North & South: American Civil War 2.0 New Maps, New Units, Bug Fixes, and MORE!!!!

[Slyk]

Hi there, big fan of 1.0. One of my favorite TW mods of all time so far and I play a hell of a lot of TW. Just have a minor suggestion/request for the upcoming 2.0 release.

In another Napoleon mod that I really enjoy, NTW3, one of the more subtle changes they made was both greatly increasing the speed and flattening the trajectory of artillery projectiles on the battlefield. Its actually pretty noticeable and a lot more immersive when cannonballs are flying at a more true to life muzzle velocity and not being lobbed in a rainbow arc towards the enemy at what looks like 100mph or less. Obviously this doesn't apply to howitzers and mortars. Would love to hear your thoughts.

I will look at this more closely. I think that the standard game did this to 'scale' the rate and range and speed of projectiles. I am not sure of the relative values used in the standard game vs. actual muzzle velocity but it is worth taking another look at. I'll put it on the list. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Slyk]

More of the Fort Wagner map. Some shots of in-game testing along with the terrain in L3D and the base/source map vs. the poly terrain view. Also throwing in the new "Coastal" faction corps and units.

Note that I have added the 'Gabionade' feature to the Confederate artillery batteries. These guns are currently using the Parrott gun model as I don't have the skills to make official Columbiad and Sea Coast gun models. The units are set up to the original specs with their ammo, however. You will have the choice of using the Gabionades or not. By using them, your arch of fire is much less, but you will be protected from counter-battery and infantry fire. I had to reduce the parapet in front of all guns as their canister was obstructed at close range, so that is why the Gabionades have been added.

[Gen. Ulysses S. Grant]

um why does it have fort wagner in the 2nd and 7th pics Have the name on the center of the fort and weird drawings??

[Slyk]

um why does it have fort wagner in the 2nd and 7th pics Have the name on the center of the fort and weird drawings??

As I noted in the post, the 'source' image.... I have done this multiple times where I show the source image or survey map that I use to make the maps.... You can see how it lays out and fits the terrain....

[Gen. Ulysses S. Grant]

As I noted in the post, the 'source' image.... I have done this multiple times where I show the source image or survey map that I use to make the maps.... You can see how it lays out and fits the terrain....

ah ok just wondering

[JmCraz8]

Hey Slyk for one amazing job holy smokes this is all beautiful and second thanks for adding Perryville this battle is so overlooked and I can't wait to see it, one of my favorite battlefields to visit and looks like it did in 1862, keep up the great work can't wait to play 2.0!!!!

[Slyk]

Thanks, Jm. I'm trying to finish up a couple 'smaller' battles, like "Cross Keys" etc. so that I can move on to doing the XML for the "Scenarios" for a number of battles, including Perryville. If you look over the battle map list, you will see lots of lesser well know battles, many of which I hope I can get scenarios completed for...but I'm one guy

[Napoli23]

Slyk you had mentioned there mught be a campaign style scenario linear campaign how will that be implemented or in otherwords how is that possible?

[Slyk]

Napoli23: Well, my friend is not able to put in as much time as we hoped and he's the one with the skill to crack the LUA scripting. What we were hoping is to develop a 'Campaigns of...' like that in the base game. Essentially you would play one faction or the other and have to complete the war in a chronological order by fighting and winning each Historical Battle against the AI. IF we have more help, we most certainly can implement an actual "Campaign" similar to that of the base game. "How" is not the issue, it is "Who" can help us do this.

Right now I expect a massive update in content but not as much as I hoped for in scope of broader play modes. We will see. I am one guys doing ALL of this right now and it's getting tougher to do as many hours a week as I had over the winter. Spring brings house and yard projects and and and I would hope to have something this summer, toward September at latest, but that is a matter of getting the bare essentials done. And then, adding in the flavors that I want to do...such as simple things like "Quotes" on the loading screens, updating those to Civil War era quotes. Lots of little things that just make it "better".

[Gen. Ulysses S. Grant]

Slyk you are best Dev 2017

[Napoli23]

Slyke i appreciate this information and your efforts! That Campaigns of idea would be brilliant. Have you tried reaching out to other modders in the community maybe they can give pointers on how to crack that lua scripted code. Regardless your work is the most accurate representation of the civil war. Will you be making a seige of petersburg scenario with trenches and all? Another interesting scenario the siege of Vicksburg?

