BRITISH ARMY - WSS - REGIMENT 1st FOOT GUARDS: DEPLOYMENT

During the War of Spanish Succession  the British Army was, along with the Dutch, the unique army that deployed on three ranks, This said, I was wondering, in general, how to deploy my 1:1 ratio soldiers in order to give a more realistic vision of a unit.

I took as example 1 company of the 1st Foot Guards Regiment. The different possibilities in wargaming can be:

a) unit in movement

b) unit firing

c) unit standing

There is hence the problem to recreate the maximum effect of these 3 different situations at 1:1 ratio (i.e. 1 man represented by 1 papersoldier); this is not only a matter for WSS but in general for all my wargames. I actually opted for 2 different arrays: from Napolonic period on a sort of mix of postures of the men all togheter without any firing soldier. For the period before Napoleon a static and more uniform array of the unit.

Here some example:

1 Napoleon's and later period "mixed array"

2) Pre-Napoleonic period

As you can see in the previous pictures, the papersoldiers have all the same position. Here comes the problem: trying to increase the realistic vision of a wargame battlefield, for my last units (February 2023) I tried to prepare some examples of deployment for WSS and in particular 1 company of the British Regiment Foot Guards.

Picture 1. Three  metal stripes where to put the papersoldiers with magnet

Picture 2. The Company in "firing position". To show it, I put shooting men in the front, while the rest are just ready to shoot. This gives l'idea that: a. the unit will not move in that turn; b. they are ready to shoot 

Picture 3. The same as before but with the effect of the shooting. This means that that unit already shot in that turn and cannot shoot again

Picture 3. Once the shooting phase is over, the fron line must be removed and a third line must be added 

Picture 5. The company in "standing position"; this means that the unit is waiting for orders, or can move (see the last rank). The visual picture is not the top, because of the V effect of the guns: the front in opposite direction that the rear.

Picture 6. An alternative: to avoid to make too many papersoldiers, it would be possible to add just some shooting papersoldiers, giving the idea as in picture 2, but with much less papersoldiers.

I checked over some pictures on Internet about how units are deployed in wargaming:

 

As you can see the units are in a mix of shooting / standing /ready to fire /marching positions without a real pattern. This put me even more in confusion.

Also "der Alte Fritz Journal" goes for a plastic unique position

but then.... he changed

Any comment is more than welcome....