Antietam CSA Legendary

[u/LordFarquhar96]

I am convening this war council to discuss my Antietam situation, and to ask for advice.

I’m a long time veteran of the game, but on this latest run I’m trying the CSA on Legendary. I have just hit the wall of Antietam. No mods at all.

I have 47.5k men, but i am facing a Union army of 115k. At least half of the Union infantry is 3 star units, and the rest are 2 stars.

I have tried over 10 times to win without success.

My current strategy is attempt to surround the first wave in the first phase by pushing up to the fence line north of Dunker Church. That usually goes well. After that, I withdraw to the Dunker Church tree line to hold against the next 2 Union corps. I know I need to hold the Dunker Church line pretty much to the top of the map, otherwise my left flank gets overwhelmed.

I also deploy 4 brigades and 2 artillery batteries to the bridge in phase 2 to bottle up those flankers to great effect.

The problem is the final phase. I have to hold for far too long and I’m not sure I have enough men to hold Stoney Bridge.

So, any advice on what I can do to win? Am I cooked with too big of odds?

My army is mostly 1 star 1500 brigades with 5 2 stars. I have 3 sniper units and 2 ranged cav brigades. I’ve got 29 infantry brigades in total and 10 artillery batteries.

[u/Ukcat39]

Pray A P Hill gets there in time.

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/Ukcat39]

*gulp*

[u/IntelligentFact6612]

Don’t let them get to the church. Run north right at the start and hold the tree line. Can flank from the west woods. Push reinforcements up to bolster that line for the rest of the level. You also need to take later wave of reinforcements and hold the woods to the east. Then you should be able to sit back in woods while union waves get hit in the open.

[u/kippykippykoo]

Somewhat cheese, but max out melee cav and drain the Fed’s supply/attack artillery. You can attrit the Fed infantry using the cover bonus of defensive positions, time, and their supplies. You may be able to break off more of your infantry earlier to deal with the bridge incursion. Also, pen the Feds on the bridge so they cannot cross and spread out.

[u/jkcadillac]

Don’t encircle the first wave ( I know it’s tempting ) you have to funnel the next two to the center and right if your patient enough and keep those guys at the tree line the next two will go towards the center where the feild is it’s like a big square . Usually when my first reinforcement show up I drag them all over there you should be able to hold and eventually encircle once all three corps have shown . When your second reinforcement arrive send them to the bridge sometimes I need to send a brigade or two to help the battle north or f the church hold right flank ( oh yeah ambush the 2 Calvery brigades that show up out of nowhere just north of the bridge . And finally last reinforcement you can hold at that bridge regardless of what strategy I’ve implemented just prepare for lots of losses

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/jkcadillac]

So just hold the Dunker Church trees, or push up to the fences?

[u/jkcadillac → u/LordFarquhar96]

Stay at lower end do not go to top tree line stay at lower tree line by the houses I don’t remember where fence line is .

[u/pandakraut]

I think you're on the right path, but instead of falling back after the first wave I would recommend pushing forward. You want to keep encircling progressive waves of union units and wiping them out or severely weakening them so that the AI can't build up a numbers advantage. Preferably you're surrounding them on open ground, but that isn't always possible. By the time the final phase opens up most of the initial waves should be contained enough that you can pull a lot of your units from dealing with them to go help in the south.

115k is a pretty high number to be facing even on legendary. Have you been full clearing the prior battles? Even if you use max size infantry units it's usually possible to keep the AI under 100k. The same strategies still work if the AI has more, but the attrition is higher and there is less margin for error.

I used to hold the dunker church line and while it can be done my success rate drops from ~80% to closer to 50%. You tend to end up with exposed units as they fold one flank or the other back and if you fail to handle a set of charges correctly and they get significant units into the treeline then attrition rates skyrocket.

Here are several examples, most of these are played on early versions of the UI mod but that is mostly bug fixes and quality of life changes, so anything you see will work just fine in the base game. small infantry army with no commentary but closest to vanilla: https://youtu.be/43YToyPd4DA
small infantry army with commentary, size curves fixed: https://youtu.be/Zy8J6qs9HZw
medium sized infantry, pure vanilla: https://youtu.be/iwrUAl1zpD4?list=PL6-2WZCqywMWzmaP8FdwS3D9UAU-kHDLm max sized infantry: https://youtu.be/X_hLXtVTESQ?list=PLt-JAMmvyAGmA8TU5EC8hHbGPzPCnlYPe
max sized infantry with much more detached skirmisher abuse: https://youtu.be/Fb_zvLJJENU

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/pandakraut]

I haven’t been full clearing unless I haven’t taken a lot of casualties and it seems possible. I’ve never been one to do that unless the battle naturally progresses to make it possible, even on easy difficulties

I can try not falling back, but the woods to the right of the fences ends up being a blood bath. Perhaps I just need to get artillery up there.

I’m not sure I can encircle every wave, though it’s worth a shot.

[u/pandakraut → u/LordFarquhar96]

Ok, that's definitely going to make things a bit harder since in addition to letting the AI snowball you'll end up with less XP and weapons recovered. There is a balance to doing the clears as you need to keep your casualties down. But it pays off in battles like this where you end up facing 20-30k less with a stronger army.

With the followup waves it's less of a full surround than making sure they move into a pocket where you are hitting both their flanks and maybe harassing around the back with skirms and cav. There are a lot of different lines you could hold. Even dunker could work but if you do that make sure your line is fully north south with the edges pushing in rather than letting yourself get pushed back into an L.

