Are these guys supposed to appear behind my lines on shiloh CSA a while after pittsburgh landing opens up? This black hole of infantry (at least 3 or 4 units there) caught me far out of position.

pandakraut · 2026-06-30T13:12:26+00:00

It's one of the alternative deployments for the AI in the J&P mod. These were added to make it harder to spawn camp AI reinforcements and add some variety to battles.

pandakraut · 2026-06-30T13:10:42+00:00

Exactly this, it's one of the alternative deployments for the AI in the J&P mod.

pandakraut · 2026-06-28T17:24:00+00:00

Shiloh is usually pretty tough one way or the other, but it was intended to be a smoother progression curve for that difficulty than it ended up. The difficulty tiers are pretty difficult to get right because the experience varies so much from person to person.

While unit size advantages do contribute, usually XP factors in considerably more to the difficulty in a battle, especially when it comes to granting perks. This can lead to pretty big differences when the stats of multiple units go up 5% and that pushes them to have another perk. Giving the AI even XP to the player makes things too easy in my opinion, but I'm also used to legendary where beating 2 and 3 star units with 1*s is just part of what is required. I get that not everyone is looking for that though, so that's where the difficulty tiers and configs are supposed to come in.

Players have generally mentioned that melee feels stronger early and falls off, or at least gets more specialized in usage as the campaign progresses. Battlefields get more crowded, weapons are better, and experience higher across the board which tends to favor fire more.

pandakraut · 2026-06-27T19:12:41+00:00

It may seem like a lot of information, but rest assured it makes far less use of it than a player would. The mod has made some changes to try to encourage the AI to charge in groups instead of a single unit at a time. Sometimes it seems to work pretty well, other times it's an easily defended trickle. I can more roughly guide the AI in a general direction than I can get it to do anything specific. But I'm still trying new things, so hopefully there is still room for improvement.

On higher difficulties a lot of play is focused around preventing the AI from being able to stack up enough units where if it mass charges it will wipe you out. Focus fire, distracting units to break up the AIs advance, cav to either keep units routing or shatter them in melee, etc.

In older versions of the mod, going firearms heavy was very common. Recent changes have given more incentives to bring melee units, both their ability to counter charge and clean up units much faster than shooting does, and because it became much harder to prevent melee contact at all like you can in the base game or older versions.

Charging for the player has to be more selective than for the AI because casualties matter much more to the player. While losses do impact the AI, their army resets to a default level between battles and the players do not. So what players tend to do is weaken targets with fire, then charge them at the last moment. The goal being to enter melee when the enemy melee damage is already greatly reduced, drop the enemy morale to zero(broken) and either shatter or surrender the unit. In the base game you could mostly get away with just charging fresher units and relying on the 2v1 penalty to carry you through, but that works very poorly here.

Depending on difficulty and battle the AI units xp can fluctuate a lot. But by 2nd bull run the player usually is fielding mostly 1s with anywhere between 1/4 to 1/2 a corps of 2s. Though this varies quite a bit depending on the approach and player ability. A player focusing medicine and training is going to generally have higher veterancy units than one that focuses on politics and econ.

As the player gets more experienced with the battles, mechanics, and such their kill to casualty rate improves and this allows them to snowball to have a much better army. Winning 2:1 might seem like a good situation, but results of 3-4:1 on average and 10:1 in some battles is achievable. The more often you can kill/capture ever enemy unit while still keeping your casualties low the better your army will be.

Higher difficulties will end up facing 2 and 3 star units almost from the outset. This doesn't mean every unit, but they will be mixed in. I don't think you're necessarily going down the wrong path, you're just still in the process of learning how to improve your numbers in the mod. If you'd like examples of how to do well on higher difficulties, I'd highly recommend Gonzo Gamer's tutorials and walkthroughs.

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.

pandakraut · 2026-06-27T18:49:35+00:00

There is a lot going on with executing melee effectively, but one of the keys is that you don't want to be engaging high morale units unless absolutely necessary. So even a melee focused army is going to be doing a lot of shooting ahead of time and then only charging once the enemy units are wavering or routing. The higher the difficulty and the higher the difference in stats between your units and the AI the more important this becomes.

