Custom battles allows players to fight on many of the historical battle maps included in the campaign, as well as a number of maps that are exclusive to custom battles, using all the main factions that are available in the mod. There are also numerous historical generals to play as, for both the Union and the Confederacy, along with a brief biography describing their service during the American Civil War. Included in the list of playable characters are two regular private soldiers, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb, whom the player can choose if they wish to play as a soldier with a rifle rather than a general. There is also artillery in custom battles with a limit of one gun per side (having any more than that causes bugs), as well as flag bearers and bugle
calls.



Some important things to be aware of:

• You should never play the "Battle" game mode, because it does not work properly. You can't choose whether to be on the attacking or defending side in that game mode, the AI on both sides will just charge by default, and since it is basically a worthless game mode, I haven't even bothered working on the entry points for it, so don't bother trying. You should always choose to play either "Siege (Offense)" or "Siege (Defense)".
  
  
• The three classes of troops available are the same as in Native M&B: Warband; infantry, archers, and cavalry. "Archers" and infantry both consist of standard infantry troops, and cavalry is just cavalry. Most maps don't really suit to the use of cavalry, but you're free to play around with it and see what works for you. You can use the sliders to determine what percentage of your army is made up of what type of troops, and you can have a maximum of 500 soldiers per side. If you have trouble with performance on any of the maps using large amounts of troops, I recommend lowering it to 200 vs. 200, or lower, depending on how good your system is at handling higher numbers of troops.
  
  
• All infantry, including "archers", are assigned to the second group (skirmishers) by default, so you will only command one group of infantry in any given battle. Although it is not intentional that all infantry troops are assigned to the second group, it ends up working out ok as this will essentially simulate you being in command of a single regiment. Cavalry and artillery are assigned to their own groups, however, so do not give orders to everyone, especially because if you give orders to the artillery, the crews may leave their cannons and join with the infantry group.
  
  
• You should always set the defenders to be 30% infantry and 70% "archers", including when you are playing as the defenders. This is because setting the defenders to be 100% infantry will result in all the troops spawning in a massive group from two entry points, and will ruin the flow of the map and the way it is meant to play out. You may even want to avoid giving movement orders when defending, because the AI will end up leaving all of their defensive positions to form into one single group.
  
  However you may want to give orders for the troops to form into a line when defending on some of the maps that have a few of your troops ahead of the main defensive line as skirmishers, so that they can fall back and rejoin your main group before they are all killed. You may also want to set the attacking side to be 60/40 or 50/50 when playing defense, because this will make the attackers' line more spread out rather than having them all spawn from two entry points, but of course you're free to experiment with different settings and find what works for you.
  
  
• When playing as the attackers, you can do it 50/50 if you want, since you will be commanding the troops, and constantly on the advance as the attacking side, it is not a concern if all of the infantry spawn from two entry points in big groups. They will leave the big groups they spawned in and form into a single line once you issue a movement order.
  
  
• When commanding your infantry group, you should always set them to form into four rows if you have more than 150 - 200 men, otherwise the troops will end up clumping on the ends of the line because the AI can't all fit into the formation when using two or three rows with that amount of troops. If you go into a battle with more than 200 troops, the AI will clump at the edges of the line regardless of if they are in four or five rows because there are simply too many of them to fit into the formation.