"Campaign Movement" Topic

I've just started to resurrect some old notes for an ECW campaign, but I'm not all that certain of the movement rates over the period of a day.
Currently I have Horse at 18 miles per day, dropped down to 15 miles per day for Dragoons because of inferior horses, Foot at 12 miles per day and Artillery 8 miles per day.
I'm beginning to think those figures may be a tad conservative, and so I throw it open for those of greater knowledge, to educate and illuminate.

I'm afraid I wouldn't even know where to start looking for this kind of information; I am however interested in knowing why Dragoons would have inferior horses.

In my opinion I would think that as long as your happy with the numbers and that Horse isn't out run by foot then its all good.

It's historically accurate information. Dragoons always had inferior horses, probably because they were mounted infantry and the cavalry had first pick.

Are rest days factored into that, or is exhaustion tracked separately?

In practice horse, foot and dragoons all moved at the same speed, that of their wagons and camp followers. A complete artillery train with heavy/siege artillery and all necessary support services would move at a slower speed but a few pieces of light or field artillery attached to a force would not slow it down to the same degree.

A commander could increase the speed for a particular mission by reducing the number of wagons, excluding the camp followers from the army, leaving his pikemen behind and taking no or only a limited number of cannon.

But the increased speed came at a price. The camp followers may have cause commanders a lot of headache but they did performed essential tasks such as foraging for firewood and food, they cooked, cleaned and mended clothes and cared for the sick and wounded.

With a limited wagon train you could only carry a limited amount of supplies & munitions and without the mobile forges and craftsmen attached to them it was not possible to repair broken wagons and artillery pieces.

Actual speed in miles covered each day depended a lot on the condition of the roads and the weather. Mud could cripple an army and slow down it's speed to a crawl while frozen but dry weather made for fast movement if there was not much snow on the ground. I'll see if I can get som samples of actual movement speeds from my sources.

Thankyou Daniel but let's not get too carried away. After all it's only a wargame!

Figure after every two or three days they'd rest for at least one day – unless they were running from someone who'd beat them.