Casualties and replacements

[Joe Kemper]

I just want to say that I am very glad that I purchased this game and look forward to the American Civil War game.

I just completed playing the Alt full campaign game head to head with me playing both sides. I tried to keep my actions as historically relevant as possible.

My comment concerns the battle casualties and the replacement system. Generally I found the larger battles quite destructive. Many hits and many regiments destroyed.
I also noticed that the company replacement rate did not actually help much. For instance, at the end of the campaign I had 113 Tory companys in the replacement pool.
There were similar high numbers on the American side. I realized they weren't being used very often because regiments were either completely destroyed or they were reduced to a few hits remaining for each company but not eliminating any companies. So, replacement companies kept accumulating.

On a related point , there are the situations were there are hits but no companies eliminated. I move them to the proper location and in a few months they are usually completely recovered. Where do those replacements come from, is there a seperate pool available aside from the company replacement pool?

Again, I do like this game and will continue to play and look forward to any help on these questions.

Thank you

[Pocus]

We will probably switch to the more accurate AACW system very soon on that, in the next BOA patch: to recover hits, you will expand (from time to time) one replacement, which will give you a 'credit' in men/hits to recover. This will help keep the replacement pool at an historical level without having to rework all the events to adjust their rate of arrival.

[Roads]

I have observed similar results. I wonder if it isn't because the hits that a given unit take seem to be split up more evenly amongst the sub-units.

I also think it might be nice to have all the levies show up with only 3 companies. This is pretty realistic - it usually took a while for newly recruited armies to come up to strength.

[Joe Kemper]

That sounds good. Thanks for the reply.

[decaro]

I hope the new replacement system in the next patch does something to help the (human) Colonial player.

In my latest game under 1.11b, I ended the contest losing by several thousand points despite winning 7 objectives and 10 strategic cities, which was more than my AI opponent (as many cities had red-crossed sabers, which means they don't count as they're under seige?). Yet the Brit AI continually got replacements, abandoning some victory sites to make massive, invincible armies a la Napoleon.

Felicitations, Pocus; thanks to your updates, BoA's AI has gotten better and better to the point where I have just now disabled the "give AI more time" feature, and if that doesn't work I'm going to disable "allow all AI behaviors." And if that doesn't work, I'll force myself to play the alternate (ahistorical?) scenario.

Mais zoot alors, if I have to set the AI difficulty to "easy," c'est fini.

In bad French, les "human" ont bessoir d'assistance!

[Pocus]

this would be my dream, to have an AI beat the good players at the average level, but we are far from that...

I agree that the replacement system need some revising... for the better! As for the red-crossed sabers, it means that the city is either under siege, or is controled without a regular and is disloyal.

zoot > zut [:'(]

[decaro]

I'm no BoA expert, but it wasn't long ago when I posted tips on how to win as the Colonials -- at the normal/average settings -- based on personal experience.