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Battle Results not adding up

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 8:47 am
by tripax
Sorry if this has been posted before, but I'm wondering if someone can help. In my current game against Straight Arrow (SA), I am Union and have 43,000+ men outside of Richmond and SA has 36,000+ also in the territory outside of the city. Here is what I learn from the battle report;
Battle Result: USA inflicted 251 hits, CSA inflicted 216 hits
Round 1: USA inflicted 3 hits, CSA inflicted 0 hits
Round 2: USA inflicted 56 hits, CSA inflicted 22 hits
Round 3: USA inflicted 33 hits, CSA inflicted 31 hits
Round 4: USA inflicted 48 hits, CSA inflicted 37 hits
Round 5: USA inflicted 32 hits, CSA inflicted 47 hits
Round 6: USA inflicted 198 hits, CSA inflicted 173 hits [but 90 Union hits were against N.S. Evans' division which only had 11 hits available so Union may have really been something like 119(?)]

So the sum of hits is:
USA inflicted 369 [or 290 if round 6 was really 119]
CSA inflicted 310

Since the hits in round 6 include hits against N.S. Evans' division, maybe hits in each round include hits against elements which have no hits remaining, while Battle Result hits do not include these? However, the CSA did not destroy any Union regiments (you can see there are not medals in the battle results for any CSA division in any round - also checking my divisions I don't think anyone is missing) and their numbers don't add up either. I am including all the relevant screenshots from each round (sorry for the dump). What do you think? Did I really lose more hits than SA?

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First Five screenshots are above, last five are in the next post.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 8:48 am
by tripax
Last five screenshots are here.

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Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 12:32 pm
by Gray Fox
Look at the actual !BattleLog file. I've studied a few. The hits are recorded one at a time and I've never seen negative hits on a unit that was eliminated. Firing stops when a unit leaves the battle. Unfortunately, since you have quite a long battle, the report is probably truncated. The graphic may just be eye candy but the actual log is the report of what happened.

P.S. If you haven't already, check out their AAR. It is top notch and very interesting, IMHO.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 2:01 pm
by tripax
Gray Fox wrote:Look at the actual !BattleLog file. I've studied a few. The hits are recorded one at a time and I've never seen negative hits on a unit that was eliminated. Firing stops when a unit leaves the battle. Unfortunately, since you have quite a long battle, the report is probably truncated. The graphic may just be eye candy but the actual log is the report of what happened.

P.S. If you haven't already, check out their AAR. It is top notch and very interesting, IMHO.


I'm not running the turn, so I don't have the battle log. There is a lot of information in the battle log that you don't get in the game (for instance, I think the log tells me if opponents generals die or are injured and gives more details about units destroyed in retreat which otherwise I don't get - although I get a small amount of info about that in the messages), I wish I or minipol had been more successful with our battle log scrapers/summarizers. It is too bad the battle results screen isn't more informative.

Thank you for your compliment. I've had to scale way back in how much time I spend on the AAR, but I hope the detail I sometimes get to give shows one view of how much more is going on in the game than it seems.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 2:26 pm
by Straight Arrow
Gray Fox wrote:Look at the actual !BattleLog file. I've studied a few.


Thanks Gray Fox, but how do you find and access the !BattleLog file? I have a back up file for the turn containing a HIST, TAG, and ORDs files, but when I try to open them, there's a message that windows can not open this file. Do I need to link the file to a specific program to open it? If so, what program and where can I find a copy?


Edit: I found a Logs folder, but it only contains a !Main log.txt document and a AI folder; neither of these seem to contain the battle file.

I do not have error logging turned on under options. Could that be the problem?

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 4:16 pm
by Gray Fox
It should be in the Logs directory, but it is only a temp file that overwrites the file with every new turn's battles.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 5:20 pm
by tripax
If you run the turn but don't have it pause for battles at all, I think the battle log is not created, but I am not sure.

Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 9:38 pm
by Cardinal Ape
I think you need to turn the error logging option on to get battle reports. You should be able to able to open it and other types of files with a text program like Windows generic notepad. I'd recommend notepad++ as it handles bigger files much better.

I do remember seeing oddities in the round to round combat report, numbers don't always add up. I can't really explain it but I think some hits carry over to the next round when they shouldn't. But it is just false reporting or a display issue. The number of hits on the normal battle screen is mostly accurate.. Except when a general leading a divisions dies in combat, then it falsely reports the entire division as dead with an erroneous amount of extra hits equal to everything kicked out of the dead generals division.

My rule of thumb is that any time a division general dies in combat you need to subtract his divisions fake hits from the total to get an accurate report of the hits inflicted.