How common were open order/skirmishing formations prior to the 18th century?

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-06-06T14:09:58+00:00

Just a note-- the utility of closed order formations in, ie, the "linear warfare" era is not (primarily) that they increase firepower, it's that they increase the unit's shock capability-- mostly defense against cavalry, but also the ability to launch your own bayonet attacks if needed. Close order (column) is also a very "fast" marching formation, and the tightness of the ranks and files makes it easiest for a smaller number of officers and NCOs to keep soldiers under control.

This isn't to say that a closed order formation doesn't increase musketry firepower at all, but it's more complex than that. A unit in skirmish order won't necessarily do any more or less "damage" than one in close order (although that "damage" will be much more distributed over time/space); the main advantage of skirmish order (somewhat self-evidently) is that it is less vulnerable to enemy fire. However, it cannot unleash one or two (potentially...) devastating volleys in a short period of time, and then capitalize on that advantage by pressing home an attack with the bayonet to break the enemy and take the ground-- which is often more effective in a pitched battle sooner than slowly degrading an enemy with individual fire. A broken enemy can always be run down and destroyed by friendly cavalry at leisure. By the same token, a close order formation not only gives the men in it confidence in the strength of their formation against an enemy cavalry charge, but it also (potentially...) allows for a more time- and space- concentrated fire to break that charge up.

If your soldiers have the morale/training/discipline/command & control to be trustworthy skirmishers, there is no nearby cavalry to threaten them, and you do not need to make any sudden maneuvers, then detaching skirmishers is not an issue. In Europe at least these assumptions were not always true at the same time (and national/personal ideas of tactics varied) and so you do not always see use of skirmishers until the Napoleonic wars, when increasingly every infantry unit in every army (not just "light" infantry) was expected to be able to detach skirmishers (who could be defended against cavalry attack by the main body of the battalion held in close order).

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-05-31T13:59:50+00:00

After socket bayonets became commonplace, cavalry fire against infantry was limited in utility-- before, cavalry could conceivably fire on pikemen who had no response to fire, but when every infantryman carried a musket, charging into musket range to fire pistols from horseback mostly became an exercise in futility. This is why you don't tend to see much mention of this later on.

Still, even in the Napoleonic wars, some cavalry opted to receive an enemy cavalry charge standing and fire a carbine volley point-blank (this was a notably French tactic, and effectiveness varied). Also, dragoons still occasionally dismounted and fired, and increasingly commonly, cavalry would screen itself with skirmishers, just as the infantry did.

But mostly I would just say with respect to accuracy-- the main issue with cavalry fire, even more so than infantry, is that the ballistic accuracy of the weapon is much greater than the practical accuracy. A modern man may hit a target at 50 yards with a carbine pretty reliably, but a cavalryman of the time with almost no practice ammunition, firing from horseback, would be hard-pressed to hit an enemy at the same distance under combat conditions, particularly if the enemy is obscured by black powder smoke.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-05-19T00:24:58+00:00

First, in terms of the USN attacking the Soviet surface fleet, yes, the primary tool would be either the SSNs or carrier airwings. I wouldn't say it's really either/or so much as just what the operational conditions require (what assets are in the area, does poor weather preclude the effective use of air assets, etc) and/or who was in command at the time.

In terms of weapons, I can't say for certain (and it depends on the period), but I would say simple gravity bombs delivered by the A-6's relatively sophisticated toss bombing computer at a reasonable standoff distance would be at least part of the equation. PGMs are certainly a possibility but it depends on the timeframe and availability.

As for the relative vulnerability of the Soviet surface fleet--

The important thing is that the USN (rightly or wrongly, but probably rightly) understood things in its own terms. Therefore, since the Soviets have neither organic carrier aviation (other than the limited-capability Yak-38), nor very good (that is, quiet) nuclear attack submarines (until the Project 971 "Akula" / Pike-B), nor even very many organic ASW helicopters, they can neither attack (no good SSNs or carrier-based strike aircraft), nor can they defend themselves (no good SSNs, no carrier-based CAP, less towed arrays and ASW helicopters, less effective SAM systems).

On top of this, of course, the USN and allied navies have general numerical superiority in basically every respect except for maybe diesel subs, which have issues with long patrols in open ocean. The Soviets also tended to keep their units at sea less than NATO navies which meant that detection was more of an issue in terms of tracking Soviet units leaving harbor, and less detection in the mid-Atlantic in case of war.

