BigDuke66 wrote:What a single post can stir up...
@richfed
I my eyes the biggest problem, not only in this but all other AGEOD games, is the priority for AI. AI is never up to a human player and if you ever witnessed the main Rebel army march off to the great lakes while leaving Richmond unprotected you will beg for a human opponent. All the things you would like to see are done by human opponents and to make the AI do it the same way would take ages to program, that just won't pay out.
PBEM mods for many old games from the early days of AGEOD or the recent mod for EAW show what the engine can really do and what depth can be achieved with it if only PBEM would have priority. So if they every decide on CWIII AI is the last thing they should do.
AI can always be improved. Always.
The issue with Athena sending a force up to the great lakes starts with Athena's view of the map. If detection is turned up for Athena she will see things way behind the front lines, which are generally only minimally garrisoned. These are juicy targets for Athena, and per chance she might go after one, often Pittsburgh. Once at Pittsburgh, she sees even further, and the Union player is generally rushing forces to Pittsburgh to relieve it, in which case she might just decide to avoid a major engagement, or after a major engagement, decide it might be more useful to go and disrupt the Union even more by heading for Eire or Cleveland. After all, with a large Union force nipping at her heals, retreating over the Pennsylvania and Ohio planes if much quicker than egressing back down through western Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains. This is one reason why Pocus did so much work on the retreat rules; to disincentivize and restrict her from retreating through uncontrolled areas.
Basically, never giving Athena more than a low bonus fixes this issue, along with the Union beefing up the Pittsburgh garrison as befitting such a strategically important city.
BigDuke66 wrote:@wrlertola
Is that a public patch, haven't seen anything about a new patch. What does the patch change?
@Durk
Yes it is likely the best Civil War game in it'S branch but that does not say anything about the shortcomings that this game has, and it has not few.
@pgr
Yes, this simple approach might be the best.
@Captain_Orso
Well is there any use for a lot cavalry in an infantry division?
Isn't the engine already made the way that cavalry divisions attached at army level help in pursuits?
Not to forget that all the leaders with special cavalry traits are not of much use if cavalry is mainly locked in mixed brigades.
And of course the fact that the few good leaders should give there combat benefits to the infantry, what is hard if the limit of elements is reached in a division but it is half full of cavalry or light(useless) artillery.
I think these points alone will have an impact on gameplay.
Cavalry in a large stack greatly increases its detection value, and protects against pursuit damage. IIRC a minimum of 4 cav is required to be effective. If you could detach the cavalry from your divisions in a corps stack and send them off to do raiding, you would lose these perks, but who am I do tell anybody how to run their armies.
That's why I suggested allowing cavalry and artillery to be detached from brigades, and thus divisions. Besides it allows a player to expedite getting infantry into position, instead of waiting for artillery and cavalry to complete training, although this is actually not historically accurate.
So maybe the solution would be to change the build pools after a certain date. Before date X brigades would have to be built with artillery and cavalry attached, which is historical, and after date X the player would get a set of brigades which have slots for artillery and cavalry, but these slots would have to be filled with artillery and cavalry manually, if the player wished them to be filled.
I also think cavalry should have an upkeep cost. The cavalry went through an enormous number of mounts during the war; especially the Union cavalry. Cavalrymen generally had a very high disregard for the well being of their mounts, and were constantly riding them to the point that they required extensive care to recover. Generally for every cavalry man, there were to be two mounts on hand, although not personally. Cavalry soldiers did not have their own personal mounts necessarily, which probably exacerbated the situation. At any rate, often mounts could not be healed enough to put them back into the field within any reasonable time frame, so they had to be replaced, and this was a major and costly issue for the army.