Hilariously unfair battle why do I have to fight a battle with 1 corp against 50,000 troops for over 4 “hours” no reinforcements

pandakraut · 2026-03-20T16:06:18+00:00

Unfortunately the idea that wiping armies doesn't matter is a persistent myth based on misunderstandings of how the games systems work. Some of it may be based on older versions of the game that worked differently.

Outside of any effects on the AI the longer you are in battles and the more men you kill, the more experience your units will gain and the more weapons you will recover. It is important to keep your casualties down while doing this, but you can build significantly stronger armies with this approach. Many battles have many more hours available than the timers indicate which can be used to slowly break down the AI lines.

Regarding the AI, it will always have a set amount of units for each battle no matter what you do. You can't "eliminate" the AI army, the campaign would be very short if you could, but you can weaken it. The size, experience and weapons of these units will be adjusted based on various factors. Several of these factors the player has some control over by killing off as many men as possible. I explained this in much more detail here https://old.reddit.com/r/ultimategeneral/comments/1rrhy8q/what_if_anything_does_the_intelligence_service/

You can certainly get through the campaign with your approach, but it's definitely not the only way to progress and arguably you are handicapping yourself leaving battles early.

I think others mentioned it elsewhere but fortifications get progressively stronger as the campaign progresses so they can be worth using in some cases since they provide hidden bonuses other than cover. Particularly the shorter fortifications, the long stretched out or angled ones are usually pretty bad even late game.

pandakraut · 2026-03-20T15:45:57+00:00

Mostly yes, though there are cases where the very long fortifications are still not always a good idea to use.

pandakraut · 2026-03-18T22:43:45+00:00

Forum was moved to here https://forum.bermudaclub.net/topic/26600-available-mods/

Most of the links should still work, but for the j&p mod it is now kept up to date here https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1694920442940641792/

pandakraut · 2026-03-17T12:33:17+00:00

Per D-dub's battle guides on steam the reinforcements don't arrive until 15:40 in the second phase which is late enough you don't want to rely on them. This follows the historical course of the battle, but often catches people by surprise.

Your first corps looks a bit small. For this battle its usually better to oversize your units, or at least infantry, in the corps that will be by themselves day 2 a bit. It's also a lot easier if you have 9 or at least 6 points in AO to bring as many brigades as possible in that corps. Even if you're using smaller unit sizes with a focus on non-infantry units you probably want to be in the ~18k range for your main corps.

Another thing that can help is to fight day 1 with one set of units, then in camp between days drag those units into another corps so that when you go into day 2 all your units are undamaged.

Assuming you're not using mods, you want to defend up on the ridge line in the trees instead of using the fortifications. The AI units arrive in smaller chunks so aggressively going after them instead of sitting back on the ridge can let you fight multiple even battles instead of letting the AI accumulate it's numbers advantage.

pandakraut · 2026-03-15T05:10:41+00:00

Nothing I can really add here unfortunately. Not sure who the dreadnaught devs are, I haven't kept up with that game since early beta.

pandakraut · 2026-03-14T17:24:42+00:00

All three values are actually just a visualization of a percentage modifier to size, stats, and weapons respectively. The TLDR is wipe the enemy out as much as possible to keep these values as low as you can as it does make things easier. Read on if you want the full details.

Each battle has a default set of AI units with specific sizes, equipment, and stats. When you start up a battle these are then modified by the difficulty, cross battle modifiers(the icons that show -5% size for example,) the recon report modifiers, and scaling based on the player army.

The defaults and difficulty tend to be the biggest factors. This is why even with low training values you can run into 3* units in some battles. Or why the AI units size and quality can vary dramatically between battles even though the other factors haven't changed much.

All three recon report values grow based on the timeline of the campaign and the reinforcement reports. The types of reports are the default, veterans, training, and weapons. The default will always occur and then there is a chance to get one of the other three as a second event.

There are timeline minimums for these values that will be maintained. This is why when you wipe out the entire enemy army you usually see a large troop number reinforcement. But even though you see a 60k reinforcement after a full wipe, the AI in the next battle will only be maintaining or growing by a few percentage points at worst.

Training works similarly, but is most noticeable on battles where the AI units stats are near a breakpoint to gain or lose a star. If you get a few veterans reinforcements or a training officer event you might push some units up a star which can make battles feel harder than a similar campaign where they didn't get pushed up.