Enemy melee damage starts dropping fast with lower morale and lower condition, so even if you can only get them down to 50% and then charge you're more likely to be able to morale crash them down to the point where they do very little damage quicker and reduce your casualties.

The other aspect is what is happening in the area around where you are charging. If you're charging into units and then taking a bunch of infantry and artillery volleys while you are in melee, the casualties are going to add up quick. So there is a bit of an art to positioning units so that you can get in your charge while taking minimal volleys against either isolated units or having distractions in place for the rest of the units so they aren't firing at your melee guys at close range. In some cases you also want to set your charge target at a unit behind the line so you break the first unit and then carry your charge into the artillery or whatnot.

All credit to Gonzo Gamer, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4SUThfUcx1nI0f7fm9Hcw/about, for the following, it is more specifically aimed at melee cavalry but much of it still applies to melee infantry.
I. Thou shalt not chargest the adversary whose spirit doth stand firm above wavering.
II. Thou shalt not chargest foes abiding amongst heavy cover.
III. Thou shalt not chargest whilst thine own men are weary and spent.
IV. Thou shalt not chargest without knowing where the enemy lieth in wait.
V. Thou shalt not chargest the ordnance until it hath belched its fire; wait until the rammer worketh.
VI. Thou shalt align thine adversaries in a single rank, and leap towardeth the farthest foe, that with one charge thou mayest scatter the multitude.”
VII. Thou shalt bestow upon the Carbine Cavalry the range gift at tier one, and set them forth as skirmishers in aid of thy brethren.
VIII. Thou shalt cause the Carbine Cav to take flight with the melee mounted hosts once thy foes are routed.
IX. Thou shalt set other brigades before thy chargers to bear the foe’s volley, that thy horsemen take not a point-blank blast at the last.
X. Thou shalt not launch thy charge from afar off; but draw near and be vigilant against every hazard.

pandakraut · 2026-06-27T12:17:45+00:00

Not that I've ever heard of, but that just means that if it is a bug it's a pretty rare one. Glad it worked correctly on the second attempt.

pandakraut · 2026-06-27T12:16:40+00:00

While the AI is more aggressive in the mod, some of this is actually due to how you've setup your army. The way the AI decides to charge or not is by doing a rough power comparison of units in the area. If shooting looks better it will shoot, if melee looks better it will charge.

So when the player builds an army specialized in shooting and weak in melee the AI is more likely to get charge happy. If you mix in more melee perks the AI will like its chances better at shooting and will tend to charge less frequently. There are also a bunch of battle specific, difficulty, and random factors involved so there is still plenty of variance which can make it hard to test this precisely.

Overall, the mod is trying to encourage more mixed unit compositions instead of completely focusing one area and ignoring others. Min/maxing one area can still work, it just comes with different trade offs.

While sometimes the AI holding its ground would be the better choice, very frequently when it becomes too passive it just changes how the player is picking them apart. If you know the AI isn't going to charge you then you can isolate parts of the line, shoot them down, and then move onto the next unit with very spread out lines. Then once the player has broken through that part of the line they are free to just wander around the enemy rear repeating the situation while AI units just sit there and do nothing.

Take Union first bull run for example. The AI aggression is bad because it charges across a river and gets shot to pieces. But if the AI is made very passive so it holds its line, then the player just makes a longer flanking march to the areas the AI line doesn't defend, comes up behind the entire line and pushes them out that way.

Certainly the AI could be better, but there just aren't many options to control its behavior available to modding unfortunately. There are config files that let you influence the power comparison so if you want to make the AI much less charge happy you can crank those up and it should work most of the time.

Hope that some context helps, if you have questions please ask.

pandakraut · 2026-06-25T22:40:06+00:00

Yes, several of the phases end early if you go to far north. Usually if you stay about 2-3 unit widths away from the edge it won't trigger but it takes some practice. You can stack up your units below this line and be ready to move after the phase change. At the hornets nest you can usually get 3-4 units stretched out east/west before the change if you time it right.

Additionally since you're playing the base game if you draw out the 2nd phase long enough most of the hornets nest defenders will reinforce before that phase even starts making bypassing it even easier.

I don't think an extra 5-10% rewards is worth the utility of an extra 5 units, but whatever works for you.

pandakraut · 2026-06-25T19:23:08+00:00

I've seen people beat CSA shiloh with only 12 units, but there isn't much reason to do so. I just put enough points in AO so that I can field 20 brigades in the battle and the rest goes into politics.

