ACW skirmishers

Our group spent a lot of effort getting Napoleonic skirmishers to work very well and be quite a threat on the battlefield. One idea we used was to converge the light or voltigeur companies of each brigade into a unit that became the brigade's skirmish screen.

I feel sure that ACW brigades did something similar, with each regt detaching a small unit of men (a company? A half company?) who were probably its smallest and nimblest men and its best shots to scout ahead, report back and snipe enemy officers.

I have a question first: How did ACW skirmishers function and in what kinds of percentage of a regts strength, and a brigade's strength? I wouldn't want there to be too many. I then would like to suggest we add a small skirmish unit to each brigade which has possibly a slightly better firearms rating and perhaps a slightly longer range. We make skirmishers hard to hit as we have for the Nap mod. We could do something similar for a cavalry brigade making a 'picquet unit' shoot a bit better and move a bit faster (we define the unit class in unitglobal.csv to let them go faster).

The current skirmish formation is also horrible, being far too long and thin to be of use. It takes forever to wheel and deploy. I suggest we make it shorter and denser like we did for the nap skirmish units. I'd like to test something like this. It could even help with our scouting issues.

Two companies for regiment if I remember well was the rule of the manuals, but in the second part of war was very frequent to use more companies or more regiments as skirmishers. Federals use in massive mode skirmishers during the Atlanta campaign, and Lee's Army formed unofficial sharpshooter battalions taking the best man from the brigades' regiments.