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BigDuke66
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Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Wed Mar 14, 2018 5:32 pm

Has anyone a clue how the normal(none officer) training/upgrading of these units work?
What I see so far is that these elements upgrade to a better version alone, but:
1. What is the probability of this happening?
2. Is the accumulated experience important?
3. Are there prerequisites to fulfill?
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Thu Mar 15, 2018 8:41 pm

BigDuke66 wrote:Has anyone a clue how the normal(none officer) training/upgrading of these units work?


Yup :o






















:( whaaaaa....? You want to actually know how? :blink:

Mkaaaaay :rolleyes:

BigDuke66 wrote:What I see so far is that these elements upgrade to a better version alone, but:


Sounds very philosophical :papy: but this is how it works.

There are technical upgrades, which are only kicked off by events, and represent the issuance of new weapons and/or a change in military doctrine, both of which change the characteristics (generally for the better) of the element. This is done by the event replacing certain model types for other better models, generally in certain areas at different times, so not all at once. For example Union cavalry will start to tech upgrade in '63 from early war cavalry to late war cavalry. Most infantry does similar, but I'm not sure when.

Every element has a ProgRate (Progression Rate) listed in their model file. Generally for cavalry it is 5, for infantry and leaders 10, and for artillery 20. This is a factor in how quickly the element will train-up.

Volunteers and Militia also have the TrainUp parameter, which designates the Line Infantry model with which it will be replaced if it trains-up. Line and Elite Infantry never trains-up. They have reached the pinnacle of their training, although they may still gain experience.

The values in the following are taken from the Settings\GameLogic.opt file.

Each turn, every element in the game as a 75% chance of gaining 1 XP (eXperience Point). Once the accumulated XP reaches the ProgRate, the element will gain 1 EL (Experience Level), which is noted in the element display window/first tab with a star. This represents the regiments going through their standard training and learning how to maneuver by marching certain formations etc. But there is only so much experience an element can gain through just field training, and that is up to EL 2. Once they have gained their second star (EL 2), they will no longer gain XP through field-training.

Each time an element gains an EL, for it to gain the next EL, the element will need to gain double on XP as it needed the gain the previous EL. So cavalry with EL 1 (ProgRate 5) needed 5 XP to gain EL 1, but requires an additional 10 to reach EL 2.

During battles, an element will gain 1 XP for every 2 hits it scores, but loses 1 for every hit scored against it, but I don't think it can leave a battle with few XP than it started with. There is a 1000 XP limit in the game, which will practically never be reached.

Direct leaders (brigade and division) gain 10% of the XP gained by the elements under their command, but only if an enemy element is actually destroyed, and can lose 5% if they lose an element. IIRC corps commanders gain 5%, and army commands 3%, in the same way.

Each turn there is a 7% chance per EL of a militia, volunteer, or conscript element of it training up, which means the element's model is changed to that listed in its TrainUp parameter.

BigDuke66 wrote:1. What is the probability of this happening?


See above.

BigDuke66 wrote:2. Is the accumulated experience important?


Yes, see above.

BigDuke66 wrote:3. Are there prerequisites to fulfill?


Yes, you must transfer $1 per element you wish to allow to train up, to my PayPal account :siffle:

What? ... but Pocus... b-b-but ........ no there isn't :crying:

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:29 am

Thanks for the insight.
Overall the probability to get volunteers upgrade to line infantry doesn't look that bad. though about relying on them instead of building all these silly mixed brigades, especially as any upgrade will again allow building volunteers, a pool that never goes dry this way.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Fri Mar 16, 2018 1:15 pm

That's not exactly correct. IIRC the Union only gets those "silly mixed brigades" [Vol Inf, Vol Inf, Lt Inf] per event. There are none to be built. The South had IIRC only one small pool of them to be built in one state, and even that cannot be abused, because elements train-up, but the Unit containing them doesn't change. It will simply then contain [Inf, Inf, Lt Inf], but still be the same Unit.

The one place where there might be any abuse along this line is with [Mil] units. It goes something like this. In the Far West each state has a small pool of militia you can build. Each of these militia units has 1 militia element, but may be combined(1) with a second militia unit also containing a single militia element. The first advantage is that the militia units with a single militia element have a command cost of 1, while the units of combined militia units also have a command cost of 1. So you get double the power for the same command cost.

