"Require Historical Deployment?" Topic

When you game historical battles, do you generally restrict players to historical deployments, or somehow limit their ability to achieve better deployment than those troops on the ground did originally?

I'm thinking particularly of the early battles of Frederick the Great, when he wasn't (as yet) quite so great, like for instance two I've just read about, Mollwitz and Chotusitz. (Thank you everyone who recommended Christopher Duffy and Brent Nosworthy.)

At Mollwitz, Frederick discovered two things almost by accident: the oblique order and the army square. He really didn't mean to do either of those things, the Prussians, for all their vaunted cadenced marching and parade ground reviews, judged the distances wrong (it snowed in April) and this led to a really, shall we say, unorthodox deployment.

At Chotusitz, they had an even more disjointed deployment: the Austrians had been slow in their night attack, while FtG had gone ahead with the advance guard and had to return to add his forces to Leopold's. He even later critiqued Leopold's deployment, especially around the village.

The Prussians won both battles, so I guess it means deployment isn't everything.

If you were to game either battle would you force the Prussian player to begin as Frederick the (not yet) Great began, or to deploy as FtG "meant" to deploy?

I would have thought that if the the rules, and your opponent, are any good, you would start as the Great Man intended and the inevitable friction and interplay of forces would take care of the rest.

It is good to try various approaches, historical deployment, free deployment, including arrival times and of course a campaign approach,

Tally Ho!

It really depends on the scenario, sometimes I go with the historical deployment, sometimes not. Historical certainly saves a lot of thinking and setup time, free or varied setup can produce interesting alternate outcomes. For some very big games we've had a week or two of pre game planning time and even mini planning games beforehand, which are quite good fun.

For one off games of historical battles I usually go with historical setups and entry times, as researching that stuff is what I find enjoyable. But for something like Waterloo I've done it both ways as I've refought that at least five times now.

Refighting historical battles IS fun to do, but whatever you do, players tend to act based on their understanding of the historical battle.
The only way to do it, at least to me, is to do obscure historical battles so players dont know what really happened!

Whereas I regard a game in which the players follow the historical course of action for perfectly sensible reasons and attain the historical result to be the ultimate achievement of scenario design.

With preparing a historical refight Scenario, I usually tie myself quite close to the historic deployment for as much as I can research the details. As for MR, I also find this quite enjoyable. Recently, I also tend to become more restrictive, forcing the gamers also to obey to the ranking of regiments within the order of battle.
For instance if I have a SYW Allied army, The British would form the right wing of the Army and a player cannot simply ignore this and move the Brits over to the left, except C-in-C would be in Command range of the British overall general and personally order him to do so.

I gave up. I tried historical orders of battles and deployments. The players ignored it and wanted to deploy their own troops. I said no. They wasted four moves redeploying their troops to where they wanted them.

As for the historical Victory conditions they were even less successful.