Black powder weapons - simulations

[Saphroneth]

I was thinking about how best to simulate black powder weapons in a RTS. Here I'm thinking Napoleonic era onwards, but hopefully the logic I'm using makes sense.




Firstly, consider small arms and bayonet fighting. Let's say you have a unit (unit X) and it's armed with muskets, and trying to repel an attack by unit Y.

Obviously the ideal would be that the weapons have the range, rate of fire and accuracy of their real counterparts... except that would mean that battles last hours. A single regiment of musketeers firing at 2 rounds per minute could end up firing for half an hour, and I'd rather not have to spend a whole day playing the Battle of Waterloo.

So - how can you change things around?

Well, the number of casualties suffered by a unit as it advances are

Distance (i.e. range) * accuracy of weapons / (running speed * refire time)
(Ignoring long range meaning lower accuracy for now).


So if you double the rate of fire without changing anything, you double the casualties taken by the attackers unless you also double running speed, halve the range or halve the accuracy.

Similarly, there's the problem that an advance takes several minutes to close through the range of the weapons... and the problem that historical accuracy is extremely low.

The way I think it's been done in games like Total War is this:


1) Greatly reduce the refire time.
2) Increase running speed.
3) Dramatically increase accuracy.
4) Increase greatly the number of casualties a unit can soak up before it panics.

This combination works reasonably well in producing fast paced battles which look dramatic - but it also has a flaw. Actually two of them, the way it's implemented.
The first problem is that it makes battles look far, far too bloody for a realistic representation of history. The average regiment charging home against an enemy firing in rank volleys is going to be fired at by about two bullets from everyone in the enemy line, in the space of about fifteen seconds, and it's going to end up losing half or more its total strength!

Which leads into the second problem. When a 600 man regiment makes a charge which it may or may not have succeeded at OTL, it would OTL take a few dozen casualties (and likely as not fall back). Here it would take over three hundred, and still has a chance to reach the enemy line with bayonets! That's bloodier than the Somme, and these infantry just kept on charging!


It's dramatic, and looks good, but it's nothing like reality.

So what would be better - how can we reduce the time taken for historical battles without them looking like everything happens in two spectacularly bloody minutes?

Well, I think one useful change would be to try and make sure that a unit which takes a few % casualties IS shaken, possibly slowed and may break - or, at least, make if they do heavily dependent on morale and experience. And that accuracy trends up dramatically as an enemy gets closer...

I think a faster unit speed and a faster firing rate are acceptable tradeoffs - double both and it's not too different from OTL. That would double the speed of an assault without otherwise changing things much.

Or maybe we just need a controllable fast-forward button on the interface.



Much the same logic applies to cannon - with an additional problem. If you've got a regiment of 120 in three-deep lines and it's 5% of your army, taking six casualties due to a single cannonball loses you 6/2400 of your force - or 1/400.

If you have the actual army of Wellington at Waterloo, a single cannonball causing six casualties loses you 1/12,000 or so of your army. So each cannonball represents 30 times the destructive capability of OTL.
This means that Napoleon's grand battery has to be represented by... four guns. Not very impressive!

The alternatives are?

I don't know - any ideas?

 

[Fabius Maximus]

There are a couple of other problems with the Total War method, too. In the first place, it throws off the balance of musketry vs. cold steel (melee charges for infantry are pretty much a non-starter in ETW, since any unit trying to perform one will just lose half its men to enemy fire before it's able to close with them), and secondly, if you're playing the grand campaign armies often lose so many men that they're put out of action after a single battle.

As for alternatives... I guess you could make a game where you ignore the individual soldiers and just track the battalions instead, if that makes sense.

So, say you've got two battalions of 1,000 men each blasting away at each other. Instead of trying to make and track 2,000 separate sprites, you could just treat each battalion as a single unit, with a numerical strength rating working kind of like a health bar. This way you could simulate battles with historical numbers of people without breaking your operating system by trying to keep track of 200,000 separate sprites.

(I tried to make that clear, but I've a feeling I haven't been entirely successful, so if you don't understand just say and I'll try and come up with a better way of putting it.)

 

[Saphroneth]

The mention of bayonet charges is on point - and it brings something else to mind. Morale in video games is not modelled well.