The trick (or optimal use of resources, if you will) is that if you have a Training Officer like Franz Sigel in the Far West, he can train-up one of these combined militia units each turn to give a an excellent (for the Far West) [Inf Inf] unit, plus apparently these combined and trained up units don't count for the militia pool (seems to be a bug to me) IIRC, so each time you train one of these units up, you can build another 2 militia unit. That's the way I remember it, but I might be wrong.

But even if it were fixed (or it's not exactly how I remember it), there is still a trick to get a fairly powerful force out of those 6 [Mil] units.

This is based on the fact that the [Mil] units you can build actually have a second slot in them for a second infantry-type element, which can be a Mil, Vol, Inf, or even Elite Inf.

Let's say California has a pool of 6 [Mil] units.
- You build 6 and combine(1) them to 3x [Mil Mil] units. The game assess these 3x [Mil Mil] units to be 3 of the [Mil] units you just built, but cannot find the other 3 on the map, so the game gives you 3x [Mil] back into your pool. This is the mechanism the game uses to return destroyed units to your build pools.
- So now you have 3x [Mil Mil] units on the map, and 3x [Mil] in your build pool
- Build all 3 of those [Mil] units and combine 2 them to a [Mil Mil], and you will now have 1 [Mil] units in your pool, plus 4x [Mil Mil] , and 1 [Mil] units on the map.
- Build the last [Mil] unit from your pool and combine it with the last [Mil] unit you already have on the map from the previous step and you will now have 5x [Mil Mil], plus still one [Mil] in your pool.

Use Sigel to train-up all these [Mil Mil] units to [Inf Inf] units and you can use them along with some cavalry and artillery you already find in the Far West and you can build a good division for very little cost other than time and effort.

You can do this in the East too, but generally the unit density is much greater, and it is wiser to simply build normal units for building division.

I do however often use this method to build 1st rate garrison unis for west of the Appalachians, where your supply lines are apt to be attacked by small cavalry and partisan units. Having a good [Inf Inf] unit garrisoning a town can be indispensable in such cases.

(1) Put two [Mil] units into a stack, select both of them and then press <Ctrl><C> to combine them to a single [Mil Mil] unit. IIRC this can also be done with a [Mil] and a [Inf](2) unit, bc the [Inf] unit has a slot for a second Inf-type unit, but you cannot combine two [Inf] units, bc none of these have a second Inf slot.

(2) These are those Regular Army 1st Infantry, 2nd Infantry, etc. regiments you get allocated per events and setup mostly in the West and Far West.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Fri Mar 16, 2018 1:38 pm

From the good Captain's stats, if the CSA had 100 first level militia, then 7 of them should upgrade the next turn (7%). To maintain this number, each turn a HQ unit dedicated to this purpose would need to receive 7 new militia and train them for ten turns to first experience level (or fewer turns if they acquire an experience point or two normally). So that would be a total of 70 militia ( 7 each turn for 10 turns) stacked with the HQ to maintain the rate of 7 trained militia per turn. The trained militia would be moved out to say seven garrison divisions at Richmond, NO, Charleston, etc. These would replace the upgraded regulars that could be used elsewhere. Thus the CSA should be more than able to match the Union training rate with McClellan, et. al. of 6 militia to regulars per turn.

That might be five Divisions in Richmond in an Army or Corps with 14 militia in each Division (two turns worth of 7) stacked with the HQ. This way the CSA player would only have to check the Division whose militia hit first level each turn. The trained militia might move to garrison Divisions guarding the coastal cities where they would eventually upgrade.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Fri Mar 16, 2018 4:51 pm

@Captain_Orso
I don't mind the mixed brigades showing up per event, especially as the Vol/Vol/ltInf can't be build.
But I meant the normal inf/cav/lightart brigades that dominate the unit pool. As I mentioned in other threads; I would prefer to lower their numbers drastically and raise the number of uniform brigades as mixed brigades disappeared rather early in the war.

