Recreating the seven years war. Part 1 of X

I have almost finished reading "By force of arms" by Christopher Duffy, so now I have feel the urge to comment upon its implications for wargame design. This is the second volume of his history of the Austrian Army during the 7YW, which is the second edition/rewrite of his earlier work "The army of Maria Theresa". this volume concentrates upon an operational history of the army. Now for those ignorant sods like myself for whom English is their first only language it is an invaluable source and possibly the best you can get at the moment.

Now part of his thesis is about the evolving skills of the Austrian Army and their ability to conduct complex operations. The signature piece being the attack by multiple columns such as the attack at Hochkirch as opposed to the unitary force which is the how we normally think of the deployment of lace wars armies. A unitary deployment has the infantry in centre deployed in two line with cavalry upon either flank, the whole moving and fighting as a whole. Frederick himself using the traditional unitary deployment in many of his battles until quite late in his career, though he did have his variation of it. Nor were the Austrians alone in using it, Frederick himself used it at Torgau and the French and Prince Ferdinand in West Germany were also moving along similar lines.

So like many wars you beginning fighting the old fashioned way and by the end of new technologies and tactics have transformed warfare as we know. We are normally used to seeing this best represented through the evolution of technology. In WWII the technology has markedly evolved and matured as pretty much every weapon system at the end of the war is there at the start. WWI has similar technology changes including the introduction of whole new classes of weapons. The 7YW is also a war where many changes occur not in the technology but in how the generals approach the war.