Great game with terrible final level.

[TUN]

 

I finally made it to the Battle of Washington as the CSA, and after steamrolling pretty much every battle I've hit a brick wall, apparently needed 4-5 entire corps to even attempt the level? Can someone please explain to me why having 2500 troops in each group is even an option if it horribly handicaps you and pays to just have two groups at half the size? Why are so many of the CSA levels encouraging the player to focus on just two or three corps only for the battle of Washington to out of nowhere pull the rug from under you and expect you to have 4-5 entire full corps? I can't fathom how I was able to steamroll every level decimating Union troops only to hit a brick wall in the final level, the Union should be almost decimated by this point.  Was this an intentional design decision or an oversight on the developer? Was this some sort of meta thing the dev threw in to stress that the Confederacy didn't win the war?
Do I really have to restart the entire campaign and focus on amassing tons of smaller troops to fill up 5 corps for the final battle? Did I seriously just waste almost 70 hours of my life playing the game the way it was encouraging only for the final level to expect me to have guessed I needed five corps without looking up a guide beforehand? I really liked this game but I honestly feel like I've wasted my time now and never want to touch it again. I'm sorry, I'm just extremely frustrated at random massive difficulty spikes in games, especially when there's legitimately no way to predict it coming without looking up guides beforehand. Is there any way to beat the Battle of Washington with only 2-3 corps that are not even maxed out? I can't even take the first fort without losing almost my entire starting army and apparently on day 2 the Union throws a 120K army with tons of cannons at you?!

[pandakraut]

Only 3 corps are required for the battle of Washington. They have an extra highlight the optional corps do not.

There are more than enough weapons and recruits available to use 2500 man infantry units and still fill out 4-5 corps as long as you are filling some of those slots with non-infantry units. Especially on lower difficulties.

The number of corps that can be deployed in each battle are largely based on the number of corps that historically participated in those battles. In general the CSA had fewer available.

The battle of Washington is partially alternative history, it's based on the battle of monocacy but was expanded for one final challenge for the player to conclude the campaign.

If you've been steamrolling the union you should have plenty of extra money and guns. Even if you're just throwing together completely fresh units to fill out from your main army these should be sufficient for storming fortifications en mass.

The CSA campaign is generally regarded as the harder one to win as the union recieves larger rewards and has several battles that are easier. But it is very possible to win.

If you don't even have two maxed out corps you are certainly not in a great spot. You'll want to expand to at least 3 maxed to have a good shot. You should have lots of captured weapons, if you haven't sold any off yet you can get a lot of extra money that way.

If you are short on recruits you can get a bit more through a reputation buy. But if that still isn't enough then you are probably going to have to backup a few battles and try for a better result. The big danger of the CSA campaign is attrition and running out of recruits. This is why maxing politics and minimizing casualties while still getting lots of kills for experience and weapons is needed.

A last ditch measure if you have no extra recruits is disbanding the majority or all of your existing max size units and rebuilding your army with smaller ones. This will allow the same number of men to cover a larger area.

[TUN]

7 hours ago, pandakraut said:

If you are short on recruits you can get a bit more through a reputation buy. But if that still isn't enough then you are probably going to have to backup a few battles and try for a better result. The big danger of the CSA campaign is attrition and running out of recruits. This is why maxing politics and minimizing casualties while still getting lots of kills for experience and weapons is needed.

 

I reloaded one save back, and instead of replenishing my men to 2500 each I did only 1000 for each unit and was able to fill up three full corps of all infantry and several cannons each. After a few tries I was able to beat Day 1 no problem, and using fame I was able to get more money and recruits to partially replenish almost all my men to 1000 for each unit before starting Day 2. I've been able to beat the first and second part of Day 2, but when it shifts back to the three northern forts my men are just too diminished to hold off what's left. I feel like I need to reload a much earlier save game and play with filling up 4-5 corps of 1500 men to be able to really tackle this level. I'll take a break from this game for a few weeks and try to do that. I feel like this level is beatable if I just had another full corps of troops.

I have no idea if the devs are still patching the game, but I would highly recommend adding something earlier in the campaign to nudge or encourage the player to focus on filling 4-5 corps full of smaller squads of men, even if it's just a simple text sentence after the Battle of Gettysburg saying that "your advisors recommend training smaller units to fill up all your corps." At the moment there's absolutely no way for a player to even anticipate the last level and can be easily lulled into a false sense of playing the game correctly after steamrolling the previous grand battles with only 2 full corps.

[pandakraut]

The battle definitely gets dramatically easier with 4-5 corps of units 1500 or larger.

Some more things that might help push you over the edge without too much backtracking.

Make sure to be detaching skirmishers on all your infantry units. You'll end up with more total damage than if they stay attached. They can also do ok at flanking or manning fortifications if total number of units is a bigger problem than damage output.

