Why is the accuracy so bad?

[trooper007]

Even if I place my units close to the enemy's, they hardly get any hits. Dozens of shots fired, hardly enough kills to justify it. I'm always having to send them in to engage in melee.. is this meant to be or? does the fact that I've set my units to 400 men per unit affect this? Does unit size affect it?
Cheers.

[slicer523]

The muskets used at the time had a maximum effective range of between 50-75yds, anything past that and you'd had a hard time hitting a man sized object. Now to account for the amount of shots fired, with everything going on around your average footman, smoke in the eyes making them sting and making it hard to see (troops actually looking away and closing their eyes when firing), explosions and people dying and shouting around you, LOUD noises, and mostly your common soldier didn't really want to kill someone, they were just pointing their weapons towards the enemy and if they hit they hit and if not as long as hes alive then rinse and repeat.