Strange moves...

[ajarnlance]

Please correct me if I am wrong but I am sure that I have read in the rules that in order to enter a region with 0% military control a force must go to offensive mode. So how does an un-activated general McClellan with 2 divisions march into Chester IL when I am there and he has 0% MC??
A couple of moves later I assault a city with an inactive McClellan who has just moved into the region at the same time. When I check the battle report my forces are RED for assault, McClellan's forces are ORANGE for offensive BUT he is un-activated that turn.... makes no sense to me...

Finally how does Shelby (with only a cavalry force) who's card tells me he has an 85% chance of evading if overwhelmed, fight a much larger force for 3 rounds and never evade and die like he committed suicide... and guess which high initiative general got him... McClellan... ??? What are the chances McClellan could manage to catch Shelby and keep him from evading for 3 rounds....?? IRL Shelby could have walked into McClellan's command tent and drunk his coffee without little Mac moving a muscle...

[Ace]

Even McClellan will attack when entering region with 0% MC, but with 35% combat penalty (35% combat penalty equals -7/-7 off/def general stats

[Captain_Orso]

Un-activated means that the player cannot set the stack to Offensive Posture and his movement is reduced by 35% at all times. The power of an un-activated stack equals the MC that stack's faction enjoys within that region, down to -35%.

So if an un-activated McClellan moves from a region where he has 100% MC into a region where he has 0 MC his power will go immediately to -35%, but he must still go to Offensive Posture, just at -35% adjusting upward if and when friendly MC goes above 35%.

This also means that if an un-activated McClellan is sitting in his own region at 100% MC, if an enemy stack moves in to attack him he will be at what ever % MC he maintains when the battle ensues--the stack moving in will likely take on some MC and the region will not remain at 100% Union MC, unless the enemy stack is in PP or very, very weak.

[ajarnlance]

Thank you both kindly for taking the time to explain this. I am playing my first PBEM game and I know that inevitably I am making some mistakes as the CSA player. However, I am finding that the game seems to punish me whenever I try a bold move or launch an attack. My generals are much better early in the game but it doesn't seem to matter.

Has anybody been able to recreate Jackson's Shenandoah valley campaign in this game? Jackson kept three Union armies (each one bigger than his own) tied down in the valley for months. Seems to me if you had Jackson with a small stack adjacent to 3 larger Union stacks it wouldn't be long before he got stomped in the game. Jackson talked about a small army being able to defeat a larger army through surprise, speed and guile... but I don't think the game models this very well. IRL Lee divided his forces in the face of larger Union armies... would you get away with this in the game? "Fortune favours the bold"... not in this game... not so far anyway

Giving this theme more thought... it boils down to an issue of entrenchment vs. manouver. The game gives the advantage to entrenchment thus robbing the other player of the advantages of taking the initiative. Union player: build big stacks and turtle forward one region at a time then quickly entrench. Unless I attack him the first turn after he moves into a region he will be too strongly entrenched to attack. IMHO the "entrench" decision card has made this problem worse. IRL the only way to move an opponent out of his entrenchments would be to march around his flank and fall on his rear, thus cutting his lines of communication. Lee successfully sent Jackson around McDowell's flank (thru the Shenandoah valley) in the campaign that lead to 2nd Manassas. In the game this is very difficult to accomplish because the Union can entrench units in every region and so prevent a flanking army from moving quickly. Honestly, I see single cavalry units entrenched to level 4. Did small cavalry units even carry shovels in the CW? Did they all have engineer units with them to tunnel into the earth?? I know that by the end of the war Lee was in entrenchments that foreshadowed WW1 trenches, but I don't remember reading about so much entrenching IRL early in the war. Seems like an exploit to me and it reduces the advantage of mobility and manouver in the game....

[ohms_law]

There are a ton of events that happened in the real war that can't be recreated in the game. That's just the way things are, when it comes to things like this.
Honestly, I'm kinda glad that we can't recreate Jackson's actual antics in the Shenandoah. That sort of ability would be seriously unbalancing.
Still, the COnfederates can certainly hang on to the Valley, and Manassas, if they play well. So, it's not as though we can't recreate the effect of Jackson's campaign.

