Solo Gaming - What should Generals be doing?

I suppose we have all seen players who, as the commanding General,  micro manage every aspect of their wargames army.  It's almost a built in requirement of most rules as there is no one else available to move units, decide who they attack and all the myriad of other decisions needed for combat units.  As a result the player ends up covering every level of the chain of command at the same time.  In the worst cases the micro management is down to moving exact distances to avoid the other side being in shooting range or charge reach.  In my experience, limited I grant you to re-enactment and reading military history, that isn't how things happened in reality.  Real life isn't so cut and dried, generals couldn't be certain how far a unit could advance, or how close they could get to the enemy and still be safe,  In fact they often couldn't even see all of their troops to know what they were doing!  We shouldn't have that level of control either as the player or in the form of an AI opponent.

Against, not with, that's..AGAINST Yourself!

I tried to reduce the control available in my detailed pike and shot rules by using a standard system of orders for each unit.  These set an objective; either a location or an enemy unit, an action when they reach the objective and the speed of movement towards the objective, either fast or slow.  Lastly a delay can be set before starting to move.  As an alternative a support order can be given where a unit simply follows another and assist or takes over that unit's objective if they cannot complete it.  So an order would be something like this:  Advance quickly to  Rabbit Warren Hill and take it by close assault and then hold that position.  After that new orders would be sent or the unit would continue to Hold and other troops would continue the action.  It's assumed in the rules that units will attempt to follow orders until either; they are completed, or they get new orders, or they change orders by using their initiative (via a reaction test).  I think that this goes a long way towards reflecting the reality of command and control for pre 20th century warfare.

A commanding general is only one man, perhaps with a few messengers and aides to assist him, but he can't do everything himself.  Time and space conspire against him if he tries (unless the Army is on the small side).  If he tries to micro manage every unit he can't react to every change in circumstances for every unit, he doesn't have the time.  He cannot get new orders to a unit  from where he is to where they are with any certainty that the situation on receipt won't have changed while they were in transit.  So to balance those problems armies delegate command responsibility.  Hence the chain of command springs into being.  This balances speed of reaction to changes against lack of overall control.  At Battalion level the colonel has to react to the immediate combat situation and may amend the overall plan while still attempting to fulfil his part in it.  At Brigade the Brigadier reacts to the situation the battalions of his brigade are facing and perhaps to the situation of the Brigades alongside his own and so it goes.  Each commander has limited autonomy and is supposed to be following the larger plan (or in some cases not!).

While all of the above may be interesting, it should also have an impact on solo rule mechanisms.  It shows how the AI army should behave; it should have delay built in at higher levels but be capable of reacting to tactical changes at lower levels fairly quickly, unless the officer concerned is of limited capabilities, by some form of reaction test.  These limited capability chaps do exist, consider Byron at Marston Moor charging his cavalry wing over the ground Rupert instructed him to force Cromwell to cross to disrupt their formation!  Or as Brigadier Peter Young once reported on a junior officer "Sir if that man was a horse, I should hesitate to breed from him!"  I'd like an AI system that can throw up this sort of inconsistency.  Much of the reaction at front line level should be included in your rules of choice but that isn't automatically the case.  I'd almost goo as far as saying that rules should cover these issues be they solo or not.

So I'm now at the point of thinking that there should be an opening stage where the Commander in Chief carries out his comparison of forces and considers the strategic overview to determine if he will fight and if so what style of action to fight - attack, spoiling attack, hold and counter attack, defend or withdraw.  The second stage is to look at the ground and craft a plan based on how the terrain constrains tactical options for each side.  This is the stage at which the details of the action are thrashed out.  Hold the left advance the centre and hook around the right level of tactics plus creating a deployment plan.  I like the idea of giving commanders some personality traits which would have an effect at this stage. I'm also thinking that the orders should be to the top tier formations so wings, centre and or reserve in pike and shot fights or brigades.  I'm currently a bit stuck on how to convert these to orders for individual units, but I will get there.  As a bonus I found my spreadsheet from my last attempt to create something so I have a start compared to where I thought I was.