Jagger wrote:
I have never been happy with the static game in the east which is basically the norm. I think the solution is to give army commanders a minimum strategic leadership of 3. I am considering the same change for corps leaders but not certain yet. Currently within the mod, the minimum strategic leadership is 2 for both army and corps leaders. The problem is the Union cannot launch a sustained offensive with army and corps leadership having a typical strategic leadership of 2. The game just isn't working correctly if the results of a 2 strategic ratings are a Union army sitting still for two years until new leadership becomes available.
In our current game, I reduced tactical attack/defense ratings for all Union leaders by 1. I think the primary penalty for Union leadership should be their poor tactical attack/defense ratings rather than low, basically useless strategic ratings. The Union should be able to launch offensives...just not very good ones. In my opinion, both CSA/Union army leaders definitely should have a minimum strategic rating of 3. The big question in my mind is whether corps commanders should also have a minimum strategic rating of 3. I tend to think both should be changed. What are your thoughts?
(Independent corps commanders already receive a minus 1 penalty to their strategic leadership since they are not within command radius of their army commander. So a base minimum strategic leadership of 3 is equal to 2 for independent corps.)
Your Mod is so satisfying with the changes until now but i think i have a few things to say after your most recent posts. It's gonna be a long post, so get ready. Here we go:
I've never been happy with the static game in the eastern theater either. I've never tried to take the initiative and attack the enemy in the east as the Union (but had to develop and execute other plans in order to compensate this). I always send the old wolves to less important places, fight the real war in the west, and send them to the east as soon as they promote, or just sit in the entrenchments and wait for better commanders' arrivals. And after i saw your posts, i decided to read about the civil war again and compare the game with what really happened.
Personally, i don't believe that the Union commanders were worse than their counterparts (not including the high ranked political monsters like Banks, Fremont, Butler etc.., since they had more to do with the politics, not commanding, but my ideas are open to debate), so the main problem with the Union commanders was not tactical, but strategical and structural. So i don't find the decrease of the offensive and defensive ratings of divisional commanders realistic. As from what i've read, i can give lots of examples about this if it is necessary.
When it comes to army (and sometimes corps) commanders strategical rating, with a minimum rating of three, most of the army commanders will be active. So how is it gonna be historical (or realistic) when there are examples like this? :
"That night, McClellan ordered his entire army to withdraw to a secure base at Harrison's Landing on the James. His actions have puzzled military historians ever since. He was actually in a strong position, having withstood strong Confederate attacks, while having deployed only one of his five corps in battle. Porter had performed well against heavy odds. Furthermore, McClellan was aware that the War Department had created a new Army of Virginia and ordered it to be sent to the Peninsula to reinforce him. But Lee had unnerved him, and he surrendered the initiative. He sent a telegram to the Secretary of War that included the statement: "If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army." (The military telegraph department chose to omit this sentence from the copy given to the Secretary.) McClellan ordered Keyes's IV Corps to move west of Glendale and protect the army's withdrawal, and Porter was to move to the high ground at Malvern Hill to develop defensive positions. The supply trains were ordered to move south toward the river. McClellan departed for Harrison's Landing without specifying any exact routes of withdrawal and without designating a second-in-command. For the remainder of the Seven Days, he had no direct command of the battles." (After the Battle of Gaines' Mill, June 27 1862)
or
"When Pope learned from McDowell about Buford's report, he finally acknowledged that Longstreet was on the field, but he optimistically assumed that Longstreet was there only to reinforce Jackson while the entire Confederate army withdrew; Hood's division had in fact just done that. Pope issued explicit orders for Porter's corps to rejoin the main body of the army and planned for another offensive on August 30. Historian A. Wilson Greene argues that this was Pope's worst decision of the battle. Since he no longer had numerical superiority over the Confederates and did not possess any geographical advantage, the most prudent course would have been to withdraw his army over Bull Run and unite with McClellan's Army of the Potomac, which had 25,000 men nearby.
One of the historical controversies of the battle involves George B. McClellan's cooperation with John Pope. In late August, two full corps of the Army of the Potomac (William B. Franklin's VI Corps and Edwin V. Sumner's II Corps) had arrived in Alexandria, but McClellan would not allow them to advance to Manassas because of what he considered inadequate artillery, cavalry, and transportation support. He was accused by his political opponents of deliberately undermining Pope's position, and he did not help his case in history when he wrote to his wife on August 10, "Pope will be badly thrashed within two days & ... they will be very glad to turn over the redemption of their affairs to me. I won't undertake it unless I have full & entire control." He told Abraham Lincoln on August 29 that it might be wise "to leave Pope to get out of his scrape, and at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe." (2. Battle of Bull Run, August 29 1862)
So, according to me, low strategic ratings and leader activations represents the history very well. Giving those army and corps commanders a higher strategic rating will make them respond faster and much more effective than history due to the march to the sound of guns, no matter what the offensive and defensive ratings of the commanders, since two corps are more effective than a single one, even if there aren't any fire bonus.
There's one problem though, we know who will be active or inactive during a 15 day period, so who will carry out the orders and who will not, and we also know the precise number of days to move to a region and the leader stats, so the player normally acts regarding all these, causing ahistorical choices and results. As a player, if i have a chance, i will never take offensive actions in Virginia with McClellan as the army commander.
And you are right, it was the eastern theatre that saw the most number of clashes throughout the war. These are my suggestions to improve the situation:
- Creating more events for the Union player, like the one in the vanilla version "Move into Virginia or lose 10 NM points". It wasn't only in the start of the war that forced Union troops to seek to end the war immediately, but during the four years, especially with an intervening and pushing Lincoln as the President. So it can force the players to make quick and bad decisions, since VP and NM points are so important in the game, and your Mod allows this because the Union has a 2-1 men advantage.
- I like the recent changes in Runyan's Leader Mod, demoting generals like McDowell, Banks and Butler to 2*, which forces the players to use McClellan as the first choice. But i think more restrictive action should be done. As done in choosing Army Commanders, maybe seniority should effect the choice of corps commanders also, so players have to use 3*** generals as corps commanders before the 2** generals, and removing them should have a political hit. I think this one is hard to do, since killing and losing units (not the number of troops) have the biggest impact on seniority, and i think it was so much easier to be promoted to a higher rank, especially in the Union army, only with winning minor skirmishes, without destroying units. So it can make removing those incapable generals really hard to remove, also can lead to the same game exploit with the Army Hq (sending them away without any troops, so they will just stay there doing nothing, waiting for a better commander to take the command). But limited number of corps of 3*** generals with low strategic ratings can force the player to use them. But i'm not sure if these can be coded into the game.
- Increasing the VP of the cities in the east, and maybe turning more cities (or regions) into objectives. So the Missisippi theatre will have a strategical role, such as dividing the south into two, but the successes in the eastern theatre will have bigger impacts.
I was gonna write a thread about my ideas above, but after seeing your posts, i decided to write here first. I'll write a post about my demands from you in the following post.
apy:
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), and i think i ignored the army command radius changes that you made in your mod while i was looking at the Union command failures early in the war. In the vanilla mod, i used independent corps (as you describe them) so much that i forgot it is best to use them with the army commanders in the mod.
), whose chances of being active is higher than all the three being active at the same time. Still need to test and see.
