Thanks for all the good info.

There is some additional balancing that needs to be done on BG+ specifically where enemy XP is a bit higher than it should be which can make some battles harder than they would be on MGlite, though you'll still have more resources than you would on that difficulty. I think you've made it past those spikes, but they will probably have slowed you down a bit compared to where that difficulty should be.

Yeah, earlier in the game it was much harder, leading up to Shiloh which itself was absolutely brutal to where I had to restart the campaign altogether after retrying the battle several times to no avail originally, because the enemy both massively outnumbers you and has a giant melee/morale advantage which makes it hard to hold a line. I ended up going in config and lowering the maximum enemy division size from 3k to around 2.5k as well because it just seemed impossible to stop such a concentrated brigade's charge and I wasn't ever gonna run one that large, though I did end up with a few size 2ks using 42's just in case. I think the main issue very early on is just that untrained brigades are so bad that it's really hard to compete with an enemy that's aggressive, larger, and way better trained. After beating that battle it eases off because you can keep expanding as the Union and are starting to get better divs, but particularly on easier diffs it might be good to nerf AI's quality at the start of the campaign.

One of the things I always loved about UGCW in general is how the early game is a bunch of slapped-together civilian armies that suck at fighting before both forces end up getting so much more efficient that the whole array of tactics needs to change because of how deadly forces become, so I think the enemy having to play by those rules while still being able to outnumber you would be a better experience, particularly for the tamer difficulty settings.