I imagine that depends on whether the zombies are as brainless as the people who resurrect them.
Watching the first, I was struck by a thought on the level of discipline shown by the British regular regiment. When facing a mob of farmers and whatnot, the formation almost looks machine-like (I realise we are talking about a pre-industrial revolution battle). A thousand men strung out in skirmish lines, or hiding behind cover, does not look as “big” as a thousand men standing shoulder to shoulder. The massed ranks can inspire fear on those not (or inadequately) trained to face them.
Never mind.
You can’t reload your weapon prone. These were muzzle-loaders. For a long time everyone know that breechloaders would allow tremendous tractical flexibility, except they couldn’t make breechloaders that wouldn’t explode in your face.
And early weapons were muskets, not rifles. They were hugely inaccurate. In the modern era we’re used to the idea that you see the enemy, you point your weapon at the enemy, you pull the trigger, and he falls down dead. Except with early firearms this was not the case. Your bullet would fly in the general direction of the enemy, but it would only hit a particular guy you were aiming at by blind luck. And ranges were short, so you couldn’t shoot at anyone you could see, you needed to get a lot closer to have a chance. Thus the “don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!” advice. You need to get really close before you fire because if you fire from far away you’re going to miss, and then it will take you a while before you can reload. And by that time they’re probably charging at you. So if two lines are marching towards each other, the side that fires LAST has a huge advantage, not the side that fires first.
And this is why you have the apparently nonsensical to modern eyes tactic of officers screaming at their men not to fire, all while the enemy is charging at them. With modern weapons you’d open up and massacre the charging enemy. But they didn’t have modern weapons, they had single shot muzzle loading muskets. The reason you told your troops to hold their fire is because they’d get one shot, and the best time to shoot was at point blank range.
Of course people used terrain and height advantages, this is elementary tactics. But if the enemy is sitting on the high ground behind defensive works you don’t have to march up and fight against him, you can stay back. A battle only occurs when both sides agree to fight. So you can’t hide behind defensive works unless the enemy absolutely needs to kill you. If he can wait, or go around you, he will. He doesn’t have to fight unless he wants to. And while you’re sitting behind your works, he’s out there stealing your goats, burning down your houses, and raping your wives.
As for charging “carefully”, well, you can do that–march deliberately up to the enemy and then attack them. Except while you’re marching slowly towards them, they’re shooting at you. So if you’re going to charge, you march up to just outside the range of their weapons, then you run as fast as possible towards them. The goal is to remain in weapons range for as short a time as possible. In the early gunpowder days this could mean they only get one shot at you before you’re on them with cold steel. If they’re lucky, maybe two shots or three shots, as weapons improved the killing zone grew larger and charges became harder and harder. Of course, if you’ve got horses then you can charge a lot faster. But if they’ve got pikes or bayonets your horses won’t charge into a wall of spears, horses have too much sense. The primary mission of cavalry wasn’t to charge headfirst into the enemy, it was to charge into the enemy’s rear, or while they were running away. THEN the cavalry would massacre them. But a frontal cavalry charge was suicide.
I can assure you that the people fighting in these armies wanted to live, they weren’t suicidal. The whole propaganda machinery talking about how brave soldiers never retreat and face death without flinching and obey orders without question and so on was propaganda to convice scared men to fight. And if the other side’s soldiers are a bit more brainwashed and fight a bit longer than sensible men would fight, and your side has sensible men who run away from danger, your side is going to get cut to ribbons when you run away.
Because once the men are down, it is impossible to get them to stand up again in any coordinated and timely fashion. It disrupts the formation, and gives the enemy an opportunity to charge without fear of a counter volley.
When they were defending, they always tried to occupy advantageous locations. But when you’re the attacker, you don’t have that luxury.
There’s also the problem that broken terrain prevents you from maneuvering effectively. It gives you an advantage in static defense, but it often makes a flexible defense and a counterattack impossible.
They Hussites tried that in the late middle ages. It’s a horrible idea. First, you have to build hundreds of shielded carriages. Then you will need animals to drag them. Once you have them, your strategic mobility is gone. You can’t traverse any terrain that isn’t suitable for the carriages, and even on optimal terrain your speed will suffer. Lastly, it confines your army to a defensive role.
Well-trained professionals. The ability to stand your ground under fire was one of the things that made elite units stand apart from green recruits. If you stand firm and trust your fellow soldiers to do the same, you have much better chances of surviving.
Slings are terrible in the confines of closely packed ranks. You would need to space the men so far apart that the total frontage would triple or even quadruple. That, in turn, would mean that the density of your firepower would diminish by as much. Even worse, your army would be extremely vulnerable to cavalry charges.
Sometimes they would change those combinations for variety purposes.
/nitpick= The quoted statment can be misleading. A firearm can be a muzzleloading rifle, as well as a smoothbore breachloader.
The “Kentucky” rifle was a muzzle loading rifle, discussed in the first part of this wiki article, available during the French & Indian War and the Revolutionary War. The rifling made reloading even slower than the smoothbores.
