Hal, interesting that you should be switching to terrain blocks. Several of the old crowd in Fort Wayne/Elkhart are doing the same, myself included. To me it makes sense. If the game is even 1:5 or 1:10, let alone the usual 1:20 or more, we are more likely to be dealing with farmsteads, small villages, blocks of buildings, or even towns than individual structures where door and window placement or number of stories are critical. The only conspicuous exceptions I can think of are the Granary at Aspern-Essling, and chew house at Germantown--not much for 150 years of horse & musket warfare. Obviously blocks of built-up areas can look prettier and possibly be easier to store safety. One important caveat obviously for skirmishes and role-playing games, we need not only individual buildings but lift-off roofs and internal structures. We do need to think the conversion through, though, and decide what a built-up area represents, how big a garrison it can hold and how that garrison should fight. I have seen relatively recent professional' rules specify how many buildings represented a village and how many a town, and how many battalions each category could hold. This is simply not satisfactory without at least a range of building sizes, and some acknowledgment that some battalions are twice the size of others. a built-up area should have a capacity in men or stands for a specified size. Anything else places one at the mercy of the worst sort of rules lawyer. Which lets me segue into my 'areas of ignorance". I've seen a lot of ink spilled over the width and depth of a Napoleonic file and the effective range of a smoothbore musket. Some of that ink was spilled to good purpose. some arguments were settled and others at least influenced by more facts. now let's try some different questions: Garrisoning Built-up Areas How many soldiers were needed for an effective garrison of a given area in different eras? I've seen nothing on this. a few suggestions. The Alamo was certainly undermanned. Blenheim village was stuffed past all utility. Hugoumont was perhaps a little undermanned. For myself I have tentatively declared La Haye Sainte "just right and decreed that my terrain blocks of 10 or 12 square (about 500 for 25mm 1:20) will hold a garrison of no more than 30 castings/600 men. My sample is much too small, however. Could other smoothbore players help with known perimeter/areas vs known numbers of defenders, with any comments on the "rightness" or otherwise of the fit? Surely this changed in later warfare. Can the fans of such periods give their examples and suggest their own conclusions? Observation About every other year, someone quotes the artillerist's companion on visibility with the naked eye. but commander's eyes were seldom naked. Does anyone know anything about the power of telescopes/perspective glasses available to general officers from the ECW to the FPW? The only hint I have available is an ad offering a replica of Nelson's telescope, and describing it as 25x. If that's correct, and if corps and army commanders had similar optics, then a soldier three miles away--on a clear day and with no obstructing terrain--would be about the size of a 5mm soldier held at arms length--i.e. visible right down to facing colors. Makes sense to me, especially since I'd already concluded on the basis of anecdotal evidence that a Napoleonic general officer could identify infantry battalions/cavalry regiments at perhaps three miles off on a clear day from an elevation. As for identifying regiments or nationalities-well, obviously infantry in covered shakos and greatcoats with cased colors were a little trickier than Highlanders or Old Guard with colors flying, but tentatively two miles. I have, however, not even this much of a guess for anything pre- or post-Napoleonic. Does anyone have facts? Skirmishers I think the uses and abuses have been covered pretty well, but a) How dense could a skirmish line be without simply being a sloppy line? My impression is that Peninsular War British, with perhaps one skirmisher for six or eight in line, were near the practical maximum. If more men were available, they would be fed in as replacements instead of thickening up the line. Can anyone confirm or contradict this? b) Granted that some entire battalions were deployed as skirmishers, if a battalion kept a skirmisher screen ahead of a formed body. How far ahead could they go? And was there a minimum distance necessitated by keeping the battalion's front clear? I have an impression of effective musketry range for the maximum--say 150 yds for the smoothbore--and maybe 50 yds represents the point where skirmishers must be recalled as more an obstacle than a help. Can anyone provide evidence from regulations or memoirs? What do we know about the size of combat formations as opposed to the strengths of regiments? If you look at the larger battles of the ECW, regiments over 1000 are commonly divided into two battalions, and regiments smaller than 500 tend to be amalgamated. Von Steuben's drill manual makes this explicit. units smaller then 80 files (160 men) are to be amalgamated, and units larger then 160 files (320 men) are to deploy as two battalions. In the Peninsula, Wellington sent home or amalgamated units in the 300-400 range, but doesn't seem to have an upper limit, as some regiments were in excess of 1000. We know some French 1814 battalions were only about 100 men. Were they deployed as such? Information please! Back to MWAN #108 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com