[ohms_law]

Addressing the statement about entrenchment specifically, though; I wanted to offer this, from McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom:

Grant’s objective was a dusty crossroads named Cold Harbor near the Gaines’ Mill battlefield of 1862. Sheridan’s cavalry seized the junction after an intense fight on May 31 with southern horsemen commanded by Lee’s nephew Fitzhugh Lee. Next day Sheridan’s troopers held on against an infantry counterattack until Union infantry came up and pushed the rebels back. During the night of June 1– 2 the remainder of both armies arrived and entrenched lines facing each other for seven miles from the Totopotomy to the Chickahominy. To match additional southern reinforcements from south of the James, Grant pried one of Butler’s corps from the same sector. At Cold Harbor, 59,000 Confederates confronted 109,000 Federals. Both armies had thus built themselves back up almost to the numbers with which they started the campaign four long weeks earlier.

These four weeks had been exhausting as well as bloody beyond all precedent. The Federals had suffered some 44,000 casualties, the Confederates about 25,000.[SUP]25[/SUP] This was a new kind of relentless, ceaseless warfare. These two armies had previously fought several big set-piece battles followed by the retreat of one or the other behind the nearest river, after which both sides rested and recuperated before going at it again. Since the beginning of this campaign, however, the armies had never been out of contact with each other. Some kind of fighting along with a great deal of marching and digging took place almost every day and a good many nights as well. Mental and physical exhaustion began to take a toll; officers and men suffered what in later wars would be called shell shock. Two of Lee’s unwounded corps commanders, A. P. Hill and Richard Ewell, broke down for a time during the campaign, and Ewell had to be replaced by Jubal Early. Lee fell sick for a week. On the Union side an officer noted that in three weeks men “had grown thin and haggard. The experience of those twenty days seemed to have added twenty years to their age.” “Many a man,” wrote Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body.”[SUP] 26[/SUP]

All of this was on Grant’s mind as he pondered his next move. Another flanking maneuver to the left would entangle his army in the Chickahominy bottomlands where McClellan had come to grief. And it would only drive Lee back into the Richmond defenses, which had been so strengthened during the past two years that the usual defensive advantage of fieldworks would be doubled. Another dozen Union regiments were scheduled to leave the army when their time expired in July; this factor also argued against postponement of a showdown battle. Grant’s purpose was not a war of attrition—though numerous historians have mislabeled it thus. From the outset he had tried to maneuver Lee into open-field combat, where Union superiority in numbers and firepower could cripple the enemy. It was Lee who turned it into a war of attrition by skillfully matching Grant’s moves and confronting him with an entrenched defense at every turn. Although it galled Lee to yield the initiative to an opponent , his defensive strategy exacted two enemy casualties for every one of his own. This was a rate of attrition that might stun northern voters into denying Lincoln re-election and ending the war. To avoid such a consequence Grant had vowed to fight it out on this line if it took all summer. “This line” had now become Cold Harbor, and the results of a successful attack there might win the war. If beaten, the Confederates would be driven back on the Chickahominy and perhaps annihilated. Grant knew that the rebels were tired and hungry; so were his own men, but he believed that they had the edge in morale. “Lee’s army is really whipped,” he had written to Halleck a few days earlier. “The prisoners we now take show it, and the action of his army shows it unmistakably. A battle with them outside of intrenchments cannot be had . Our men feel that they have gained the morale over the enemy and attack with confidence.”[SUP] 27[/SUP] So Grant ordered an assault at dawn on June 3.

The outcome revealed his mistake in two crucial respects . Lee’s army was not whipped, nor did Grant’s men attack with confidence. Indeed, hundreds of them pinned slips of paper with name and address on their uniforms so their bodies could be identified after the battle. At dawn came the straight -ahead assault delivered primarily by three corps on the left and center of the Union line. A sheet of flame greeted the blue uniforms with names pinned on them. The rebels fought from trenches described by a newspaper reporter as “intricate, zig-zagged lines within lines, lines protecting flanks of lines, lines built to enfilade opposing lines . . . works within works and works without works.”[SUP] 28[/SUP] Although a few regiments in Hancock’s 2nd Corps— the same that had breached the Angle at Spotsylvania— managed to penetrate the first line of trenches, they were quickly driven out at the cost of eight colonels and 2,500 other casualties. Elsewhere along the front the result was worse— indeed it was the most shattering Union repulse since the stone wall below Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. The Yankees suffered 7,000 casualties this day; the Confederates fewer than 1,500. By early afternoon Grant admitted defeat and called off further efforts. “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered,” he said that evening. “I think Grant has had his eyes opened,” Meade wrote dryly to his wife, “and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”[SUP] 29[/SUP]

