Single Player - Limiting Companies In Play

[Tobel]

I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of units in play in the SDII Army General Campaign. Is there any method to roll back the amount of companies in a battle to 3 as opposed to 5? When I let the AI handle the other companies, they generally do silly things and get wiped pretty hard.

[jswarpaint]

It sounds like your referring to when in Army General you play a skirmish via Tactical Battle instead of choosing autoresolve so in other words your doing a hands on skirmish..... since ya can't assign units to AI on the main battle map ...

Well, I think the answer is no .. it is quite aggravating or different than a solo skirmish but I have to run the entire battle on slow as possible and pause about every 10 seconds it seems for most of the battle because I choose to control all units .. because ... [ the AI will do generally silly things and get wiped out .. ] so it is quite daunting ..

WAIT I have and idea ... You can also as you probably know ON THE SCREEN WHERE YOU CHOOSE WHICH COMPANIES TO BE AI controlled or which ones you control .. You can move those companies around and so you can control all the good stuff sort or and let the AI control the stuff that perhaps you don't mind so much loosing.

If you go to time stamp 18:24 of this video you can actually drag and drop sections to other parts so that one part is your control and the other par is AI hope this makes sense. In very fine print it reads drag and drop companies as necessary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV7scP8ZSRk

[CaptainSpacetime]

Yeah don't give AI control to anything.

Have you played much skirmish OP? Army General mainly feels overwhelming when you aren't familiar with the units, because otherwise the sheer numbers aren't that much greater than a regular skirmish.

[Elettricità sovieta]

Originally posted by Tobel:

I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with the sheer amount of units in play in the SDII Army General Campaign. Is there any method to roll back the amount of companies in a battle to 3 as opposed to 5? When I let the AI handle the other companies, they generally do silly things and get wiped pretty hard.

I bet you can find a mod for this on the workshops

[Tobel]

Correct - I just assumed you do the tactical battle most of the time, perhaps I'm wrong in that.

Oh that tutorial video is probably perfect - I think I stopped at his 3rd video. If I can still drag/drop that might be helpful. Good to know I'm not alone in pausing a lot. I was hoping to play coop campaigns but I think I'm late to the party and didn't see a lot of folks online. Maybe the skirmish as Spacetime suggested is the best route until I'm intimately familiar with the mechanics. Cheers all.

[CaptainSpacetime]

Yeah it honestly took me a while to really get into AG, it was 100% because of confusion on what's actually in the little battalions and what they're good for. Getting to the point where you can beat hard AI with ease in skirmish is a good point to jump into AG.

I'm doing the first German campaign now and I'd say like 90% of my battles don't even use the full 5 units. Often it's maybe 1 or 2 infantry + artillery. And the infantry is often something in A phrase then another in B. So there's isn't a crazy amount to micro since it's sorta all spread out?

And you don't have to bring in every single unit, I'll often just go sequentially like first battalion first company (are those the right terms lol? like main unit then first smaller unit in the dropdown) use all those, then go to the next if i need more dudes. Helps me keep it organized in my head so I'm not constantly hunting through 100 lists for one more dude.

And when you bring in the battalions the order you pick in the strategic view is the order they'll be in in the tactical map. So I'll put like all the infantry first, then artillery, then planes. Then i know the first two tabs are all my infantry without having to know what the ♥♥♥♥ like III. //2 Sturm.395 Abeitler is by name.

[morganc425]

It is often worth handing a few battalions over to the AI if you are dug in and defending in a battle and you have some well placed mg and antitank bunkers and defences. The bunkers really keep the Ai casualties down and they often don't lose many more than you would commanding yourself. So even if you have 5 battalions in the battle for eg, 3 infantry 1 tank and 1 artillery, I would take command of 1 infantry and the tank and artillery battalion to give you control of the heavy weapons with some infantry for support and leave 2 infantry battalions in AI command. they should handle themselves well enough with light enough casualties in those circumstances

[steeno]

My problem with the 5 battalions is more like i can only add 2-3 battlions because the others are either bombarded or not in range, but the enemy mostly always adds 5 battalions. i played only orsha on the axis side so far. and in the end the soviets bombard me with units because they have access to 5 full decks and i have 300 deployment points but no units to deploy anymore. and if i watch all the old lets plays of people like vulkan when they played orsha as axis with max. 3 battalions it looks way easier ^^

edit: since i didn't found a mod which resets the limit i created one https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2783854250
simply sets BattleNbBattleGroup from 5 to 3 in CampaignConstantes.ndf
did a quick test in a new campaign and indeed i and the ai was only able to add 3 groups to the campaign.

[CaptainSpacetime]

Originally posted by steeno:

My problem with the 5 battalions is more like i can only add 2-3 battlions because the others are either bombarded or not in range, but the enemy mostly always adds 5 battalions. i played only orsha on the axis side so far. and in the end the soviets bombard me with units because they have access to 5 full decks and i have 300 deployment points but no units to deploy anymore. and if i watch all the old lets plays of people like vulkan when they played orsha as axis with max. 3 battalions it looks way easier ^^

edit: since i didn't found a mod which resets the limit i created one https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2783854250
simply sets BattleNbBattleGroup from 5 to 3 in CampaignConstantes.ndf
did a quick test in a new campaign and indeed i and the ai was only able to add 3 groups to the campaign.

I thinks that's just more of a learn campaign strats thing. You have to play defensive-ish as Germany and use your own artillery to prevent being overrun.

If you don't want your units picked off piecemeal like that make sure they're adjacent to each other, then even if bombarded they'll still reinforce. So if you're worried about being attacked make sure you've placed your dudes so you'll for sure be able to bring in 3 inf + air + arty and maybe an AA if you're out of coverage.

Between arty + you counterattacking to deorg soviet units the AI never really gets the chance to attack or do anything because they end up all stacked up on roads with most of their units half dead already. Any new stuff gets stuck way in the back.

And if you watch Vulcan play with 5 battalions it looks just as easy, he's just good at this dumb game lol

[Carnifex]

In my opinion, Army General skirmish maps are too large and the player has too many units to control. This is my biggest gripe with Army General.

The non-Army General 1v1 maps and skirmish modes by comparison are way more balanced in terms of land area and army sizes.

In Army General skirmishes, I recommend delegating one or two infantry regiments to the AI and focusing more on parts of the map that the coop AI is not focusing on. At the start of the match you can click on the "attack" or "defend" icons at the bottom right and place them on the map to indicate to the friendly AI where you want to fight.

I personally like to control at least one infantry regiment and any armor, artillery, or air regiments that I brought with me into the battle. I also always choose the regiments with defensive placements during defend battles. So ideally I'll be controlling two or three groups with two delegated to the AI.

Also, while you should always be mindful of your reinforcement points and thinking about what units to bring in next, you will usually have a LOT of "floating points" (unused reinforcement points) in Army General. Do your best, but also play at your own pace. It's easy to get overwhelmed otherwise and you'll feel like you're just trying to pump out units than actually play a strategy game.

Unless you're playing coop, you'll have to make some compromise in terms of AI delegation vs being overwhelmed with your own forces and the scale of the maps. For this reason I play Army General casually and play hard AI on non-AG skirmish battles for more serious fights or even pvp.

[jswarpaint]

I figured out what they need to do ... a minute goes by or whatever it is and if you are controlling 5 division each minute each time the thing goes around ya got a whole bunch more units to place and if you don't well the enemy is going to place units ... so what they .. need to do is have the thing that winds around take 10 times as long to wind around make it move s l o w l y very s l o w l y so that even though you have a lot of units to place by the time the thing winds around a flag or two can change hands ... whatdoyathink ???