Casualties Seem Out Of Proportion Sometimes

[Southerner]

In some of my battles I knock off 8 to 9 thousand doodles in a single battle. Yet my forces only suffer minimal losses. Sometimes a few as 0-60. This happened not once but several times yesterday as I put in a major gameplay session.

While I don't mind in the least not having to scrape up the scarce C.S.A. replacements it does seem a bit far fetched to say the least.

In my real life military experience we usually lost one guy just marching to the PX. The Battle of Fredericksburg which was about as lop sided as battles get, as far as losses are concerned ,still had General Lee lossing
5,377 while inflicting 12,653 on General Burnside.

A major battle where an army lost 0 while inflicting thousands would be a miracle.

Guess I'm just wondering how/why the game manages to conjure up these bloodless outcomes.

[beeper]

Yeah ive noticed very lopsided outcomes also. Most times i think it is related to entrenchment levels. I think the effects of entrenching sould be lessend when troops are ouside of forts. Although in fairness to the designers it looks to be a very tricky issue to deal with. Many variables and such a wide possiblity of outcomes, some unrealistic results should be expected.

[arsan]

Hi!
Are you using a patched version of the game?
Your results seems very strange... on the first patches the battles used to be much more lopsided but it was solved months ago.
IMHO, result now (1.09) seems very appropriate 95% of the time: even the winner losses a lot of soldiers and armies don't fight to the dead (elements completely lost are rare), unless trapped on a siege.
Maybe you could post some images with this kind of battle reports so we could see the exact situation of the battle.
Regards!

[stars&bars]

I am using the latest patch, and there are sometimes some odd battles. One example recently was where 1 element v 1 element had the battle screen come up 3 times, and both sides lost 0 men. I think on the whole though, its not a major problem, just the odd isolated incident.

[Southerner]

Hi!
Are you using a patched version of the game?
Your results seems very strange... on the first patches the battles used to be much more lopsided but it was solved months ago.
IMHO, result now (1.09) seems very appropriate 95% of the time: even the winner losses a lot of soldiers and armies don't fight to the dead (elements completely lost are rare), unless trapped on a siege.
Maybe you could post some images with this kind of battle reports so we could see the exact situation of the battle.
Regards!

Hi. I'm very glad you asked that question 'cause I don't really know which patch version I have and this saves me the trouble of asking how I find out.


The patch I am using I got from the "AGEOD ON THE WEB" link http://www.a-acw.com/ that installs with the game. I went to the site and looked under downloads and the patch DL option does not specify which version it is. It is just a RAR file of 78.8 Mb or so. I figured the patch available would be the latest version available(in fact the site states the it is the latest) so I never questioned it.

When booting up, the splash screens display a "2.0" I alway figured that was the version I had. So I suppose now I will learn the truth.

[Rafiki]

The patch version is displayed bottom right in the startup screen. If you are "fully patched", it should be 1.09e.

I checked the patch available from the http://www.a-acw.com/ website; it's 1.09e

[mlp071]

In my campaign total number of casualtes is around 200k/year for both sides, that sounds close to real numbers.

I do get some occasional results like this (this is with 1.09e), but i contribute that to CP penalties, lack of cohesion and AI lack of positioning (second one has 0 casualties for me though??) :



4500 versus 16 500(AI troops were all in city)



0 versus 2000 ( AI troops moved accros the river to attack)

I did have some smaller battles (1-2 units versus 1-2 units ) that were with 0 casualties on both sides.

[arsan]

Hi!

Certainly, the first battle seems a little lopsided. But bear in mind one very important thing that can help to understand (or at least explain) some of this results:
- On the battle report, you will see all the elemnent both sides have present on the region... but it did not mean all of them participated on the battles.
This is a little confusing, but it seems to be a limitation of the battle report system
I could be the case that some units are in a stack inside the a city and don't participate on a battle outside the structure. Even several stacks outside a structure can not support each other because of delayed battle comitement, as the regions are very large.
This is one of the dangers of having several stacks. You can't be sure every one will be engaged in battle or at least be engaged at the same time. Its possible that they are defeated in turn, instead of fight at the same turn.
You can check this by seeing the casualties after battle. If you have several stacks its probable some of them suffer all the losses and some none (as they have not been committed).

The second screen result has an easy explanation: there are nearly no real combat units on the union stack. They are all support units except the guns, and the naval gusn are "fixed guns" and only fire to the sea.
So the only opposition is the siege guns, not much against a full CSA corps.
The "problem" in this case is not the casualties. Its that a stack of supports units tried to attack your powerful corps...

Regards!

[mlp071]

Hi!

Certainly, the first battle seems a little lopsided. But bear in mind one very important thing that can help to understand (or at least explain) some of this results:
- On the battle report, you will see all the elemnent both sides have present on the region... but it did not mean all of them participated on the battles.
This is a little confusing, but it seems to be a limitation of the battle report system
I could be the case that some units are in a stack inside the a city and don't participate on a battle outside the structure. Even several stacks outside a structure can not support each other because of delayed battle comitement, as the regions are very large.
This is one of the dangers of having several stacks. You can't be sure every one will be engaged in battle or at least be engaged at the same time. Its possible that they are defeated in turn, instead of fight at the same turn.
You can check this by seeing the casualties after battle. If you have several stacks its probable some of them suffer all the losses and some none (as they have not been committed).

The second screen result has an easy explanation: there are nearly no real combat units on the union stack. They are all support units except the guns, and the naval gusn are "fixed guns" and only fire to the sea.
So the only opposition is the siege guns, not much against a full CSA corps.
The "problem" in this case is not the casualties. Its that a stack of supports units tried to attack your powerful corps...

Regards!

Yeah , i have no problems with casualties totals in the end of the turn.If this is most lopsided i had , i would assume that battles are fine .

Like i said , in first case , i can contribute that to AI lacking 2** general and lack of cohesion.I know how badly lack of skilled CO can affect units from real life.

Second one is as you said

[Spruce]

A few months ago while working on older patches - Pocus proposed to tweak some of the moddable parameters.

However - I don't recall what parameters those were - anyhow I tried it out back then and my results were much more balanced. The tweak resulted in =

- less extreme losses (like 40.000 casualties in one week),

- less polarised results - more balanced,

- and more important - less destroyed units - as it influences morale so much I don't like to have battle weeks were morale drops 20 or 30. I mean you can lose the war in one season - but not in one week,

Pocus, can you recall what were those settings in the moddable file ? IIRC one of them was chance to hit ?