Campaign Army Surrender

[Kyecthus]

What are the requirements to have an army on the campaign map break apart or surrender?

In Western Missouri, as the Union I attacked the State Guard with overwhelming superiority in a pincer from north and south near Springfield. It was about 65k vs 30k.

I manually fought the battle, captured every supply\entry point on the map, completely surrounded them and still the Confederate army retreated with only 4k casualties against my 2k. If they hadn't able to magically retreat their broken and routing divisions, it should easily have been a major victory. There were almost no reported desertions and they didn't seem to care that they had no supply line or practical means of reinforcement.

This just resulted in the army on the campaign map retreating northwards through my flanking army. I keep pursuing but the army just continually retreats through my forces.

I enjoy the game, but some mechanics just seem dumbfounding with how to actually envelop and destroy a campaign army.

[Wrigley]

They can break apart, but not surrender. You break it apart by keeping enough pressure on it when it's retreating on the campaign map. If you keep it engaged long enough, the army will disintegrate. It will reform, but it'll take time for the survivors to get back to their territory, and many won't or will desert.

The fact is that there were no large surrenders in field battles during the ACW, at least not as large as you're talking about. Those only happened in sieges and at the end of the war. Armies just didn't have the tools to truly envelop and destroy their opponents, so allowing the player to do so would make the game unbalanced and encourage cheesing the mechanics.

[Kyecthus]

Makes sense. I was picturing something akin to Appomattox.

[A_P_Hill]

Actually they can surrender.

The key to this is to have any form of escape back to their territory to be blocked by your troops.

[Wrigley]

Individual brigades can, but I've never seen an entire army do it. I suppose it's theoretically possible though if you somehow get every brigade to surrender.

[BookishBread]

so to get an enemy unit to break apart or disintegrate there lines of retreat have to be completely cutoff. I myself have never had the immense problems others have of them retreating through my lines deeper and deeper, i actually haven't had this problem at all for several campaigns. I do know that when an enemy unit stops moving it can instantly takes over your nearby IIPs, when it retreats it will retreat to nearby IIPs just like if its in its own territory. When a unit disintegrate on the campaign map its every man for themselves. Some you will actually capture, some will desert and some will make it back to the army and fight again. The desertion rate is influenced by individual state support.

A far as enemy units breaking apart individually in battle there is two ways this happens.

Surrender: they lay down there weapons and give up as a unit. this individual unit will cease to exist after the battle
Disintegration: its every man for himself. When this happens the unit is usually in a bad enough spot that most of the men surrender to you anyhow, but there is usually a small force that survives or escapes but not always. Usually this unit will exist after the battle but they got almost no manpower and are useless. I think the AI usually just combines these units but if given enough time they can build up there manpower. I also think its programmed in that reinforcements arrive to this brigade at a higher rate for some time, no matter if its an AI or player brigade.

Both of these seem far more likely to happen if the brigade officer is KIA or Wounded. I don't know if injuring there divisional or army commanders matters when it comes to this. it also happens easier if there national morale is lower.

Also I have had an army surrender to me in battle but only once and it was a long time ago. it happened after they already gave up the battle and were retreating but its very unlikely as the AI national moral was pretty low and I had inflicted like 60% casualties already, mainly from capturing units left to right. This was several patches ago and I know others had that individual army do it too (it was the army of Mississippi if I'm not mistaken).