What you constantly call militia are in my eyes volunteers, at least all the "militias" one can build have only volunteer elements.
The"real" militias, those with an M element, are spread over the map as static garrison that can't be build be the player.

The way you describe combining the units is just what I intend to do, the training officer combined with the possibility of auto upgrades to line infantry should fill my infantry force with additional uniform brigades to augment the rather small pool of uniform brigades that I can build.

@Gray Fox
That the CSA can out train me is worrying but I wonder if the CSA is able to provide these numbers as I guess that their money & conscript pool should be smaller than my, even when pulling the events to raise money & conscripts.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:30 pm

I'll give the plan a try this weekend. Some of the volunteer elements could also be combined as Orso posted into pairs to stretch the numbers in the force pool. We'll see.

P.S. It takes 15 experience points, not 10 to train the volunteers to first level, so that would require a 15 turn cycle to train the volunteers. I don't believe that the force pool would support that many militia (over 200).
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 3:55 am

Well does the gain of 1 Xp by the HQ prevent the 75% chance to gain 1 Xp normally?
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:32 am

Those garrison units, if they survive an attack, can be combined with a militia unit. I've done that frequently.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 4:40 pm

I guess I wouldn't combine militia elements with volunteer elements, both have very different values in some spots, for example militias take ages to upgrade as their Prograte is 50 while volunteers have 10.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 4:43 pm

Yes BigDuke66, a unit can gain one XP from the HQ and another normally in the same turn.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 8:24 pm

Gray Fox wrote:From the good Captain's stats, if the CSA had 100 first level militia, then 7 of them should upgrade the next turn (7%).


:poke: No, you missed one very important point... well two :rolleyes: .

Non-'Line Infantry' elements only gain the 7% chance to train-up (not upgrade) to Line Infantry once they have reached EL1--they have 1 star in the stats--. Before they have reached EL 1 they have 0% chance to train-up. BTW this also works with conscript cavalry and volunteer cavalry and such elements.

Gray Fox wrote:To maintain this number, each turn a HQ unit dedicated to this purpose would need to receive 7 new militia and train them for ten turns to first experience level (or fewer turns if they acquire an experience point or two normally). So that would be a total of 70 militia ( 7 each turn for 10 turns) stacked with the HQ to maintain the rate of 7 trained militia per turn. The trained militia would be moved out to say seven garrison divisions at Richmond, NO, Charleston, etc. These would replace the upgraded regulars that could be used elsewhere. Thus the CSA should be more than able to match the Union training rate with McClellan, et. al. of 6 militia to regulars per turn.


No. First off, every element has a 75% chance of gaining 1 XP per turn through field training. The Training Master Ability of HQ Units explicitly provide 1 XP to every element in the stack they are in, whether the got the game mechanics 1 XP for that turn or not.

If for simplicity we assume a set of militia elements in a stack with a HQ Unit will always gain the 1 XP through game mechanics, plus 1 XP through the HQ Unit, it will take 5 turns for the militia elements in this stack to each gain 10 XP and thus reach EL 1 and be eligible to train-up, at which time each of these militia elements with EL 1 has a 7% chance each turn to train-up.

That means, if there were 10 militia elements in this stack with an HQ Unit, after 5 turns you might expect for 1 militia element to train-up to a Line Infantry element after 5 turns.

You could do all this training in one stack somewhere, like in Richmond, and this is where organising this gets to be lots of work. You can start out just building Virginia militia units and training them up. VA probably get a whole slew of them in her pool (I'm not about to go looking it up at this point)--because generally VA has the largest build pools of the Confederate states in the game--and you can build them all in Richmond, which makes things easy.

But once all the VA militia units have been built--and this is your proposal, to have a huge number of them training--you will have to rail them in from other states, or have other HQ Unitis for this purpose in other strategically positioned locations, which means extra costs for extra HQ Units.

Then you have to consider, whether you want to build [Inf Inf] units with the trained-up militia elements, because you have to combine them before they train-up. Once trained-up, you cannot combine them. Since this method of training militia, GF, is based on the random chance of militia elements training-up, you cannot plan which elements will train-up when. So if you combine two [Mil] to a [Mil Mil] and have the good luck that one of them trains-up, you could wait out the war waiting for the second to train-up as well. Of course having an [Inf Mil] unit is better than having two [Mil] [Mil] units, but not nearly as good as having an [Inf Inf] unit.

