viking123 wrote:Under the current rules CS only gives protection to the file it is next to. Thus if my cavaliers charge it is 2 dice at 4's and two at 5's for the carbine armed BG with CS. It gets an overlap from the CS in melee which I might be prepared to match if I have an overlap on the other side of carbine armed BG.
I don't know how other people use CS under the current rules, however, when I use them with my Swedes I either take the minimum 2 and leave them hidden in some terrain as they are a liability or I take 4 of them and put a CS BG on either side of a mounted BG; either a carbine/pistol horse BG if I want to maximise firepower or a hvy arm superior pistol/pistol horse BG if I want a tough group. Therefore the problem of only 1 file being unprotected is not an issue in my army.
viking123 wrote:My other concern was the fact that against infantry the carbine armed BG with CS gets 4 dice - one on a 4 and 3 on a 5. Yes under the current roles at short range they will get 5 - 2 on a 4 and 3 on a 5. However, under the current rules my infantry might be able to fire at the CS with one dice at long range and two at short on 4's so can kill the CS. Under the proposals I can not kill the CS so all my dice are at the mounted BG on 5's.
When only firing with 1 or 2 dice, killing CS who get a +1 on their death roll is not a high probability. Now, you get to concentrate more dice on the mounted, giving you a better chance of forcing a cohesion test or killing a mounted element. When the mounted goes, the CS goes too. There are few historical examples of mounted with CS taking on infantry - they nearly always faced enemy mounted. The only example I can think off is the Imperial musketeers lining the ditches at Lutzen - it is noted that the Swedish mounted suffered from this fire. Eventually the CS shot were detached from the mounted and drove the musketeers away using superior firepower.
viking123 wrote:When you are looking at the issue of how commanded shot worked in real battles you also need to clarify the number of CS markers a players is allowed under the army. Currently an ECW Parliamentarian army is allowed 0 - 4. As under the rules a CS BG is made up of 2 Medium foot that means an ECW Parliamentarian gets two CS BG's. This could be interpreted to mean that an ECW Parliamentarian can have 0 - 4 CS markers rather than just 2.
The current proposal is to allow the same number of markers as the number of elements (i.e. 0-4 CS markers in the example above). The enables more BGs of mounted to have CS which is a better simulation of what happened historically where quite a number of mounted units would have had CS. e.g at Breitenfeld and Lutzen, the entire front lines of Swedish cavalry had CS.