Confederate AI??

[Ol' Choctaw]

What counter measures did you develop?

I typically use the forces that show up in WV supplemented by perhaps a brigade or two, to form a screen along the railway between Grafton and Harpers Ferry, set to attack, so long as fair weather holds. Each area has a strength of only about 100 pwr but they usually leave it alone.

I also try an early move on Manassas with a blockade of the James and Rappahannock to diminish their supplies in VA.

The AI seems to value stealth in its early moves for any raid and if checked it will abandon them.

In Ky gunboats on the river and militia converting military control seems to check raids and a cannon or two in a few of the towns on the rivers stops them from chancing using the rivers.

Some of it could be luck, but I have not had a single deep raid since I started using these methods.

[vaalen]

I typically use the forces that show up in WV supplemented by perhaps a brigade or two, to form a screen along the railway between Grafton and Harpers Ferry, set to attack, so long as fair weather holds. Each area has a strength of only about 100 pwr but they usually leave it alone.

I also try an early move on Manassas with a blockade of the James and Rappahannock to diminish their supplies in VA.

The AI seems to value stealth in its early moves for any raid and if checked it will abandon them.

In Ky gunboats on the river and militia converting military control seems to check raids and a cannon or two in a few of the towns on the rivers stops them from chancing using the rivers.

Some of it could be luck, but I have not had a single deep raid since I started using these methods.

Ol' Choctaw, you just might have renewed my interest. I will give it a try. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

[Ol' Choctaw]

I think it should work for you. If not let me know what happened and where they broke through.

[Longshanks]

Those are all good suggestions, Ol'C.

You can also try sticking about two-three brigades (around 100 pwr) in towns like Pittsburgh, NYC, etc. The AI goes for these because it sees a poorly defended high value target. Once winter comes, you can remove the regiments.

[soundoff]

From everything that I've seen (I've been working on putting together a simple mod that allows players to build more historical oob's through their troop purchases), despite the unhistorical nature of the early drafts, the actual manpower totals produced by them are necessary to raise a historical number of troops. I've come to think of the draft as less of an actual draft and more of a super call for volunteers.

When you look at the number of troops/units in the various armies by early 1862, it's almost impossible to reach those troop levels without doing at least one draft (remember, by March 1862 the Union should have one huge army to campaign against Richmond, the equivalent of another army in northern Virginia and the Shenandoah, two armies in Tennessee, the equivalent of an army corps to be assembled along the south Atlantic coastal areas and another guarding Fort Monroe with however many troops getting ready to invade New Orleans- unless you buy the absolute cheapest units possible, you can't put all that together with just the Volunteer calls). The thing that really skews everything is that the AI will do their first draft as early as possible thus producing unhistorical troop levels just in the very earliest months of the war- by the end of the 1861 everything is on track.

At last, at least one other voice in the wildnerness that realises that by adhering to historical draft dates whilst solving one unhistorical aspect of the game that you introduce another. If the draft dates are corrected in any ACW2 it has to be counterbalanced (assuming we are looking for historical accuracy) with a much much higher number of volunteers in 1861.


I've always felt that the real problem is not the 'unhistorical' draft dates for a least they enable you to get to historical troop levels. Its how those recruits are used thats the real issue. We can plough to many of them into front line units ....... totally inappropriately. And by ignoring the 3 and 6 months enlistments of the first year then the Union side particularly is able to have a significant portion of experienced troops by early 62.


So +1 from me wsatterwhite