Using Cavalry Efficiently

[Gary McClellan]

Heh, loaded topic here, and a fair bit to digest (and my tactical tips are dubious, I'm actually very limited as a player.)

I'm going to talk more in general about cavalry than the ingame tactics.

Berto asked how Napoleonic Infantry could be "worse" than SYW at holding off Cav charges. That's actually a bit backwards. Cavalry technique substantially improved in (and after) the SYW. During the SYW, the Prussian Cavalry was the best at the massed charge, (and approached the effectiveness of Nappie era.) That's why they actually get an extra bonus above everyone else's cav. Everyone else was considerably less effective.

All of that said, a fair bit of the modeling of Cav in the game is based on the idea that Cav could not assault fresh, good order infantry from the front. If you think about it a moment, that makes sense. The same hedgehog of bayonets that makes a Nappie square effective also works even if a unit is simply in line, so long as the enemy attacks from the front. Then, the gaps between battalions in line were generally small enough to prevent Cav from sneaking in between. So, for the Cav to effectively get away from the bayonet wall, they would have to loop to the far end of the line. Even then, it was common to post the grenadier battalions between the 1st and 2nd lines at the far end to create a box (Look at the Prussian deployment in Gross Jaegersdorf to see a good example of this.) Even at times if the cav got the flank, the rear rank of a line formation could fight off enemy cav (this happened at Minden, if someone wants, I can post up from something one of the soldiers there wrote.)

Then, lets look at the most decisive cav charges of the war(s)

1) Hohenfriedberg (War of the Austrian Succession) This is the biggie, as it's likely the most successful single charge of either war. The Bayreuth Dragoons (double sized regiment) broke the back of the Austro-Saxon forces. How did they do this? They found a seam that allowed them to attack the Austrian flank and rolled the whole thing up. (I'll admit, getting something quite to this scale is hard in game terms, but I've not messed with setting up any WAS stuff.)

2) Rossbach (as someone else mentioned). The Prussian cav first broke apart the Franco-Imperial Cav. However, the F-I infantry was in his horrid, ungainly road column, and ended up "having their T crossed" by the Prussian infantry. While they were involved in that battle (and losing) the Prussian Cav reformed, looped to the flank and attacked that monstrosity in the flank. (See the Rossbach "Infantry Battle" scenario for a setup of this.)

3) Kunersdorf. After a long, hard fought day, the Prussian infantry had been repulsed when the Austrians brought up reserve Cav (I'd have to look, I think some Russians were in it, but this stage was mostly Austrians) and launched a backbreaking charge.

Now, you can argue this is cherry picked, but the point here is that in each of those cases, the Cav was decisive by either attacking from the flank (Rossbach), exhausted troops (Kunersdorf) or both (Hohenfriedberg). (I would want to doublecheck on Granby's charge at Warburg, but I suspect it's more the same.)

So, back to the original question. How do you use cav? Against other cav, then to launch assaults against flanks and D or High Fatigue troops.