Winning and Losing battles

[runyan99]

So, how do you win a battle? As best I can figure, the only way is to have a larger army. This seems to be very reliable.

Only problem is, the Union almost always has the bigger army. Out west, with smaller armies, bad leaders, and weak defensive bonuses, I'm having a hard time seeing how the South can ever win a significant battle. I know the South lost the real war, but as a game this seems to be putting the CSA player in a box without options. Does the south only win the game if the Union army commanders do not activate enough times to get to Atlanta by 1864? Short of the Union generals doing nothing, it seems impossible to hold any ground. What can the CSA player do?

What exactly determines who advances and who retreats? Given equal sized armies, does an army commander with a 4 attack rating always beat the enemy general with a 2 defense rating? That's my experience so far with Grant and Bragg. Since defensive bonuses in 1861 and 1862 approximate zero, is it practically impossible for a smaller CSA army to hold off a larger Union army, excepting the special case of wherever Lee is with his 4 defense rating?

[Joel Billings]

It's all in section 10.1.4. Army leaders are the most important factor (aside from numbers), although a great army commander can even win when very outnumbered because he can keep the number of units committed by both sides down, negating the larger armies numerical advantage.

The rule book contains tons of details regarding modifiers and how things work. It's worth reading the various combat sections several times if you want to really understand the details. I suggest not jumping to conclusions about the value of various modifiers until you've had a chance to read the details and see them in action in many battles.

[runyan99]

Okay, some more questions. The vertical bars shown in 10.1.3. They go up each battle, but are not documented. What do they represent?

When the manual says "Random", as in Random(ACV*4), what is the value of Random? Is it one die, 1-6?

[Joel Billings]

The vertical bars are an indication of the combat value of the forces that have been committed to the battle. IIRC, the number printed inside the bars is the combat value (the height of the bars shows you a visual comparison of the two forces size), although these are not the exact the final combat values used for determining retreats since some of them have some randomness included. I don't recall exactly what they are, but I think they may just be the unmodified values of the forces involved (not accounting for all the leader/fort modifiers, but again I'm not sure of that).

Random(ACV*4) means you first multiply the ACV (army leader's attack or defense rating) and multiply it by 4. Let's say the attacking leader's attack value is a 3, so you take 3*4=12. Next you execute Random(12), which is basically going to find a random number somewhere beween 0 and 11.99999. It will then truncate it, so in this case you get a value between 0 and 11. So this leader will provide an average CV boost of 5.5 to each unit it helps in the battle.