Overview
Tired of your recruits constantly screwing up? Tired of your regulars also constantly screwing up? Maybe YOU are the problem! Here are some tips on how to check yourself before your regiment becomes a wreck.
The Basics
This guide isn’t for casual pub leaders. This is for those interested in not being an awful regiment leader. If you’re not in a regiment, join one or form your own, because it’s more fun to play as part of something bigger than yourself.
A line should quickly and efficiently perform maneuvers as commanded by their leader.
If the line moves too slowly, they may fail to escape dangerous situations.
If they move quickly but devolve into a giant ball of flesh, they have painted a giant, easy target for the enemy to shoot at.
Regular trainings are necessary to grease the moving parts of your regiment. If you haven’t trained in a month and half of your line forgets how to do a wheeling maneuver, that’s on you.
If your soldiers complain that your trainings are boring, make them less boring. Ask your soldiers what they think would be fun to do, and add those fun activities after you run through your maneuvers and are satisfied with their performance.
Left, Left, Left Right Left
How often do you say Left when you mean Right and Right when you mean Left? Once in a while is understandable, but if you do it with regularity, your regiment is going to be in trouble.
Are your soldiers supposed to turn left and retreat towards cover, or are your soldiers supposed to turn right and advance towards the enemy firing squad? While some soldiers may be on the same thought wavelength as you and go the correct way, most will do what they see everyone else doing, and some will do explicitly what you say.
If you say the wrong thing, it is a matter of luck whether the line: 1) follows you the correct way, 2) gets confused and mulls around and eventually realizes what you wanted, or 3) goes the way that you said to go. When an enemy line rolls up on your flank, quick and decisive maneuvering is necessary, or else you’re line will be reduced to corpses. Mulling around or going the wrong way = corpses.
If you say the right thing, the only reason anything would not go perfectly would be if your soldiers aren’t listening to you; perhaps their music is too loud, perhaps you said it too quietly or forgot to press your push-to-talk button, perhaps someone is talking to them in real life, or, worst of all, your command was correct but inherently confusing (covered in another section).
If you do accidentally say the wrong thing, correct yourself as soon as possible.
If you need help with your Lefts and Rights, treat it as a skill and practice it. If you’re too proud to admit it to your soldiers, have them run around behind you while you practice your various directional commands, correcting yourself when you screw up. If you’re not too proud, let your soldiers know what you’re going to practice, and maybe they’ll think of some interesting and fun ways to help you practice it. They might have their own issues with the same thing and might benefit too from such practice.
Keep It Simple
When deciding how you want your soldiers to execute a maneuver like moving from a single column into two columns, take some time and think of as many ways to do it as you can. Ask your officers, your NCOs, even your recruits, if they have any good ideas for how to do it.
Now that you have a list of ways to execute the maneuver, keep the simplest ones, and eliminate the more complicated ones. Then, try them with your soldiers! See which methods happen the fastest and with the least mistakes. See which methods confuse your soldiers. Ask them which method they like best.
If you must insist on having a complicated maneuver, be sure to not only train it well, but also be sure to explain why the maneuver must be so complicated, when there are obvious, simple ways to do it.
Standards and Confusion
Commands should be standardized within your officer corps. If you say ‘left wheel’ and your Lt. says ‘wheel left’ that’s fine, but if you say ‘line to my left’ and he says ‘wing left’, you might want to consider having a chat with him. Your soldiers will need to know what both terms mean, know they they mean the same thing. For each variation in commands, all of your soldiers will need to learn and remember a new command. Maybe your soldiers like it that way too, and can handle remembering what each officer is trying to say. If not, consider standardizing the commands throughout your regiment.
Some regiments I have been in required soldiers to wait for ‘march’ to be spoken before executing a maneuver. Within those regiments, some officers followed this rule, others did not. Sometimes we forgot to wait for ‘march’ and were scolded; other times, we waited for ‘march’ and were scolded. Pick one or the other. If not, expect mistakes to happen, and don’t blame it on your soldiers.
I was once in a regiment where the officer insisted that a left wheel started from/pivoted around the right end of the line. This is awful. Please never do this.
You wouldn’t say ‘forward march’ and expect your soldiers to press S and back up. Forward means forward. Left means left. A call of ‘left wheel’ or ‘wheel left’ should direct everyone’s attention to the left. The enemy approaches from the left side, and the line pivots to the left around the leftmost soldier holding his weapon up to define the new line’s position, starting from the left side of the line.
Make sure your commands aren’t confusing in any way. If your soldiers are confused about what to do, it might be your fault. Explain not only how to perform each maneuver, but also WHY they are performing that maneuver.
When you’re standing in an empty field with a group of recruits, telling them to wheel left for the first time is always a disaster. Some will just look at you holding your sword up and not move. Some will guess that they are supposed to move and go stand to your left. Some will guess correctly to go stand to your right. Make sure you tell them what ‘wheel left’ means first, before asking them to do it. If you have some non-recruits with you, have them perform the command first, so the recruits can see what they are supposed to do. For the final nail in the coffin of doubt, have some sort of enemy to your left, whether it’s a tree, a rock, some scarecrow targets, or some non-recruits on the other team. Why are we wheeling to the left? Because there are enemies to our left, and we want to square up to our enemies. Explain why it is beneficial to square up to enemy lines. Every bit of knowledge counts.
