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PLEASE DON'T VOTE UNTIL YOU'VE READ THIS

Since BigDuke66 ---aren't you missing a '6'? --- dredged this subject up from the depths Re: How useful is the light artillery?; not the question of the usefulness of 6-lber's, but how they are implemented in the game.

The reason 6-lber's don't auto-upgrade to 12-lber's anymore, is because the brigades with them, have their slot designated as for 'light artillery', which is what 6-lber's are, but 12-lber's are 'field artillery'. So when a brigade lost an infantry regiment, and the player allowed it to regain that regiment as a replacement, the code first looked if there were any artillery was missing, and seeing that there was no 'light artillery' in the brigade, because it had upgraded to a 12-lber 'field artillery', gave the brigade a brand new 6-lber, at which time the brigade reached its capacity on elements. So now the brigade has, for example, 1 inf., 1 12-lber, and 1 6-lber .

However, that's kind of a-historical, and inflexible.

There's another issue with the auto-upgrades, they were free, and since the Union got them much quicker and in far greater numbers, it didn't seem terribly fair to some.

There are some possible solutions:

• Change nothing from the way it is now (brigades are built with 6-lber's, which don't upgrade). You are happy with the status quo.
• Early brigades are built with 6-lber's, and later brigades with 12-lber's. The player will still be stuck with a whole slew of brigades with 6-lber's.
• Player can always choose between a brigade with 6- or 12-lber's. The player will still be stuck with a whole slew of brigades with 6-lber's, but if he wishes, the player may start to use 12-lber's at his own discretion.
• Brigades have no batteries embedded in them; player must purchase artillery separately.
  Advantages:
  
  • Player can always buy 12-lber's, either to replace 6-lber's or to put them with a brigade from the start.
  • 'Replaced' 6-lber's are still in the game and my be used elsewhere at the player's discretion.
  • Upgrades are not free, so they are fair.
  Disadvantages:
  
  • Brigades will no longer have batteries embedded in them, so the Commander-Brigade combination will be weaker.
  • It will require a small amount of more management: you will have to purchase batteries separately.

Now you may take the pole, and don't forget to post your comments

Garrison Divisions can make do with the intrinsic 6-lbers, but IMHO artillery do better in an artillery Division. So I chose brigades with no artillery.

Captain_Orso wrote:BigDuke66 ---aren't you missing a '6'?

I'm desperately working to achieve the 3rd 6.


I have not yet chosen because I wonder how the brigade structure changed over the war, I have the impression that the early very mixed brigades later disappeared and single type brigades were formed. But I couldn't find some hard facts about it, a request on civilwartalk.com also did yield any answers.

I would maybe go with the 2nd option as I doubt any 6 pounders were produced later in the war. But if so I would question to change the ratio in some areas, I check the setup for July 1861 and New York for example has the capability to build 47 brigades with artillery while only being able to build 16 without artillery, in such cases the ratio should be the opposite. The players should always be able to build more brigades of the type that has no artillery element compared to the type that has an artillery element, the amount of normal infantry to artillery i just to big, btw the same counts for the brigades that come with cavalry in most cases it seems they had only some companies but not a whole regiment attached to a brigade.

The 4th option is also a possibility but would lack the early mixed brigades and by them takes away some of the development that happened in the war.

I'm sympathetic to what BigDuke says about the ratio of brigades with artillery attached to those lacking artillery. So I think my actual preference would be somewhere between the first and fourth option - namely to have significantly fewer mixed inf-art brigades, but to still keep some. I like the convenience of sometimes just being able to get the attached art for independent commands. A solution that would permit this flexibility would be to have brigades build without the artillery piece but allow an artillery piece to be merged into brigades.

One more observation: I suspect most players will build a higher ratio of heavier artillery when they aren't building a few 6lbs with their infantry brigades. I suspect that will result in players consuming a bit more WS. For the union, the ratio of cost between 6lbs/10lbs/12lb/20lbs is about 1/2/1.4/3 whereas the WS ratio is about 1/3/1.5/3.5. This depends of course how many of the embedded artillery players actually replace.