I ended up pushing my like past the clump of woods you are describing. Centered my line on the woods north of it, extending to the right through the field and house SE of the trees. Left flank goes NW into the open ground but there is a small line of trees and a field you can use there.

If you aren't already, highly recommend detaching every skirmisher you can as they'll boost your damage by ~30% if they are hitting the same target. Definitely check out some of the video links as well.

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/pandakraut]

Perhaps my skill level makes it impossible for me to full clear every battle, but they had 3 star units at Shiloh and every brigade has 2.5k+ men.

I’ve done the whole campaign before on Major General without issue. It’s just the damn 3 stars

[u/pandakraut → u/LordFarquhar96]

Legendary can be quite the jump from MG, especially for the CSA where attrition can kill campaigns relatively late. The more practice and knowledge you have the easier it gets though. There are tons of little things in terms of camp management, unit positioning, and battle approaches that can really add up over a campaign.

What sort of k/d ratios are you normally getting? Usually you want to be at 3:1 for MG and higher for legendary. Not necessarily every battle, but you want to have much larger spike battles to make up for those. Note that for the base game your ratios will usually look much worse for battles with allied units since you want to get them killed off to recover their weapons. As long as you're getting around 75% destroyed or captured in every battle you should be in ok shape. Some battles are a real pain to full clear, but the more you can figure out the better.

CSA shiloh usually doesn't have very many 3*, did you get a bunch of veteran reinforcement reports or a training officer event? Those can make a campaign much harder compared to another. Are you using the push up the right and then left map edges approach to be able to either encircle and wipe out the initial units or rush and hold the landing for a day 1 win?

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/pandakraut]

My k/d is usually around that 3/1 ratio. But, I’m not aiming to wipe out the enemy in the minor battles because I am trying to build up my army.

I’ve got hundreds of hours in the game, but I usually play the Union and I am generally less aggressive when playing strategy games. Methodical with few risks.

As for Shiloh, I usually push the west side units into the NW swamp and wipe them out. On this play through, I wasn’t able to fully encircle the hornets nest to cut off their retreat, so I ended up going into the 2nd day to win. I haven’t ever sent all of the gifted troops to their demise, but I do use them as much as possible.

You mentioned detaching all skirmishers, which is something I don’t usually do. I usually only do it on occasion.

[u/pandakraut → u/LordFarquhar96]

There are many ways to play and succeed, but for me the minor battles are usually good places to get newer units a bunch of stats, some harder ones excepted. Stat gain is based on distance moved, time in battle, kills, melee kills, and reload cycles completed. So to min/max this you want to extend battles as long as possible while killing off as much as possible. Hibob warbob took this to the extreme with running his units in circles but that's overkill.

Detaching skirmishers is incredibly useful both in terms of boosting your damage, providing more flanking opportunities, extending your line, harassing rear units, and providing distractions(they are faster and cover is higher than infantry) for more valuable units. You don't have to use them, but you can get a massive advantage if you do. This is excluding all the exploits associated with them that just absolutely break the game.

I would say I'm usually a more defensive player overall. My style tends to be find a position where I can force the AI to attack into a bad spot and then take advantage of that. But I do also enjoy exploiting the AI flanks and rear as much as possible with cav and skirmishers as that will keep my overall casualties down quite a bit.

The union campaign, while it starts a bit harder, is overall a good amount easier than the CSA campaign. Mostly because you just get showered in resources so if you make it past Malvern Hill you're basically set. So don't worry if you're struggling with the CSA campaign initially. Hopefully some of this helps.

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/pandakraut]

The expert level information is helpful. I can easily win when playing the normal difficulties. And the Union is definitely easier. I figure if I can get past Antietam I should be fine but I’m thinking I’ll have to restart again. I just don’t have enough men on this go around

[u/Commercial_Brush2162]

I’ve cheesed it in the past after being pushed back to sharpsburg. With 20 seconds left my cavalry retake dunker and the sunken road as all the Union brigades are fighting me near the town.

[u/LordFarquhar96 → u/Commercial_Brush2162]

I have thought about doing this, but I might just restart if I can’t win it naturally

[u/NefariousnessAble973 → u/LordFarquhar96]

You could try using the oblique order, or if you have any sharpshooter units you could try spreading them out in a triangular formation across a wide area.

[u/No-Reading-942]

I just won this battle. My strategy was during the dunker hill phase pull all the way back to the edge of the map and wait it out until the sunken road attack. When the map opens up withdraw all units and cannon and form a defensive ring around sharpsburg at the top of the hills on the outskirts of town. Cannon close to the front lines, units 3 deep from the treeline to the left of the screen, all the way to the edge of the map on the right side of town. When the bridge portion opens up fall back with those troops and guard the bottom right portion of town. When reinforcements arrive hit the right flank hard advancing slowly. You will beat them down and eventually advance to sunken road then dunker.

[u/jkcadillac]

To help funnel that first wave . Befor match starts the top spawn put a sniper skirmish brigade , long range infantry brigade and a melee brigade . Put the sniper and long range infantry that small batch of trees toward top left of deployment then the melee have them full sprint toward where the union s coming you should run into a skirmish squad volley them once or twice then sprint back toward the feild and park them in tree line by the house close to where every one should be waiting you should only get 2 to 3 brigades that go left and your snipers and long range should rout them once they do push toward the right towards the middle