Two things different: muskets have smoothbore: they have "scatter".
Muskets will probably damage friendly units if say, the target is in the line of fire....although at farther ranges the possibility is lower.
Whereas hand cannoneers have a curved trajectory.
Or at least that's the way it works in American Conquest (Cossacks engine).
Whereas rifles are slower to load, at least during this time period. They are more like sniper weapons (to compare, of course this is not true today.)
Also mind you, firearms in this period are smoky, inaccurate, still slow to load (in real life, the maximum speed of a musket was a shot every ten seconds, and that's if you were very very fast in stamping down the ramrod, etc.)....pikemen are the staple unit of this period, actually. Dead on, reliable, hardy, and relatively long ranged and effective en masse. (For armoured ones, anyway.)
To an extent, of course.
Quote:
u still can charge with horses but its not gunna be as effective with the gunners picking ure men off their horses
The Cavalry Charge was still prominent until 1915, when machine gun fire changed everything in WWI, actually.
In fact, if you have something like cataphracts, (the equivalent, lets say, the Winged Hussar), or armoured cavalry, the musket balls do much less damage due to the momentum of the other force. Mind you, the musket was shot point blank: you can't "pick off men off the horses" - that's something riflemen do.
Muskets are like early shotguns: smoothbore caliber and aimed point blank. You didn't aim at an individual: you took a bunch of musketeers as a formation unit, and aimed it at another formation unit, and in a volley for maximum effect (so the scatter goes everywhere in one shot, volley to cover all areas at once so the enemy can't "run away" from the scatter).
This was usually quite devastating at close range, but mind you, then there was a period where this meant the musketeers were totally vulnerable as they were reloading.
THEN the cavalry charged. It was all about coordination, timing, and outmaneouvring your enemy. In fact, I like this era, because unlike say, AoK, where its skirmisher against archer, the musketeer can easily beat the cavalry at one point, or get slaugheted in the other. Also, row by row firing (ie. one row fires, but not the other) also allows you to have "emergency" point blank.There are very key differences between rifles and muskets. Rifles were expensive to make, and hard to make with precision. Muskets, somewhat, but with less production problems. Muskets found it hard to pierce armor, whereas rifles had little problem.
[This message has been edited by Natalinasmpf (edited 05-31-2005 @ 02:26 PM).]