As for the Inf-Cav brigades, I will readily agree that it is ahistorical. It does have the advantage though that it ties a lot of a player's potential cavalry down in armies so that it is not all treated as a raiding and scouting force. While this may be less fun, it does provide an inexperienced or reckless player some inherent protection from pursuit if their force loses a battle even if the player does not attach any independent cavalry regiments.

Upgrading 6-lber to 12-lber aside, unless you are putting all your artillery into a single division, once infantry and artillery are inside a division it will make no difference, whether your artillery is embedded into a brigade or not. Once inside a division, the 'brigade unit' is not regarded, only the 'division unit' counts. So when a division is picked to go into frontage, all of its infantry goes into the infantry frontage, and its artillery goes into support frontage.

Historically, at some point during the war, experience showed that 'pooling' artillery ---putting it into an Artillery Reserve or Artillery Brigade within the corps and/or army structure--- and deploying it through the corps or army command was more effective than having batteries actually attached to a brigade to deploy to when and where the brigade or division was deployed. The CS started using this doctrine much earlier than the Union, but eventually, both sides used it.

In the game, if artillery is embedded into brigade units, it is not possible to reflect this change, as the artillery, being locked inside the brigade, is also always locked inside the division.

Although historically, many brigades had artillery attached to them, doctrinally, once inside the division structure, it made no difference, because they were deployed with the division to where the division commander decided, and later with artillery being pooled in Artillery Brigades and Artillery Reserve, through corps or army command to where those commands decided.

I may have found a solution to units being built with 6-lbers, so that once their 6-lber as upgrade to a 12-lber, they will not receive another 6-lber as a replacement, whether while replacing its integrated battery or erroneously while replacing a missing infantry regiment, but I haven't been able to find on solution to allow artillery to be pooled into an Artillery Brigade or Reserve, because they are locked in the infantry brigades as an integral part of those units.

So, in the choice between function and form ---the ability to pool artillery vs historically having batteries attached to brigades basically just for looks--- I would rather go with functionality.

Gray Fox has created one or more threads discussing putting artillery in its own division, representing the use of Artillery Brigades and Reserves; maybe he can point to those here. GF?

A while back, pgr posted that a Division of artillery might be a better solution than infantry with some artillery in mixed Divisions or even loose artillery in a stack. I gave it a try and became a proponent for his idea. I found that up to 15 batteries could be placed in an all artillery Division. These gained the advantage of a Division commander that loose artillery in the stack did not enjoy. I also found that the artillery Division did not usually attract small arms fire, as infantry Divisions had more manpower and thus the combat algorithm rightly targeted the infantry to the exclusion of 'smaller' units. So this gave the artillery Division an advantage over the mixed Division. Also, you get a finite number of artillery batteries using the frontage feature. Let's say you have X number of 6-lbers in a mixed Division and the same number of 20-lbers in an artillery Division, but the frontage only allows X number to fire in a stack. In combat the guns that fire are randomly chosen. Half the time the 6-lbers fire and your expensive heavy guns sit idle. Clearly, you would rather have a Division of heavy artillery firing every round and no light guns in mixed Divisions screwing this up. So I advocate one or two Divisions of the best artillery you can afford with a stack of infantry Divisions that have no artillery and perhaps two-three cavalry per Division for pursuit/screening and to add to scouting for the stack. Mixed Divisions with light guns can be entrenched in cities/forts etc. and then the light guns get a to-hit bonus from entrenchment that makes them more effective. Several threads exist where this is discussed in depth. I'll try to locate them.

Here are some of the artillery posts, unfortunately, the embedded links don't work in these posts.

viewtopic.php?f=331&t=38429

viewtopic.php?f=331&t=50009

viewtopic.php?f=331&t=43084

viewtopic.php?f=331&t=39695

viewtopic.php?f=331&t=38619

I looked at the attacks on the infantry and 6lbs in some of the elite brigades that form. Those elite infantry regiments are both more likely to hit and do more damage than their attached artillery.

I would advocate using 6-lbers in defensive positions where the entrenchment adds to their to hit score. That's the best use I have found for them. Large brigades with infantry, artillery and cavalry are really only useful during a very short period at the beginning of the game before Divisions are possible.

One point I might mention is that if 6-lbers are freed up from the starting brigades, then the CSA player may combine these with some cheap flatboats to make several useful forts that otherwise would not be part of the plan.