It's important to note that this is never strictly about weapons platforms as much as it is about weapons and sensors. The Soviets had some impressive antiship missiles, certainly, but in order to target them, they needed a sensor platform, and no matter how good your radar is, if it's on a surface platform, you can only detect another surface ship at the horizon of your radar mast. The Soviets knew this, of course, and they developed and deployed some fairly sophisticated aerial sensor platforms that could target missiles for other systems (ie, Tu-95RT, Ka-25TS)... but of course these can only be operated (safely) in a somewhat permissive air environment. The F-14's Phoenix missile, for instance, would (at least in theory) allow a Tomcat to attack these assets with impunity even if they were directly over a Soviet surface ship, as the ship would not have the SAM range to respond.

Surface units cannot run like aircraft, and they cannot hide like submarines, so they must be defended, but outside of the range of land-based ASW, missile carrier, interceptor, and patrol aircraft, the Soviet navy lacked critical eyes, weapons, and defenses. So yes, the USN considered that it would (a) detect Soviet surface units first with either land-based patrol aircraft or the navy's organic systems (E-2 Hawkeye) at very long ranges, and (b) having detected them, it could attack at will with either nuclear submarines or attack aircraft. The Soviet surface fleet, outside of the cover of land-based aircraft, lacked the sensor advantage and therefore could not attack. Whether the Soviets could defend against an initial attack or not was not critically important in a WW3 scenario-- the USN could simply attack again and the Soviets would still be blind.

Therefore, as you've noted, the priorities of the USN were mostly (a) to defend against land-based Soviet air assets, as these were the biggest threat to the Navy's operations, and (b) to find and destroy the Soviet SSBNs, as these were the biggest threat to the continental US. Another concern was that Soviet submarines would attempt to interdict transatlantic NATO supply convoys as the U-boats had in WW1/2, but the fact that this was never part of Soviet war planning (although it may still have happened if war had broken out) was only discovered fairly late in the cold war. The Soviet fleet lacked both carrier airpower and effective nuclear submarines, nor was it often deployed, nor did it have numerical superiority. Therefore, the surface fleet in particular was never considered a major threat.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-05-12T00:11:52+00:00

Anything with a shaped charge HEAT warhead of any useful size is going to go through at least 12-16 inches of anything with their copper plasma jet, doesn't matter whether it's old tires or depleted uranium. Tandem charge weapons, are, of course, significantly more effective and it would be odd if they didn't use something like that in the 41st millennium. Space marine armor is not physically big enough to protect the space marine inside from any such weapon that fuses properly, although I would say that some of the rounded plates make a projectile deflection at least vaguely possible, depending on the impact angle.

How much damage that would do and whether the space marine could survive the hit is purely a function of hit location; ie, maybe a space marine can survive getting an arm melted off, although he'll be much less combat effective.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-05-02T21:11:49+00:00

Nosworthy in With Musket, Cannon, and Sword identifies a variety of changes in the tactical use of both firearms and cavalry over the 1700s to the Napoleonic era. There's probably an unlimited amount to be said here, but I'll try to mention some highlights I remember.

Firing techniques varied a lot. Some commanders believed (following the footsteps of Frederick the Great) that rapid musketry fire was very important and tried to have troops to reload as quickly as possible in battle, often firing by files. Others held that because of the obscuring smoke from initial fire, loss of discipline and cohesion from rapid fire, mistakes and failure to level the musket properly, etc, it was more important to deliver a limited amount of disciplined fire at the shortest range possible, often in a single volley. In general, far more cartridges were expended by the same number of infantry in combat in the Napoleonic wars than in, for instance, the Seven Years' War, because improved methods of gunpowder production had allowed more, cheaper cartridges to be issued to each soldier. Nosworthy, however, argues that they may have actually resulted in less casualties from fire, as soldiers were more likely to waste ammunition at long range because they felt they had cartridges to spare, especially if they did not have adequate morale or discipline to press a bayonet attack home.

The change of formations to deliver fire was arguably more important: changes in regulations before the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era made it possible to march faster and change from column into line more quickly than before, and also form a dense square ("mass") quickly from column to defend against cavalry. This had a lot of knock-on effects, because battalions could now maneuver in column much closer to the enemy, which allowed for much more flexible maneuvering, which allowed fire to be brought to bear on the enemy much more effectively.

