UGCW Feedack v0.74

[Hitorishizuka]

More screenshots for the previous bug I just mentioned.

Combined division stats while still in-battle:

Post-battle:

The combined divisions were obviously made from Cake+Grimes and Preston+Moody. As can be easily seen, they have the losses scaled as appropriate, but the kills aren't applied proportionally to their ledger. They still gain stats appropriately, though.

Speaking of which also, this is the first time I used GeneralPITA's trick/exploit of using a large brigade using whatever as weapons and a small brigade with the best weapons and combining the two to give a division with the best weapons. As can be seen above, this is kind of ridiculously broken and should probably be nerfed. Also should be noted that CSA can do it easier because it's far easier for them to get Fayetteville access whereas Union has to wait a fairly long time IME to get enough top tier rifles to outfit a brigade to do this. (I think Union has to deliberately wither units down to 200 or so whereas CSA can just start a fresh brigade of 500.)

Edited January 22, 2017 by Hitorishizuka

[GeneralPITA]

 

8 minutes ago, Hitorishizuka said:

As can be seen above, this is kind of ridiculously broken and should probably be nerfed. Also should be noted that CSA can do it easier because it's far easier for them to get Fayetteville access whereas Union has to wait a fairly long time IME to get enough top tier rifles to outfit a brigade to do this.

It's very broken Hitori, but it's a fun playthrough. I'm sure it'll get fixed eventually. Kill stats are totally jacked up, but you accrue experience and promotions evenly. During battle the kills are accurate for superbrigades, but after battle it zeroes out in the victory screen and doesn't show up in history for individual brigades at the barracks. Cumulative kills in the career tab are acccurate.

[Hitorishizuka]

1 minute ago, GeneralPITA said:

 

It's very broken Hitori, but it's a fun playthrough. I'm sure it'll get fixed eventually. Kill stats are totally jacked up, but you accrue experience and promotions evenly. During battle the kills are accurate for superbrigades, but after battle it zeroes out in the victory screen and doesn't show up in history for individual brigades at the barracks. Cumulative kills in the career tab are acccurate.

It's even worse because I'm playing min-size this campaign, so enemy brigade sizes are all only about 1k or so at full strength. A full division of Fayetteville, even at low experience, kills 200 or so per volley if they don't have excellent cover, so they insta-rout. I'd half guess that a full division of even 80 Firearms would instantly shatter them.

[GeneralPITA]

12 minutes ago, Hitorishizuka said:

It's even worse because I'm playing min-size this campaign, so enemy brigade sizes are all only about 1k or so at full strength. A full division of Fayetteville, even at low experience, kills 200 or so per volley if they don't have excellent cover, so they insta-rout. I'd half guess that a full division of even 80 Firearms would instantly shatter them.

I recommend your minimum size strategy if you're going to use this exploit. Scaling can get out of hand quickly. 

TIP: Don't use standard infantry brigades with enfields etc, they affect scaling negatively. Only use superbrigades that merge farmer rifles with fayettevilles. If you don't do this the AI will start through M1863s at you. I mostly encounter M1855s because my infantry are 80% farmer rifles. 

I assign two infantry brigades per division, all other slots go to cavalry and artillery.  The parent brigade can be whittled down by detaching skirmishers before merging, then bonsai them. After a few battles it'll be a lean brigade of ~100 three star fayettevilles (with all stats maxed except melee), allowing you to distribute your limited guns to every division. By Chancellorsville you can achieve 20 fayetteville brigades. I buy out all the farmer rifles for each grand battle so I can spend my money on other things like artillery and cavalry. 

[Hitorishizuka]

4 hours ago, GeneralPITA said:

I recommend your minimum size strategy if you're going to use this exploit. Scaling can get out of hand quickly. 

TIP: Don't use standard infantry brigades with enfields etc, they affect scaling negatively. Only use superbrigades that merge farmer rifles with fayettevilles. If you don't do this the AI will start through M1863s at you. I mostly encounter M1855s because my infantry are 80% farmer rifles. 

