Tactics Questions - Line and Column, Stacked or Not Stacked

[TytusDeZoo82]

Well, we already have the best ever. There's nothing else out there, i think, to compare, at the operational level, even taking into account these comments.

I think how you arrange things to encourage players to follow historical tactics is, indeed, very complex.  Melee has to have some extra punch - because that's what it achieved, historically. Difficult to arrange that without arriving at this situation.  The rule changes in WPW are a good move.

Partly, the issue is to do with unrealistic recklessness about losses, I believe. The scoring system and the fact that it's not real (of course) encourage very unrealistic persistence in the face of heavy losses. All my games end with losses very much higher than the historical losses. There's not very much incentive to preserve life, and, this being so, you might be more inclined to go for a brutal melee attack, over and over, rather than less dramatic shooting.

The melee attacks can be a bit of a lottery, compared to shooting, and if this was real life, that isn't a lottery you would want to play. Today, for example, in an Austerlitz game, I experimented attacking 2 disordered, retreating French columns in a town hex by shooting at them with two units (from behind, out of line), and by melee with the same 2. Over four runs I got different results for the melee, but shooting nearly always produced around 30 casualties (from around 800 good-order men shooting in line into around 800 disordered men in column, from behind and flank) for no losses. Melee attacks could be very dramatic - up to 80 casualties, but always for high losses, sometimes more losses then casualties inflicted.

So there IS an incentive there to line up and fire and take no losses, and go slower. The problem is that if I had been attacking good order units like that (and in clear terrain, perhaps) then, as I said above, I would have lost out, because they could have turned and done a melee attack into my line, which would usually be a safe bet. Then I would have been very much at a disadvantage, disordered in line.

But as I say - I'm far from an expert. I'm sure there's something I'm doing wrong.

Hehe okay you convice me to to buy some title from Napoleonic Battles. I will treat melee like a full asault and fire combat like a careful advance. Do you think that Republican Bayonets of the Rhine or Marengo will have this new rules what WPW have?
We don't know completely how this things looked in napoleonic times at last.