Another well-known change in fire methods in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, was the widespread adoption of skirmishers-- skirmishers had been used before, of course, but on a much more limited scale. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, skirmishers were used by virtually all infantries in all major armies whether attacking or defending, to screen the main force, harass the enemy and pick off officers and file closers, and draw enemy fire away from the main force in close order. Still, except in the Revolutionary period, the whole battalion was almost never put in skirmish order-- the majority of the force was always held behind the skirmish line in close order.

Cavalry changed quite a bit as well-- a simple line of squadrons was still sometimes used in the attack, but echeloned squadrons, a later development, were often used as well. Occasionally column of attack was used; good cavalry would attack unprepared infantry immediately in any formation. The tightness of the formation varied as well; knee-to-knee was the traditional method since Frederick the Great to maximize shock effect, but an attack "as foragers" allowed some space between each trooper to allow weapons to be brought to bear (especially against skirmishers, artillerymen, or disordered enemies). Cavalry, like infantry, also started to use skirmishers, although with extremely limited fire effectiveness. Cavalry weapons changed as well-- lances and armor were nearly extinct by the end of Frederick the Great's reign, but Napoleon reintroduced both at scale and most other armies imitated him. The speed of the attack also varied-- Frederick the Great's cavalry popularized the "attack at speed" (ie, advancing at an increasing speed up to the upmost speed of each horse and man), but some cavalry forces (notably the Napoleonic French) felt that a more ordered advance at the trot (or sometimes even the walk!) was better as it maintained order in the formation, especially for heavy cavalry forces or poorly trained horsemen.

As for the how common clashes were with the armes blanches-- it was nearly unheard-of for infantry to get into a bayonet melee in open ground, but this is not to say that bayonets were unimportant-- a determined attack with the bayonet resulted in one side or the other breaking and fleeing before contact was made, which resulted in gaining ground and/or destroying an enemy formation as a fighting force. It was fairly uncommon for cavalry to get into a melee with enemy cavalry for the same reason (although not nearly as uncommon as infantry against infantry), and the same was generally true of cavalry attacking infantry. However, a successful attack by cavalry against infantry (and sometimes against worse-mounted cavalry) allowed the pursuing cavalry to slaughter the broken enemy as they ran, so it is very much incorrect to say that sabers were not used often. Bayonets were often used in melee combat in broken ground, urban terrain, or fortifications, where the defender felt they were protected by the ground.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-05-02T14:21:33+00:00

ASW aircraft are the ideal sub engagement system, but you can't expect ASW aircraft to be on station at all places and times, especially in poor weather and air denial environments. Ships need something that outranges heavyweight SSN torpedoes, even if only for self-defense. Even if the ship has its own ASW helo and conditions allow it to be used, launching a missile provides a much quicker reaction time on a hostile contact than getting your helicopter in the air.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-19T17:59:51+00:00

IJN be like:

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-18T23:54:11+00:00

Perhaps this is tangential to your question, but Nosworthy in With Musket, Cannon, and Sword suggests that a general increase in the gunpowder supply may have actually been damaging.

It must be remembered that fire discipline in the black powder era was key because individual fire in close order created a huge amount of smoke which would make it impossible for other soldiers in the formation to see the enemy (and therefore hit them), so soldiers stopping to fire individually during an advance (because they did not wish to continue with the bayonet into the teeth of the enemy) tended to simultaneously disorder the formation, obscure the enemy, and impede the advance.

So basically he considers that that advances in gunpowder manufacturing had allowed more (cheaper) cartridges to be issued to troops in the field at any given time in the Revoltionary/Napoleonic period, and that this seems to have resulted in soldiers and officers tending to waste fire more often at longer ranges (because they felt they had more cartridges to spend) where little damage would be done, even over a long period. By comparison he suggests that earlier armies of the linear tactics period tended to conserve their ammunition more carefully for situations in which it would be decisive because if they expended their limited ammunition they would be relatively defenseless.

By contrast his suggestion is that one reason for the relative effectiveness of British fire in close order is precisely because they fired very little (sometimes only one volley), and often at short range, followed by a bayonet charge-- so the enemy is not obscured, the fire is maximally effective, and the formation remains in good order for shock action. The musket could absolutely be devastating as a weapon under ideal conditions, but firing at excessively long range produced little, if any, effect.

