Nicely done - I can't imagine playing this on Legendary, all those 3 star brigades are scary. I just discovered a bug with the 500 man brigade scaling exploit during 2nd Bull Run. After day 1, I expanded all my brigades but then I took Stony Ridge early (flanked and attacked from behind) and ended the scenario before all my forces arrived and could be used. Back at camp all the brigades that had not made it into the battle had reset back to 500 men. Also all the weapons I had purchased and manpower used to expand these units was lost (and no money refunds!). I had to restart the scenario and this time I only expanded the brigades that were going to be used first for the flanking attack. I haven't finished the Union campaign so I don't know how many battles have late arriving troops might miss the battle. But be careful.
At first I was going to say that it's not fair to manipulate the manpower levels. Then I thought to myself, hell this is war!. Ain't nothing is fair in war........Exciting finish.
The AI scales to the player after every camp phase. So waiting until after Day One might not be useful if you are under scaling, which I think you are. - Adding men to units during the battle results in an After Battle Report that is not accurate, and it reduces the number of men you get back because of medicine. - One-star units can do fine against 3-star enemy units, but zero-star units are terrible and will be easily overrun. I think that the best plan is to get and keep one-star units, but I am very interested in seeing how your approach works. - 42s are almost useless, I always recommend getting out of the musket business as soon as possible. However, I never give expensive rifles to green units, they just get killed and lose the weapons.
9:45 my biggest complaint about this game. Moving your troops after day 1, to reset it to what it wants. Big flaw, especially on longer battles. Rarely does it benefit you.
Great battle: my observations you used cover defensively very well however your still making a battle line where cover isn't available... i suggest stacking units on top of each other instead the ai inst smart enough to try to out maneuver you instead they will be aggressive on legendary and approach the stacked units... having 6000 men in one location is great you fire 3 units at one which on legendary routes them quickly within about 2 or 3 vollies... also when the cover is around 80% the units do very well stacked compared to not stacked spread out... i usually put two units stacked so that i can spread them out in a line as much as possible but if the musket rage of the covered units can cover all the gaps then your okay... i will often use snipers in these gaps to add to the routing potential! since you have cav now what you did with them to go behind the lines is great and at antietam this strategy you should use with your infantry. antietiem: army make up you need 3 core fully loaded my first core i load a little heavier on infantry and my third core my middle core which is reinforcements is a lot of artiliry! Core1 4 arty all 24 pounders and not in the first two brigades because you want fast troops early on... then i use 18 infantry and 2 snipers this core also is my most experienced units. core2 12 arty 12 infantry no snipers or cav. core 3 is what ever you can muster up i had 18 units 7 arty and 10 infantry 1 cav. Initial start i send all of my infantry around the left side of the map behind his fortified positions using the woods to hide my troops. You will run into two cav units do not target them or the ai will move them instead i broke off 6 skirmishers and moved the troops and the skirmishers south boxing hsi cav in the left corner of the map 2 units 900 each dead by 6 skirmishers and 2 infantry units the other 4 infantry i made a perimeter where his reinforcements come in just south of the town house behind the woods. if you finish off the cav set your skirmishers up in a line to the edge of he map from this town house so that when the units route they keep routing to the end of the map and eventually die just like the cav did... the 2 infantry that were there set up to engage them as they flee as well... note you need to stack your units 2 facing directly south and two with their rear to the wooded area.. ( you will have arty firing on them) this is okay they will not route one arty can not route a 2k infantry units... i have them hold ground here until the units appear... once they route use all your forces to chase them... and kill them before time runs out you may even charge them to get them to surrender... elimination of them is key... while all the above is going on more troops will show up ... send half around like your first forces did send the others around the other side avoid the entrenched troops in the middle until the battle screen opens up... after battle opens up the half of troops you send left push in through the woods and hold position do the same on the right with the other half ... now even more troops are here to surround them... meanwhile the troops in the left corner of the map now head straight for sharpsburg! the sunken road ignore till late in the battle... your troops may have encircled or routed his forces in the fences ... if you have them encircled finish them off before moving forward... i tend to let them route back to the sunken road and launch foolish charges at me ... for a while ... during this time the troops across the river in the south bring them in and ignore the sunken road but head straight for sharpsburg... position on the hill there cutting off the reinforcements which will be coming... combined with your first core troops in charps burg you should be able to take control of the town and then send 5 or 6 infantry to start surrounding the sunken road... your troops in the north you begin to slowly encircle him unstackgin any units also your arty should be in a half moon. again a big circle slowly inching forward every so often will eliminate all his forces but those left down by the bridge... from here form a line along the river and the town and let your arty earn xp and snipers ... he will continue to send all he has at you ... you should loose around 15k troop but kill close to 70k very valuable xp this battle isn't won in a massive charge slow movement and positioning of troops is vital... the slow set up of a plan like this where you don't engage at first can lead to massive victory in a battle that is otherwise perilous with your campaign you may not have the troop # to pull this off if not your could always ignore the sunken road take sharpsburg and get the tie with limited casualties... also your arty shoudl each have close to 500k each if you surround him like i described above... the units stay routed and spin in place no knowing where to go ... I hope this helps you out in winning the day loving your campaign!
