Light Infantry vs Line Infantry

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Originally Posted by antisocialmunky

I dunno Didz, that sounds more like hyperbole. You have to train the people how to fight right. Give just get anyone a sort and its pretty much a coin flip that that person will be totally ineffective and die.

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My point was that you do not need to train men to fight in loose order, they will do that naturally, all you need to do is teach them how to fight. Therefore, it should not be a technical innovation to enable your men to use loose formation and any unit with skirmishing ability should be deployed in loose formation by default.

As it stands I have skirmish units in the Maratha Army that are useless to me becuase they are depicted in close order and so take equal casualties to their close order opponents even though they have half the men.

It just another feature that worked before but now doesn't.

Line Infantry -

Has twice the number of men as Light Infantry, and therefore more staying power.


Light Infantry -

Half the # of men, much greater range, ability to deploy spikes.


The best use of Light Infantry isn't on the flank or in the center... they are best deloyed where they can stay hidden and snipe from a safe distace. The spikes are best deployed near the artillery or in the woods where trees will obscure them from vision somewhere directly between thier starting cavalry position and your artillery.

Making a line out of Light Infantry seems temping but it just doesn't hold unless you are under ideal circumstance (ie hard cover, uphill).

Consider French revolutionary armies and it becomes pretty obvious that the instinct of untrained or scarcely trained men under fire was to spread out and use cover. No one needs to be trained to use their common sense. What they did have to be trained to do was operate in a formation even if it was an open and flexible formation.

Well I'm getting the hang of this now and have developed Ottoman Column tactic's to make the best use of the way infantry work.

Four Jannissary units in dense column grouped with two units of skirmishers in line with skirmish on.

What happens is that as the enemy approach they get a volley of musketry from the skirmishers which usually provokes them to charge. The skirmishers retreat through the the jannisaries, I order the jannisaries to charge, the skirmishers stop running, and start firing at the enemy in the melee.

So you end up with enemy musketeers (melee defence 4/5) being hacked to bits by janissaries (melee attack 15) and shot by skirmishers. The only thing to avoid is using artillery, which would make mincemeat of everything.

The AI seems to get really confused at having its own expliot used against it, I've even seen Russian Musketeers try to form square. It also works against cavalry if you turn the skirmish ability off so that your snipers keep firing, they seem to pick off the cavalry quite quickly as the jannissary keep them busy.

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Originally Posted by Furious Mental

Consider French revolutionary armies and it becomes pretty obvious that the instinct of untrained or scarcely trained men under fire was to spread out and use cover. No one needs to be trained to use their common sense. What they did have to be trained to do was operate in a formation even if it was an open and flexible formation.

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Um, that time period (which is after the ending of the campaign in this one) featured the "Levée en masse," which was the 1st large-scale compulsory conscripting of the Industrial Age. Napoleon's tactics focused on a combination of massed cannons, cavalry charges, and infantry columns breaking through the enemy line and convincing the survivors to leave the field ... bloody, but effective (at the time: imitating them later led to the horrific casualties of the ACW and WWI).

Skirmishers were deployed relatively rarely, and even then they were recalled and re-attached to the assault column. One theater that saw extensive use of skirmishers (and guerrillas) was the Iberian Peninsula,

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Originally Posted by Didz

My point was that you do not need to train men to fight in loose order, they will do that naturally, all you need to do is teach them how to fight. Therefore, it should not be a technical innovation to enable your men to use loose formation and any unit with skirmishing ability should be deployed in loose formation by default.

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Well, the American Revolutionary army tried that, at first, with their militia. They were copying the tactics that seemed to work during the French and Indian Wars. However, collections of individuals shooting from behind trees and such were generally only useful for harassment, not for taking and holding a battlefield.

Also, fighting in such an "ungentlemanly" manner caused the British troops to take out their frustrations on the unarmed citizenry of the towns they occupied ...

Eventually, the Continentals brought in "Baron" von Steuben to train them in the European style. The rest, as they say, is history.

Not Napoleon. He had a professional army. He meant the revolutionaries in the beginning.

Also, your attitude towards the British is fairly demeaning, if not completely wrong. For one, the whole point of the British campaign was to only target revolutionaries, and not the largely ambivalent populace. Any officer that allowed their troops to ravage a town would have received hefty punishment for blatant disregard for the commander's intent.

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Originally Posted by MikeV

Well, the American Revolutionary army tried that, at first, with their militia. They were copying the tactics that seemed to work during the French and Indian Wars. However, collections of individuals shooting from behind trees and such were generally only useful for harassment, not for taking and holding a battlefield.

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That's exaclty what skirmishers are supposed to do, they are not intended to take and hold battlefields thats what the line infantry is for.

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Originally Posted by MikeV

Eventually, the Continentals brought in "Baron" von Steuben to train them in the European style. The rest, as they say, is history.

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And he taught them close order tactic's, not light infantry tactic's, in fact, the British did the reverse and taught some of their regiments to fight in open order as skirmishers to oppose the guys behind the tree's. The 60th Rifle Regiment which fought alongside the 95th in Spain and Europe was actually formed in America as a response to the snipers.

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Originally Posted by A Very Super Market

Also, your attitude towards the British is fairly demeaning, if not completely wrong. For one, the whole point of the British campaign was to only target revolutionaries, and not the largely ambivalent populace. Any officer that allowed their troops to ravage a town would have received hefty punishment for blatant disregard for the commander's intent.

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Yes, I think that assessment was based upon the Mel Gibson version of the war as portrayed in the film 'Patriot', otherwise known as 'How to teach your children to become murderers.'

'Um, that time period (which is after the ending of the campaign in this one) featured the "Levée en masse," which was the 1st large-scale compulsory conscripting of the Industrial Age. Napoleon's tactics focused on a combination of massed cannons, cavalry charges, and infantry columns breaking through the enemy line and convincing the survivors to leave the field ... bloody, but effective (at the time: imitating them later led to the horrific casualties of the ACW and WWI).
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Yeah cheers but I don't need a lecture on Napoleonic tactics, especially from someone who thinks it was all about assault columns. The point is that soldiers instinctively spread out and protect themselves when they get shot at. They is why they had to be trained to stand shoulder to shoulder and fire in unison, which in any case even trained soldiers could not manage for extended periods of time.

The American example showed as the earlier war of the Seven Wars before that you need both irregular and regular troops, both men capable to stand up in battle and men adept to skirmish. The regular units - or part of it - were also employed as Skirmishers and were usually the better men than the common soldier. However both the fighting styles needed trained men.

IMHO there are two often conflicting tendencies in this ages for no very well trained troops:
a) to bunch up
b) to take conver

The result would be a completely unstructured cloud of men - very difficult to command. An example would be the successfull battles in Tyrol against the French and Bavarians. Through superior positions and fine markmenship they were able to inflict quite stunning victories but were unable to exploit most of them.