New Model Bayonet Drill is a Technology in Empire: Total War.
Description[]
A drill which has been refined to formalise the latest fashions in bayonet usage, making for a more effective melee attack.
The first bayonets did a fine job of providing musketeers with the equivalent of a short pike to use in an emergency. Because they were pike replacements, the drills used were largely based on the well-known and understood pike drills. Now, however, bayonets are seen as something more than substitute pikes, something that pragmatic soldiers discovered for themselves. New books are emerging, advocating a new fashion of bayonet drill: holding the bayonet-carrying musket at waist height, rather than advancing with it leveled at shoulder height. There is also an emphasis on the offensive use of the bayonet, carrying the fight to the enemy, rather than using it defensively to keep attackers at bay. In the thick of hand-to-hand fighting, however, many soldiers use their muskets as clubs, as the need to live takes precedence over formal training!
Historically, this development is the birth of the "spirit of the bayonet" and the belief in the efficacy of "cold steel" which was to last for the next two centuries in some armies.
General Information[]
Unlike previous bayonet technologies, New Model Bayonet Drill does not replace them. Soldiers benefit from the +3 charge bonus of the drill in addition to the +3 melee bonus bayonets grant after making contact with their targets. Soldiers are updated visually on the battlefield, as well: instead of charging with their muskets shoulder-high, they charge by gripping their muskets from the waist. This can be useful in determining whether an enemy faction has researched this technology.
In the extremely unlikely event that this technology is researched without the bayonet technologies are researched first, this technology has no effect on the battlefield.