I always take the short victory on this battle So I have basically no experience fighting it in its entirety. That being said obviously there's only so many 24 PDRs available but it probably would have helped to bring in some more Napoleons, possibly even 6PDRs if you couldn't get more Napoleons. Smoothbores likely would have outperformed the rifled artillery in this battle because you were mostly shooting at soldiers in close range and not other batteries. I have noticed your 2nd Corps commander is a Brigadier General. One of your spare Major Generals would give them a 2nd perk. Not sure if the Corps Commander provides better command for each unit in his Corps or if that's strictly division and brigade commanders. If it does that would be a decent boost. I know for sure the perk itself would help a little bit.
I find the reasoning for choosing Day 2 to attack a bit strange: While there is a similar timer to Day 1, the AI mainly has already entrenched, and has about 10k men more. Day 1, with a quick encirclement in the South, and holding the woods against the reinforcements, while the second Corps pushes through the weakened forces in the North, sounds like an alternative. Also, in this case the experienced units from the 1st Corps can play a more important role, and for the major part of the battle, the player is less reliant on the rookies - However, Day 2 becomes attractive IF you can, despite its strategically better position, still manage to completely slaughter the AI army, without significant own losses. ;)
That's basically what I did. I've put my best units in the vanguard and moved them around the western Rebel flank. Just out of sight of the Confed lines. I gave them a short rest in their rear and then pushed toward the objective. Meanwhile my second Chor arrived and I attacked the Rebel position from the exact oppsite side, while having some flank protection against Jackson. This way I took the wooded ridge from both sides almost simultanisously. It worked pretty good and losses were acceptable.
Playing the Confederates, this was the battle that I won, but it cost me nearly half my army. It was a harsh lesson. The first thing was to not have my defensive line along the railroad tracks, but to instead set up along the wall behind it and let the Union brigades go across an open field and get chewed up instead of letting them fire from the cover of trees on the other side of the tracks. I think I would have been able to hold the line with much fewer losses while my reinforcements rolled up the Union line as they pushed in from the west. Antietam turned into a nightmare later because I had hemorrhaged too many soldiers at this battle.
So to summarize what your plan is: Your Strat is to bait the enemy out of the earthworks and into your line of fire where your Arty can have a fun time massacring's them with their grapeshot and shrapnel canisters while also leveling up your green units
So I just attacked stoney ridge 2nd day the army took it next day normal. But the battle was mostly on the hill and plains encirclement mostly in the woods east of the capture point.
The problem with green units is they need to be backed up with veterans, At least one veteran brigade to each green Division. Ideal is one Sharpshooter per Division, One light regiment as skirmishers , one veteran brigade and the rest green. Consider the division and corps units in AGEOD Civil War 2.
i think compass calls the thing with the cav running through the lines. ghost cav ... but yes.. vanilla game edit still have soooo many flawed game mechanics, so i am now using the rebalancing mod, and even though i find some of the mechanics in that one immensly frustrating aswell, i' ll much rather have that installed
So I finished this by days end the 28th Aug by capturing Stony Ridge,suffering 3K casualties and inflicting over 8K. Whenever I go the full battle I get hammered,losses are huge!! What is the best tactic going forward?
It was truly ugly,casualties are heavy on both sides.However youve finish strongly,your army will only just get stronger with every battle.Your rookie regiments will be needing that experience in the long run.
*wins every battle in the Peninsula Campaign* "The Peninsula Campaign has failed!"
Nicely done - I can't imagine playing this on Legendary, all those 3 star brigades are scary.
I just discovered a bug with the 500 man brigade scaling exploit during 2nd Bull Run.
After day 1, I expanded all my brigades but then I took Stony Ridge early (flanked and attacked from behind) and ended the scenario before all my forces arrived and could be used.
Back at camp all the brigades that had not made it into the battle had reset back to 500 men. Also all the weapons I had purchased and manpower used to expand these units was lost (and no money refunds!).
I had to restart the scenario and this time I only expanded the brigades that were going to be used first for the flanking attack. I haven't finished the Union campaign so I don't know how many battles have late arriving troops might miss the battle. But be careful.