You can transfer units between the north and south parts of the battle. As the phase is coming to the end you want to put them as close to the bottom/top map edge as possible. I usually oblique move(right click hold to rotate) a unit so that it is perpendicular to the map edge and half the unit sticks off the bottom/top. Takes some practice/saves to know when you need to get units into place, but this can stretch your relative strength further.

In the two side battles prior to Washington, there are ways to win with very few casualties. You likely don't have the mass artillery and sniper units needed for the best option, but there are several hours past the shown countdown timer in each battle. You can setup assault columns to force your way into each point after the timer expires and immediately click finish to try to keep down casualties. If your limitation is recruits not weapons this may help come out further ahead. If one or the other is giving you a lot of trouble, it could also be worth skipping them entirely if you end up with more total forces that way.

Last official patch was years ago unfortunately. Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Cold Harbor both let you bring up to 5 corps if I'm remembering right, so there is some signalling even if those battles can be won with less.

In the pinned available mods thread you can find the UI & Customizations mod which is basically an unofficial patch at this point. Though it doesn't address this specific concern.

The general hint I think would be better worded as always to try to max out the number of brigades you can deploy to each battle first, then if you can make units larger do so. The "best" size to use is a matter of some debate. There are good reasons both to use smaller or use larger, but maxing brigades is always the first priority.

This bit doesn't help you now, but if you have at least one slot open in a division, you can drag and drop units between corps in camp during multiday battles. This allows things like the CSA fighting Chickamauga with 5 corps because you swap the entire set of units out on days 1 and 2.

[TUN]

7 hours ago, pandakraut said:

You can transfer units between the north and south parts of the battle. As the phase is coming to the end you want to put them as close to the bottom/top map edge as possible.

I definitely took advantage of this, towards the end of the first phase of Day 2 I had a good chunk of my army wait at the bottom of the map for it to shift to defending the city and two forts. That ended up backfiring on me though when it shifted back to the north to defend the three forts again. I tried several times sending fewer units to the bottom, sending some back to the top, etc. It seems like no matter what I do I either have an easy time up top and my army on the bottom part of the map is way too small, or I send a bunch of my army from up top to the bottom and then have too small of an army when the fight goes back to defending the three forts up top.

I'll try detaching skirmishers from everyone, even with so few numbers are they decent enough at manning defenses as a 1000 man infantry unit? 

[pandakraut]

Detached skirmishers won't be as good, but can still do decent. Would be better if the units were bigger, but nothing to be done about that currently.

Definitely need to time things right so that you transfer any units you brought down back up before the phase ends.

 

[TUN]

Holy wow I did it! That was absolutely brutal, I was seconds away from losing Fort DuRussy when it switched to the final phase of the battle. I don't think I've spent this much time on a single battle in any game in over 20 years and I still barely won. Thank you for some of those tips!

But man, I really feel like the game needed some kind of hint to the player to prepare for this level. I guess if someone has tons of free time then hitting this level, realizing you screwed up several levels back and redoing them isn't a huge deal, but some of these levels are so long that it makes going back a real hassle when I don't have 6 hours a day to redo almost a quarter of the game. Thankfully I only needed to redo one level before Washington to get the numbers I needed to just barely win Washington. I still love this game and it's easily in my top ten favorite strategy game, just what a brutal final battle for the CSA!
 

[pandakraut]

Nice work, glad you figured out a way to make it through

[TUN]

5 hours ago, pandakraut said:

Nice work, glad you figured out a way to make it through

The hardest part of the level from all my attempts is defending Fort DuRussy, especially during the second phase where you have the protect it. During the first phase I was able to get the AI to largely avoid attacking it by rushing a general and several extra units up there; it seems leaving other areas less defended influences where the AI attacks on the first phase. On the second phase though the AI just seems to go after DuRussy no matter how many units you have at it, and the fort is so small you can't really fit that many units inside so most of them are getting shelled by cannons and running away. Literally at the last ten seconds of the phase tons of Union Infantry started charging at only two units of men and a general in the fort when it switched to the final part of the level. The final phase of the level was much easier to defend, even though the Union does an annoying sneak attack on the city from the south.

Doing a bit of research I'm glad to know I'm not alone in thinking this level is pretty unfair, it seems like a lot of people ran into Washington like it was a brick wall after doing really well in the battles leading up to it. It's less so the level itself being unfair, it's more so that the game seems to encourage building your army in a way that handicaps you on the final level (focusing your men and money into fewer larger units in less corps). Washington clearly was designed to the point where you need to spread your army out to man as many defenses as possible, with one unit manning the defense and at least one unit behind to shoot down enemies that charge into melee, which can't be done with less corps full of 2500 man units. I'm confident that if I redid all the battles from Gettysburg on and focused on getting 4 full corps of 1500 infantry and a 14 man cannons in each brigade this level probably would have been a steamroll for me. As it stands though I'm glad I only had to redo one battle before and was able to pull it off by the skin of my teeth. 

[pandakraut]

DeRussy is definitely the hardest part. You really want to try and have units defending it's flanks rather than relying on just the fort itself. Especially because of how the fortifications can be flanked fairly easily.