I assign two infantry brigades per division, all other slots go to cavalry and artillery.  The parent brigade can be whittled down by detaching skirmishers before merging, then bonsai them. After a few battles it'll be a lean brigade of ~100 three star fayettevilles (with all stats maxed except melee), allowing you to distribute your limited guns to every division. By Chancellorsville you can achieve 20 fayetteville brigades. I buy out all the farmer rifles for each grand battle so I can spend my money on other things like artillery and cavalry. 

I actually went the other way and kept a couple extra bullet catcher brigades to pair with them in order to keep them from being flanked. Detached skirmishers can only do so much in that regard. The one downside to doing this is that your maximum initial troops in your first divisions will be lower than it otherwise could be since you're effectively sacrificing a brigade's worth of troops to combine, so I would rather compensate for that with a stronger line rather than just using cavalry, which are still finicky and expensive. The combined division's doing the damage anyway, I think you just need more bodies in the way to give them the time to do it. In a 5 brigade division, I actually swapped my Melee Cavalry out of the first two divisions and punted them down to DIv3/4 and moved up another Infantry brigade to cover the hole instead.

[GeneralPITA]

14 hours ago, Hitorishizuka said:

I actually went the other way and kept a couple extra bullet catcher brigades to pair with them in order to keep them from being flanked. Detached skirmishers can only do so much in that regard. The one downside to doing this is that your maximum initial troops in your first divisions will be lower than it otherwise could be since you're effectively sacrificing a brigade's worth of troops to combine, so I would rather compensate for that with a stronger line rather than just using cavalry, which are still finicky and expensive. The combined division's doing the damage anyway, I think you just need more bodies in the way to give them the time to do it. In a 5 brigade division, I actually swapped my Melee Cavalry out of the first two divisions and punted them down to DIv3/4 and moved up another Infantry brigade to cover the hole instead.

I added three brigades of 2500 M1855s to each of my first three corps for this reason. You're right that this strategy sucks up brigade slots and limits you on numbers, but Fayettevilles are dominant enough to overcome this and scaling works to your advantage. 

[Luckybluemoon]

To get the back on topic, Additional feedback #...whatever.

1.  Retreat directions have become an issue when on the edge of a map.  Units tend to just retreat right into my lines on the edge of the map.  Otherwise they are good.

2. Any word on custom grouping please?  I had 5 Cavalry Brigades in Chancellorsville and while they routed anything the Confederates could throw at them, controlling them was a pain.  Same thing with Artillery.  Once an Army gets beyond 8 divisions it starts to get really hard to manage without custom grouping.

Thank again!

[Col_Kelly]

4 minutes ago, Luckybluemoon said:

To get the back on topic, Additional feedback #...whatever.

1.  Retreat directions have become an issue when on the edge of a map.  Units tend to just retreat right into my lines on the edge of the map.  Otherwise they are good.

2. Any word on custom grouping please?  I had 5 Cavalry Brigades in Chancellorsville and while they routed anything the Confederates could throw at them, controlling them was a pain.  Same thing with Artillery.  Once an Army gets beyond 8 divisions it starts to get really hard to manage without custom grouping.

Thank again!

1. It's been reported, let's hope it's fixed soon enough

2. One way is to build specialist divisions with either nothing but cav or nothing but arty in them. Ideally the 3rd / 4th division of your corps since the 1st division is often sent in reinforcement by default in some battles. 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

BTW, thank you for getting the forum reply quote box problem resolved. We appreciate you taking care of that!

[Nox165]

Found a bug, in battle of Chancellorsville historical, in the last phase a union only 4 or the 6 corps show up.

 

Yeah, XI corps and III corps are not showing up on the union side in historical mode.

Edited January 23, 2017 by Nox165

[A. P. Hill]

Earlier yesterday, (January 22nd 2017,) I started the battle of Shiloh in a new confederate campaign.   The battle was going great ... I was taking the works at Pittsburgh Landing and had about 12 seconds of action left before the FINISH would pop up.    That's when it went to crap.

For the first time ever, I have experienced what others had mentioned about "freezing".  However, since this happened around 17:00 or 17:30 hours, and one of the two title championship American football games was under play since 15:00 I figured just for giggles and grins that I'd let the computer run and see if it couldn't chew out the freeze while I watched the play off games.

