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Heh, the first time I did the battle on BG, I freaked at the 100k+ Union troops, too. But, they're actually pretty easy to beat by hunkering down in the forts and immediately adjacent fortifications to give your troops some breathing room. That said, the fort on the upper left side is the one most vulnerable, so it's good to station as large forces as you can there, with a plan to shift over and bail it out if necessary.
I love the final count in this battle, lol. It's pretty insane
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933940936
So starting from Gettysburg, you really need to start training more troops in preparation for Washington. Every single battle needs to have one or two new brigades that you are "breaking in." This doesn't hurt as much as it used to since idle troops don't count directly towards autoscaling anymore (at least I'm pretty sure).
I know this is too late given that you are seeking advice on this battle alone, but it can be virtually impossible if your macro doesn't even allow you to fill all the brigade slots at Cold Harbor.
No matter what your macro state, the most important thing I can say is that you shouldn't charge forts- take out surrounding units, then attack from three sides. The fort units will rout without you having to burn precious stamina. Your troops will need energy to cover the massive amount of ground on this map.
Another thing that is very helpful is to get some cavalry in their rear and take out their artillery slowly yet gradually. This requires a lot of micro and a lot of pausing.
I realized that while I seemed to have vastly outnumbered the Union after my amazing victory at Antietam, later in the campaign it meant nothing....
I figured out why this is actually, and it's sort of an error in regards to how this game is designed.
The AI army is ASSUMED to have both a western army and an eastern army. So, Grant in the West, Meade in the East.
HOWEVER, for some reason, my Confederate army is the only army the Confederacy has, East and West.
I think this game would get a lot more complex and sensible, if it made you design two armies (As both sides) One for Western theatre battles , one for Eastern, as it works now, the two theaters don't mesh in a sensible way, and at Washington, that is apparent, when Grant shows up with a random 100K+ army, and in reality, I should have my entire western army free as well, after winning against the Army of the Tennessee in the West.
I have yet to beat this battle. I am beyond frustrated with this game. When you win a battle and kill over 40k people the enemy needs to feel this significantly.
Perhaps the game should "guide" you and suggest you start increasing the number of corps you use, or enter in a a "fatigue" status so it encourages you to use other corps / division.
I refuse to play throug this game again as the CSA. It was hard enough the first time only to find out you are blocked.
This really needs some balancing.
The main thing IMHO for D.C. is confidence and courage. When you see a billion troops show up, just remember that when you're on defense, it takes 3+ infantry brigades to rout just one of your fortified units.
D.C. works best with 5 full corps, but I did it with 3.5 on BG, and there are yt out there with only 3 corps on MG.
I AGREE WITH YOU 100% and the original OP - This is what I posted a week ago:
There is something seriously wrong with the victory conditions when playing Washington as Confeds. on normal mode. I have 70k men against 88k union men. After the third map (3rd map victory), the union will throw at least about 5 times more men at you than you have. I saw about forty union artillery units just come out of the side of the maps attacking each time shooting at my forts that I had take over. The union has INFINITE amount of troops. Going into the batlle I had made a draw at Gettysburg, won the Ferry mini map just before Washington, so I had two of the three bonuses that you get before the Washington battle (10% less enemy army and 15% less enemy weapons etc). I CANNOT WIN THIS LAST AND FINAL battle (I had a draw at Gettysburgm big ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ deal ! ). I have 9 or 10 on all my career stats except for recon. I HAVE WON EVERY MAJOR BATTLE except one draw going into Washington battle and I only bypassed a TWO mini battles on the cold harbor main map screen and ONE mini battle on the washington main map screen. I am done with this game, I have spent many many hours trying different attack methods, planning methods etc. F'ing etc. to beat the last battle of the game all the while winning and winning throughout the campaign. I am done with this POS.
Old thread, but I ran into the same exact issue as the quote.
I loaded up on bringing men and guns to Cold Harbor, in anticipation of having prime defensive territory so I could slaughter the Union. Which I did.
To the tune of 60,000-ish casualties.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1102020861
Then, I got to Washington, and after needing no more than 3 corps all game long, I ended up seeing that I needed 5 corps for the final battle, with no warning at all. I tried it with three reasonably sized corps (20,000 each, about) and noticed that I seemed to be facing 100,000+ men again.