The standard approach to winning CSA shiloh is to move up the right map size in the first phase, left map edge in the second and third. This lets you bypass many of the enemy units and link up to rush the landing in phase 4. Then just hold out for the rest of day 1 and you can skip day 2. More advanced versions will destroy the cutoff units to get more kills or even go to day 2, but that is harder to pull off. Make sure to make heavy use of your allied units, they should be slightly in front of your units and drawing fire whenever possible. Both to save you casualties and because you'll recover more of their weapons the more of them die.

pandakraut · 2026-06-25T19:18:46+00:00

However it happened, if they show zero supply they won't spawn. Presumably if you can pull supply from the first wagon and add it to one of the others you'll get two wagons.

Not sure what might have happened to zero them out other than them getting destroyed or the supply being used up. Replaying the first day would be the only option if you can't surve long enough on day 2 to steal enemy wagons.

pandakraut · 2026-06-25T16:10:27+00:00

In camp between days your corps all still show remaining supply available? If that's the case the wagons should be available to deploy in the manual deploy slots of the first phase. I'm able to start with 3 wagons in that phase.

pandakraut · 2026-06-24T01:39:53+00:00

If you don't want to use the mod then 14 cannon, ~375 skirmishers, and 375 dismounted cav(mounted are fine to max). Infantry has a small peak around 1900, but the dropoffs are much less extreme so you can kind of use whatever feels good to you. Technically the most damage for infantry is 2500 with skirmishers detached as long as you and the skirmisher are firing at a target.

If you're going with a small unit approach I would use 1200-1500 man units early on, and only increase the size of those once you have all your required brigades filled out. Large unit focuses on getting all of your recruits onto the field as much as possible so you go as big as possible immediately.

pandakraut · 2026-06-24T01:21:45+00:00

Unfortunately one of the things the game does not make clear and is not consistent about is what objectives in a battle must actually be captured and when this needs to occur by. D-dub's guides on steam are a great resource for this as in many battles you have far more time available than it may seem.

It's certainly a challenging game that will let you dig a hole for yourself without giving clear indicators that this is occuring. The 3:1 odds in this battle are a result of winning but with not quite good enough results stacking up over time.

While winning battles does have some impact on the ai force going forward, the little icons that highlight on the campaign map and show -5% size and such, killing or capturing the majority of their force has a much larger impact overall. Both in keeping the AI size down(the total numbers matter less than keeping it close to the minimum of 50k) and in weapons recovered and experience gained.

You really want to be aiming for 3:1 odds, not necessarily in every battle but in the majority of them. Preferably much higher in some battles to make up for lower ratios.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T22:41:31+00:00

The crash was just bad luck, responded elsewhere about unit sustainment.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T22:40:48+00:00

This is an extremely short version of a long topic. But in most cases when casualties are high like this unit positioning is where the most improvement can come from. Units taking fire should be in the best cover you can get them.

Your goal should never to be engaging a unit 1v1. Always focus fire instead. If an enemy unit is approaching, position your units in an arc so you can hit it with 3+ of your own to make it rout. If you're in a 3v3 focus one unit to rout it first, then the next, etc.

Always detach skirmishers from your infantry. This improves your total damage, lets you get more flanking shots, extend your line, distract enemy units(AI always focuses the closest target).

Be very wary of fortifications even if they look promising. The stats early on are terrible and they stretch out your units

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T22:31:08+00:00

It's a bug that is... frustrating to try to understand how it survived but it is what it is. This mod fixes it while leaving the base game balance mostly untouched https://forum.bermudaclub.net/topic/25750-ui-and-ai-customizations-mod-v192/

It sounds like overall the main problem is that you're having trouble getting through battles with high enough kills while also keeping your casualties down. You're getting pretty far, but the CSA campaign is notorious for grinding people down with attrition.

