Why did I lose this battle??

[Granatenwerfer]

Hello,
please look at this screenshot. I actually lost the battle as CSA (defender) against the mighty USA.
I was well entrenched.
It is completely double dutch to me that I lost this battle.
What was the reason? Any ideas? Click on the image to enlarge.
Thx.

[Blood and Thunder Brigade]

With an entrenched Johnston and 16,000 men vs Banks and 24,000 I'd fancy my chances of a successful defense any day of the week. Did Johnston withdraw? If not, hold your ground and hopefully Banks will attack you again and you can bleed his army dry and set yourself up nicely for an overwhelming counterattack. As it is, you stand a good chance of victory if you attack Banks now, particularly with the losses he sustained.

[Granatenwerfer]

I don't know if my General, Johnston, did withdraw. Probably yes, because this is the only explanation for me to lose such a battle. Although my army hasn't lost any ground.
My foe got more losses in men, my army inflicted more hits and more cohesion losses on him. The postures of my General were defensive/defensive. Maybe it had been better to order defensive/hold at all costs?

Unfortunately, in the next turn Gen. Banks did not attack again.

[Nikel]

From time to time you will find battles results you do not agree with.

But this is a strategic game and you have to consider it as the leader of your side, and your generals sometimes will...

[Blood and Thunder Brigade]

Maybe it had been better to order defensive/hold at all costs

I can't say I've ever used that defensive posture lest it turn a bad situation into a disaster.

[psanick]

Complementing what Blood and Thunder Brigade and Nickel said, yes, the outcome of the battle sometimes doesn't match what we imagine. I like to think that these types of battles are tactical defeats (which we don't control in the game).
The most important thing is that you have not lost national morale.

What we control in the game is at the strategic and operational level. Therefore, despite this "tactical defeat", you had a strategic victory. With a smaller number of troops, you caused a large amount of losses to the USA. Furthermore, as the friend above said, now Banks's troops are in a difficult situation, which over time will increasingly lose battles and troops, and especially supplies, in consecutive battles, leading to liquidation if they do not retreat.

I also don't advise using "order defensive/hold at all costs", especially playing with CSA. Instead of a "strategic victory" that you obtained, the opposite could have happened, obtaining a tactical victory, but at a cost in men and materials that you as CSA cannot incur. With the CSA it is always better to survive to fight another day, while at the same time inflicting significant losses on the USA.

[pgr]

So I noticed in the screen shot, the Union force was organized into 3 divisions, while your force was still in a bunch of brigades. The Union CP cost was 12, where as yours looks like it could have been a lot higher (esp if you had a bunch of other loose units that we would have had to scroll down to see.)

I bring it up because if you had busted your CP cap, that will nerf the stack's power level. The game does a retreat check before each combat round, and it is primarily comparing the power difference between the two stacks. If it's big, the smaller side will try to retreat.

I'm betting you could have stuffed all your elements into 2 divisions, (CP cost 8) you would have hung in there. That said, the win loss calculation is a bit odd. The important thing is that you didn't loose any NM.

[Xeja1]

It is both easy and difficult to understand why you lost.

The easy answer: You lost because your army retreated before theirs.

The difficult answer: You need to learn the combat mechanics. Individual elements take cohesion damage and rout. Especially when you have many loose elements in a stack, like in the early game, a single element can by chance fail several moral checks, rout, and then by chance again the rest of your army can fail moral checks and rout, triggered by that first element.

Remove loose elements from your stacks, do not use low cohesion/moral elements like volunteers in your stacks, and increase the cohesion of each element as much as possible, to avoid stacks routing due to bad luck.