Us of Militia and morale

[1stvermont]

I read on forum that every unit killed you lose morale, And if militia are easy to kill, is it not best to just not buy militia?.


Please share your opinions on militia.

[FightingBuckeye]

Volunteers are decent to hold/build fallback entrenchments, garrison duty, and in a pinch can be used as cannon fodder. They can actually be pretty decent in the right circumstances, ie good defensive terrain and/or dug in. So I'll build them for those purposes and if I'm the CSA I'll use them to help flesh out my armies a little (say I have a division with 17 elements in it I might put a volunteer or cavalry unit in the last slot). As the Union, I'll also build volunteer units for my 3 training officers to turn into regulars. I try to keep volunteers out of my frontline divisions, or spread them around if I can't avoid using them.

Just keep their limitations in mind as they'll need lots of help if you expect them to go toe to toe with regulars. You won't get very far in fact if you build tons of volunteer units and place them on frontline duty. I had someone try that one time against me when I was the CSA. They expected to hold out until most of those volunteer units upgraded before going on the offensive. A crack 25K corps under Jackson absolutely slaughtered a volunteer heavy 70K Union army. Once a couple volunteers routed, the rest of the army melted away. I think in after 3 battles, that Union 'army' was down to 36K or so and I still had 20K or so. So yes, volunteers can be useful but don't rely on them for the messy work and try to put them in positions to succeed. You can help by throwing an elite unit and a marksman unit in divisions with lots of volunteers. Just forgo the elite unit if its a garrison unit.

Just losing one unit usually doesn't impact NM, so don't avoid them just for that reason. Killing units will always earn you victory points however. And sometimes a unit(s) surrendering during a siege will give the winning side a NM and some VP.

[ifailmore]

csa has a lot of 1 unit (element) militia how do I make them into brigade ( I only know of putting bunch of ems along with some canoon and arty and a general unit to make a division) Is there other ways making the one unit militai into bridages ?

[FightingBuckeye]

As far as I know, you can only make small 2 element "brigades" with 2 militia, volunteer, or Unionist/CSA equivalent. I don't think you can make anything else short of a division.

[Captain_Orso]

You can combine 2 militia/volunteer elements into a single 'brigade' unit by selecting only those two in the Unit Panel and pressing <Ctrl><C>. This cannot be undone.

[Rod Smart]

I read on forum that every unit killed you lose morale, And if militia are easy to kill, is it not best to just not buy militia?.


Please share your opinions on militia.

Keep in mind there are two types of the lowest type of infantry: Militia, and volunteers.

Militia are given to you, pop up during sieges, or appear by using the Copperhead/Unionist RGD cards. I like the RGD card militia, because they do not count against the command points, so I can add a couple of elements to a larger army stack.
Volunteers are recruitable, and can be useful if used correctly. As buckeye says, never construct an army of all volunteers. But they are great for garrison duty, are easily trained up by the recruiting officers in the game, and can turn the tide of the Far West. You'll also need them in Minnesota for the Sioux uprising.

[tripax]

When you upgrade militia to conscript, the conscript unit you get does not have the full compliment of hits and takes from the infantry replacement pool to fill up. For this reason, I avoid training militia to conscript if I have conscripts to train.

[Rod Smart]

When you upgrade militia to conscript, the conscript unit you get does not have the full compliment of hits and takes from the infantry replacement pool to fill up. For this reason, I avoid training militia to conscript if I have conscripts to train.

Are you sure? I've never seen that before.
And pretty much every game I'm training militia at some point, whether because I lose track of my recruits and end up training the Cincinnati militia, or I'm training the RGD militia to take advantage of the the zero command points.

[Gray Fox]

Three line or conscript infantry elements cost as much as four militia. Militia gradually over many turns upgrade to a much better element. If you are the Union player, McClellan, Halleck or Sigel can upgrade two militia each per turn. Here's a pic of the upgraded militia:

[ATTACH]34344[/ATTACH]

These are pretty good infantry. I always have a group of militia training to infantry with these Generals.

When raiders enter an opposing state, militia may be auto-generated in some of the state's cities. Some players like annihilating these for experience, VP's and sometimes even one point of NM.