Here's what I did.  At the first freeze, I clicked randomly on the screen until the screen went opaque and the dialog box came up about the game not responding and the two questions of ending the game or letting it continue.  I consistently chose "Continue" each time it came up, went back to watching the games, rinse and repeat.  I did this throughout both 3 1/2 - 4 hour games.

My observations is that the game doesn't "freeze".  There is apparently some code or math that causes it to choke the processing capability of the system, yet with time, the processor was capable of chewing through the build-up, and revert to a clear screen.  I was unable to actually move troops at that time, but as I clicked to make troop movement efforts, the screen would again go opaque and the dialog box would appear.

During the course of this effort, I managed to get the clock from 12 seconds to 1 second by consistently clicking the screen until the dialog box would pop up and then chose continue.

I also found that as the game "progressed", and it did  ... troops actually moved on the map as the time changed.  Troops that I had assigned a path to pursue just before the 12 second "freeze" occurred, continued to follow the said path, troop casualty rates, kill rates, moral, and etc., continued to fluctuate based on the timer counting down. Troops retreated, troops charged etc., but it was done at such a slow rate of action.

I say I got the timer down from 12 seconds to 1 second ... when that actually happened, it was 01:00 Monday morning and I needed to hit the sack because in 4 1/2 hours I needed to get up and get ready to face a day's work.

So, if this can be of any help to the dev staff, I submit it here.   I couldn't get F11 to work in game, and as I said at about 01:00 Monday morning I called it quits.  I never did see the Finish Button, I have no idea whether the database will show me having won Shiloh or not  yet as I haven't logged into the game.   I'll post those results as soon as I find out.

Respectfully. 

[GeneralPITA]

24 minutes ago, A. P. Hill said:

Earlier yesterday, (January 22nd 2017,) I started the battle of Shiloh in a new confederate campaign.   The battle was going great ... I was taking the works at Pittsburgh Landing and had about 12 seconds of action left before the FINISH would pop up.    That's when it went to crap.

For the first time ever, I have experienced what others had mentioned about "freezing".  However, since this happened around 17:00 or 17:30 hours, and one of the two title championship American football games was under play since 15:00 I figured just for giggles and grins that I'd let the computer run and see if it couldn't chew out the freeze while I watched the play off games.

Here's what I did.  At the first freeze, I clicked randomly on the screen until the screen went opaque and the dialog box came up about the game not responding and the two questions of ending the game or letting it continue.  I consistently chose "Continue" each time it came up, went back to watching the games, rinse and repeat.  I did this throughout both 3 1/2 - 4 hour games.

My observations is that the game doesn't "freeze".  There is apparently some code or math that causes it to choke the processing capability of the system, yet with time, the processor was capable of chewing through the build-up, and revert to a clear screen.  I was unable to actually move troops at that time, but as I clicked to make troop movement efforts, the screen would again go opaque and the dialog box would appear.

During the course of this effort, I managed to get the clock from 12 seconds to 1 second by consistently clicking the screen until the dialog box would pop up and then chose continue.

I also found that as the game "progressed", and it did  ... troops actually moved on the map as the time changed.  Troops that I had assigned a path to pursue just before the 12 second "freeze" occurred, continued to follow the said path, troop casualty rates, kill rates, moral, and etc., continued to fluctuate based on the timer counting down. Troops retreated, troops charged etc., but it was done at such a slow rate of action.

I say I got the timer down from 12 seconds to 1 second ... when that actually happened, it was 01:00 Monday morning and I needed to hit the sack because in 4 1/2 hours I needed to get up and get ready to face a day's work.

So, if this can be of any help to the dev staff, I submit it here.   I couldn't get F11 to work in game, and as I said at about 01:00 Monday morning I called it quits.  I never did see the Finish Button, I have no idea whether the database will show me having won Shiloh or not  yet as I haven't logged into the game.   I'll post those results as soon as I find out.

Respectfully. 

Same thing for me AP Hill, the first time the game ever froze was with the recent update as CSA at Shiloh. You're right that it can apparently "chew through" the freeze if you decrease the load. I  issued fewer orders at the moment I expected it to freeze (which occurs as the last wave of reinforcements arrive at Pittsburgh Landing) and was able to complete the mission.