Yikes! good to know.
At first I was going to say that it's not fair to manipulate the manpower levels. Then I thought to myself, hell this is war!. Ain't nothing is fair in war........Exciting finish.
I figure it's already unfair/unrealistic to have scaling so I don't bad for manipulating that system.
History Guy Gaming my thoughts are: if it’s an actual game mechanic and it isn’t a bug, then its exploitation is fair game.
Good work general. on to Richmond!
A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND!
The AI scales to the player after every camp phase. So waiting until after Day One might not be useful if you are under scaling, which I think you are.
- Adding men to units during the battle results in an After Battle Report that is not accurate, and it reduces the number of men you get back because of medicine.
- One-star units can do fine against 3-star enemy units, but zero-star units are terrible and will be easily overrun. I think that the best plan is to get and keep one-star units, but I am very interested in seeing how your approach works.
- 42s are almost useless, I always recommend getting out of the musket business as soon as possible. However, I never give expensive rifles to green units, they just get killed and lose the weapons.
In this battle the after battle report wouldn't be affected because I didn't suffer any casualties until after I maxed out my forces.
9:45 my biggest complaint about this game. Moving your troops after day 1, to reset it to what it wants. Big flaw, especially on longer battles. Rarely does it benefit you.
Great battle: my observations you used cover defensively very well however your still making a battle line where cover isn't available... i suggest stacking units on top of each other instead the ai inst smart enough to try to out maneuver you instead they will be aggressive on legendary and approach the stacked units... having 6000 men in one location is great you fire 3 units at one which on legendary routes them quickly within about 2 or 3 vollies... also when the cover is around 80% the units do very well stacked compared to not stacked spread out... i usually put two units stacked so that i can spread them out in a line as much as possible but if the musket rage of the covered units can cover all the gaps then your okay... i will often use snipers in these gaps to add to the routing potential! since you have cav now what you did with them to go behind the lines is great and at antietam this strategy you should use with your infantry.
antietiem: army make up you need 3 core fully loaded my first core i load a little heavier on infantry and my third core my middle core which is reinforcements is a lot of artiliry! Core1 4 arty all 24 pounders and not in the first two brigades because you want fast troops early on... then i use 18 infantry and 2 snipers this core also is my most experienced units. core2 12 arty 12 infantry no snipers or cav. core 3 is what ever you can muster up i had 18 units 7 arty and 10 infantry 1 cav.
Initial start i send all of my infantry around the left side of the map behind his fortified positions using the woods to hide my troops. You will run into two cav units do not target them or the ai will move them instead i broke off 6 skirmishers and moved the troops and the skirmishers south boxing hsi cav in the left corner of the map 2 units 900 each dead by 6 skirmishers and 2 infantry units the other 4 infantry i made a perimeter where his reinforcements come in just south of the town house behind the woods. if you finish off the cav set your skirmishers up in a line to the edge of he map from this town house so that when the units route they keep routing to the end of the map and eventually die just like the cav did... the 2 infantry that were there set up to engage them as they flee as well... note you need to stack your units 2 facing directly south and two with their rear to the wooded area.. ( you will have arty firing on them) this is okay they will not route one arty can not route a 2k infantry units... i have them hold ground here until the units appear... once they route use all your forces to chase them... and kill them before time runs out you may even charge them to get them to surrender... elimination of them is key... while all the above is going on more troops will show up ... send half around like your first forces did send the others around the other side avoid the entrenched troops in the middle until the battle screen opens up... after battle opens up the half of troops you send left push in through the woods and hold position do the same on the right with the other half ... now even more troops are here to surround them... meanwhile the troops in the left corner of the map now head straight for sharpsburg! the sunken road ignore till late in the battle... your troops may have encircled or routed his forces in the fences ... if you have them encircled finish them off before moving forward... i tend to let them route back to the sunken road and launch foolish charges at me ... for a while ... during this time the troops across the river in the south bring them in and ignore the sunken road but head straight for sharpsburg... position on the hill there cutting off the reinforcements which will be coming... combined with your first core troops in charps burg you should be able to take control of the town and then send 5 or 6 infantry to start surrounding the sunken road... your troops in the north you begin to slowly encircle him unstackgin any units also your arty should be in a half moon. again a big circle slowly inching forward every so often will eliminate all his forces but those left down by the bridge... from here form a line along the river and the town and let your arty earn xp and snipers ... he will continue to send all he has at you ... you should loose around 15k troop but kill close to 70k very valuable xp this battle isn't won in a massive charge slow movement and positioning of troops is vital... the slow set up of a plan like this where you don't engage at first can lead to massive victory in a battle that is otherwise perilous
with your campaign you may not have the troop # to pull this off if not your could always ignore the sunken road take sharpsburg and get the tie with limited casualties... also your arty shoudl each have close to 500k each if you surround him like i described above... the units stay routed and spin in place no knowing where to go ... I hope this helps you out in winning the day loving your campaign!