One last pet-peeve on the subject of confusion: make sure you explain the concepts of all-at-once movement and ripple movement, and make sure your soldiers know which kind of movement you want for each maneuver, and why you chose that kind of movement for that maneuver.
The Well Oiled Machine
Have you ever seen a giant flock of birds flying around and wonder how they don’t all just run into each other, especially when they change directions?
I don’t know how they do it either, but I know how to stop a line of soldiers from being an unorganized blob of soldiers running into each other, forming giant clumps for enemies to aim at.
In most cases, trying to perform commands in an ‘all-at-once’ style is a mess. You can consider yourself lucky if you’ve ever had your soldiers fire a perfect, crisp volley. Trying to get them to all run forward, stepping off at exactly the same time, keeping a perfectly straight line? Just stop, it’s not going to happen. It’s difficult to do even at the walk. It’s easy to do in real life, because as real-life humans we can quickly and automatically making minute adjustments to our strides to match the people next to us. In Holdfast, you only get two speeds.
For most commands, ripple motion is the best. The first soldier moves, then the second, then the third, each soldier not moving until the one in front has moved. Moving your line out? Johnny is finishing up his reply to his girlfriend’s text, but it’s okay because he’s in the back of the line, he doesn’t need to move until everyone in front of him moves.
Ripple motion is slower than all-at-once, but it has a big advantage – it is very easy to hold formations and keep spacing between your soldiers.
There are only three instances where I believe all-at-once maneuvering to be useful – ‘line to my left/wing left’, ‘reverse column’, and retreat.
1) When moving in a column towards an enemy, the enemy simply needs to aim at your approaching column and has your entire line within his sights. You should swing your line out to the left or right, so that your enemy can only aim at one or two of your soldiers at a time. You call for ‘line to my left’, and your soldiers start moving to the left. There’s no need to do this in ripple motion, because they cannot possibly run into another soldier – each is moving to the left so that they are behind and to the left of the soldier ahead.
2) Having your entire line suddenly turn around and reverse direction can only be accomplished by all-at-once motion. Otherwise, you would simply be turning around, which is not at all sudden as the snake tail must still travel out to the farthest distance before turning around. Each soldier must, at roughly the same time, turn around and begin moving the other way. As long as every soldier does it right, the line will retain its form and no clumps will be created. One way to improve the cohesion of this maneuver is to have soldiers stop and turn, rather than turning while still running.
3) Sometimes you come over a hill and the whole other team is there, and you have no choice but to run away if you don’t want to be eliminated in one giant volley. Retreating is inherently all-at-once. When you call for a retreat, nobody is going to wait for someone else to move, they want to get to safety as soon as possible. Any time that you need to get all of your soldiers out of the way as quickly as possible, make sure you use a special command that they know is all-at-once (usually just Retreat + a direction), otherwise some who do not see the danger (for example, an incoming cannonball) will perform a normal, slow maneuver.
Motions aside, a well trained regiment should also be able to hold some spacing between each solider. Events might not allow as much spacing as in the old days, but you can absolutely get away with having your soldiers NOT jam as tightly together as possible. It might not be much of a space, but it looks so much better and so much more professional to have a line of soldiers whose elbows and shoulders are not all clipping through each other. Train your soldiers in the lost art of stopping a little early and taking one or two tiny steps to get in perfect position, rather than simply jamming their body into the next soldier’s. When moving as a line, you should also emphasize keeping a certain amount of spacing, because even if they are moving, two soldiers jammed together while running are an easier target than two soldiers a couple feet away from each other.
Lastly, give your NCOs and privates a chance to lead every now and then. Maybe not during events, but definitely during some trainings. If you never give them a chance to lead, and during an event the officers all die, it is now up to someone from the non-officers to take control of the line, and if you don’t want that to be a total disaster, give them some chances to practice leading. Not only is it educational for them (they may for the first time feel the pressure of having to make choices that will probably get everyone killed), not only is it fun for them, but it can also be educational for you, because you can learn which of your lower ranking soldiers may be worthy of filling future leadership openings.
TLDR; Conclusions
Have regular trainings that include both boring drills and other stuff that is NOT boring.
Make sure your commands are standardized, simple, logical, and are fully understood by your soldiers.
Make sure your soldiers perform maneuvers quickly but without forming clumps.
Stay in formation and keep spacing while moving, and have your soldiers stop early when forming up to have a better looking, better performing line.
Let someone else lead once in a while; you might be the greatest leader to ever grace this earth, but it’s just a video game, and your soldiers are actual people – you might make someone’s week by letting them lead in a training battle or actual event.
My Credentials
I advanced from a rosy-cheeked recruit to the rank of Company Serjeant Major in a M&B: Napoleonic Wars regiment that was constantly expanding and would bring 50-60 soldiers to events regularly near its end.
Most of the officers of that regiment eventually got tired of the game and disbanded, and I helped co-found a new regiment consisting of everyone who wanted to keep playing, and was chosen by vote to become Colonel. That regiment gradually wound down and down as more and more got tired of playing NW until the final four or five of us decided to call it quits from the NW life.
Later on I joined some friends from those past regiments in a North and South mod regiment they had founded, where I was given the position of Major (I didn’t do much leading in that regiment, mostly because I was in China at that time and my ping in-game was atrocious, but they valued my opinion and wanted me as part of their officer corps). That regiment, as all eventually do, also faded away.
Took a few years off after that, tried joining a few regiments here and there, but was never impressed by any of the leaders I encountered, so now I’m writing this guide in the hopes future leaders will be decent.