tripax wrote:Two points:
1) It would also be possible to create a new artillery which has all the stats, image, etc of 12 lbers but is of the type light artillery. I don't even think it would be that hard.
Yes, I think it would. I've never done something like that, but I imagine one would simply change the family from medium to light artillery, but that would also mean that it would take replacements from the light artillery pool, which are much cheaper than medium.
Beyond that, I know it would fix the issue with a brigade its upgraded artillery getting a 6lb-er replacement for a missing infantry regiment, but it would not fix the issue that the event controlled upgrades from 6 to 12lb-er are free, which firstly favors the Federals greatly, and secondly is not terribly logical, because the 6lb-ers simply evaporate.
tripax wrote:2) There have been a few attempts to overhaul the brigade systems to push them towards more historical accuracy in their structures. Generally, Captain_Orso and I discussed incorporating some changes I proposed, but I never got any feedback from ageod, and when my mod broke after an upgrade, I stopped supporting it. As always, I'd love to push the game in this direction, and I'm most interested in helping if ageod showed interest in incorporating changes.
PS: My vote is leave it be, but it doesn't seem like I can vote above.
BigDuke66 wrote:Could you sum up what changes you had in mind?
What I had in mind was removing the artillery from all brigades and putting an equal amount into the artillery pools.
I've also thought about doing the same with cavalry.
There are a number of reasons for this, plus a change in supplies, which I will explain in some detail below, but this is gong to be long, sorry.
So, if you're not interested in my long diatribe on all the details, you can stop reading here.
The problems however are inherent in the game itself. The basic concept has some "iron cages" which you simply cannot break, like units. A unit is defined has having x number of elements and a weight of Y and command cost of z. It doesn't matter if the unit actually contains x elements, or what those elements are at any given point in time, you still have a weight of Y and requirement of z CP's.
EG: Imagine one of those massive Virginia brigades with 2 artillery, 1 cav, and 5 infantry, and it gets mauled in battle so that only 1 artillery remains. It still weighs y and needs z CP's, even though all that is present is 1 battery with whatever number of hits.
Another is that the unit cannot be broken down and rebuilt like a division. On the one side, you can assign a single leader to lead a brigade, which might have 3 infantry, 1 cavalry and 1 artillery ---cool
---, but if you have a unit with 2 inf, one with 1 inf, one with 1 cav, and one with 1 arty, you cannot combine them with a leader as with a single large brigade, even though they are exactly the same elements.
Of course, in general, this last issue is more mostly minor, and the first issue generally also minor. Once you are putting everything into division, the restrictions of units simply don't play much of a role, except that artillery and cavalry are chained to them.
While reading Grant's memoirs, I found something he said about the Overland Campaign to be very revealing. He said that he left much of his artillery behind before starting the campaign. The reasoning being two fold. Firstly, that the artillery required a huge number of mules/horses to pull. These needed to have all their fodder carried by supply trains along with them. Each mule/horse need 10 times the weight of fodder as a man required, which makes for a huge amount of supplies being carried to feed mules and horses.
But, how many horse per battery? I saw pictures of a demonstration once of how the distance between artillery pieces was determined, when they were deployed on a battlefield. It's not a tactical consideration. It's purely logistical. When a gun was brought into line on the battle field, it's team pulled it straight into it's position so that the team was facing toward the enemy. But that of course meant that the gun was facing away from the enemy. Now the team was swung like a gate, with the gun being the gatepost, until the gun was facing the enemy. The length of the team pulling the gun determined how much room was required between the guns of a battery to be able to swing the team around to deploy the gun, and often that was 6 to 12 mules or horses in a team depending on the wight of the gun. Then you also have to consider other wagons more carrying ammunition and other equipment, because the caissons only carried enough to satisfy the initial needs of a gun.
So for each gun in a battery, imagine an average of 8 or 10 horses, times 8 guns in a battery. Now put them all in line on a road and if you consider that infantry regiments were practically never full strength, the artillery of a brigade could easily take up far more of the road than all of the infantry regiments in that brigade.
Secondly, in the Wilderness he couldn't even put all the artillery to use. There was simply not nearly enough room to put them, and it would have been exceedingly difficult to find room in the marching order for all the batteries, each taking up much more room than an infantry regiment. On top of that, in poor weather, they destroyed the roads so that infantry could not even pass.
All this put together meant the the artillery, which couldn't be deployed in the Wilderness in the first place, only slowed the army down and increased the huge amount of supplies it needed.
The traffic rules don't really reflect this correctly, but I was thinking, it might be possible to to tweak it so that infantry add almost nothing to 'traffic', wile every battery and supply units should add a huge amount.
Also something to consider is cavalry. A regiment with lets say 500 actual cavalrymen. There are actually a lot more in the regiment. There is a section which does the actual care of the horses, because the cavalrymen themselves didn't do that, because they are out in the field. Plus the regiment has more than 1 horse per cavalryman, more like between 1.2 to 1.5, depending on many factors, and these need to be taken care of ---very often the mounts need special care, and would have to recuperate from a previous deployment, because the cavalrymen were notorious for misusing their mounts, so that after two to four weeks in the field and by the time the mounts were returned and they couldn't be ridden further until they had recovered, if ever again at all---. And horses need even more on fodder than mules. Mules can live and work on hay, while horses need oats etc. to keep up their strength and be deployable. And because the cavalry and logistics went through mules and horses fairly quickly, any unit using horses or mules should have a fairly expensive upkeep each turn.
So although a cavalry regiment won't really take up much more room in the marching order than an infantry regiment, and they won't destroy the road in poor weather, like artillery, they would require a huge amount of wagons to haul their fodder.
So GS should actually be 2 different things, GS, which includes food for humans and sundry equipment etc., and Fodder for mules and horses, because the are not really interchangeable.
Artillery and supply wagons should do more to slow movement in the best of whether, and infantry less, with the situation becoming far worse in poor terrain, like forests, swamps, and mountains.
But to be able to react to traffic and the need for huge amounts of fodder, the player would need to be able to control how many batteries and cavalry regiments he takes along with the army at any given time, and here we are back that the beginning, having come full circle.