[Kesto11]

Hey Slyk, I posted in the 1.0 thread about far too many CSA troops wearing Union blue pants. Could this be updated in 2.0 so more units have accurate uniform pants? Also, will this version be more single-player friendly in terms of historical scenarios BAI? In my limited experience, the historical scenarios BAI basically runs the entire army a mile away when defending and does not follow the plan of attack on the LRT scenario. Still very fun to play, but I would like to see the AI attack historically at the start, and then adjust accordingly. It's been a little while, but when I played Scourge of War: Gettysburg, the AI was very good at following the general battle plan and also responding to how the battle unfolds. Given, that was the Vanilla game that was under development over years by entire teams.

Simply put, is this too much to ask for? I am guessing I am asking for a miracle here given your limited time and manpower with this mod. Following the advice given about mods, I do not expect anything, but merely would like to know the scope of capability of this mod.

One other thing. I noticed a 40-50% drop in FPS with ACW 1.0 compared to Vanilla. There is also a half-second or so delay for me between issuing an order and it taking effect. Clearly this mod is more demanding than Vanilla so I am guessing this is normal? I don't really want to drop my settings much because this game and mod are just too beautiful. I can play on high/ultra settings on Vanilla and get great FPS and response times. I have i7 Core 7700 HQ (2.8-3.8 GHZ w/Turbo) laptop with GTX 1060 GPU. I am guessing this game is causing a bit of a CPU bottleneck.

Also, I was named after Stonewall Jackson, so it's safe to say I have an interest in the Civil War

[Slyk]

Kesto: Pants... I can add more options in the variantmodels file... this essentially have 'option' or 'variants' set up for the solider types/models. The only way to get less blue pants would be to make more variants entries for other than blue. Doable. But I am not sure what that does to the memory demands and game load on the CPU. Worthy comment just not sure of the technical demands it creates with me adding more and more other content. I'll look into it because there are a number of similar uniform issues I want to look at enhancing.

Battle AI in Scenarios... the way in which I am able to create these scenarios limits the defending AI. Essentially, you always have to defend. The attacking AI does a pretty good job, I think... evil aggression in many cases. Defending though...forget it. We were trying to crack that and essentially did. However, the guy helping me has trailed off into other stuff. We know how to do it, we just have to program it and it's more or less XML and LUA components. He made the AI defend in particular ways and we 'know' how but it is TIME, a lot of time to do it right.

FPS: In scenarios you are going to suffer due to the number of units. This is not generally a GPU thing but a CPU thing because Creative Assembly developed these games in a dumb-ass way... they are single-core. IF this game or any of their Total War games were multi-core/multi-thread... OMG!!! We could do so much more. Most scenarios have the units at 25-35% of their actual strength at the battle. I had to cut down based on the scope of the scenario, etc. I am developing....was developing this all on an AMD-FX6350 over-clocked to 4.3 Ghz and driving it all on a GTX770. I just did a new build with an AMD R5 1600x but still the same 770 until June or July when I hope to replace that with a 1080ti or whatever the top AMD GPU turns out to be.

SO. Great thoughts and I appreciated them. Keep asking/suggesting and I'll answer the best I can.

Thanks!

[WalterSobchak71]

Kesto: Pants... I can add more options in the variantmodels file... this essentially have 'option' or 'variants' set up for the solider types/models. The only way to get less blue pants would be to make more variants entries for other than blue. Doable. But I am not sure what that does to the memory demands and game load on the CPU. Worthy comment just not sure of the technical demands it creates with me adding more and more other content. I'll look into it because there are a number of similar uniform issues I want to look at enhancing.

Battle AI in Scenarios... the way in which I am able to create these scenarios limits the defending AI. Essentially, you always have to defend. The attacking AI does a pretty good job, I think... evil aggression in many cases. Defending though...forget it. We were trying to crack that and essentially did. However, the guy helping me has trailed off into other stuff. We know how to do it, we just have to program it and it's more or less XML and LUA components. He made the AI defend in particular ways and we 'know' how but it is TIME, a lot of time to do it right.

FPS: In scenarios you are going to suffer due to the number of units. This is not generally a GPU thing but a CPU thing because Creative Assembly developed these games in a dumb-ass way... they are single-core. IF this game or any of their Total War games were multi-core/multi-thread... OMG!!! We could do so much more. Most scenarios have the units at 25-35% of their actual strength at the battle. I had to cut down based on the scope of the scenario, etc. I am developing....was developing this all on an AMD-FX6350 over-clocked to 4.3 Ghz and driving it all on a GTX770. I just did a new build with an AMD R5 1600x but still the same 770 until June or July when I hope to replace that with a 1080ti or whatever the top AMD GPU turns out to be.

SO. Great thoughts and I appreciated them. Keep asking/suggesting and I'll answer the best I can.

Thanks!

