Questions arising from tutorial3
I've got few answers, let me see if I can help.
does the AI always reshuffle them
I really don't know. I've had some good luck by arranging my corps with infantry in the center, cavalry to the flanks, and artillery behind. They probably get rearranged anyway, but I just let the corps commander do it the way he wants. He's going to anyway, and somehow it usually works out.
the Russians manage to set up a defensive line
I had enough problems with enemy defensive lines in the tutorials that I avoided attacking them altogether when playing the Montebello battle until I could get a corps to attack them from the flank.
After a while I realized I was having some success doing frontal attacks (usually by accident) and it was never as bad as in that tutorial. And the enemy has certainly had plenty of success doing frontal attacks on my defensive lines. I'm not sure what was different about the one in the tutorial.
artillery didn’t deploy to bombard the Russian line
Some of that has been tweaked, and is still being tweaked.
After giving fire this compressed group of 4 overlapping battalions moved into hand to hand contact with the enemy line. However although the units were in contact in 3d view they did not melee but rather continued volleying until the French broke and fled..
I never saw that one, but there have been a lot of improvements in the 3D view matching what the game engine is doing.
Other attacking columns did not make contact or get close enough to deliver a volley before they were observed to be walking backwards, still in formation, away from the enemy (towards whom they remained facing).
You'll see this fairly often. The corps commander has issued a command to retreat, which you can see on his information panel. Usually the corps will go back several hundred to a thousand yards, then advance again. Once I saw an entire corps retreat totally off the map this way, marching backwards from the center of the map to the map edge. This is good when it's an enemy unit doing it, and you can always give another order to stop your own corps commanders doing it, or give orders to individual regiments to advance. As long as your corps isn't going to retreat off the map, it's probably doing what you'd want. If individual units are close to your map edge, you might want to give them orders to advance to keep them from disappearing. Once they've left, even if the corps advances again, they don't come back.
A cavalry unit which managed to get behind the Russian line... the Russians were firing at them and they could have hit the lines from behind! (the Russian infantry line did not respond to the close cavalry presence by forming square either)
The cavalry is following doctrine. It won't attack unless it thinks it can win. The infantry probably knows the cavalry isn't strong enough to be a threat so doesn't form square. Most of the time the infantry will form square. And I've seen cavalry charge infantry that wasn't in square and get repulsed, usually without a melee.
This is actually good because it means your own attacks can't be totally stopped by having to form square to defend against a small handful of wounded guys on sickly horses. The cavalry has to be a credible threat. I guess this is a pretty good feature, but it means I can't use my favorite tactic of stopping an entire infantry division with two squadrons of cossacks.
Hope this helps.
Hook