What you want for a good simulation is that:

1) Units which are untrained and inexperienced are extremely fragile. Heck, experienced units can succumb to confusion - I'm thinking here of the moment at Waterloo where both the Middle Guard and the British foot fired on each other, then broke at about the same time, then both reformed.
2) Units can often break simply because they see enemies with bayonets coming towards them.
3) The fact of being fired on - especially if you can see it, with big flashes of flame and the thunder and smoke of musketry volleys - is important to morale matters.
4) A unit being fired on can (and often does) go to ground and refuse to move forward.
and (5) units can be very hard to rally and reform - generally if they return after less than a couple of minutes they're fine, otherwise they'll need to be reconstituted somehow.

 

[Practical Lobster]

Have you played Ultimate General Gettysburg? I think in general that's a game that addresses a lot of your concerns - although it's not perfect and in general artillery is too deadly, I think.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

The mention of bayonet charges is on point - and it brings something else to mind. Morale in video games is not modelled well.

What you want for a good simulation is that:

1) Units which are untrained and inexperienced are extremely fragile. Heck, experienced units can succumb to confusion - I'm thinking here of the moment at Waterloo where both the Middle Guard and the British foot fired on each other, then broke at about the same time, then both reformed.
2) Units can often break simply because they see enemies with bayonets coming towards them.
3) The fact of being fired on - especially if you can see it, with big flashes of flame and the thunder and smoke of musketry volleys - is important to morale matters.
4) A unit being fired on can (and often does) go to ground and refuse to move forward.
and (5) units can be very hard to rally and reform - generally if they return after less than a couple of minutes they're fine, otherwise they'll need to be reconstituted somehow.

I used to do Spanish Civil War tabletop gaming way back in the day, and one of the rules I remember was that if you wanted to charge your unit into hand-to-hand combat you had to pass a morale roll first. Possibly the unit you were charging had to pass one to see if they would stand and fight, although I might just be making that up. Anyway, that would be quite a good mechanism to have IMHO, as it would be a simple way to address many of the issues you mentioned.

 

[Saphroneth]

It's one of the things which forms a big difference between the ACW and other wars of the time (plus/minus) that in the ACW, with no real hard core of well drilled troops to provide the impetus and example, the armies consistently proved unable to push a bayonet assault through the beaten zone.
This is despite the beaten zone being fundamentally unchanged from the Napoleonic period (it'd be longer and worse if the armies of the ACW were better rifle-trained, but they weren't so firing was usually at ~50-100 yards)... and that kind of thing is what would be neat to have to balance in a RTS or the like. (I think it's one reason ACW wars tended to involve so much manoeuvre, assaults which would have been successful if launched by other armies bogged down and failed so turning movements were the ideal.)

I've wanted for a while to be able to play out a version of Gettysburg where either (looking at Pickett's Charge):

1) The defenders are rifle trained, letting them open fire at 800 yards rather than ~100 or less.
2) The attackers are rifle trained, meaning they can destabilize the position from 600 yards.
3) The attackers are able to manage a French-style charge, getting in with the bayonet and taking the line.
4) The defenders are able to manage a French-style advance, so once the attackers bog down the defenders can counter-attack and thoroughly rout them.


They all seem interesting.

 

[Practical Lobster]

Wouldn't one of the big problems remain the lack of smokeless powder obscuring visibility and rendering short ranges and massed volleys the only viable tactics? So even with better training, both sides would only get a few long-range volleys before resorting to the more familiar close-range engagements.

 

[Saphroneth]

Wouldn't one of the big problems remain the lack of smokeless powder obscuring visibility and rendering short ranges and massed volleys the only viable tactics? So even with better training, both sides would only get a few long-range volleys before resorting to the more familiar close-range engagements.

If smokeless powder obscuring visibility was an insoluble problem, then several real battles (Inkerman, the Alma, Solferino, the Indian Mutiny, most of the Franco-Prussian and Franco-Austrian wars) are impossible.

It's a problem when you have troops shoulder to shoulder pumping out smoke as fast as they possibly can into a space fifty yards across. More measured firing and a wider dispersion and longer range is quite capable of producing long range fire from large formations in the black powder age.


e.g. two American formations facing one another 50 yards apart, shoulder to shoulder, two ranks deep and firing once every 20 seconds per man means that the smoke in the area is about twelve shots per minute per width of a man - 24 shots per minute per metre. A British formation sniping at Russians 400 yards away in extended skirmish order and firing twice a minute is producing:
1/2 of that due to the separation, as the smoke clouds don't merge
2/3 of that due to the rate of fire
1/4 or 1/6 of that due to the much wider spacing

So the problem is 10-18 times less severe.

