mixed order and amount of skirmishers

[duc de limbourg]

I saw that in mixed order, one third of a battalion must be fed forward as skirmisher. What is the background of the one third. Britsh battallions only had 1/10th, French 1/6th as lightskirmishers. I know that maybe more men could be fed in but 1/3rd?
When also having light battalions, rifles etc the british could have almost 50% in their skirmish line; imho much too much.
Also, when considering Austrian/Russian troops is this a little bit high.
How do other interpret or handle this?

[Big Al]

The game is abstract and therefore the figure is just for the sake of convenience. I mean, a real unit did not consist of just 24 or 36 men did it? 1/3rd tends to allow for a couple of bases to be placed in front of the main body of the unit. For example, most of the units used in the photos in the book consist of 6 bases of infantry. Each base has 6 figures on it, making a total of 36 figures . 1/3rd of this is 12 (sorry for the basic maths lesson, no insult intended) which would allow a player to base 12 figures either individually or in pairs to place in front of the rest of the unit as skirmishers. If you didn't want to base them individually, then you could just put two bases out in front. It is as simple as that, no other reason.

[Alan Charlesworth]

BP covers circa 200 years of history. In that time there were wide variations in the number and effectiveness of deployed skirmishers.

BP is not a detailed set of rules that concerns itself too much with the level of granularity that you refer to. The Mixed Formation in the rules is a generic representation of units that throw forward skirmishers.

If you want a bit more detail you can easily add it to the rules.

If say you had 1805 French v Russians/Austrians you could ban the Russians from forming into Mixed to reflect their relative ineptness at skirmishing. Alternatively you could let the French re-roll a missed shot or have an extra die. You just need to be careful about the change in the odds that you create. For instance one extra die with say 4s required for hit and save is a 25% chance of a casualty and 17% chance of Disorder, on top of the basic chance in the rules. These are significant odds shifts.

Remember, in the Napoleonic period all nations went through wide variations in their skirmishing ability. So one set of factors would not be correct even for a single nationality. If you want that level of detail you need to look at rule sets such as General de Brigade or Republic to Empire for example. I prefer BP for most of my Napoleonic wargaming because, I like the command system, they are fast playing, great for large games and multi player, give reasonably good outcomes without obsessing over process and are easy to use.