Increasing Union Naval power - some interesting finds about Union Athena

[Turbo823]

I've been experimenting around with a bunch of different settings for the Union with the idea of increasing Union naval invasions. My goal here was to improve Athena's play as the Union.

I added naval transports in Boston. I also added marines and line infanty at the same time. When I set the sethealth and setcohesion to 20 to the naval units, no new naval invasions. When I increased both factors to 75 for the naval units, the infantry I added did a naval invasion in North Carolina 4 turns later. I had mixed results on 3 tests I did.

Doing the same thing, I located the new transports in Annapolis and tried adding some infantry. What was interesting here is that Athena did a naval invasion using different units. I was able to repeat this 3 times, with slightly better results than Boston.

Lastly, I added naval units and a large number of brigades in Fort Jefferson just to see if I could force a naval invasion. Within 9 turns on 3 tries, Athena invaded the gulf area with some/all of these units.

Some comments I have are:
- If Infantry is deployed in an area that doesn't have a land bridge and is further from the front line, Athena seems to eventually use these units for naval invasions..
The proximity to Washington with its available infantry may allow Athena to easier move infantry to board nearby transports.
- If the naval units are far north and with low health, Athena doesn't seem to use them constructively for naval invasions. Maybe its the distance?
- More naval forces seem to encourage more naval actions. Maybe naval invasions are lower on the priorities and more naval units allow for more
options?
- Obiviously this all unbalancing if the player is the Union or if there is a player versus player game. It would however be a possible way to improve the Union AI for a strictly Union AI vs player.

I would have liked to observe what Athena was doing during its moves but I don't know how to so all I could do was wait for a reaction. I did this by manually editing the 1861 April Campaign file in the events folder so I don't have an Excel file to share. All that CVspitter thing lost me.

I did have some problems with CTD's. I suspect that it had to do with the way I was adding the new naval units in that text file.

Perhaps someone with more modding experience in AACW can look into this further...