Rank and Platoon Fire

[numnutz6383]

Playing as Austria, 1754 and about to wage war with Poland to satisfy the victory conditions, and I just noticed that my Line Infantry does not utilize Fire by Rank. Does that option have to be explicitly turned on (no button for it on the Battle UI AFAIK?) or is it the default shooting technique? Platoon fire has been researched but I can't recruit Guards yet. Would there be a reason that Fire by Rank does not work?

P.S. This is regarding ver. 1.5, with all of the available DLCs installed.

[Foxdragoon]

I have heard that researching platoon fire seems to fix some of the problems with fire by rank. My Russian line infantry have similar problems with fire by rank, they often just stand around and only the first rank shoots (sometimes they don't even do that). It is fantastic when it works, though. To me, it just seems to be some kind of bug where each rank waits to be completly ready to fire and some soldiers do not reload on time or something. Hopefully someone can shed some more light on this topic.

[lemming3k]

Rank fire is sometimes buggy, if even a single soldier in the unit is reloading, nobody in the entire unit will fire. You often find in line battles that the ones on the edge shoot outwards at a unit slightly to the side a split second before the one directly in front of them reaches the battle lines - this means the rest of the line(and any behind) won't fire as it puts them out of sync, so they wait, and get shot. Same goes for if they are standing on the edge of your firing zone - front rank fires, but as the enemy aren't in range of the second rank that messes up the firing sequence so everyone waits.

Having used FBR more extensively lately I've actually come to the conlcusion you can do better without it, and it's far from the miracle tech people believe it to be.

[Axe27]

Playing as the Maratha Confederacy lately, I have noticed that FBR is no match against Experience. My very experienced Sikh Musketeers, who have fought in more battles than any other unit in my army easily slaughter opposing Russian units who have fire by rank.

[Maximus Lazero]

That's true, but FBR definitely helps, and against units of equal experience, it will prove a winner.