This is where what I described in using a leader with the Training Officer ability is IMHO far superior to simply waiting for militia elements to randomly train-up.

Gray Fox wrote:That might be five Divisions in Richmond in an Army or Corps with 14 militia in each Division (two turns worth of 7) stacked with the HQ. This way the CSA player would only have to check the Division whose militia hit first level each turn. The trained militia might move to garrison Divisions guarding the coastal cities where they would eventually upgrade.


In the long run, you will gain Line Infantry elements to be used where you see fit, but it is far from an optimal strategy. The South is really screwed in this sense, because the Union gets two leaders very early in the game--with a third shortly after--, which you nearly never want to use for anything else really--Halleck, McClellan, and Sigel--, three if you consider that Sigel is a 3-1-1 and could be replaced from field command by any other standard 3-1-1 leader, of which the Union will have in abundance. So these you can have have sitting around in a few strategic locations churning out 6 Line Infantry elements per turn for the cost of 6 militia elements. The Union can plan the training exactly and build [Inf Inf] units at will, within the noted limits, and since the Union can plan this so exactly, he can rail them in from any state in the nation, bc they only cost 1 RailTP (Rail Transportation Pool) point per turn per element for railing them in from where ever. The Union player doesn't need to build them all at once to have them all gaining XP and EL to have their chance of training-up optimized, bc the time they are waiting in line to be trained-up by the leaders with Training Officer can be as short as you wish. You just have to keep the queue of mil elements for each leader at a level of a minimum of 2 elements to keep those three leaders in at 100% of their training capacity.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 8:32 pm

BigDuke66 wrote:@Captain_Orso
I don't mind the mixed brigades showing up per event, especially as the Vol/Vol/ltInf can't be build.
But I meant the normal inf/cav/lightart brigades that dominate the unit pool. As I mentioned in other threads; I would prefer to lower their numbers drastically and raise the number of uniform brigades as mixed brigades disappeared rather early in the war.

What you constantly call militia are in my eyes volunteers, at least all the "militias" one can build have only volunteer elements.
The"real" militias, those with an M element, are spread over the map as static garrison that can't be build be the player.

The way you describe combining the units is just what I intend to do, the training officer combined with the possibility of auto upgrades to line infantry should fill my infantry force with additional uniform brigades to augment the rather small pool of uniform brigades that I can build.

@Gray Fox
That the CSA can out train me is worrying but I wonder if the CSA is able to provide these numbers as I guess that their money & conscript pool should be smaller than my, even when pulling the events to raise money & conscripts.


The garrison militia units allocated by the game and locked in a region are state militia, but they are practically the exact same thing as the Vol militia units you can build, which also have their state affiliation listed on them.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 8:37 pm

Gray Fox wrote:I'll give the plan a try this weekend. Some of the volunteer elements could also be combined as Orso posted into pairs to stretch the numbers in the force pool. We'll see.

P.S. It takes 15 experience points, not 10 to train the volunteers to first level, so that would require a 15 turn cycle to train the volunteers. I don't believe that the force pool would support that many militia (over 200).


:blink: You are right! The have 'ProgRate = 15'. I don't know how that got past me :bonk:

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 8:38 pm

BigDuke66 wrote:Well does the gain of 1 Xp by the HQ prevent the 75% chance to gain 1 Xp normally?


No, they work in conjunction with each other. So with an HQ Unit, each element could gain 2 XP per turn.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 17, 2018 8:50 pm

BigDuke66 wrote:I guess I wouldn't combine militia elements with volunteer elements, both have very different values in some spots, for example militias take ages to upgrade as their Prograte is 50 while volunteers have 10.


Oh god, help me in my old age. YES the State Militia garrison elements have ProgRate = 50. IIRC Pocus did this to prevent them from being abused, since they are free units placed on the map per event and cost the player nothing.