I always take the short victory on this battle So I have basically no experience fighting it in its entirety. That being said obviously there's only so many 24 PDRs available but it probably would have helped to bring in some more Napoleons, possibly even 6PDRs if you couldn't get more Napoleons. Smoothbores likely would have outperformed the rifled artillery in this battle because you were mostly shooting at soldiers in close range and not other batteries.
I have noticed your 2nd Corps commander is a Brigadier General. One of your spare Major Generals would give them a 2nd perk. Not sure if the Corps Commander provides better command for each unit in his Corps or if that's strictly division and brigade commanders. If it does that would be a decent boost. I know for sure the perk itself would help a little bit.
I find the reasoning for choosing Day 2 to attack a bit strange: While there is a similar timer to Day 1, the AI mainly has already entrenched, and has about 10k men more.
Day 1, with a quick encirclement in the South, and holding the woods against the reinforcements, while the second Corps pushes through the weakened forces in the North, sounds like an alternative.
Also, in this case the experienced units from the 1st Corps can play a more important role, and for the major part of the battle, the player is less reliant on the rookies
- However, Day 2 becomes attractive IF you can, despite its strategically better position, still manage to completely slaughter the AI army, without significant own losses. ;)
That's basically what I did. I've put my best units in the vanguard and moved them around the western Rebel flank. Just out of sight of the Confed lines. I gave them a short rest in their rear and then pushed toward the objective. Meanwhile my second Chor arrived and I attacked the Rebel position from the exact oppsite side, while having some flank protection against Jackson. This way I took the wooded ridge from both sides almost simultanisously. It worked pretty good and losses were acceptable.
Playing the Confederates, this was the battle that I won, but it cost me nearly half my army. It was a harsh lesson. The first thing was to not have my defensive line along the railroad tracks, but to instead set up along the wall behind it and let the Union brigades go across an open field and get chewed up instead of letting them fire from the cover of trees on the other side of the tracks. I think I would have been able to hold the line with much fewer losses while my reinforcements rolled up the Union line as they pushed in from the west. Antietam turned into a nightmare later because I had hemorrhaged too many soldiers at this battle.
So to summarize what your plan is: Your Strat is to bait the enemy out of the earthworks and into your line of fire where your Arty can have a fun time massacring's them with their grapeshot and shrapnel canisters while also leveling up your green units
You got HFs in this battle, nice. When I did this on Legendary I only got weapons worse than HFs. This should be a big help at Antietam. Good luck.
So I just attacked stoney ridge 2nd day the army took it next day normal. But the battle was mostly on the hill and plains encirclement mostly in the woods east of the capture point.
The problem with green units is they need to be backed up with veterans, At least one veteran brigade to each green Division. Ideal is one Sharpshooter per Division, One light regiment as skirmishers , one veteran brigade and the rest green. Consider the division and corps units in AGEOD Civil War 2.
Had the damned terrible idea of taking the offensive against the Confederates on the second day. God that was terrible mistake.
I've learned many hard lessons that way.
History Guy Gaming I’m never making that mistake again lol.
The ghost cav bug has always been in UGCW, but this never affects any other type of unit (as far as I know).
i think compass calls the thing with the cav running through the lines. ghost cav ... but yes.. vanilla game edit still have soooo many flawed game mechanics, so i am now using the rebalancing mod, and even though i find some of the mechanics in that one immensly frustrating aswell, i' ll much rather have that installed
So I finished this by days end the 28th Aug by capturing Stony Ridge,suffering 3K casualties and inflicting over 8K. Whenever I go the full battle I get hammered,losses are huge!! What is the best tactic going forward?
It was truly ugly,casualties are heavy on both sides.However youve finish strongly,your army will only just get stronger with every battle.Your rookie regiments will be needing that experience in the long run.
Just think how hard it would have been in real life to get troops to the right spot. No point and click back then. :)
Do not put a battle line in clear terrain... outside of that you did real well
Not pretty, but a win is a win! That experience will be clutch later.
Onward.
Onward to Richmond!
You know 5 is an odd number right?
Lol fair point. I guess even isnt the word I meant. Just like units to have numbers that end in 0 or 5.
I'm just messing with you, I do the same with my troops.
History Guy Gaming I think “round number” was what you were looking for.