I didn't see the vote option in the thread, but I'd much prefer brigades w/o artillery, or at least substantially reduced numbers of brigades with attached artillery. And while I'm at it, the same sentiment applies to mixed cavalry/infantry brigades.

Two points:
1) It would also be possible to create a new artillery which has all the stats, image, etc of 12 lbers but is of the type light artillery. I don't even think it would be that hard.

2) There have been a few attempts to overhaul the brigade systems to push them towards more historical accuracy in their structures. Generally, Captain_Orso and I discussed incorporating some changes I proposed, but I never got any feedback from ageod, and when my mod broke after an upgrade, I stopped supporting it. As always, I'd love to push the game in this direction, and I'm most interested in helping if ageod showed interest in incorporating changes.

PS: My vote is leave it be, but it doesn't seem like I can vote above.

Could you sum up what changes you had in mind?

tripax wrote:Two points:
1) It would also be possible to create a new artillery which has all the stats, image, etc of 12 lbers but is of the type light artillery. I don't even think it would be that hard.

Yes, I think it would. I've never done something like that, but I imagine one would simply change the family from medium to light artillery, but that would also mean that it would take replacements from the light artillery pool, which are much cheaper than medium.

Beyond that, I know it would fix the issue with a brigade its upgraded artillery getting a 6lb-er replacement for a missing infantry regiment, but it would not fix the issue that the event controlled upgrades from 6 to 12lb-er are free, which firstly favors the Federals greatly, and secondly is not terribly logical, because the 6lb-ers simply evaporate.

tripax wrote:2) There have been a few attempts to overhaul the brigade systems to push them towards more historical accuracy in their structures. Generally, Captain_Orso and I discussed incorporating some changes I proposed, but I never got any feedback from ageod, and when my mod broke after an upgrade, I stopped supporting it. As always, I'd love to push the game in this direction, and I'm most interested in helping if ageod showed interest in incorporating changes.

PS: My vote is leave it be, but it doesn't seem like I can vote above.

BigDuke66 wrote:Could you sum up what changes you had in mind?

What I had in mind was removing the artillery from all brigades and putting an equal amount into the artillery pools.

I've also thought about doing the same with cavalry.

There are a number of reasons for this, plus a change in supplies, which I will explain in some detail below, but this is gong to be long, sorry.

So, if you're not interested in my long diatribe on all the details, you can stop reading here.

The problems however are inherent in the game itself. The basic concept has some "iron cages" which you simply cannot break, like units. A unit is defined has having x number of elements and a weight of Y and command cost of z. It doesn't matter if the unit actually contains x elements, or what those elements are at any given point in time, you still have a weight of Y and requirement of z CP's.

EG: Imagine one of those massive Virginia brigades with 2 artillery, 1 cav, and 5 infantry, and it gets mauled in battle so that only 1 artillery remains. It still weighs y and needs z CP's, even though all that is present is 1 battery with whatever number of hits.

Another is that the unit cannot be broken down and rebuilt like a division. On the one side, you can assign a single leader to lead a brigade, which might have 3 infantry, 1 cavalry and 1 artillery ---cool ---, but if you have a unit with 2 inf, one with 1 inf, one with 1 cav, and one with 1 arty, you cannot combine them with a leader as with a single large brigade, even though they are exactly the same elements.

Of course, in general, this last issue is more mostly minor, and the first issue generally also minor. Once you are putting everything into division, the restrictions of units simply don't play much of a role, except that artillery and cavalry are chained to them.

While reading Grant's memoirs, I found something he said about the Overland Campaign to be very revealing. He said that he left much of his artillery behind before starting the campaign. The reasoning being two fold. Firstly, that the artillery required a huge number of mules/horses to pull. These needed to have all their fodder carried by supply trains along with them. Each mule/horse need 10 times the weight of fodder as a man required, which makes for a huge amount of supplies being carried to feed mules and horses.

