Chain of Command Question

[Blood and Thunder Brigade]

I'm sure I've seen the answer to this question on this forum before but I'm too lazy to go searching for it
Anyhow, if I have a three or four division army under the direct and overall command of a 3 star general with each division commanded by a one star general, if I slot a two star general in there but without any troops under his direct command, does the 2 star general still have a role of some kind? Does he act as a sort of adjutant or a sort of provisional corps commander?

[Gray Fox]

Supposedly, the stack gets extra CPs for an aide-de-camp, but I have never seen this to work.

[grimjaw]

What Gray Fox said, although I seem to have hazy memories of it working at some point. The manual for CW1 & CW2 both state, in slightly different wording, that a leader with a strat rating of 4 or higher, in an army stack but not commanding troops, provides a CP bonus. CW1 seems to indicate that it goes to subordinate corps. CW2 implies that the bonus goes to any army or corps stack that has this leader. I dont remember it from CW1, but I also haven't seen it in CW2. According to the manual entry, rank shouldn't matter, just the strat. I didn't see anything is the gamelogic.opt file about it.

[simovitch]

It works just fine in the game.

Remember, the max baseline Command Points you can have in an Army or Corps stack is 16. This is achieved in a Corps, for example, by say the 2-star commander (8CP), and two 1-star leaders (4CP each = 8CP). This then can only be increased beyond 16 by a balloon, Signal unit, the stack commander's strategic rating minus 2, and an aide-de-camp with a SR=4 or higher. The ADC would have to be a leader that hasn't yet contributed his CP to the stack.

I bought CW2 with the Matrix sale and I'm loving the scale, depth, and flavor that it has to offer. I enjoy the new options and battle plans too. Great stuff. I played CW1 for many years as well from the early days through the development of the legacy patch.

Most of the negative comments originate from players not fully understanding the mechanics of play, which is exacerbated by the incomplete manual. But much can be learned by playing the scenarios against the AI, and one of the keys to success is understanding the command structure and command point distribution.

Good to see some folks still tinkering away at it... Thank you!

[Blood and Thunder Brigade]

I've always used the likes of Theophilus Holmes & John Forney in the ADC role, but wasn't entirely sure whether it was really achieving anything or not until recently when I saw Holmes receive seniority points, etc, despite not having any troops under his direct command. It's all something that I'm eager to have a better understanding of.

On a different topic, if I remember correctly, in a game of mine some 12 months ago I'm sure I saw Stonewall Jackson gain the 'military genius' trait after a series of particularly hard fought but successful battles in Harpers Ferry, Winchester & Strasburg. Was I seeing things? and if not, how does this work/happen? And can any general gain leader traits?

[grimjaw]

RE: traits, I assume you mean abilities in game terms. The different models for a leader can have different abilities, but a leader at a given rank can't add or subtract from the number of abilities he has. McClellan has multiple models for the same rank, but he's a minority of one, IIRC.

Stonewall's rank 2 model has three abilities. His rank 3 model has five abilities. One of them is the military genius, but that ability is just flavor. It's in there to combine multiple ability icons into one, so that when a model has more than three abilities they won't clutter up his portrait. The military genius ability doesn't do anything else. In fact, the ability that Stonewall gains at rank 3 is actually a penalty, quickly angered, so you can see the genius part of it is counterintuitive.

There are several abilities like that. The emplaced arty is another. The ability is just information. Other things affect the movement of units with an emplaced ability.

Traits is probably a better term than abilities for what these things do.

EDIT: I should have been more specific. The genius ability is a type called a collection. The emplaced ability is a type called a flavor.