I like you could not report because F11 won't work during a freeze, I'm glad you brought it up. 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Follow up on the bug report regarding the cavalry unit (Bristow) becoming stuck on the North map edge of the Train Station during the Union Campaign intro: 

Bristow ran to the map edge and got entangled once again, but he regrouped and reentered the battlefield. Whatever you did to tweak that is working as long as the unit is given orders to leave the edge. Just an FYI. 

[A. P. Hill]

22 hours ago, GeneralPITA said:

... I  issued fewer orders at the moment I expected it to freeze (which occurs as the last wave of reinforcements arrive at Pittsburgh Landing) ...

Yep, Wallace's reinforcements came in from the northwest, and just as I annihilated those forces, that's when the trouble started ...

Edited January 24, 2017 by A. P. Hill

[Col_Kelly]

18 hours ago, GeneralPITA said:

I like you could not report because F11 won't work during a freeze, I'm glad you brought it up. 

When you have a freeze or a crash restart the game and press f11 right after that. That's what the devs asked for during early beta so I see no reason for it not to work now. 

[Mr. Mercanto]

Is it too soon to ask how the Gettysburg patch is coming along?

[GeneralPITA]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Mercanto said:

Is it too soon to ask how the Gettysburg patch is coming along?

Not too soon, AI and unit improvements have been made, Gburg is coming after that's fine tuned. Can't give a day specifically. 

[Mr. Mercanto]

2 minutes ago, GeneralPITA said:

Not too soon, AI and unit improvements have been made, Gburg is coming after that's fine tuned. Can't give a day specifically. 

Yay! Its going to be kind of surreal to play Gettysburg in UG:CW rather then UG:G. Can't wait to see how it makes the transition. 

[Nox165]

21 minutes ago, GeneralPITA said:

Not too soon, AI and unit improvements have been made, Gburg is coming after that's fine tuned. Can't give a day specifically.  any word if that Battle of Shiloh name bug for the genernals not having actual names is fixed yet? Its the one bug that is driving me fucking crazy.

 

[Koro]

8 minutes ago, Nox165 said:

 

Nox, when you quote, don't write in the box :P. You did the same thing on the steam forum ^^

[Nox165]

Looks like its possible to abuse the phase change in battle of fredericksburg. I was able to get, all the forces from phase 2 into phase 4. I know have the whole union army against the confederates northern flank.  This is a good example of why phasing is broken in this battle. http://steamcommunity.com/id/Nox165/screenshot/89345132739729511

[GeneralPITA]

3 minutes ago, Nox165 said:

Looks like its possible to abuse the phase change in battle of fredericksburg. I was able to get, all the forces from phase 2 into phase 4. I know have the whole union army against the confederates northern flank.  This is a good example of why phasing is broken in this battle. http://steamcommunity.com/id/Nox165/screenshot/89345132739729511

Koro posted this to the tester forum today, it will be looked at. The hope is that the new performance tweaks may make it possible to expand to a full map but don't quote me. 

I use my monogolian horde in both stages of battle at Fburg to great effect. I know, I'm cheap. 

[Mr. Mercanto]

2 minutes ago, GeneralPITA said:

Koro posted this to the tester forum today, it will be looked at. The hope is that the new performance tweaks may make it possible to expand to a full map but don't quote me. 

I use my monogolian horde in both stages of battle at Fburg to great effect. I know, I'm cheap. 

The Mongolians were pivotal in the Civil War.

[Mr. Mercanto]

I really wish we could flank enemy entrenchments. It bugs me to n end when I get my boys around the enemy fortifications and my opponent still enjoys the exact same beneftis of cover. At Fredricksburg, if I get a brigade behind the stonewall, the enemy should be annihilated. 

[GeneralPITA]

Just now, Mr. Mercanto said:

I really wish we could flank enemy entrenchments. It bugs me to n end when I get my boys around the enemy fortifications and my opponent still enjoys the exact same beneftis of cover. At Fredricksburg, if I get a brigade behind the stonewall, the enemy should be annihilated. 

Taken care of by Darth in the next patch. Fburg will be more fun.