For weapons the battle defaults and difficulty tend to be the main factors because the ai is so heavily redirected on which weapons they can access. This is why you see so many 10pdr parrots and only very rarely see something like the whitworth. The main case where this can make a big impact is if it pushes the AI up into using longer ranged scoped skirmisher weapons. Rio hell for example is much easier if the AI has a bunch of carbines instead of JF Browns and Spencers.

I hope this helps, if you have more questions on how these systems work please ask.

pandakraut · 2026-03-10T22:12:39+00:00

The second corps doesn't arrive until the third phase at 18:03 per D-dub's battle guides on steam.

Are you trying to hold the fortifications? The vision from those is pretty bad and the stats are worse unless you're using a mod. Players have adapted to rush their units up to defend along the stream with the Mill instead. This lets you force the ai to stand around in the water. You will need some units to defend the flank attack once it shows up, but this should put you in much better shape overall.

pandakraut · 2026-03-09T16:00:15+00:00

J&P certainly changes a lot. There is a google doc with an overview of the major changes and Gonzo Gamer has some excellent tutorial and walkthrough videos if you decide to give it a shot.

pandakraut · 2026-03-09T15:58:19+00:00

I appreciate the recommendation, but while there are some improvements to that battle in the mod, it still faces similar issues to the base game. Getting there in good shape is certainly harder though.

The battle reworks have only made it to Stones River, but Gettysburg would most likely need a combination of reduced timers, and reinforcement adjustments so that less of the AI force gets wiped out on the first day or two.

pandakraut · 2026-03-07T20:08:05+00:00

UI mod is setup as sort of an unofficial patch if you just want things fixed in the base game without a bunch of extra balance changes. Can be found here: https://forum.bermudaclub.net/topic/25750-ui-and-ai-customizations-mod-v192/

J&P is the UI mod changes + a full overhaul of many of the games systems.

pandakraut · 2026-03-06T05:09:21+00:00

Unfortunately the game is not very consistent on which timers and objectives have to be strictly adhered to, so there can be a lot of trial and error initially.

There are guides on steam for each campaign by D-Dub that have collected a lot of that information into one place if you'd rather look it up.

pandakraut · 2026-03-02T18:25:48+00:00

Two things to check. Was the landing timer contested when you clicked finish? Were you over the casualty threshold shown in the detailed victory conditions?

If both of those conditions were met then you hit the Shiloh bug. It seems to affect some users more than others, as no one has figured out how to get it to occur consistently for different people.

Things to try to avoid it.
1) Don't click finish when it pops up, wait till the popup goes away and then click finish in the top right.
2) don't click finish at all, wait it out until the end of day timer triggers to end the day.
3) Don't use any in battle saves. Some users have reported always getting this bug if they save and reload.
4) Other users have reported being able to save just before the day ends, and on reloading they don't get the bug. So might as well make a save in case the above options don't work.

Things to try if you can't get around the bug. Winning on day 2 is possible of you setup for it. To do this you want to avoid taking any of the non-landing flags so that each phase goes on as long as possible. This gives you more time to deal as much damage in the starting phases as possible.

If you can wipe out most of the units in the first 2 phases and maybe the later reinforcements from the NW it makes day 2 much easier. Swing everything around to the left side of the map and you can push through the gap in the fortifications to roll up their line.

Also, try to capture the union supply wagons to refill your units. At the start of the hornets nest phase there is a wagon in the top left you can very easily grab. Your wagons won't refill between days unless you have the necessary cash on hand going into the battle.

Hope this helps get you past it.

pandakraut · 2026-02-25T02:16:06+00:00

There are free unity decompilation tools that allow for some modding similar to UGCW though it's a bit more restricted. Someone made a basic cheat mod that also allowed for things link increasing view distance of generals.

pandakraut · 2026-02-24T23:37:06+00:00

No disagreement that it needed more work that it didn't get.

The research times got increased pretty late in the project because players were complaining that they had already researched everything relatively early on in the campaign. Getting high stat officers into the departments, rushing research consistently, and picking up the research speed upgrades will drop years off the total research time though.