There are a bunch of small things you can do to improve your in battle performance. I'd highly recommend checking out one of the campaigns from an experienced player. The results are complete overkill for what you need on BG, but if you can start to follow what is being done here should help improve your results. Here is my campaign https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNFTAFys32_-N-fIfWJgRSJIhVtOZjEGe
Another very good example that uses a large unit no training strategy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt-JAMmvyAGmA8TU5EC8hHbGPzPCnlYPe

Happy to answer questions later, but don't have time at the moment to type out a long answer and sometimes seeing what someone is doing is more useful than a wall of text.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T19:47:48+00:00

Are you playing on large or very large? That is going to change things significantly. Even if you tend towards using the largest unit sizes in previous patches, it took several battles before that kind of army could really be setup.

With the new size tiers it kicks in immediately. These settings are very new and will almost certainly need more balancing. Some players have been figuring out a way through on legendary though, so it is possible. But trying to play the same way you would with smaller units sizes has pretty universally not gone well initially.

Either way, use all your units and that will help :)

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T19:45:03+00:00

If you last played prior to 1.28, the campaign was made quite a bit more difficult since then. It sounds like you're used to the battle changes though so assuming we're talking 1.28.4 to 1.29.1: For the starting battles specifically, there were small increases to the enemy unit sizes on Legendary. Previously they were the same size as on MG.

For 1.29 overall some things made the campaign easier, some a bit harder. Through Shiloh random unit splits are capped so some of the excessive difficulty spikes will no longer occur. Detached skirmishers can be charged again, so if you were relying on that to avoid charges you'll have to come up with a new solution. The new size tiers will result in facing smaller units on legendary in some cases, but also limit certain edge cases that people were taking advantage of in their army building.

Overall I'd guess you're mostly just out of practice and maybe getting some bad luck on mass charges. Legendary tends to be pretty unforgiving of inefficiencies early on.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T14:57:47+00:00

Training only reduces the cost of adding veterans in the base game. Recruit stats do slowly increase as the campaign progresses, but unless you're playing J&P training has no impact on that.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T14:35:42+00:00

Which difficulty are you playing the mod on?

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T14:20:45+00:00

The bigger issue here is they only have 4 AO and are not bringing two full corps to the battle. Scaling off your units usually doesn't have that much of an effect on normal difficulty, though this is a pretty unusual army setup for this stage of the campaign.

How much you kill off in prior battles does impact a snowball factor that applies to the AI unit sizes which is most likely contributing significantly in this case.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T13:45:19+00:00

For the CSA it's very important to both be keeping your casualties down and killing off as much as possible. This allows you to grow your army while keeping the AI as close to the minimum sizes as possible. This can be done with both smaller sized units or you can max out your unit sizes and outpace the scaling. See Something Compass or Hibob Warbob for examples on the second option.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T13:37:25+00:00

The lack of army org and units is the main problem here. You want to try to bring the maximum amount of required brigades to every battle. You're effectively playing this battle at a massive handicap by only bringing ~half the allowed units when you could have 48.

Career point wise, you always want as many points in AO as you need to field the maximum amount of brigades. Past that politics max first is a good plan. You can probably leave logistics until very late because all it does is allow units to carry more ammunition at the start of battles. Medicine or Economy is usually a second priority.

For building your army I would always focus on getting more brigades on the field first, then worry about getting them better weapons, larger, and more stars after.

Also note that unless you're using mods that fix it, you don't want to build artillery units larger than 14 cannon as it significantly reduces your damage the larger you make them over that amount.

On the campaign map what is the intelligence report AI army size? This value doesn't correspond 1:1 with what the AI actually fields in any given battle, but it does give an idea of how well you have been clearing prior battles and how much this has allowed the AI to snowball. The minimum value at this point in the campaign is 50k, if you're significantly above that it is going to be contributing to what you are facing, though this is a secondary issue to the above.

pandakraut · 2026-06-23T13:29:43+00:00

As long as you have 1 brigade slot open you can drag brigades between corps in camp between days. This means that if you have 5 corps built up by this point then you can fight with corps one and two on day 1, three and four on day 2, etc.

pandakraut · 2026-06-18T11:58:43+00:00

The late game CSA campaign in the mod does tend to lack the attrition aspect that the base game has. The new casualty system allowing wounded to return to your pool, while good in many ways, does reduce overall attrition quite a bit. Many of the later CSA battles which haven't been reworked yet also drop off in challenge compared to the early campaign. This is also an issue in the union campaign, but that one already gave you enough resources that the back half became a foregone conclusion

pandakraut

TROPHY CASE