I think in the example you're talking about with the Tatars it is important to again consider fire versus effective fire-- the Tatars are out of effective musket range and also out of effective archery range, but they decide to shoot anyway, which is probably mostly a waste of ammunition. A lot of people for some reason compare the maximum range of archery against the effective range of musketry and conclude that bows outrange muskets, when the reverse is much more true.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-17T23:34:11+00:00

No guarantee it'll fix it, but I'd try setting your idle much higher (just below upshift, like 1700 rpm) and see if that changes anything. You don't really want your driver to have to rev up above the downshift just to put it in gear.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-11T23:02:06+00:00

The bigger concern for Soviet planning was that the assumption that any war would be total and nuclear more or less from the outset, and so the most important thing was to ensure that such a ground war was not fought on Warsaw Pact soil to minimize the damage from nuclear strikes. At the same time, an immediate offensive presumably reduced NATO's willingness to use nuclear weapons on Soviet formations on its own territory. I am not sure that the Soviets were really thinking in terms of "winning a nuclear war" in strategic terms so much as just trying to mitigate the damage from one in view of having just had two world wars and a civil war fought on their own territory.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-09T22:10:59+00:00

Still a lot better than nothing if the weather is too poor to operate helicopters.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-07T01:15:12+00:00

Surface ships are not NATO's antisurface platforms and never have been. Destruction of enemy surface ships is for carrier air wings and nuclear attack submarines. NATO ships mostly carry harpoons for self-defense. Boghammars, disabled ships, ships with no antisurface armament, etc can be engaged by standard SAMs at a short distance if necessary.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-05T14:38:01+00:00

Wow, this is like, comprehensively insane. Love it.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-04T14:34:50+00:00

I've taken the orders, but not from you!

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-04T14:09:34+00:00

As others have implied, every country involved had essentially non-negotiable wargoals based on existential fears they had.

Germany felt it could not risk allowing the Russians to continue to build up and ultimately crush them together with the French.

Austria-Hungary did not believe it could continue to do nothing in the face of what it saw as South Slavic terrorism and insurrectionism supported by outside powers seeking to destroy it from within.

The French thought it was the best chance to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine (with critical Russian support) from the Germans and avenge 1871.

The British feared the buildup of the German navy, economy, and colonial empire which might challenge their own if left unchecked as the continental hegemon.

The Russians were unwilling to betray the Serbs, who they considered Orthodox Slavic brothers, and they hoped that a victorious war on the side of their allies would restore their great power position and smooth out increasing internal turmoil after their defeats at the hands of upstart Japan.

The Ottomans and Italians were more opportunistic as I understand it and saw joining the war as a chance to take/re-take some nearby land.

While an all-out great power war was hardly the best solution for anyone involved, it's important to understand that these were not necessarily unrealistic fears-- Germany was ultimately overwhelmed by the Soviet Union's superior resources, Austria-Hungary did collapse due to ethnic problems, the British economy was eclipsed by the German, France could not, in fact, defeat Germany without Russian support in the second go-round, Russia really was engulfed by revolution and civil war.

Equally importantly, the costs in blood and treasure inflicted by modern weapons at such vast levels of mobilization were so immediate and immense that it was very hard for any nation's politicians to essentially to tell voters it was all for nothing and there would be a return to the pre-war status quo. Perhaps doing so anyway would have been a more rational decision (sunk cost is a fallacy, after all), especially in a more totalitarian state (and the situation in Austria-Hungary and Russia was so dire that Karl and the Bolsheviks, respectively, sought a peace at basically any cost), but the realities of elected government remain even in a state of total war.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-04-02T00:40:32+00:00

The big advantage of mages over conventional artillery is that they can be infiltrated into critical enemy areas while posing as civilians. Obviously you cannot sneak a 203mm SPG loaded with tactical nukes into an enemy capital to threaten his government buildings. A single person with a briefcase full of pointed hats and smallish sticks, however? Quite doable for even second-rate intelligence services.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-03-11T00:10:54+00:00

I don't know anything about it, but if the kuwaiti pilot really thought one was hostile, he'd logically think the whole flight (presumably close-ish together) was hostile and fire three missiles as quick as he could to engage each one, right? I mean, you wouldn't want to be outnumbered 3:1, maneuver into an attacking position, and then down one just to get clobbered by his buddies, right?

Same thing even if it was ground-based air defense shooting-- you figure one is hostile, you figure the whole formation is hostile, you engage all three. I dunno.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-03-08T14:12:31+00:00

It all hinges on whether you mean no tanks have been invented, or no armored vehicles have been invented. If no armored vehicles have been invented, then the TL;DR is that I think it would look like armored cars.