But, how many horse per battery? I saw pictures of a demonstration once of how the distance between artillery pieces was determined, when they were deployed on a battlefield. It's not a tactical consideration. It's purely logistical. When a gun was brought into line on the battle field, it's team pulled it straight into it's position so that the team was facing toward the enemy. But that of course meant that the gun was facing away from the enemy. Now the team was swung like a gate, with the gun being the gatepost, until the gun was facing the enemy. The length of the team pulling the gun determined how much room was required between the guns of a battery to be able to swing the team around to deploy the gun, and often that was 6 to 12 mules or horses in a team depending on the wight of the gun. Then you also have to consider other wagons more carrying ammunition and other equipment, because the caissons only carried enough to satisfy the initial needs of a gun.

So for each gun in a battery, imagine an average of 8 or 10 horses, times 8 guns in a battery. Now put them all in line on a road and if you consider that infantry regiments were practically never full strength, the artillery of a brigade could easily take up far more of the road than all of the infantry regiments in that brigade.

Secondly, in the Wilderness he couldn't even put all the artillery to use. There was simply not nearly enough room to put them, and it would have been exceedingly difficult to find room in the marching order for all the batteries, each taking up much more room than an infantry regiment. On top of that, in poor weather, they destroyed the roads so that infantry could not even pass.

All this put together meant the the artillery, which couldn't be deployed in the Wilderness in the first place, only slowed the army down and increased the huge amount of supplies it needed.

The traffic rules don't really reflect this correctly, but I was thinking, it might be possible to to tweak it so that infantry add almost nothing to 'traffic', wile every battery and supply units should add a huge amount.

Also something to consider is cavalry. A regiment with lets say 500 actual cavalrymen. There are actually a lot more in the regiment. There is a section which does the actual care of the horses, because the cavalrymen themselves didn't do that, because they are out in the field. Plus the regiment has more than 1 horse per cavalryman, more like between 1.2 to 1.5, depending on many factors, and these need to be taken care of ---very often the mounts need special care, and would have to recuperate from a previous deployment, because the cavalrymen were notorious for misusing their mounts, so that after two to four weeks in the field and by the time the mounts were returned and they couldn't be ridden further until they had recovered, if ever again at all---. And horses need even more on fodder than mules. Mules can live and work on hay, while horses need oats etc. to keep up their strength and be deployable. And because the cavalry and logistics went through mules and horses fairly quickly, any unit using horses or mules should have a fairly expensive upkeep each turn.

So although a cavalry regiment won't really take up much more room in the marching order than an infantry regiment, and they won't destroy the road in poor weather, like artillery, they would require a huge amount of wagons to haul their fodder.

So GS should actually be 2 different things, GS, which includes food for humans and sundry equipment etc., and Fodder for mules and horses, because the are not really interchangeable.

Artillery and supply wagons should do more to slow movement in the best of whether, and infantry less, with the situation becoming far worse in poor terrain, like forests, swamps, and mountains.

But to be able to react to traffic and the need for huge amounts of fodder, the player would need to be able to control how many batteries and cavalry regiments he takes along with the army at any given time, and here we are back that the beginning, having come full circle.

It took a while for the South to get rid of the six pounders in the ANV.

After repeated official requests went nowhere, Lee made a personal request to the Tredegar Iron Works to replace his 6 pounds with 12 pounders.

As there was a shortage of gun metal, Tredegar was unable to do this. A work around was hammered out where the ANV gave up their 6 pds to be recast as 12 pds. The casting and boring happened quite quickly, and all the necessary equipment for the new guns was on hand, but of course the melted pop guns didn’t provide enough metal to replace the same number of bigger guns.

Throughout the war, much of the gun metal available to Tredegar was used for costal guns and state orders; the regular army often ended up sucking on the hind teat.

If nothing else, thanks to Orso for sharing the info RE: equine considerations. This allays my fears of having my mule subsist solely on hay. ;p

The points really are:

1. Supply Trains and Wheeled Artillery should be causing far more delays through the Traffic Rules than infantry.

2. Everything with horses should be using far more GS than infantry. Whether there it is really necessary to have GS and Fodder is another question. Maybe it's not necessary. It's not something I've really thought about soOOoo much. In such cases my default stance it, mirror reality and everything else will fall into place.

If you step back and look at everything I've written, there are really 3 categories of issues, and the question of Artillery: In or Out is only one symptom of those issues.

A. The Traffic Rule. Supply Trains and horse drawn artillery should cause far more delays than infantry. But to work with that, the player needs tools to reduce the affects of the situation, which means controlling the number of batteries a unit has, which can only be done if artillery is not locked inside units.

