".

[veji1]

I agree that this is where the designers have to depart fundamentally from the way BOA works.. there the elements are simple building blocks, you lose some of them in battles when they take too many 'hits'.. simple boardgame logic, efficient and great fun.

But this isn't adapted to the ACW. In a game and time frame where command structure is everything, the sudden destruction of elments is bad for game play... in the ACW, basically you always managed to retreat... Whenever a unit has lost many men, it retreats... and after it has retreated the player or AI should merge/disband elements (regiments) that have been too severely mauled..

I am sure this will get fixed in time. The point of balance is hard to fine, but the game has to got towards more wear and tear and hurt for troops and units and less either fully ready or destroyed..

[Pocus]

combat should stop a bit earlier in the next update, leaving a more exhausted winner, because it will cost more cohesion to fight a round. We are progressing by little touches so to not break the combat system which is running 95% fine for us.

[veji1]

Good news...

I Think there should be a minimum cohesion level to "willingly" engage the fight.. If a force is under say 50 cohesion, it shouldn't be able to engage the fight willingly.

So we would have a situation that would prevent "running battles" that last 10 days out of 15..

the armies start with good cohesion : fight

then their cohesion drops, say after the battle, which is a Union victory, the CSA force has 29 cohesion and the Union one 45. Than even if the Union won the battle, and is better off than the CSA, and "could" finish it off, well it can't, and you have two forces on defensive or passive posture which allows the CSA to disengage and run away...

Now say after a first battle, the Union has 57 cohesion and the CSA 39 : Then the Union can take a roll to engage again the fleeing rebs..

Some sort of trick along those lines would be great.

[Pocus]

I agree, but we must thread carefully. I'm all for more realistic combat result, but I think we must act by small touches on the parameters. Also, you have to understand that this is a game, so there are simplifications compared to reality. Players act differently too, so you are bound to have weird results from time to time. I can garantee 99% satisfaction, not 100%

[veji1]

Of course I am in no hurry, it is great fun as it is and I know that overcorrecting is the worst thing....

[Spruce]

I'm happy to see that people are willingly to improve this issue.

I must repeat that for me - the top priority is to prevent an army (or corps) to lose all of it's brigades. Even at the smaller scale - like a division in the western theater (Arkansas) - losing half your brigades is a total disaster. That means there's nothing left to stop the enemy - or it will take very long time to rebuild that group.

It happened to me - really - I lost 2 of the army corps of the ANV. That means I lost 50% of my max. battle power - and I had plenty of conscripts for reserve and enough money to fill in the ranks.

I'm all in favour of cohesion and strength formula's - as long as brigade destruction is severly toned down.

IIRC a similar example = Grant invades Tenessee and defeats my forces - I was smart to have send Polks corps to reinforce. At day 12 Polk engages Grant and Grant suffers a devestating defeat losing 50-75% of his brigades. And the result is that Grant moves up North and I've never seen him since. I mean = surrendered or captured units were a part of the ACW - but not at the scale we are seeing in the game.

Off course - I don't want perfection - just an improvement on the matter of brigade destruction - because it's a serious game breaker at the moment.

p.s. = the speed of troop reinforcment has to tweaked also - slower reinforcment.

But I agree with Pocus - smaller steps are preferable to avoid crashing the system.

[Spruce]

today the Army of the Tenessee (Brag) attacks the Union positions. There are 2 battles during one turn - all the corps are involved. Out of 53 combat units (brigades, artillery, cavalry, HQ, etc.) 33 units get destroyed. I counted them on purpose.

that's 62% of the army destroyed after 2 "engagements".

[Stonewall]

An interesting "solution" that I have been experimenting with is completely altering the "hits" and "men per hit" values in the model files. My first experiment was to alter the values for all infantry and cavalry units in the game. Keeping the number of men per regiment at 1000 for infantry and cavalry, and 750 for militia and volunteers.

Values are 20 hits per regiment with 50 men per hit for a total of 1000. I altered this to 40 hits per regiment with 25 men per hit keeping the total per regiment of 1000. For the 750 man units, this was changed from 15 hits @ 30 men per hit to 30 hits @15 men per hit.

The results were surprisingly good. Since damage is dealt on "hit" basis and not on a "man" basis, this has allowed for more durability of combat units and lower overall casualty numbers as units have more hits, but still lose same amount of cohesion per hit, thus eliminating a need to alter the combat engine.