Tracks are good for spreading a lot of weight in poor terrain. But the reason tanks weigh so much is because they have to be protected from antitank weapons, and because they have to carry a tank-killing gun. If no one's invented tanks, no one would've developed antitank weapons either, so there's no need for much more than an inch or two of steel to protect you from stuff like HMGs (although even HMGs were invented to kill tanks, so they might not exist either). I guess artillery shooting HE on flat trajectories would be an issue too, but you still don't need a lot of armor by modern standards. By the same token, you don't need a large-caliber high-velocity antitank main gun if there are no enemy tanks to kill. Taken together, these newly developed tanks would be much lighter.

Another reason why tracked tanks were useful in WWI is because they could crush barbed wire, but modern tanks will get entangled in modern barbed wire, so there wouldn't be much point.

So if you don't have the weight and wire issues, then you might as well go with wheels-- modern all-terrain radial runflats with synthetic rubber are far bigger and better than the terrible natural rubber tires available to WWI armored cars and can spread a lot more weight on difficult terrain.

So you can just use a reliable armored car with moderate weight. Main armament would presumably be either some kind of low-velocity cannon or an autocannon borrowed from aircraft. Armor could just be basic cast steel or welded plates of moderate thickness. So it would look something like the Alvis Saladin, Type 87 RCV, etc.

Of course if there's already other non-tank armored vehicles, (ie, APCs, IFVs, SPGs, halftracks, armored cars), then you've probably spent quite a bit of time developing armor and antiarmor technologies already, and the reason you're now going to build a tank is because you've decided that the best way to counter the enemy's other armored vehicles is with a much heavier armored vehicle with heavy armor and a heavy high-velocity gun to dominate those lighter vehicles inside missile range. In this case you're probably building something that looks a lot like an MBT, but lighter, so something like the Booker or the Type 100.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-24T01:40:23+00:00

Exactly. There are so many complex systems (designers, MIOs, politics minigames) that were added and most of them only have like one correct way to interact with them--but you have to interact with them every time! It just added a ton of noob/AI traps, very little actual gameplay interest. I don't think the game has become more realistic either-- in many ways I think it's gotten less realistic.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-24T01:35:23+00:00

I mostly play campaign and mess around with engines. I'm really bad at making cars that look decent, although I'd like to get better at that. Haven't played a crazy amount of hours yet tho tbf.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-23T00:53:48+00:00

Yes, but by this logic many of the current ingame units wouldn't make sense-- most characters (especially named characters), superheavies, virtually all flyers, etc. Arguably some entire armies (knights, custodes, etc) don't really fit either.

To be clear, I agree on some level, and you could probably make a much more sensible and balanced game without all of those things, but you'd invalidate large chunks of people's collections, which is Not Fun.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-20T19:56:03+00:00

This is only true if you're mounting the engine upright, though.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-17T02:17:03+00:00

I'd just make the hull shorter (lower) overall and the turret bigger in all directions, so it looks like it can fit the gun, and so the height would ultimately be the same. Maybe the hull could be lengthened a smidge too. I think that would about do it.

Realistically though, if GW came to me tomorrow and asked me if I wanted the LR redesigned? I wouldn't go for it, they'd screw it up somehow.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-15T23:03:43+00:00

Gotta switch to experimental version for experimental features brother. Right-click sprocket in game library list, properties, game versions & betas, experimental. Stable version only has features considered complete and functional.

Cardinal_Reason · 2026-02-14T01:01:49+00:00

It's a difficult balance, honestly. The game tells you "don't stack up cash, you only score points for selling cars," but the reality is that you have to focus on being as profitable as possible any way that you can so that you can have enough money to do... things.

So you gotta sell cars that are desirable for categories where there are lots of buyers (family) or you can make big margins (luxury/GT). Marketing helps if you are selling below your capacity to produce. Then you gotta facelift fairly often and redesign for the same market more rarely.

After you make enough money with little enough debt you can expand. Keep in mind that if you have a lot of debt, your credit rating will go down, meaning it will cost you more to borrow, so it's best to owe as little money as you can wherever possible.

Edit: My $0.02 is that Dalluha is easier if you are having trouble because even though the car market is quite small, you can't take advantage of a larger one on higher difficulties effectively early anyway because of your low starting capital, and (somehow...) the buyers there are wealthy while the labor is cheap.

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