This is borne out by the events at Inkerman, where regiments of Russian troops "melted" under the fire of British formations at ranges of 400 yards or more - for example. Inkerman had the troops firing through difficult visibility conditions... and it wasn't powder smoke, it was rain.

Similarly, a Prussian formation with the Dreyse in extended skirmish order will be firing at an enemy 200-300 yards away and doing it at most twice as rapidly as the American formation - and, again, several times more widely spaced.

If the transition from black powder to smokeless was what made long range fire tenable, then black powder rifles are useless and the standard range of combat would have remained at 50-100 yards until the invention of smokeless. This is obviously wrong - the much more consistent explanation is simply that the American Civil War demonstrated troops for the most part not trained in how to use their rifles properly. (When they had them - something like 10% of the regiments at Gettysburg were armed with smoothbores.)


If asked to conclude that the American armies - almost entirely formed fresh for the war - were unable train troops to properly use their rifles, or that the French, British, Prussians, Russians and Austrians (all professional forces with experience and funding) were doing extensive long range / accuracy practice at different points 1850-1870 despite it being impossible to use it in battle, I'm inclined to go with the argument that says the quickly raised army was not able to completely recreate modern armed thinking in two-three years and get it all right... rather than the idea that five separate Great Powers were all training, fighting and refining something impossible.

 

[Practical Lobster]

I was asking from a position of ignorance, not criticizing. Thanks for the information, that's quite interesting.

What could have achieved this higher level of discipline for the American troops? European advisors on both sides, perhaps?

 

[Saphroneth]

I was asking from a position of ignorance, not criticizing. Thanks for the information, that's quite interesting.

What could have achieved this higher level of discipline for the American troops? European advisors on both sides, perhaps?

The funny thing is that they had every opportunity - for example, George McClellan was in the Crimea as a military observer, and could have instituted the tricky but rewarding Hythe method (or equivalent) in the US troops. The only problem is that he seems to have been more interested in the saddles of the Russian cavalry...


...but there's at least two examples of someone actually doing it. One is Cleburne, on the CS side, who had a copy of the Hythe musketry manual (by 1863) and some experience in the British Army. Cleburne's division had musketry of a high enough quality that the difference was clearly noticeable and the changes were attempted to be propogated through the Army of Tennessee - though the fact it would have taken something like 5,000,000 rounds to train 50,000 troops in a single year of the Hythe course rather made that difficult.


The other is the US Sharpshooter Regiments. These men went through the Hythe-style mill (which is to say, dozens of shots with meticulous records and competition over accuracy and range estimation) and as a result were as good as most British regulars.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

I was asking from a position of ignorance, not criticizing. Thanks for the information, that's quite interesting.

What could have achieved this higher level of discipline for the American troops? European advisors on both sides, perhaps?

A bigger pre-war army would probably help.

As it was, the US army c. 1860 was tiny (the figure of 16,000 is floating around in my head, although I'm not sure if that's true). Normally when you want to increase the size of your army quickly, you use your pre-existing troops as a cadre around which to build your new, bigger army. The US military establishment, however, was too small even for this, so that in practical terms the two sides weren't increasing their army size but trying to raise and train an army from scratch. Naturally, this meant that a lot of corners were cut in their training. If both sides had started the war with, say, 50,000 men apiece, the quality of troops, even new troops, would have been much higher.

 

[Practical Lobster]

It seems to me then that really your best bet is to have the changes happen for the Union, since the Confederacy would never have the resources to implement the sort of training regimes necessary?

Have McClellan pick up different lessons from the Crimea and really start reforming the army. Maybe earlier on someone could pick up one of the early repeater rifles, allowing unprecedented accuracy and rate of fire?

It would be a hell of a different civil war if by 1863, at least in Virginia, Confederate attacks are getting mowed down by skirmishing lines at 600 yards by soldiers with repeating rifles. I think anyone observing that conflict would pick up some radical notions about the advantages of industrial output in warfare.

