Screenies

[Ulstan]

Again, the numbers of casualty speak for themselves.

No, they really don't. Casualties admitted to hospitals are not representative of casualties as a whole. For one thing, dead people aren't admitted to the hospital.

Your reasoning is that muskets were the main form of death dealing in the NW because about 70% of hospital cases had musket wounds, and that therefore melee combat is not to be considered, as it caused fewer hospital cases.

If your reasoning is correct, we may as well get rid of artillery and cavalry from the game entirely, because they also caused fewer wounds than muskets in the admitted hospital cases.

Attempting to close to melee was an incredibly common tactic for attacking infantry in the NW. That the enemy so rarely let them do this doesn't mean that tactic wasn't important or that it didn't happen, any more than the fact cavalry couldn't usually break formed infantry meant that cavalry was a useless and non-important aspect of the NW.

And Napoleonic wars are speaking from a different era; yes, french army under his leadership have used more aggressive, unconventional tactics.

Not really. There's more or less a linear path of accuracy and deadliness of firearms. The better and better firearms get, the less and less effective melee charges become. Melee charges and cavalry pretty much ruled the day when muskets were still in their early stages. In the Napoleonic eras they were still very important but muskets could also cause a lot of damage. By the time of the ACW rifled barrels and percussion caps had made things like cavalry and bayonet charges virtually suicidal.

As an aside, this is why I think the ACW would be so incredibly dull for a TW game - you have essentially infantry in line and artillery and that's it. NW has our arms of combat, artillery, cavalry, formed infantry, and skirmishers, and all were incredibly important and potent in their own ways on the battlefield. Not only that, infantry would adopt many different formations for many different battlefield situations!