Column Formations

[Philippeatbay]

How does the game represent a unit drawn up in column formation?

One of my biggest complaints with the Tiller Napoleonic games is that someone noticed that Napoleonic battalions tended to walk around the battlefield in columns and assumed, incorrectly, that these were the same formations that they used when they marched down a highway.

They weren't. Not even close.

A Napoleonic battalion in column formation has its individual companies in line formation (three men deep and thirty to fifty wide depending on strength), but the five or six companies are stacked one behind the other.

So a bird's eye view would show a formation that was about eighteen men deep and thirty to fifty men wide.

The same battalion in road march formation would be four to six men wide and a hundred or more men deep.

The footprint of these two units is totally different, and there's another key difference: a battalion in road march formation probably shouldn't be considered a formed unit as such, because marching order wasn't a formation that you were supposed to fight in.

I haven't scoured the screenshots to figure out if this is being correctly represented in the game or not, but I did notice one disturbing image of several units that were drawn up two or three men wide and a dozen or so deep. I hope this was a screenshot of units arriving in position the moment before they started changing into line or column.

This is a very fundamental question about formations. By the end of the Napoleonic wars the column was the default formation that you would expect to find a formation in at any given moment: line and square were specialty formations that were used in specific situations.

I should add that I am primarily describing French and continental practise. The Brits liked to draw their troops up in two-rank lines because a man in the third rank doesn't do much besides stand around waiting to replace someone in one of the lines in front of him when they got hit. Napoleon was apparently toying with the idea of switching over to two-rank lines, and probably would have done so if he had stayed in power a few more years.

[Hexagon]

You are right, i suggest a lot of times that for nap engine they can use the REN block formation for the assault column and leave the actual column formation only for movement... like the used in EAW serie were in column you cant defend your self... and remove to the assault option out of assault column and line formations.

Well, i am curious to about the effect of column formation in assault in the game and if is profitable use the formation or not... if i dont remember bad in Waterloo in the french assault over the allied left they use 3 divisions and the brigades form in line BUT with every company behind others... something like a column formation but not the usual one.

[con20or]

SOWWL has a long, slender road march column formation and also a broad attack column.

[Hexagon]

Thanks for the reply and info