Screenies

[Ulstan]

It is a TOTAL revision of history to think that melee combat played much role in that era... most of the wounds were from musket fires and not bayonets. Generals of that time much preferred to exchange fires till one side broke and ran. Doesn't CA have any historians keeping their fantasy games "somewhat" in line with history?

I think that is mostly backwards. Lengthy fire fights are a product of the ACW, and not of the Napoleonic Wars (or any time period before). The primary form of attack up through the Napoleonic Wars was a charge to melee, often using a massed column of infantry (unless you were British). The French were best known for their extremely attack columns but after the the thrashing they received at French hands, even the Austrians adopted a similar formation when they revamped their army in 1809.

Extended firing back and forth was role of skirmishers, and they weren't all that lethal at it. Reading accounts of the battles in the NW, time after time after time the forces are described as advancing, firing a volley, then charging. Sometimes even the defenders wait until the attackers are in range, fire a volley, then launch their own counter charge.

The fact that often their enemies would break and run doesn't mean that bayonet charges were useless, it means they were even MORE feared than musketry fire, and thus likely correspondingly more dangerous. If a soldier is willing to stand and endure musketry fire, but gets the hell out of dodge when a bayonet charge comes his way, the only conclusion you can come to is that the bayonet was a more lethal killing weapon than the musket ball - which for that time period, was true. Muskets were terribly inaccurate, which is why most of the attacks didn't rely on musket fire to get the defenders to move, but rather closed for hand to hand fighting.