Mounted Rifles

Mounted Riflemen are skirmishers and snipers without peer, picking off leaders to sow confusion in enemy ranks.

Organised and equipped as light infantry with muskets and horses as mounts, these riflemen see themselves as an elite force. Chosen for initiative and intelligence, they fight without close supervision from their officers. Their uniforms set them apart in an age when soldiers dress like peacocks: they deliberately blend into the landscape, firing on the enemy from the safety of the undergrowth. If these men are forced into close combat they will suffer heavy losses, but their ability to fire both mounted and on foot makes up for this shortcoming.

Historically, the most famous riflemen, the British Greenjackets, carried infantry rifles designed by Ezekiel Baker. This muzzle-loading flintlock fired a small ball from a tightly rifled barrel to give superb accuracy, with accounts of riflemen holding targets for each other at more than a hundred paces! It was a slow business to load the piece properly and could take a minute or more to do properly, but the resulting shot was deadly over astonishing ranges. Baker even carefully supplied a long “sword bayonet” so that the overall length of his rifle plus bayonet matched that of a line infantryman’s bayonet-tipped musket.