Christian, hi!

Sorry for the long delay in replying.

Yes, there were a bewildering number of Napoleonic firing systems: fire by ranks, fire by whole battalion, fire by half battalion, fire by files, fire by platoons and other variants like the third rank loading and passing the muskets to the second rank.

At one point the game designers have to draw a line in the sand and start abstracting without taking away the essence of the fire combat mechanism.

In Waterloo 3D we are indeed modulating fire combat by the following factors.

*Musket clogging : The longer your battalion fires, the worse it gets. The number of misfires go up, and the reloading time also goes up with musket clogging.

*Terrain height difference between opposing battalions will influence accuracy.

*Stress and fatigue will affect musketry.

*Unit class and training will affect musketry.

The graphics and the AI part are already super-optimised and we felt that introducing another set of variables like rank and platoon firing will over-complicate things.

Thanks for your time and comments.