On a side note, there is a State Militia unit allocated to the Union in Virginia City, Nevada, IIRC, which has its EL raised twice per event, for what reason, so it winds up with 150 XP(!!), and if it trains-up to a Line Infantry and retains those 150 XP--there is a chance that a unit training-up loses some part of it's XP in doing so--you suddenly have a Space Marines [Inf] unit with EL 4!, but it's still locked in Virginia City, NV :cuit:

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sun Mar 18, 2018 8:47 pm

While much of the XP discussion has focused on Militia/Volunteers, the xp method of upgrading is most efficiently employed on conscripts and conscript cav. Using a Training Officer on a conscript is less effective than on a Volunteer unit, since the gain in quality is much larger because you could have started at Volunteer, skipped conscript and gone straight to Line Inf in one turn. Don't waste your Training Officers' turns on conscripts, especially as the CSA, since you don't have many. Also, conscripts cost the full Line Infantry amount, so you don't get any economic advantage when you buy them either.

Conscripts tend to accumulate in large stacks early in the game, and this is exactly where you want to put your Training Masters (HQs) anyway. The Master can give all of them XP at once, and once the conscripts have their stars they will start to switch to line Infantry without any further effort on your part. In the meantime, they will at least have an extra star, which boosts their stats some (and you will get stars on your non-conscript elements too).

At a 7% chance each turn of upgrading to Line Infantry, the mean time to upgrade for any individual element is 14 turns (1/.07). So if you had ten conscripts with stars then after seven months about five will have changed to Line-Infantry. By mid-'62 you can have most conscripts upgraded to Line Inf. if you are trying for it. This is particularly important in the 1862 West scenario since you have enough turns to upgrade a lot of them but not enough turns that they will all eventually upgrade anyway, like in the GCs.

Conscript Cav are particularly important to manage. Like any conscript they only need 5xp for a star, but the boost to their soft stats from just one star is HUGE, particularly to their Hide and Evasion. Conscript Cav make cav stacks they are in easy to spot and engage, but even one star will make them operationally effective. Prioritize getting Cav Conscripts early xp.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Sat Mar 31, 2018 1:07 am

Building a force of up trained volunteers I recognized something strange, for some turns now my combined volunteers brigades stored within a division were trained up by McClellan.
Strange is that they, although now showing line elements and having a different soldier on the unit counter, retained the militia symbol & state of origin color mark in the upper right corner of the unit counter. They still show the Home Area in the element details window instead of any upgrade path, and also have a drop in their max cohesion when being outside a division, insides the have about 63, outside only 48. That means that the lowering of cohesion when being out of state-of-origin seems to apply only when being outside a division.

Now as it all didn't make much sense to mee, I put some of these volunteer brigades outside of a division and led them train up. The result differs from those trained within a division. First there is no militia symbol & state of origin color mark on the unit counter anymore, there is also no Home Area in the element details window but an upgrade path, finally it doesn't matter anymore if they are inside or outside a division, the max cohesion stays the same(63).

So having these state volunteers inside a division when one of the few training officers upgrade them seem to lead to a dead end.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Mon Apr 02, 2018 10:36 am

BigDuke66 wrote:Now as it all didn't make much sense to me, I put some of these volunteer brigades outside of a division and led them train up. The result differs from those trained within a division. First there is no militia symbol & state of origin color mark on the unit counter anymore, there is also no Home Area in the element details window but an upgrade path, finally it doesn't matter anymore if they are inside or outside a division, the max cohesion stays the same(63).

So having these state volunteers inside a division when one of the few training officers upgrade them seem to lead to a dead end.


Fascinating...

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Mon Apr 02, 2018 8:02 pm

Captain_Orso wrote:Once they have gained their second star (EL 2), they will no longer gain XP through field-training.

Does field training mean only the 75% probability to gain Xp per turn?
Because I see elements with 2 stars and they still gain XP, but they are also together with HQ that has the Training Master ability.
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Tue Apr 03, 2018 1:27 pm

BigDuke66 wrote:
Captain_Orso wrote:Once they have gained their second star (EL 2), they will no longer gain XP through field-training.

Does field training mean only the 75% probability to gain Xp per turn?
Because I see elements with 2 stars and they still gain XP, but they are also together with HQ that has the Training Master ability.