 

[Saphroneth]

Early repeaters didn't really have unprecedented accuracy - they were basically the SMGs of the victorian era. And the other problem is that the Union was extremely hard pressed to supply enough muzzle loading rifles to its army let alone repeaters - e.g. the Union ordered 10,000 of one type of repeater (I want to say Spencer?) and the arms company asked them to reduce the order to 7,500 because they couldn't make any more, while the Union actually imported more Enfield muzzle loading rifles in the first year of the war than it produced domestic rifles of all types, and would go on to import 436,000 Enfields along with hundreds of thousands of other weapons (mostly in 1862).

The Minie rifle was the state of the art at the time, with breechloaders still problematic and the repeater a niche weapon. (What makes it worse is that the smoke problem is immensely magnified by a repeater - all by yourself you're pumping out dozens of smokepuffs a minute.)

So I'd say that if the Union was armed universally with repeaters - which is unlikely to impossible - they certainly wouldn't be able to use them to mow down Confederate attacks at 600 yards. (Early repeaters used pistol calibre rounds, for example, and had very low muzzle velocities for the time.)

Frankly if one side was trained to Hythe, that's more than enough to make them be the side which wins the war. Hythe trained infantry could completely dominate enemy artillery in range unless that artillery was well handled rifled pieces, ideally in large numbers and screened by infantry.


(Another thing that's hard to model in a game is industrial takeup.)

 

[Saphroneth]

Actually, maybe the model that HOI 4 reputedly uses should be used in the next Victoria game as well. In that, a military formation has training and equipment tracked - so, for example, you can assign a formation a half dozen tanks to train with.
Similarly, in a game which is a good simulation, you could spend a vast amount on a peacetime military and on training them, or you could spend a smaller amount on keeping a 'nucleus' army well equipped and trained on modern equipment and tactics. That way, when you mobilize, you can rely on the training not being diluted too much.

 

[Tripwire]

Could you just speed everything up dramatically, at the same rate? Troops reload faster, they march faster, horses gallop faster, etc etc, and one entire day lasts a couple hours?

 

[TFSmith121]

Cleburne's brigade was no better than any other, as

- snip - ...but there's at least two examples of someone actually doing it. One is Cleburne, on the CS side, who had a copy of the Hythe musketry manual (by 1863) and some experience in the British Army. Cleburne's division had musketry of a high enough quality that the difference was clearly noticeable and the changes were attempted to be propogated through the Army of Tennessee...- snip -

Cleburne's brigade was no better than any other, as witness his defeat at Liberty Gap (where his troops were beaten by both regular USV units armed with muzzle-loading rifles and by mounted infantry equipped with breechloading repeaters), and driven out of a defensible position by small arms fire from US troops fighting dismounted.

This, of course, was par for the course in the Tullahoma Campaign in 1863, which ended in a complete defeat for the rebels. If anything, the army with the most innovative small unit and small arms tactics displayed at that point were the US forces, as witness Liberty Gap, Hoover's Gap, and the results of the entire campaign.

This was also true for Cleburne's efforts in the following campaigns, which included, at the end, his death at Franklin in 1864, as a major general and division commander, while serving, essentially, as a squad leader.

So whatever his troops may or may not have gleaned from his British rifle range techniques, they didn't translate to any real advantage on the battlefield at the battalion/regiment, brigade, division, or higher level.

Best,

 

[Practical Lobster]

Well, as Saphroneth said, it's not as if the Confederacy would have the resources to really implement the necessary training on a large scale. And since I doubt they deployed in the kind of skirmish formations he described, they probably would run into the visibility problems I mentioned.

 

[TFSmith121]

True ... theory (on the range, for example) rarely

Well, as Saphroneth said, it's not as if the Confederacy would have the resources to really implement the necessary training on a large scale. And since I doubt they deployed in the kind of skirmish formations he described, they probably would run into the visibility problems I mentioned.

True ... theory (on the range, for example) rarely trumps practical reality in battle; along with the smoke problem, the reality that the vast majority of the battlefields are not parade grounds presumably has something to do with it.

There's also the minor reality that whatever supposed advantages British Army training and long service enlistments may have brought when it came to shooting down various locals with substantially less organization or industrial spheres behind them in various imperial skirmishes, the reality is when the British actually got into major wars with Western "peer" opponents in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century, they either a) lost (1st South African war, 1880-81); b) won in alliance with other armies that provided the vast majority of the forces involved (French and Turks in 1854-56); or c) ended up mobilizing mass forces of volunteers that overwhelmed their enemies by a ratio of 5-1 (2nd South African war, 1899-1902).