And it took almost six months for someone to come along and claim they’re smarter than professional soldiers used to be, just as I predicted it would.
Everything you’re suggesting is a silly idea. I mean no offense; you aren’t an 18th century general so it’s not to be expected that you’d have good ideas of how to fight wars back then. Read my post about 10 back and Apollon’s detailed explanation for why these are bad ideas.
But what needs to be emphasized, again and again, is that a musket is not a rifle. They are both firearms but they are used in totally different ways. You do not use a musket the way you use a rifle for exactly the same reason you do not use a rifle the way you use a 16-inch battleship gun; they are very different weapons, used by different people, in different ways, to accomplish different ends in types of warfare that are very different.
Zombies with battleships would be pretty damn scary.
The problem with games like Starcraft is they do not model what is probably the MOST important elements of the battlefield.
Morale and Command & Control.
If you and I had relatively equal armies and you spread out in an concave arc like that what I would do is carve into your center and break your army in 2. THAT alone would probably dispirit your soldiers into running and, if not, make controlling your army to do anything remotely coordinated would be much harder.
The Center is probably more important than the flanks for this reason. Assuming both sides have strong centers, then the battle is influenced by what happens on the flanks. If you can turn a flank you win…however, if you weaken your center to do this…you are flirting with disaster.
There have been generals whose whole career was based around the strategy of ‘throw yourself at the middle and break it’. It’s simple and easy to try. Getting your army coordinated to do all sorts of flanking, spread out stuff is hard.
That’s pretty well the plot of The Reality Disfunction. 
You’ve never actually read any Kipling, have you?
Kipling may have been patronizing as hell but it was more “I’m better than you so I have an obligation to help and protect you” rather than “I’m better than you so I’m entitled to be the boss and have the best of everything”. Kipling saw racial superiority as a burden not a privilege.
LOL. Good point.
While I’ve never actually done it, I also imagine it’s a challenge to load a muzzle-loader while on the ground. Pouring powder down the barrel seems unlikely. Handling the priming rod is also awkward. I imagine that would greatly decrease the speed of reloads.
Remember, the strategy was to have 3 or more ranks of troops. Each rank or row would fire as a volley. So the first line would fire, then kneel. While they begin reloading, the next line would advance between them, take aim, fire, then kneel. Then the third line would advance between them, fire, kneel. Repeat. Lying down makes advancing in that manner impossible. Volley fire concentrates firepower, but rank fire means you get faster volleys, in trade for smaller volleys.
Say a well trained crew can reload in 2 minutes. You can either have 1000 men fire 1 volley every 2 mins, you can have 500 men fire 1 volley every 1 min, or you can have 250 men fire 1 volley every 30 seconds. Which is most appropriate? Might depend on the engagement. On the other hand, if you fire off all in one volley, that 2 minutes everyone is reloading the enemy engages in a charge with bayonets. Plus there’s that morale factor of taking incoming fire faster than outgoing fire. “Damn, they’re getting off 4 shots to every one of ours.”
You have no idea.
One thing that keeps puzzling me in threads like this is how people say archery training was extremely time consuming, and that a musket got you a fucntioning soldier in a few weeks exercises. Yet, the thing that blows most people’s minds is the discipline demonstrated by soldiers in those battles in waiting for the enemy to come so close, and not routing. Kind of contradictory.
Lines didnt seem to break that much during those times (a good example is the American Revolution where militia troops used to rout very easily, compared to British regulars). You cant say that a musket will give you a working soldier with very little training, and reconcile that with the amount of training and drilling it must have taken to field soldiers who wouldnt rout at the first charge or volley fired against them.
Weren’t most new recruits placed in already formed units? So they were surrounded by soldiers who already had been through battle and wouldn’t break, and would most likely bayonet the recruit next to them if they did try to break & run.
I remember Sharpe spending lots of time on training his men to quickly reload their muskets. Hey, here’s a passage from one of the books!
I’m not much of a military buff but Young Sean Bean was pretty impressive. Not that there’s anything wrong with Slightly Older Sean Bean…
Discipline was often instilled by extreme ruthelessness in administering harsh punishment, and relied on a resonably small cadre of officers and NCOs. Not sure how long this would take to administer the message “if you run, we will tie you to a post and beat you to death”, but I’m willing to bet it was less than the time it took to develop the huge muscles necessary to work a longbow.
While true, there was a good reason for this. Most of the militia were armed with hunting rifles, which took longer to load than the muskets used by infantrymen. So militiamen panicked when charged with bayonets because the British could be on them before they could get reloaded.
Daniel Morgan figured out a way to deal with this problem at the battle of Cowpens. He put his militia out front, had them fire off a couple of rounds and then retire behind the regular infantry. (For good measure, he made sure they were fighting with their backs to a river, to prevent any all-out skedaddling.)
There’s a good discussion of this in The Road to Guilford Courthouse.