I believe it only refers to the base-line 75% chance of gaining 1XP per turn.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Tue Apr 03, 2018 5:36 pm

Thanks.
It was mentioned that 1 star gives a 7% and 2 a 14% chance to train up, does this continue along this path with 3 stars give 21%, 4 stars 28%, etc.?
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Thu Apr 05, 2018 7:04 pm

I believe it does, but gaining the next EL always requires twice as many XP as for the last EL, so if an element has gotten to EL 2 without training up yet, it will have a lot of time to train up before gaining enough XP an attaining EL 3.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Mon May 21, 2018 8:57 am

Captain_Orso wrote:
In the long run, you will gain Line Infantry elements to be used where you see fit, but it is far from an optimal strategy. The South is really screwed in this sense, because the Union gets two leaders very early in the game--with a third shortly after--, which you nearly never want to use for anything else really--Halleck, McClellan, and Sigel--, three if you consider that Sigel is a 3-1-1 and could be replaced from field command by any other standard 3-1-1 leader, of which the Union will have in abundance. So these you can have have sitting around in a few strategic locations churning out 6 Line Infantry elements per turn for the cost of 6 militia elements. The Union can plan the training exactly and build [Inf Inf] units at will, within the noted limits, and since the Union can plan this so exactly, he can rail them in from any state in the nation, bc they only cost 1 RailTP (Rail Transportation Pool) point per turn per element for railing them in from where ever. The Union player doesn't need to build them all at once to have them all gaining XP and EL to have their chance of training-up optimized, bc the time they are waiting in line to be trained-up by the leaders with Training Officer can be as short as you wish. You just have to keep the queue of mil elements for each leader at a level of a minimum of 2 elements to keep those three leaders in at 100% of their training capacity.


It looks very truly. So I'm surprised there is no mod that adds "Training Officer" ability to some of Confederate officers. The claim that only Union officers were good at training troops has no connections to reality. I'm pretty sure it was done in game as "balance issue" to make life o Union gamer easier (or to assure Union "historic" victory).
But after a very short searching I could name 3 Confederate generals to upgrade them with that ability.
What do you think about those three officers? What do you think about such mod? (I can do it as it's fairly simple editing)

1. Scott Shipp (also spelled Ship, born Charles Robert Scott Ship) (August 2, 1839 – December 4, 1917) was an American military figure, Confederate States Army officer, educator and educational administrator born in Warrenton, Virginia. He was the second superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, briefly the president of Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (Virginia Tech) and led the VMI Cadets at the Battle of New Market during the American Civil War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Shipp

2. Gideon Johnson Pillow (June 8, 1806 – October 8, 1878) was an American lawyer, politician, speculator, slaveowner, United States Army major general of volunteers during the Mexican-American War and Confederate brigadier general in the American Civil War. Pillow commanded a brigade at the Battle of Stones River in 1863, where he performed poorly. Removed from combat duty, he worked mainly in recruiting assignments through the remainder of the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Johnson_Pillow

3. Gabriel James Rains (June 4, 1803 – September 6, 1881) was a career United States Army officer and a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Rains was wounded during the Battle of Seven Pines, and was singled out by Maj. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill for a successful flanking maneuver that turned the tide of battle in favor of the Confederates. Rains, who turned 59 a few days after the battle, was one of the oldest officers in the Confederate army, and it was decided to reassign him to a less physically demanding job. After recovering from his wounds, he was then placed in command of the conscription and torpedo bureaus at Richmond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_J._Rains
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Captain_Orso
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Mon May 21, 2018 5:15 pm

I think the solution is actually in the other direction; not in giving the South more Training Officers, but in reducing the number of Training Officers the Union has.

On a side note, McClellan actually did have the authority to form policy to put a greater effort into training the men under his command. The same goes for Bragg, and in both cases their influences on the armies under their command are historically documented.

Why Halleck, and and of all people Sigel, are given this trait, I have no idea. I do not recall having read that Halleck ever put any special policies into effect in this regard. I might be wrong, but I simply don't recall. And IMHO Sigel simply breaks the mold, being that he's a Bgd. Gen.