Slyk,

I just wanted to Thank You and whoever else has worked so diligently on this project. I dabbled in modifying the game and know how time consuming one small change can be to make. Also as a Historian of the American Civil War I think it's immensely helpful to educate people threw creative new ways like video games so again my hat is off to all of those who have worked and continue to work on this modification.

[WalterSobchak71]

Slyk,

I just wanted to Thank You and whoever else has worked so diligently on this project. I dabbled in modifying the game and know how time consuming one small change can be to make. Also as a Historian of the American Civil War I think it's immensely helpful to educate people threw creative new ways like video games so again my hat is off to all of those who have worked and continue to work on this modification.

Through not threw, sorry.

[Kesto11]

Thank you for the response, Slyk! Again, thank you for your time and expertise! If I had the time and skill set to help you with this gargantuan project, I would. This is such a beautiful work of art and I am thrilled to be able to experience it. I suppose I may have to turn down a few settings unfortunately for smoother gameplay. It is quite unfortunate that the game is not optimized well for multiple cores. I thought I purchased a great machine for this, but at least I know that it is mostly due to CA's limitations unless I want to throw down another $1K for an even better CPU.

Whatever you are able to achieve in regards to the SP BAI, I would greatly appreciate it if you could include that in the release notes so we all know its functionality and limitations. Keep up the great work and thank you again for your efforts and responses!

[Slyk]

I'm working on the battle XML for new Historical Scenarios. My time for the mod is reduced a bit more than I'd like, but still pushing forward. Here are a couple shots from the first 'test' play of the "Perryville 1 vs 1" battle.... about 24,000 men in this and that's too many. I have to trim the Union side. I think the final count will be closer to 16,000 between both armies. Other battles that I have cued up include "Champion Hill", five of the Seven Days battles, Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run and Franklin. IF there is time, I would like to add a few more.

[Slyk]

Kesto: Yes, I had upgraded my PC with first a GPU then a CPU in 2013 for this project. Both helped a little but not nearly enough. That was an FX-6350 and a GTX-770. I recently did a new AMD build with an R1600x and plan on adding a 1080 or 1080 ti this summer unless AMD's new GPUs are at least equal in capability. BUT, I don't think that will matter as the new CPU is barely at 30% running Perryville, noted above. I just think the TW code is crap. I have read in a few reviews of CPUs and GPUs where Total War games are called out for being crap on optimization and after years of modding, I would agree totally. It's a shame because everything else is amazing. We could have butter smooth 20,000+ men battles if only CA had built a multi-core or better coded game engine.

Alas. Here we are. Bigger CPU and GPU help but in the end, lower graphic settings are the best bet. But I don't help by adding more units. The threshold where things go from smooth-ish to lag-ish is around 40 units per side; which you'll see easily in 2v2 custom battles. The AI calculations just take so long because there is SO much to compute ever tick. I was hoping we could modify that tick time as well, say double the time between them, and see if that improved performance. Oh well.

Thanks of the kind words!

[Goatse_Mare]

We could have butter smooth 20,000+ men battles if only CA had built a multi-core or better coded game engine.

Sooooo frustrating to hear this.... Keep up the great work though man. Eagerly awaiting this project's release!

[Kesto11]

I have been able to play more of the ACW 1.0 mod and have very much enjoyed some of the other SP scenarios! Culp's Hill was awesome as well as Antietam Cornfield. For custom battles, I ended up modifying some variables like tweaking unit size, reducing walk/run speed of units and improving the skirmisher units so I could recreate the 300-400 Georgians holding off 4500 Union troops for hours before the federals finally crossed Burnside's Bridge at Antietam.

After playing for several more hours in historical and custom scenarios, I have a couple suggestions for tweaks. I think morale can be improved in Custom Battles because units sometimes randomly route, despite being supported by friendly units. I understand there are many contributing factors, but I have seen a unit of 250 take three casualties and route off the field, even though it was supported by other units. I understand some inexperienced units broke remarkably quickly in the beginning of the war, but this seems too common in custom battles. The morale seems to be much more stable in historical scenarios.

Second, it is way too common for suicidal AI generals to break healthy, supported units. I'm not sure if generals should even have the ability to charge. Alternatively, making their charges less effective or giving units the ability to form square could work. Cav almost never engaged infantry on horseback in the ACW because they would get massacred. In fact, there are numerous occasions of regiments forming square in the ACW, so why not add this ability?

Last one for now: I believe it was Richmond Howitzers units that have on multiple occasions blasted the ground right in front of them and killing off their own crew using the default explosive shell. Ground was flat so I'm not sure what caused this. Seemed to work fine with the "Shell" fire rather than the suicidal "Explosive Shell."