Mon Jun 05, 2017 11:50 am
Whether there will be a new patch sometime in the future I'd rather not speculate. IMHO the realities of AGEOD producing marketable games (ie products they can sell to earn money and stay profitable and earn a living) in a niche gaming field presses them to spend their time doing that, and not going back to tweak old products, for which they earn no money.
1. I find the current way Training Officer's work to be less than satisfactory, and would rather fix that, than propagate it further. Some points I believe to be factual on the subject:
One of the major issues with fresh troops was simply that they had never experienced being in a military environment, and probably had zero contact with it previously. In contrast to the present day society, in which through TV, films, and news media, practically everybody had at least an inkling of what it means to be in the military, at the outset of the CW nearly nobody had any idea of what discipline meant, why it had any meaning, nor what a lack of it had for consequences (individually as well as organizationally), on and off the field of battle.
Many of the officers had little to no experience with the professional military either, and not only had to learn military-way themselves, but instill it into their troops at the same time. This is why officers who had been to military institutes were such a premium.
The only officers I know of having read about their efforts to specifically train their troops are McClellan and Bragg. In general, troops were very often trained (practically in any time available for it). But one of the most important things an army had to learn, was to maneuver in large formations. You could train a regiment alone to maneuver as a regiment. But as soon as you had to maneuver a brigade of regiments, other maneuvers were required, and these had to be trained as well, and only the higher up commanders could allow for this training.
The game has no concept of troops being well trained on a regimental level, but not above that, and this is where the Training Officer ability should come into play. I also don't expect this to ever be implemented, because A) it would require a major change to the game engine (see my first paragraph), and B) it would make the game that much more complex, at a time where gaming is moving away from such complexities, toward a more simple Drag-n-Drop™ approach to make things work--at least from what I've been told.
All that being said, my One-Size-Fits-All™ solution would be to give all professional officers, and all officers with a minimum of 1 or 2 Experience Level (EL) the Training Officer ability, but to have this ability be to increase eXperience Points (XP) at a greater pace, if the commanding a formation, and the formation doesn't. IE the formation (Army, Corps, Division, Brigade) has time to train as a formation. The game already had the mechanics to upgrade elements using each element's XP as a parameter to increase the probability of upgrading (from Volunteers to Line Infantry) each turn.
2. Stockades cost CC's because they have the ability to spontaneously generate a garrison when attacked. This garrison is abstractly considered to always be there, but if it is not generated in an attack, is considered to have retreated or have been surprised and/or overwhelmed by the attack.
3. CC's are manpower conscripted into military service. Partisans are civilian organizations, generally independent of the military, the opposite of conscripts.
4, I can think of no compelling reason to allow a lone Brig. Gen. to lead a division without any assistance. The only reason I can think of for wanting to do this, would be to enhance the ability of divisions to operate alone, which was outside the paradigm of operations of the time.