More Questions

[Torric Roma]

So this is in context of 1861 start for the Union. and I'm more or less a greenhorn.

1: Do you recommend having/ building garrisons in forts that will be end up in the southern states once secession occurs.

2: What forts do you recommend adding a larger garrison to, and what make up should that garrison be?

3: where should additional forts be built?

4: How do I stop confederates by passing my armies/forts through the ocean when i have multiple fleets in an offensive stance and patrolling and/or blockading the sea and or river routes around?

5: what buildings should I build?

6: what is a good corp/army size? 15,000? 20,000? 30,000? 40,000? etc?

7: should I mix my divisions or should I have dedicated divisions for all my artillery, Cav, and Infantry?

8: Best ways to make sure my forces are always supplies, build depots at every city?

9: How do I get my armies to travel on rail? and how do I increase the rail supply?

10: what Categories should be Auto managed and which should be controlled by me? So policies? Projects? Weapons acquisition? Building Management? Building placement? Finances? ETC.

11: Is there a way to have certain name selection for the armies and the units you create? so it doesn't just turn into "1st, 2nd, 3rd Brigade ETC"

12: Is there a way to get certain officers selected first when standing up new units?

13: is there actually any reason for different ranks? like I am able to put a LT in charge of a division and I don't see anything change but if I promote said LT, his Fame, Admin, ETC. drops. Am I just looking at it wrong?

14: do you set up different uniforms and Colors for the uniforms for each Brigade/Division/Corp/Army or just go with the set default? also is it possible to make a new Default if you want to have a different set of uniforms for new set up units?

15: So what do you need to do to build/buy more firearms/cannons? I cant build any (except 24 ponder cannons for some reason?) even though it is auto managed or not. I built Factories, Foundries, Iron works etc, no luck.

I think that is everything so far. I am reading and watching YT videos and such but I though It might be easier to put my biggest questions in a list and hopefully I can get those questions answered without scowering far and wide and not finding everything.

Thanks!

[Butch]

1. Haven’t tried this but there’s no point really.

2. I rarely build or garrison forts and do just fine as the Union. The Confederate loves probing your front line where you don’t have any military presence. Instead of building expensive forts, have corps around major cities across your frontline waiting on rail roads that can quickly respond to any threat. I typically have at least one corps in Louisville, KY, Winchester, VA, Cairo, IL and St Louis, MO.

3. If you really want to build forts. I’d probably build one in Cairo, IL on the Mississippi river and one at Evansville, IN on the Ohio river. Any CSA river fleet or transports that want to move up towards Missouri or East towards Ohio and Kentucky will get bombarded on the way.

4. Confederate naval invasions are a contentious topic right now. I’ve personally never seen it happen to me on Very Hard but that’s probably because I keep them very busy. You’re the Union. You have the manpower and resources to always be on the offensive. Invade Northern Virginia and the CSA will tie down most of it’s forces in defensive operations to prevent you from moving south. If you’re being navally invaded you might be playing a little too passively.

5. Scroll over the factory icon that shows you what shortages you have in your economy. Early on you’ll have a massive shortage of flour (made in mills but requires crops from farms). Don’t worry too much about flour as it isn’t vital to your war economy. I like to start off by building a few salt works in high workforce areas in the East. Salt is extremely important for food and provision production. The demand for provisions will always skyrocket when your army becomes massive. Provisions are made in factories. Factories are the most important building in the game. This question is too complex to answer in one paragraph. There are a couple of great discussions on the economy in the forums here on steam. I highly recommend you check them out. Managing and fully understanding the economy is probably the trickiest part of the game but once you have it down, it’s extremely fun and rewarding to do so.

6. 20 k is a good corps size. Historically the Union had smaller corps than the Confederacy. Some Union corps were around 10-15 k. The CSA AI loves to make corps that are arouns 20-25 k.

7. Preference. I like to have cavalry in their own corps. Their main job is to scout areas of the map where I don’t have eyes or to raid deep into enemy territory. I’ll throw one artillery battery in every division early on before artillery reforms. Once I pass artillery reforms and have larger batteries, I organize them into their own divisions. The issue with having your batteries in their own division is that spreading them out across a large battlefield leads to long order delays which can be dangerous if you need to pull them back in a pinch. The advantage is that it becomes much easier to concentrate your batteries and firepower in one place.

8. Depots are extremely expensive to build and maintain. You want them on your front lines within the command radius of all your corps. Don’t build them away from the front line as they’ll pull valuable provisions, forage and ammo from your industry to places where they wont be used. Build depots as your frontline advances or even better, capture enemy depots.

9. When you give an order to a corps, a little circle icon pops up briefly. Hover over it before it disappears and you should get the option to choose rail, river or ocean transport. Click on rail and your corps will use rail transport if it’s available. You can only use railways in states where you control every single major city. You increase your rail capacity by controlling more railways as well as having certain policies/projects.

10. Veteran players usually control everything. If you’re still learning the game there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the AI manage the economic side of the game for you until you learn the ropes. Always manage the policies yourself though. There are many viable strategies and pathways you can take but generally speaking you want to rush to at least milita act 3 before 1862 so you can have those nice long contracts for your troops.