To further refine things for "my" taste, I then tweaked down the number of men per regiment to 600 for infantry and cavalry and 450 for militia and volunteers. No more 18,000 man casualties per day of battle. Divisions are down to about 8,000 men max and a really nasty one day battle will have about 10,000 causalties. I have not noticed any ai problems with the new values. I'm not saying they are perfect, but its definitely more to my liking for my own single player games.

[McNaughton]

600 men per regiment sounds about right, rarely do I see the ToE too far above 500 men per regiment. Your other tests sound promising, I have found battles too bloody, too early. I have had some very long battles, and I dread to see the turn after to see what units I have to rebuild from scratch.

However, Confederate divisions tended to be larger, at some times almost the size of a federal corps (notably after Gettysburg when Union Corps were at around 10 000 men, and the Peninsula Campaign in 1862 where the Union had more divisions, but total strength was the same). Maybe a Confederate regiment of 7-800 may represent their numeric strength (able to take more hits, but at an increased relative cost to Union regiments), compared to the 600 man Union regiment.

[Stonewall]

600 men per regiment sounds about right, rarely do I see the ToE too far above 500 men per regiment. Your other tests sound promising, I have found battles too bloody, too early. I have had some very long battles, and I dread to see the turn after to see what units I have to rebuild from scratch.

However, Confederate divisions tended to be larger, at some times almost the size of a federal corps (notably after Gettysburg when Union Corps were at around 10 000 men, and the Peninsula Campaign in 1862 where the Union had more divisions, but total strength was the same). Maybe a Confederate regiment of 7-800 may represent their numeric strength (able to take more hits, but at an increased relative cost to Union regiments), compared to the 600 man Union regiment.

I agree with the relative strengths. Its more due to the nature of the Confederate replacement system than inherently larger Confederate regiments. Union Corps tended to be comprised of 2 divisions, where Confederate Corps were 4-5 divisions until the reorganization of 1863 when the went down to 3. Generally speaking of course.

I'm not sure the answer is in changing the max strength of regiments. If anything the Union had more of a propensity to have gigantic regiments. I think the asnwer lies in modifying how many elements can be stuck into a Union division. I think it should be less, perhaps 15 elements. There is no way to modify this however, so if we want to tweak further, it will be have to me in the actual model sizes.

More importantly than getting the sizes right, its getting the results right and with more hits per unit, there is less of a chance of an individual regiment being destroyed outright. Size is just candy.

[Spruce]

if you play hours and hours to build up the army of the Tenessee and the ANV - I can guarantuee that a loss of 62% of combat units is not that "good news to keep the spirit up and continue the game".

[Pocus]

a quick solution would be to tweak down the % to hit, for now each 1 point of adjusted fire strength gives 1.5% chance to hit the target. We can try a lower number.

[McNaughton]

One thing to keep in mind, if we make casualties too hard to attain, then players will become overly aggressive. The threat of losing an entire army corps in a bad battle does have an effect on the player to bring out the "McClellen" in them (i.e., not wanting to risk the loss of their army in a bloody battle). So, I think that toning down casualties is a good idea, but, removing the threat of divisional/corps loss will just allow players to become overly aggressive, as they can easily plan and afford replacements, but it is more time consuming to rebuild a division from scratch.

Don't players get back a certain % of lost manpower after a defeated battle? Casualties are more than just killed. While you may end up with 20 000 casualties, only 5000 are KIA, 10 000 wounded, 5000 MIA/POW, with a % of the wounded and MIA(stragglers) being regained. So any loss should result in a % of manpower regained by the nation. This may already happen, as after big defeats I tend to notice that my manpower pool is significantly larger than expected. Can anyone clarify this?

[Pocus]

yes, 1/3 of your casulaties are added back to your pool.

I have exported 3 variables (will try to do more for the next update) on battle, the % to hit being one of them, so you can try if lowering the to hit value suit your tastes.

[Stonewall]

yes, 1/3 of your casulaties are added back to your pool.

I have exported 3 variables (will try to do more for the next update) on battle, the % to hit being one of them, so you can try if lowering the to hit value suit your tastes.

Awesome. You rock.

[Spruce]

please try 125 (instead of 150) as chance to hit. You'll get less "destroyed" brigades in super sized battles and reasonable result.

let's try out for some period of time,

I had one battle where I had about 4000 casualties in one day for both sides. If the fight is going on over more days, the added sum equals the casualties from the "larger ACW" battles,

[Franciscus]

As I stated in another thread, I also feel that 125 gives more realistic resullts. I am currently using this setting.

Good gaming

[Pocus]

exported more in the last release candidate by the way.