Questions about Combat

[BattleVonWar]

What is the penalty for river crossing attacks? Do you need marines in each individual division that crosses in a Corp to benefit? Pontoons only speed the crossing but do they also like Marines offer any benefit to combat across a river? With MTSG do you get penalized when crossing a river to defend another Corp or HQ?

Hills seem like Gibraltars, how does artillery perform there? Is Bronze 6 or 12ers okay there?

I use militialeaders with pure militia divisions, is this a poor idea within a Corp or Army structure? As the routing factor makes me think that they could cause a retreat.

[cmdrsam]

Might be wrong. I believe if u have pontoon as support unit in corp all divisions use it no penalty. Otherwise I think every division has to have marine or sailor to miss the penalty.

How much of a penalty not sure.

[Gray Fox]

Marines/sailors in each Division and a pontoon in the same stack also work together to get the Divisions across the river most quickly. You can test this by plotting a move with different stack configurations and seeing the number of days required. The overall difference depends on the moving unit's cohesion, leader activation and the terrain of the region across the river, so I don't have a hard figure like X number of days saved. MTSG units don't get a river crossing penalty. The combat penalty is different from the movement penalty. A river crossing is treated like an amphibious assault. If your units don't do well in the ensuing battle, some or all of them may end up annihilated. I posted in a thread that one might sneak a Division and a Corps commander across a river in small groups using P/P and then assemble them into a "Corps" the next turn. They could attack without the river crossing combat penalty. The rest of the army would MTSG and also suffer no combat penalty. I believe that the game engine may have been tweaked to prevent this.

You should give militia every advantage you can. Put them in battles where you have a good probability of winning and they should gain some experience. In one battle of our Revolutionary War, the militia were instructed to at least fire three rounds before they ran off.

[BattleVonWar]

Thanks for the good answer, I figured the common sense was that you have one elite Corp or a few elite divisions with marines/sailors cut up between them. Not a marine/sailor in every single division, then rely on MTSG to bring the rest of the Army over.

I have seen what can go wrong on more than one instance if a unit crosses a river under the wrong circumstances. It's real real ugly... Not the small rivers...

I never thought about using the system to drag across units without marines/pontooners : ) by the MTSG for instance. Would save a lot of cash and required units. Think that's what you meant precisely.

I try very hard with Militia when using the South, Bragg/Hardee...they take ages and ages and ages with 2 stars of experience they are still Militia. Takes a small lifetime. Even after partaking in 5-6 battles mostly waiting till 1863 to get say for instance the European Brigade upgraded. Makes it seem to me that Training Masters are not worth buying for the CSA at least. Not unless you had tons and tons and tons of Militia. Taylor zaps them into shape in over night in comparison.

Thank you for answering

[Gray Fox]

You're most welcome!

The Union has a dozen Marines and quite a few sailors. Since they are also very good infantry, I just go ahead and put one in every Division that is not destined for garrison duty. The CSA only has four sailor elements, so I do put them in the elite Divisions.