B. Supply Usage for units with horses. I've only really scratched the surface of this issue. It also contains a separate issue of moving supplies from a supply source to a stack in the field and the Wear-n-Tear™ it should cause on Supply Units, which is not even a concept of the game. Think of the situation in Chattanooga after the Battle of Chickamauga. Supplies had to be driven overland through the hills/mountains north of the Tennessee River, which took a huge toll on animals and equipment, and reduced the supplies arriving in Chattanooga to starvation subsistence for the troops there. The latter is modeled in the game; the former is not, it costs the player nothing.

C. Artillery locked into brigades, with regards to exchanging batteries for what ever the player wishes to buy and implement, which could partially be fixed, as I have suggested.

Of course, besides the flexibility artillery outside of units would provide, everything else I've mentioned would greatly enhance the realism of the game, but it would also require a greater amount of management on the part of the player. Supply distribution in the game has been handled inordinately generously by Pocus, so that the player, although he does have to pay attention to it, to the greatest extent, it works on its own with little but rudimentary attention of the player.

All these points sound very fine and I would like to see them implemented.
They are without a doubt a try worth, even if the players have a little more "work" to do.

Artillery having a greater impact with the traffic penalty is good and all, but I can't help but wonder if maybe artillery has too high of a base move speed to begin with? All but the biggest guns technically move at the same speed as infantry. IIRC, a stacks movement speed gets averaged out, so a couple of 20lbers don't drag the entire stack down, perhaps if it didn't average out then one might find themselves making the same choice that Grant made in the Overland campaign.

Another supply type for horses? I can't say I'm feeling the fodder idea. It makes sense, but it sounds like a lot of work to implement. I don't buy a lot of cavalry to begin with, if I had to worry about fodder it might cause to buy even less. I'd rather meet half way and simply up the cost of cavalry or their supply usage.

If anything made it into the game from Orso's last post, I'd want it to be supply wagons suffering from wear and tear. At present I can not remember ever having to buy a supply wagon replacement chit, not very realistic. Actually, with the way the game works I'm not sure there would ever be any point to buying wagon replacements; their health and cohesion doesn't affect their carrying capacity so there is no need to heal them. Building brand new wagons may be too efficient, they only take one turn to build and come fully loaded.

Cardinal Ape, I fully buy your points about supply wagons being very forgiving and artillery having an unrealistic movement.

I'm not sure that taking the minimum speed would address your concern though. That would make the crucial difference whether a player includes any artillery in their corps / formations. Once a core has 1 gun, it might as well have 50 (barring the effects of weight). With averaging, every additional gun would still slow the corps down.

RE: increased supply usage for horses or horse artillery, it seems much easier to implement it into the game as a function of greater general supply usage. While creating fodder as a resource type is interesting and would add to the realistic simulation, creating a new resource type, assigning production of that type to structures along with including it in calculations for supply chains, not to mention getting elements to utilize it, is something beyond what I know how to do as a modder. I can't see that it would be even a low priority for the developers, but I'm not privy to the councils of the great.

RE: wear and tear, I'm looking through the wiki for something that would implement some kind of hit percentage on a class of elements. But could wear and tear be represented by unit maintenance costs? This rule is turned off by default in CW2. Not the same thing as historical attrition.

http://www.ageod.net/agewiki/Unit_Maintenance_Costs

It would probably require tweaking most of the models. I don't know what effect it would have on units when the side doesn't have enough resources to pay the cost, if there would be hits on units, etc.

Why Fodder? If you simply increase the amount of GS for example a cavalry unit requires per turn, plus their capacity to carry GS so that they can remain in the field the same number of turns without picking up additional GS, 2 turns, you will make them into small fast supply units.

It is a typical tactic, at least for me, that if I have sent a cav (Cav-A) unit out to scout, if at the start of their second turn out, I discover they will not be able to return to their BOO (Base Of Operations) by the end of the 2nd turn, because weather has changed, or they were ambushed and lost too much cohesion to move fast, or an enemy unit is now in their way, I send a second cav out (Cav-B) from the BOO to rendezvous with Cav-A in the field. I set Cav-B to intercept Cav-A so they are merged to 1 stack at the end of turn 2. This means, at the start of turn 3 they will share the GS which Cav-B is carrying (Cav-A's GS will be used up at the start of turn 3) and neither Cav will lose cohesion nor take hits from lack of supply, because they will arrive at their BOO by the end of turn 3.