Then, in 1914, the regulars were destroyed as a stopgap to try and hold the line in France and then mass armies were mobilized through volunteerism (1915-16) and then conscription (1916-18), along with mobilization of volunteers from the Empire (1914-18).

God is, as a fairly well known combat commander once said, on the side of the big battalions.

Best,

 

[Saphroneth]

Liberty Gap is an example of what even some good training can do (as are, of course, the achievements of the 1st and 2nd US sharpshooters). Cleburne's brigade at the gap was outnumbered 3:1, but inflicted 2:1 casualties on the enemy (267 to 120 CS casualties).
Cleburne and Liberty Gap:
http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA331812
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=At7YP0j6lAkC&pg=PA84#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://archive.org/stream/03888368.3189.emory.edu/03888368_3189#page/n107/mode/2up



This is nothing like what could be achieved with the full course and the doctrine to go with it (e.g. at the Alma, where a British force stormed up a hill several times higher than the one at Fredericksburg, and - unlike at Fredericksburg - succeeded, indeed inflicted more casualties on the Russians than the reverse.)
120,000 Union vs 72,500 Confederates (1.66 to 1)
61,000 Allies vs 36,400 Russians (1.68 to 1)
325 Union guns vs 260 Confederate guns (1.25 to 1)
132 Allied guns vs 120 Russian guns (1.1 to 1)
Climb at Fredericksburg 20m
Climb at the Alma 117m
Casualties at Fredericksburg: 12,653 Union to 5,377 Confederate (2.35 to 1)
Casualties at the Alma: 3,342 Allied to 5,709 Russian (0.59 to 1)


But the fundamental idea is pretty simple, frankly - it's that a rifle is a weapon which takes training to use properly, and that without that training it's not much better than a smoothbore (which is why the British in the Crimea score ~ 1 hit in 18 shots fired, while the Union - for whom we have better records than the Confederacy - score about one hit in 200 shots fired despite the closer average range of the firefights.)



Of course, simulating that in a video game would basically mean that the side with better training was very likely to win.
Which is... really quite true, assuming even slightly equal numbers on both sides.
So there'd have to be some kind of economic opportunity cost to training troops this well. Probably a time cost too.

 

[Fabius Maximus]

True ... theory (on the range, for example) rarely trumps practical reality in battle; along with the smoke problem, the reality that the vast majority of the battlefields are not parade grounds presumably has something to do with it.

Of course, there are quite good accounts of most major late-19th-century battles, and we know that in a lot of them troops exchanged fire at distances well outside the maximum effective range of ACW soldiers. Maybe your, ah, "theory" that marksmanship training wasn't all that useful ought to take more account of the "practical reality" of troops managing to gun down opponents at distances of 500 yards or more.

There's also the minor reality that whatever supposed advantages British Army training and long service enlistments may have brought when it came to shooting down various locals with substantially less organization or industrial spheres behind them in various imperial skirmishes, the reality is when the British actually got into major wars with Western "peer" opponents in the mid-to-late Nineteenth Century...

"Peer" opponents being opponents who were trained and equipped to a similar standard to the British army, something which rather conspicuously wasn't the case with the American army of this period.

they either a) lost (1st South African war, 1880-81);

The Boers were expert marksmen, so I really don't think they're going to help you disprove the importance of marksmanship training.

b) won in alliance with other armies that provided the vast majority of the forces involved (French and Turks in 1854-56);

The British in the Crimean War contributed 200,000 troops, as opposed to 300,000 Turks and 400,000 Frenchmen -- not the main contingent, but not nearly as insignificant as you imply.

Not that this is really relevant -- tiny minority or not, there were plenty of clashes between British and Russian units, and more than enough examples of the Russians being driven off before they could return fire to demonstrate the importance of long-range accurate shooting.

or c) ended up mobilizing mass forces of volunteers that overwhelmed their enemies by a ratio of 5-1 (2nd South African war, 1899-1902).

See above comment re: the First Boer War. Plus, could you perhaps point to an example of an army defeating a guerrilla force without committing significantly more forces than their enemies had?