I think the better solution, aside from maybe removing the Ability from Halleck and Sigel, would be to change the Ability altogether. Maybe a better solution would be if Training Officer simply increased the XP of elements under their command by maybe 4 or 5, up to a max of 2 EL. This would allow the normal training-up code to do that work much quicker, without such a binary effect (this turn you are raw recruits, next turn you are line infantry regulars).

Creating such a new Ability ought to be fairly simply, as it would simply be Training Master with increased parameters. How well it would actually represent historical events I can only guess, but I think it would be a bit better than the Training Officer Ability.

One aspect I'd love to have in the Ability would be for it to be inherited from an Army Commander to subordinate Corps, which would allow the player to still deploy an Army's Corps while also allowing them to train, but I'm not even sure if that is possible. There are a couple of Abilities which pass traits onto subordinate Corps, but I think giving this trait to a new Ability would require an actual code change in the game engine, so I think it's really just a pipe-dream on my part.

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BigDuke66
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Wed May 23, 2018 2:59 am

If that would be done then the ProgRate for the various elements would have to be adjusted. Currently it's basically impossible that volunteer elements train up, they have a ProgRate of 15 while the the usual infantry element has only 5.
The current "conversion" from volunteer to line element is abstract but if you look at the free Union units of 1x light infantry + 2x volunteer elements that come in at the start of the game then you see that they alone take McClellan at least 6 months to train them up to line level, what does not sound so unrealistic overall.

What could be done is to let volunteers first train up to the level of conscripts and from thee to line level, that takes them longer as the usual conscripts what sounds fine.
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Captain_Orso
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Wed May 23, 2018 10:00 am

Line Infantry have ProgRate 10, not 5. Conscripts have 5, for what ever reason.

I'm not sure volunteers having ProgRate 15 is necessarily a bad thing. I'm not even sure why they ought to be different from conscripts or militia or the other way around. Green/raw is green/raw.

Actually, if there is a difference it ought to maybe be in regards that real conscripts ought not be in the game until the player actually starts conscription. Before that, they are all volunteers, and they probably ought to have a better ProgRate than conscripts, simply on the fact that they are volunteering and not being drafted (motivation and attitude).

But that would require different CC and Replacement pools for volunteers and conscripts, which would require a huge code change.

The real point is, that current the player can pick the units he wants to upgrade first (the ones he's going to give to his best leaders and be most active with, putting them into the divisions of what his most active Corps will be) and they can be fairly quickly upgraded 100% to line infantry, while the rest of his army remains green, to be upgrade later, while being held in reserve. If ALL of an army is training all at the same time and more or less all to the same degree, they ought to all pretty much complete training at about the same time as well.

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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Wed May 23, 2018 4:31 pm

Let's adjust my original plan. Either player creates a pool of 60 militia of Experience Level 1 in garrisons (conscripts may also be used). Four might upgrade to line infantry per turn at 7%. In order to train replacement EL1 militia in that number, an HQ would need to be stacked with about 60 militia of EL 0 for 15 turns (or less if the militia accrue XP's normally as well). These would be staggered so that 4 reach 15 experience points and EL 1 each turn. Four new militia are added each turn to maintain the training rate. A Division's worth of line infantry would be produced about every other month. This would seem possible in the abstract.
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BigDuke66
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Re: Training/Upgrading of militia, volunteers & conscripts

Wed May 23, 2018 6:49 pm

Does the Line Infantry ProgRate of 10 matter? I think they don't train up to elite or do they?

Having conscripts only of conscription is activated sounds fine but indeed huge changes would be needed.

I see it the way that men for volunteer elements have a much lower requirement than conscripts would have. Conscripts are mustered by army officer and declared fit or unfit for duty while volunteers are basically taken unless totally unusable. If that assumption is correct I see the need for volunteers to take longer to train up than conscripts would need.

Currently I don't see a problem with what the player can pick. It's not like I can shift the super brigades to any of the training officers and have an unbeatable force in no time. All that is done are that the volunteers convert to line, 2 each month per officer, because letting them sit around to be trained up just won't work with a prograte of 15. Of course it would be nice to have an evenly training where they all reach the level of line infantry in +6 months or so but the current abstract way is better than nothing.
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