McPherson, James M. (1988-02-25). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States) (pp. 733-734). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[ajarnlance]

Thanks for the insight... McPherson's book is one of the best. This refers to later in the war when entrenchments were more common. I wonder if they were used as commonly in 1862? Maybe someone can shed some light on that. Armies using entrenchments makes more sense. What do you think about one entrenched cavalry brigade being able to force an opponent to combat as he tries to pass through a region? Lee certainly made Grant's army bleed for every piece of ground. Lee was a very proud man.. I just wonder if this blinded him and prolonged the war. After Lincoln was re-elected was there any real incentive for the south to go on?

[Merlin]

The entrenchment levels are pretty much spot on. Beauregard built some of the most extensive works on earth outside Corinth in 1862 (He should honestly get the entrenching ability just for that) and the huge works built both by McClellan and Lee on the peninsula give the lie to the idea that entrenchments were a late war thing. The lack of entrenchments in the battles of 1862 was more the product of so many of them being meeting engagements of a sort than the lack of desire by commanders to dig in.

[ohms_law]

The entrenchment levels are pretty much spot on. Beauregard built some of the most extensive works on earth outside Corinth in 1862 (He should honestly get the entrenching ability just for that) and the huge works built both by McClellan and Lee on the peninsula give the lie to the idea that entrenchments were a late war thing. The lack of entrenchments in the battles of 1862 was more the product of so many of them being meeting engagements of a sort than the lack of desire by commanders to dig in.

Agreed. The McPherson quote above is what immediately came to my mind because it was so obviously specific about entrenchments, and I happened to know exactly where to find it.
Even in the "meeting engagements" in 1862 that you're referring to, every source that I can find talks about how one side or the other, and often both, would immediately start to dig in.

Still, aj's point about individual units, and especially non-line infantry units (even though he specifies cavalry, I'd expand that to anything other than line infantry that is on it's own) probably should be limited in the amount of entrenchment available to it in the same manner than level 5+ entrenchment requires the presence of artillery units. That being said, I don't think that it makes a significant difference... individual cav units, for example, are going to be run over by divisions or corps, regardless of how much they can entrench (they usually won't even engage, regardless). So, it's a simplification of the engine that is justified by it's lack of impact, it seems to me.

[Rod Smart]

Would it make you feel any better if you thought of "entrenchments" partly as "finding the best ground"


While a regiment of cavalry isn't going to break out their shovels immediately upon entering a region, they WILL immediately reconnoiter the terrain and find the best ground.

[ohms_law]

Ii took me a minute to dig this up, but I thought that it may help, as well:
[ATTACH]31949[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]31950[/ATTACH]

From Osprey - Warrior 013 - Union Cavalryman 1861-65

Also, as an aside, Lee and Davis, along with the entire Confederacy, were seemingly "blinded", and therefore prolonged the war, by their tactical victories on numerous occasions. The political situation in the Union throughout the war didn't really help matters either, with Democrats and Copperheads threatening to force peace negotiations or even starting to organize separate peace talks on a couple o f occasions.

[ajarnlance]

Ii took me a minute to dig this up, but I thought that it may help, as well:
[ATTACH]31949[/ATTACH]
[ATTACH]31950[/ATTACH]

From Osprey - Warrior 013 - Union Cavalryman 1861-65

Also, as an aside, Lee and Davis, along with the entire Confederacy, were seemingly "blinded", and therefore prolonged the war, by their tactical victories on numerous occasions. The political situation in the Union throughout the war didn't really help matters either, with Democrats and Copperheads threatening to force peace negotiations or even starting to organize separate peace talks on a couple o f occasions.

You are amazing!! Thanks for "digging that up" (excuse the pun)!! I can see from the list that Union cavalry did in fact carry spades... actually they seemed to have carried just about everything... feel sorry for the poor horses The quality of information available on this site is very impressive... feel like I am earning a degree in civil war history. Some very resourceful people on here! Thanks to all of you for your very thoughtful answers.