Currently cavalry units carry 4 GS and use 2 per turn. IIRC and infantry regiments do the same. Now increase the GS a cav carries to at least 3x that, because horse have to eat too and their fodder is actually several times that what the rider needs, which means the cav is now carrying 12 GS and need 6 per turn. But now a single cav could rescue an infantry brigade from starving for a turn, because the infantry is going to be eating the fodder of the cavalry horses. That's not terribly realistic, and that's why Fodder.

If you decide to just leave fodder out of the game and consider it a generic parallel to the GS the cav unit carries for its riders (which is basically what we have now), it ignores the fact that a huge portion of the supplies for an army in the field was fodder of the artillery horses. The more artillery in a force, the more the horses needed on supplies being carried in, the more supply trains necessary, the more the roads were filled with supply trains, and them more destroyed the roads in poor weather, making movement with artillery and the supply trains they required inordinately a difficult thing to do in poor terrain and weather.

Although it is true that the movement rate of a stack is averaged out so that even slow artillery will not actually slow the movement of the stack to that of the slowest artillery(1) I'm not suggesting to change anything else about artillery other than their affects to movement through the Traffic Rule, which basically says, the more troops which move through a region, the slower they will get, based on which stack was in the region first. The first has little or no slowdown, the next more, etc.

I don't actually think artillery movement speed, outside of the Traffic Rule, should be changed for field artillery. It was made to be mobile. The issues start with what I stated above, and with moving artillery which was not field pieces. But even non-field artillery should be transportable. You just have to dismantle it and have wagons to carry it.

I always play with historic attrition. I often have Supply Units taking hit from movement, especially if I have to move in poor weather. If I'm pressed for money and WSU they are the last replacement chits I buy, because even if a Supply Units has taken 50% of their hits, they still carry 100% of their capacity, which is also something which ought to be addressed.

But if you have a stack in for example a swamp region, one region away from a depot, it should cause an large amount of Wear-n-Tear™ on that stack's Supply Unit to be pulling supplies from the depot. But it doesn't, because supply distribution does not include any Wear-n-Tear™ on Supply Units, and if the Supply Unit is not moving it will hardly take any hits at all.

As far as maintenance goes, I'm principally not against it, but I don't think it really takes into account the toll normal operations took on cavalry horses. The cavalry was notorious for running their horses into the ground and there were major issues with providing enough replacements for them; not just for the South, but also for the North. And it was a very difficult long term issue. You couldn't just use yearlings for replacements. Those were too weak and too nervous in battle. IIRC 3 year olds were deemed the best, and they still had to be trained for many months before they could be give to the cavalry for field use.


(1) Try this sometime with a coastal artillery. It should take a coastal artillery 50 days to move to an adjacent clear region in good weather. Put it in a corps stack with at least 2 full division, maybe more, and the same move will be reduced greatly. You may have to actually execute the turn to see the difference. I don't recall exactly. But I do recall times, when the South has taken Cairo, IL and are carrying the coastal battery around Illinois and Missouri like they were going to use it as a battering ram against Saint Louis

Captain_Orso wrote:(1) Try this sometime with a coastal artillery. It should take a coastal artillery 50 days to move to an adjacent clear region in good weather. Put it in a corps stack with at least 2 full division, maybe more, and the same move will be reduced greatly. You may have to actually execute the turn to see the difference. I don't recall exactly. But I do recall times, when the South has taken Cairo, IL and are carrying the coastal battery around Illinois and Missouri like they were going to use it as a battering ram against Saint Louis

I've caught Union stacks dragging them around and moving a lot quicker than they
should have been. At least it sure seemed that Athena was cheating a bit.

The talk about horses indicate that horses could/should also be a resource. Besides WS the horses would also limit the amount of artillery, cavalry forces, supply wagons etc..