Like, good grief... after the apocalyptic blood-bath of Cold Harbor in the campaign, you'd think maybe the Union would have a hard time fielding 100,000 men with 380 guns.
And because I took enough casualties in Cold Harbor, there was just not enough men to make a decent fourth corps.
I mean, I'll blame myself on this one, because I thought Cold Harbor would be do-able no matter how the army scaling went... but it's pretty rough to just need 3 bulky Corps pretty much all game long, then be allowed to play Washington with my 3 corps and basically see that I needed to conserve all game long to flesh out a fourth corps.
EDIT:
Also, in the screen-shot:
Why oh why would they have 500+ guns in that battle? Even *Washington* had fewer guns, and my army was pretty much the exact same size as what I had at Cold Harbor (after spending some reputation for manpower and using every last soul in the pool of recruits, it actually ended up being a bit bigger, with more infantry and fewer guns).
I'm going to do this in my new play-through too: never have brigades of more than -say- 1500 men, but have alot more of them: it simply doesn't pay to have more than 1,500 people in your brigades, the enemy auto-scales anyway.
You must have been devastating the enemy in your victorious battles. The AI manpower directly relates to prior battle losses. The scaling in the game PRIOR to version 0.90 isn't present anymore. There is now no actual disadvantage from v0.90 onward for growing your army as large as you can, i.e., min-maxing for army sizes isn't a thing anymore. The AI will still add troops (hey, you get troops when you lose too ya know), but its growth curve is severely hampered.
On the other hand, keeping some units smaller helps them turn/rotate and move better. If you can keep unit size down (but not army size) and still devastate the enemy, plunging their manpower, veterancy, and weapon tech into a slower climb, good for you.
However, if you decide to play on harder levels with this wrong opinion about scaling, you will be beat up.
The amount of enemy "auto-scaling" is very minimal nowadays, and instead relies on a manpower pool, from which the AI draws its troops. If you devastate the enemy in prior battles, the enemy will ultimately field less troops than it would have if you hadn't devastated them (not less troops than you, just less troops than they would've had).
tl;dr: IGNORE threads about scaling prior to version 0.90; they are OLD and out-of-date (also it's safe to ignore Didz's threads about scaling as well, as he doesn't get the new concept compared to pre-v0.90).
With ModV1.8.1, I went to Washington with 5 corps and 119,445 troops (444 guns) with 22,055 recruits in reserve--I used the recruits to reinforce at the end of Day 1.
My Victory screen showed an enemy AI army of 199,800 (810 guns).
My strongest corps took the NW fort (De Russey) and only cleared out the area around the fort. Another corps took Fort Slocum. The third corps in the north was just for occupying Fort Stevens once it was taken by the other two corps in what I think was phase 3 of Day 1 (there were so many phases to Washington, I lose track of them).
My second strongest corps was the flanking corps to the east of Washington city; they took Fort Thomas, then moved to the eastern approaches of Fort Washington while my western flanking corps (very weak at this point with mostly 500-man brigades) approached Fort Washington from the west with its three 2,000-man brigades. Washington city doesn't seem to be defended by the yank AI, so I have usually taken it with a regiment of mounted infantry (rifle cav) that I sneak around the fortified defenders to the west of Washington.
In camp after Day 1, I build up the 500-man brigades and replace losses in my other brigades.
My plan to defend the forts and Washington is for the 3 corps up north to defend those forts while the 2 corps in the south defend the two forts and Washington.
NOTE: in order to get a second corps around Washington, I've had to place it (in my case the weaker western flanking corps) up north in the middle panel, then when there is just about 1:00 hour of game time left in the first northern defense phase of Day 2, I move that corps to crowd the bottom edge of the map, otherwise they won't be available to defend the Washington city part of the map.
In both the north and south, because of all the heavy artillery the yanks have, I use 4 or 5 melee cav units to attack the artillery from the rear and to attack enemy cav units.
If I hadn't minimized my initial troop strength, I shudder to think what size army the yanks would have had. 200,000 was plenty for me to handle, but in the end they were eliminated from the map and the battle ended...and for some strange reason the people of Virginia wrote in a Texan's name for their governor.