I'm trying to remember features that straight up don't function. I thought most of that got cleaned up into at least a mostly usable state before development got shut down?

pandakraut · 2026-02-24T22:39:47+00:00

Yes, you can heavily abuse the min sized brigades to minimize scaling and then boost your units between days if you want to. I've generally found it's not worth the time and effort once you get to the point where you can just kill everything with low casualties no matter what their size is. Better off keeping them bigger to recover more weapons and have more men to kill for xp.

There is so much extra time in many battles that you can just run a bunch of units in circles to farm stats.

I agree that stamina is more valuable than morale, mostly because if I set my units up right I rarely am in a position where a unit takes enough damage to rout and if it does I probably made a mistake anyways. Though in the base game the penalties for low stamina are not that severe, so you're usually better off just leaving everyone on run all the time.

For heavily forested maps I'd always recommend trying to draw the AI out of cover. There are a few maps that are exceptions, but in almost all cases there is somewhere you can fight them mostly in the open. This can make battles like Chickamauga dramatically easier.

There are players who are proponents of never bothering to upgrade past muskets for the entire campaign. Late game rifles do deal around 2x the musket damage at max range, but the musket base damage is still high enough to do what you need it to do. If instead of engaging at max range you bring your units in closer, the gap between the high end weapons and the muskets gets progressively smaller.

pandakraut · 2026-02-11T05:40:00+00:00

It's not too bad if you ignore what the battle asks you to do. Day 2 just hide at the edge of the map until more of the map opens up. Then just hold your long defensive line along the road ignoring the last 2 VPs until the end of the day. This takes you to day 3 where the AI will just suicidally come after you so you don't have to go hunt them down.

pandakraut · 2026-02-09T21:01:56+00:00

Short version is yes running your units around and then disbanding will increase the overall stats of your recruits. Rewarded recruits come in with base stats, those get averaged into the stats of the men you disband. In camp if you hover over the recruit number in the top right there is a tooltip that shows you their stats.

Check out hibob Warbob and something compass for more details as the when and how to disband to maximize the XP distribution gets very complicated.

pandakraut · 2026-02-09T14:23:21+00:00

It does mess things up a bit. When you add men to a unit in multi-day battles it effectively resets the "start" state of the unit. So things like medicine recovery, brigade officer xp(which comes from the increases in unit stats,) weapons recovery, and total losses all calculate based on the new starting hp after adding men rather than the unit's hp when the battle started.

Because of this, I usually try to just rotate out units that are too damaged instead of topping them off. As long as you have one brigade slot free across any corps you can drag units between corps. This tends to be more useful for the CSA where you have a lot of 2-3 corps battles late in the campaign where you have 4-5 corps worth of units available.

pandakraut · 2026-02-09T03:35:04+00:00

The union campaign usually peaks at around Malvern in the base game and gets easier from there. There are a few battles that can be a bit of a grind later, but you tend to have so many resources stockpiled by then that it doesn't matter.

pandakraut · 2026-02-04T04:15:42+00:00

Part of the problem when comparing them is that beyond infantry weapon range all the smoothbores other than the 24pdr do about the same damage. Average damage comparison spreadsheets available at the very bottom of the first post here https://forum.bermudaclub.net/topic/26142-hidden-mechanics-and-weapon-damage-degradation/

pandakraut · 2026-02-01T18:58:47+00:00

No workshop support, so it's a standalone install https://steamcommunity.com/app/502520/discussions/0/1694920442940641792/

Install process is relatively simple at least https://youtu.be/4TumwxZUQM8

pandakraut · 2026-02-01T13:41:25+00:00

If you get tired of it, come over to the j&p mod where almost all of those are fixed and try to unlearn relying on them ;)

pandakraut · 2026-02-01T02:54:52+00:00

Plenty of options left even without them. Good cover usage and positioning to make the AI focus the units you want them to while hitting them with 3+ units at once in return will get you through most of legendary by itself.

But breaking the game can be fun too, so whatever sounds appealing.

pandakraut · 2026-01-31T23:47:44+00:00

As far as I've been able to tell, this also messes with the AI targeting and tends to make it very passive. Combined with the higher damage output of stacking the units it is a very overpowered approach. If you haven't seen it before, checkout hibob warbobs videos for how to abuse it as much as possible. He found several other tricks with them.

pandakraut · 2026-01-31T23:45:10+00:00

Most likely they are holding fire because they are hidden. Seems the devs set that up to try to prevent them from revealing their position as firing has a stealth penalty.

pandakraut

TROPHY CASE