campaign skills question

[Bill the Bold]

Hi guys, is the starting skill selection for your "general in chief" based on the choices you make during the campaign setup?  I finished the union campaign but since I played most of it before the patch and my confederate campaign is at malvern hill (groan) I thought I'd start another union play through.  This time I made different choices in the set up and in camp after the first battle my commander already had a skill, one I consider to be useless for my corps commanders.  Was i just lucky the first two times to get the skill I wanted?  Sure, I could make him a division commander and hire a new corps commander but then the only guy you get to name and the one who's career we're following is just another random division leader.  Seems weird.

 

Kind of the same subject here, it would be nice to pick the skills of your starting units either before the first battle or wait until after it to assign them.  Cannons with stamina boost is such a waste imho.

 

Cheers!

 

 

[Koro]

I don't know if it's random or not actually but either way I would like to be able to choose his skill myself too. 

[Bill the Bold]

Just played that battle twice more and have to say its not based on your starting choices although it doesn't seem entirely random, out of two saved campaign games and the three tries today I got the same skill all but once.  

 

[Aetius]

I built a general like this:

• Tactician (AO +1, Recon +1)
• Infantry (Training +3, Recon +1)
• Army (Training +3, AO +1)

and he got the Trainer trait (+10% xp) - that's the first time I've seen it.

My normal build is this:

• Logistician (AO +1, Logistics +1)
• Artillery (Logisitics +2, Medicine +2)
• Politics (Politics +3, Economy +1)

I've got four of those builds in different campaigns, split evenly between Tactics and Strategy. I just tried a Tactician / Cavalry / Politics, and he got Strategy. So I'm leaning towards random, but possibly weighted by certain skills.

[Don't Escrow Taxes]

I've used the same build every time, Tactician / Politics / Cavalry (so you end up with 4 in Recon) and sometimes I get the trainer boost and sometimes I get the supplies boost so I think it is random.  I'd prefer to be able to choose so I could get the trainer one every time.  I only use trainer for my first two corps tho, after that I think the movement speed one is better since you don't use those brigades often enough to really train them much but just my $0.02 

[Bill the Bold]

Interesting.  The two main campaigns I went with logistics, cavalry, politics and got trainer both times.  Today I tried tactics, cavalry, politics and got speed so I thought maybe the extra emphasis on recon gave me speed but the next two plays with the same setup gave me trainer twice.  My guess is random.  Devs, the people thirst for choice!

 

That's a great idea to use speed for your 3rd corps, I have all mine set for trainer atm but it would be pretty handy to have speed for troops that deploy later in a battle.

 

[Hitorishizuka]

40 minutes ago, Bill the Bold said:

That's a great idea to use speed for your 3rd corps, I have all mine set for trainer atm but it would be pretty handy to have speed for troops that deploy later in a battle.

Speed's a good one for those battles, yeah. I've actually been playing around with raising a couple Generals for ammo who are defense choices in what I know are long battles that you don't get a break to refresh and have them deploy first but XP is hard to get away from.