Personally I would love to see the whole resource thing be much more detailed to mirror exactly what resources the North & South had in hand. Treating WS as anything so that it enables you to build muskets to raise infantry but at the same time also steel for iron clads seem wrong, just as wrong as the single supply.

Orso, you do make a good argument for the use of fodder. I'd play with it. Though, getting a good fodder system into the game may be a bit of dream, sadly. Its like an awesome piece of furniture that won't fit through the doorway of your house.

I'm curious about what you think should be the consequences of running out of fodder? What would or should happen to a cavalry unit that runs out of fodder in the field (but still has GS and ammo?) I imagine some type of combat and movement penalty? Men and horse share the same health stat, so doing damage to the horses and not the men seems pretty tough.

In case some day the brigades to get an overhaul let me note that the Brigade pictures that come up should get adjusted too.
It's a minor hassle that you get the picture of a conscription brigade while all units are trained and so should show a normal brigade picture, but this goes as far as trained colored militia get the normal brigade pictures what really looks strange.

DrPostman wrote:

Captain_Orso wrote:(1) Try this sometime with a coastal artillery. It should take a coastal artillery 50 days to move to an adjacent clear region in good weather. Put it in a corps stack with at least 2 full division, maybe more, and the same move will be reduced greatly. You may have to actually execute the turn to see the difference. I don't recall exactly. But I do recall times, when the South has taken Cairo, IL and are carrying the coastal battery around Illinois and Missouri like they were going to use it as a battering ram against Saint Louis

I've caught Union stacks dragging them around and moving a lot quicker than they
should have been. At least it sure seemed that Athena was cheating a bit.

Athena has a propensity for it. She doesn't recognize that it's COASTAL artillery, which would have great value and use elsewhere down river. Instead she schlepps it around like an albatross around her neck

BigDuke66 wrote:The talk about horses indicate that horses could/should also be a resource. Besides WS the horses would also limit the amount of artillery, cavalry forces, supply wagons etc..

Personally I would love to see the whole resource thing be much more detailed to mirror exactly what resources the North & South had in hand. Treating WS as anything so that it enables you to build muskets to raise infantry but at the same time also steel for iron clads seem wrong, just as wrong as the single supply.

Yes, horses probably should be a resource, iron too.

I think in the end, the resources which should be taken into account are those which played, or could have played, a major role in the conflict. Iron was a huge issue with the South from the beginning. AFAIK it was never an issue in the North. Could it have been? I'm not sure. AFAIK Pittsburgh was not the center of iron production as it was presented in AACW; New England was, but Pittsburgh had the latest technology and was sitting a a huge coal source, which gave it an important economically advantage.

Honestly I don't know enough about the details of the economies of the North and South to say all too much about it, but it could be done better. Biggest Room in Existence <=∞> Room For Improvement

Cardinal Ape wrote:Orso, you do make a good argument for the use of fodder. I'd play with it. Though, getting a good fodder system into the game may be a bit of dream, sadly. Its like an awesome piece of furniture that won't fit through the doorway of your house.

I'm curious about what you think should be the consequences of running out of fodder? What would or should happen to a cavalry unit that runs out of fodder in the field (but still has GS and ammo?) I imagine some type of combat and movement penalty? Men and horse share the same health stat, so doing damage to the horses and not the men seems pretty tough.

Basically a cavalry element should have 2 sets of hits, one of men, and one of horses; the set of hits for horses should be larger than that of men. Once the number of hits of horse is < that of men, the men are reduced to meet the horses, and a portion of the difference goes into the cav Replacements and/or CC-Pool. Lack of Fodder causes hits vs horse-hits.

I don't even dream about horses as resources, or cav and artillery having multiple sets of hit points (shouldn't artillery actually have 3 sets? ). That's why I only started this thread talking about artillery locked in brigades. That I could mod myself.

BigDuke66 wrote:In case some day the brigades to get an overhaul let me note that the Brigade pictures that come up should get adjusted too.
It's a minor hassle that you get the picture of a conscription brigade while all units are trained and so should show a normal brigade picture, but this goes as far as trained colored militia get the normal brigade pictures what really looks strange.

AFAIK there are no colored militia. There are colored conscripts, but they 'techup' to colored line infantry using the same portrait, so I have no idea what the issue is.

Made a thread for it:
viewtopic.php?f=343&t=51034