Benchmarks for legendary CSA campaign?

[Wood]

Just got out of a bloody chancellorsville and im begining to doubt my prospects for washington. I currently have 73k men including reserves, is that enough to keep hope? i do have boatloads of cash and good weapons but the lack of manpower looks grim, im probably going to need well over 100k for washington id imagine.

[Magnus]

73k is borderline but still doable imho. If you can minimize casualties at cold harbour, hardins pike and the minor battles right before washington, you will get to 100-110 k i guess.
Since you just finished a major battle, how high were your casualties? At cville you shouldbt take more then 10k, you can even rech 7-8k. So if you are above 10k, maybe replaying that battle is an Option?

[Spicy Camel]

That's enough men, though you'd better play conservatively from now on instead of trying to score as many kills as possible and spend reputation on manpower in every chapter.
Legendary Washington is comfortably winnable with ~120.000 well equipped troops even if veteran people here are used to much bigger armies.

[Wood]

not sure exactly what my losses were due to reinforcements between days but it was about 13k. i pushed for a day 2 win and came up 15 minutes short :/ i did kill almost all of their guns day 2 so 3 was a breeze. i could probably replay it and save 2k but at that point i may just go farther back.

i had nearly 75k after 2nd bull run thats when things started coming off the rails i guess. lost 13k at fredericksburg because of the huge very aggressive AI. i killed/captured 80k(!) but that coupled with bloody fights at antietam and stones river meant that my army was largely stagnating in size.

based on my MG playthrough i think i can get recover a bit with a cold harbor day1 and halls ferry but hardin pike and chickamauga will probably mess me up.

im gonna finish out this playthrough and see if i can do it, but ill probably end up having to go back near antietam i think

[Kristoph42]

Good luck. Like others said you might squeak by at Washington. All those damn Yankees at Washington. You should try to get positive troop gain in all your battles from here on out, basically make sure you less men then you receive as reward. (Medicine and Pow exchange are just bonus, don't count on them).

[Wood]

It's over boys, I won.

At Gettysburg I pushed for a day1 victory and got the timer running in a great position but didn't realize it would go to next day regardless. Replayed it to be more conservative but the less union casualties made day2 much harder so I ended up going back to my original save anyway hah.

Went into Chickamauga with 84k and went into Cold Harbor with 92.5k. Went into Washington with 112k men with about 7k reinforcements. Pretty much all of the additional manpower came from Laurel Hill (hooray meatshields)+Hardin Pike+Halls Ferry+rep. I decided to play Hardin pike+Halls ferry to a draw and that alone netted me like 20k men. The extra Union morale at Washington definitely hurt but I think it was worth it. Funnily enough my bottleneck at the end was actually money/rifles as all the crappy ones were bought out and I couldn't afford to buy enough 1853 enfields for the 3 thousand men left over.

The Washington offensive went surprisingly well for me and even the counterattack was mostly fine in the north apart from a few dicey moments around Fort De Russy (NW) and the trenches in the east and SW. The southern defensive was complete craziness from beginning to end and I definitely would've lost if I didn't bring a few spare brigades from the north to the south at the turn of phase (i'm not sure if thats considered a cheat/exploit). The difference between victory and defeat for me was 1 freshly raised 1500 man 1853 enfield brigade led by a major that never routed at fort thomas (east of the city) and racked up 6700 kills.

Thanks for the encouragement I was strongly considering going back to 2nd bull run and then I wouldn't have gotten here for another few weeks.

https://i.imgur.com/e10Y2Nz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/gDoTZpu.png

Also I was watching along with History Guy's CSA Legendary playthrough he did a few months back and the Union seemed to bring less men to many of the engagements despite me keeping my active force low and the union forcepool very low (around 50k after Fredericksburg) Have they changed some stuff with the CSA legendary campaign recently?

[Kristoph42]

Excellent Job Mr. President. As for the changes to the CSA Legendary campaign, I can't say. I have been playing the J&P Rebalance Mod for a while now and it is super fun. Give it a try if you get a chance.

[pandakraut]

Recent patches reduced the sizes of all AI units at Bull Run and changed the reinforcement timer at Stay Alert. I don't know what version History Guy was playing on but Campaign scaling hasn't been touched after 1.09 at least.

In terms of numbers you faced it could be your army setup or just getting different rng in terms of the AI sizing. Variance of 5-15k even with similar intel reported size is not unusual.