HOW TO PREVENT SCALING - Ultimate General Civil War - Hints, Tips, & Tricks 

The History Guy really useful tips about scalling, thank you. Tried 3 times on Normal difficulty, can’t get Washington. Watching your videos about it right now

Going a bit of necro on this but doesn’t this kind of make sense? An army would respond to a battle with the forces necessary to dispatch the enemy during this time period. If you shove more soldiers into the battle, then the opposing side would commit more soldiers as well. It’s not like either side has spare regiments just sitting idle to commit to a pitched battle, forces would congregate prior and if the enemy had a lot of troops, your side would request reinforcements to even the numbers, of which, some would be able to respond within a day. Granted you’re playing legendary mode which is completely unhistorical, but for normal mode? The scaling makes perfect sense. The AI is already damn good for an indie so the only real way to make the game harder is by throwing more bodies in the tougher modes

@@MrShamus22 Some great points. They'll increase their army if they have men and time available in advance, i agree. Or the enemy might scale a bit, but not always by roughly 33%, I would think instead that the more we increased our army size, then the enemy would also increase theirs but that 33% margin would keep dropping? (But that would probably be done because of cost and manpower etc in the real world. and this is a video game, lol). Yeah the AI is very good so the scaling does work, but I wish there was a better way. Soon the AI will be clever enough to do what we do, keep going around the side 😆

Especially when it makes no sense for the enemy to so heavily outnumber you. You can thrash the relatively low population Confederacy in battle after battle and they'll still find tens of thousands of troops to ensure you're outnumbered

And wasn't this made by the guy who did darth mod? And the entire premise of the mod was to reduce ai cheating?

@@drewoid138 exactly this

100% agree with you ! game designers just dont understand this I think and I have decided I wont be buying anymore games in this series not the Sailing game or the Dreadnought game ( well mostly because I dont like what they are doing with it )

ghost of xmas past I get where you’re coming from in a gamers perspective, but in terms of history this was what happened. During the civil war, the confederates population was 9 million. And 3.5 million of those were slaves. And then you have to factor out the old, the young, and the disabled. So really the fighting population in the confederacy was 2.5-3 million. Meanwhile the union had a population of 22 million! With a fighting population of 21-21.5 million. The confederates did has early military success, such as the battle of Cold Harbor, battle of Chickamauga, the battle of Manassas (aka Bull Run), etc. However after the loss at Gettysburg where the Union halted the confederates from entering Union Soil, the confederates became outnumbered in many of their battles. The South would never win the war because of a lack of recruitment, always being outnumbered, and in most cases taking more casualties in a battle. Also factor in the weak economy of the states and the lack of mechanized manufacturing to produce weapons, ammo, equipment, etc. The fact that this game has scaling is actually realistic.

@@ryanhynes6596 it has scaling for both sides....

He began with 63,000 soldiers and was eventually facing 160,000 northern soldiers due to unit scaling? At this point in my northern campaign my total northern force at that battle was 98,000 troops while the south came up with 58,000 soldiers at the battle of Fredericksburg (and this number includes the "reduction" in army size because of me winning previous battles). In fact at this point from those previous battles I had killed over 170,000 southerners (a kill ratio of often 3 to 1 if not more) - so where the hell does the south keep coming up with these numbers of soldiers, all of them at least two stars if not three? The north I can kind of understand with its population (though it's still highly doubtful). But the south? Granted if these numbers reflected what had happened in history the south would have surrendered by this point, because Richmond can't keep pulling 50,000 man armies out of nowhere - and vice versa for that matter. If he were outnumbered by a hundred thousand troops and still defeated the northern army? No way in hell would Lincoln be able to keep up support for the war effort.

@@ndp7054 Absolutely this. Even playing as Union, it never feels like I have the upper hand in terms of numbers, which is really annoying and frankly breaks immersion. I get that, from a gameplay perspective, they sort of have to artificially strengthen the CSA when you're playing USA, or else anybody with a lick of historical knowledge about how the battles played out in the actual war would steamroll every time. Playing as CSA is, thematically, pretty much 'hard mode' by default, but the game should not punish you for being good at managing your army or winning battles; that's just bad/lazy design. There are definitely better ways to increase difficulty than artificially increasing the number of enemies you have to fight in every battle, especially if you're good at preserving your army while still achieving your objectives.

@@ryanhynes6596 Does the scaling only work against the Confederacy, or does the same thing happen if you play as the Union? That would make the historicity argument fall apart.

??