11. No not yet. I wish there was though!

12. No.

13. Certain commands have a minimum required rank. For example a brigade can only be commanded by a colonel or higher. Every commander has a max value for every attribute (leadership, cunning, admin etc.) that can only be reached once they accrue enough experience. Promoting a commander makes them lose experience and hence attributes. This simulates the fact that a colonel who is comfortable leading a brigade wont have the experience or expertise to lead a corps immediately after being promoted to Major General for example. West point generals lose less experience when promoted.

15. Small arms and artillery are produced in ironworks. To get access to newer weapons and artillery, you need to purchase the appropriate projects. Once you have enough military subsidies invested, open the projects tab. Look for springfield rifles (or whatever weapon you want to gain access to) and research that project. Next, open the military tab and click on Weapons. Here, you can manually put in an order for a large shipment of the weapons you just researched via the project. The more troops using that weapon, the higher the standardization. The higher the standardization, the faster your ironworks can produce those weapons.

I hope this helps a little bit. I could write much, much more for every question but the post would’ve been way too long! Make sure you read the manual, it’s one of the best manuals I’ve ever had the pleasure of going through.

[superfluke128]

Butch did a great job already answering, gave you a lot of great info. Overlook any of my redundancies.
1-3 Don’t worry overmuch about those early forts, especially building and manning them.
4 Devs are communicating with players to tweak this mechanic.
5 I put gov’t buildings and railroads on auto-manage. Seems to work fine that way.

6 I like bigger corps rather than the flexible approach of more but smaller ones. I want each corps able to hold their own if called to do so. At least 3 divisions with an arty division and single cav brigade.

7 Most players keep them dedicated. I do like at least one cav brigade per corp attached directly to corp commander for scouting on the battle map.
8 Use mouse-over to check your unit’s state of supply. Only build depots when you have to, otherwise under your expenses you will see depots taking up larger percentages than you can handle. Park units in areas near (friendly) river ports and railroads to help with supply flow.
9 You have to highlight rail access on the movement tab, and sometimes it takes a little wiggling with how you position your units to get things right.

10 I manually manage everything except gov’t buildings and railroads, and railroads is just me being lazy. Things that might be safe to auto-manage might be finance and projects until you get a little more confident doing them yourself.
11 Not automatically, but you can manually change in the army management window.
12 No

13 Besides a commander’s attributes changing, the biggest factor is his experience, which is denoted by the number of stars on his portrait. You might have an experienced captain with 3 stars who loses them all by a big jump to Major General. Those stars for field command are important and have a direct effect on the troops he commands.

14 Personal preference on how much you want to customize uniforms. There is no changing the default, but you can edit a pre-existing unit’s look in the army management window with the paintbrush icon.
15 Keep in mind most weapon purchases are now unlocked via projects

[Torric Roma]

Another Question, How do i keep readiness up

[Darth Malkiel]

Thanks 😊

[Oubley]

7: Personally I like to do 2 divisions of 4-6 brigades of infantry, and at least 1 division of artillery, and if its a lead corps a cavalry division of like 1 brigade or 2 for scouting.

I try and have at least 1 brigade that is like 3k strong with the best guns and a decent leader once the 3 year contracs are researched for each infantry division.

If it's a larger corps I've been doing a 3rd "infantry" division that has more of the shorter range cannons (2 batteries) with 2-3 brigades of infantry. I tend to use this division as the defensive line / anvil. That frees up my corps artillery division (just artillery, which is also tends to be the longer range guns) to where they are needed.

army wise i like to attach a division of cavalry and 1 division of artillery. I tend to also do 3 corps of cavalry only 1 for the east, 1 for the midwest, and 1 for the west. The tend to only be from 3k -6.5k in size. There main jobs as other stated are scout / raid / do quick grabs of cities

8:
Don't stack them (corps) all together but have them in areas where they can support one another. (exception being like the capital or main cog like st. louis, those areas tend to stack a bit more)
You're going to want depots at "staging" points, most of the time this is the front lines but personally as the union I feel this is also tends to be somewhat more defensive areas. I like to do one in Pittsburg, which I guess some may consider front line still and I like to do one somewhere in Ohio, I want to say the last one I did was Cincy. then I like to steal and keep one in missouri that semi defensable in Missouri.

9:
Personally right now, since rail isn't "consumed" per say, just temporarily borrowed, I don't tend to increase all that much if ever, particularly for the Union.

4. I make a ring of 8-10 fleets consisting of 1 of those cheap gunner boats and 1 of those brown 4th rate whatcha callits. I make sure there circles overlap.

The ring goes from like washington to near that union fort on the southern peninsula.

The AI has tried naval invasions constantly in my games, the "Potomac Guard" helps stop the peninsula hopping on the eastern front. I setup larger blockades on the atlantic and 1 blockade force in the gulf. I then have 1 assault force that patrols the east coast and replaces a blockade force when someone needs a rest.

11. This might be a maybe, there a bunch of files that are editable in the game directory, not sure if these are a part of one of them. other people seem to be saying no so....