I have never seen a single rts game that has well written AI. The solution for them to be more challenging for the player has been always been them not adhering to the same rules as the player aka cheating in one way or another. Some games have created conditions and restrictions in which the AI is not that easy to overcome, at first at least, but the reality is at least what it seems from my perspective is that humans dont know/arent capable of writing an AI that would be a challenging and capable of adapting to the player skill level, experience, tactics and strategies without completely dominating in a rts games, yet... Maybe somewhere in the near future, hopefully.

Did you lose to confederate charges? If so bring some howitzers up behind your infantry, blast the enemy with shell and canister to break their units when they try to charge

i think the scaling gets worse with difficultly so if you play on easy or normal it should be as bad or even be a thing to be honest i never noticed scaling before and never had a problem with it. who knows though. still good tips though.

Agreed. I'm not going to get it now.

Rayrard honestly I had built up enough reputation by the time stones river arrived to just skip the battle altogether. I tried at least 10 times and each time my forces would get slaughtered. I just let our arty batteries fire back and forth the whole battle and didn’t go for the objectives lol. Just took the reputation hit and moved on

My pleasure Stephen!

The beginning of the Union campaign is much more difficult for the Union althan the CSA I'm on

I too discovered this glitch at Chickamauga MG level as CSA

I finally figured out how to make a bigger Army in campaign using the career points. Second time I swamped them at Antietam and drove them north of the church. On historical they still swamp me everytime

I already won over it.

But does inflicting casualties benefit later battles in terms of manpower? I know inflicting casualties reduces the quality of later troops but from what I've seen every soldier killed will be replaced and reinforced by the next major battle.

Yes, he does scale by a greater amount due to difficulty.

Yes! I will be returning to it soon...and it's the Extended Timeline Mod

correct

I kinda agree with that, but I don't think scaling is the way to go. I think the enemy army sizes should be fixed for each battle, just in harder difficulties the fixed army size is of course bigger. That way it makes the battles more difficult while at the same time it rewards you for doing well in earlier battles

I've played campaigns for both sides using the medium difficulty. When I played as the Union at Major General I found the Confederates were much more aggressive & would charge me more often (at least that's how it seemed) and their more experienced troops would rout me, where before I would out shoot them with my superior rifles. This may not technically be the AI making smarter tactical decisions, but by being more aggressive they actually were using their troops more effectively. I LOVE this game & after a break of a few months, I'm going to give it another go on Major General & I may well take advantage of this technique, just to keep up with the enemy in terms of troop numbers, though they will always have more due to scaling.

Is scaling at all difficulties or no?

The problem is you'll nearly ALWAYS be outnumbered even on Medium. Including situations when the enemy simply could not have so many troops there at that time. In that crude form it is here, scaling is just bad.

It tends to go more off of average unit size. So having twenty 500 man brigades would keep the enemy size lower than having ten 1000 man brigades.

Can't use this technique in one-day battles like Antietam because you can only add troops in between days when it lets you go back to the camp, not in the middle of the battle.

gotcha and thanks for the correction on Antietam being multi day it is multi fronts. Sometimes these larger battles become a blur. Nice series

Did a playthrough as Union and as Dixie, as Dixie I was usually outnumbered, as union it's usually 1 to 1

@@bugfighter5949 I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I'm always outnumbered no matter who I play with. The disparity does seem larger when I play as the confederacy, but I'm always outnumbered no matter what.

Keep playing. Watch other people play. You'll get there. Takes practice.

Mark Montgomery use your career points to increase army organization. Have 3 fully equipped corps. I do 4 infantry brigades and 1 artillery per division. I line the woods behind dunker church and let them come get it. Then when your reinforcements come up don’t line the sunken road. Bring them up and form a line across the bottom of the cornfield all the way to that clump of trees on your right. After they throw themselves at the woods a few more times you can go on the attack and shove them completely north and off the map. It’s worked for me so far. Of course on historical game they always overwhelm me every time

Help pls

Once a year on average.

No, the things you can do between days are pretty limited. Can't spend points.

While I do agree that scaling isn't the best way to balance things, especially as extreme as this game does on legendary, it is your own choice to play on MG/legendary. If MG/legendary is to tough for you, for whatever reason, just be a man and play the lower difficulty instead of gaming the system which is just as sad, if not sadder, in my opinion. That said I do hope they will reduce their reliance on scaling in their future games, as it is indeed pretty disheartening to see that the enemy gets the same if not more reinforcements that the casualties he sustained when you wipe out his entire force in a battle, even on lower difficulties like BG.

Alex2614 don’t hold me to it but I think the double lines for brigades disappear when you reach the ability to create 2000 man+ brigades. I noticed the same thing and was like wtf happened to my army! But I think it’s because you cram the same manpower in larger brigades rather than several small