Napoleonic Wargame Club

Just was rereading a passage of the manual(Leipzig) and on p.20 there is a strange sentence:
"If the change fails, then the unit becomes Disordered, or if the unit is already Disordered, the unit becomes Routed."
How is that suppose to happen if no disordered units can change formation?
Were disordered units meant to change formations?

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Looks like a mistype. A disordered unit cannot change formation of course. I've rarely had units rout in place due too the threat level effect on formation changes. Maybe that is what the sentence was meant to refer too.
My favorite sentence from the manual is (pg. 30): "Routed and Isolated units have their defending strength divided by 2. However, units which are Routed and Isolated defend with a strength of 0."
I'm sure it's supposed to make sense but, when you're writing a manual at a 'junior highschool' military level it can confusing to your train of thought. I think in my case the first and is supposed to be an or.

I fired off an email to the JTS Support email on this issue. I think that is should say this:

"When a non-Artillery unit attempts to change formation, then the Threat Value
in its hex is used to determine whether the change succeeds. If the change
fails, then the unit becomes Disordered or Routed."

When trying to change formation a unit can also Rout as well as Disorder if it fails the test. I am not sure where the boundary line is between Disorder outcome or a Rout outcome. The manual doesn't say.

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Bill Peters - Prussian civilian observer
Scenario Designer for John Tiller Software "Napoleonic Battles" and "Panzer Campigns" series games

Conjecture but, the way I think it functions is a normal combat rout test with a +1 if the unit trips the threat disorder target. I've had C quality units but never a B quality one that I remember routing in place.

Maybe the way moral checks are handled in defensive fire phase is here used too. Page 37 of the manual states:
"A unit which takes a Morale Check will become Disordered if it passes the Morale Check or Routed if it fails."
So can it be that units that fail the change do a moral check to see if they disorder or rout?

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There is a translation problem I think. From the other thread you said:
"The usually musket fire value of 5 is too low for this as even a 1000 men line only does about 70,31 casualties on an equally sized attacking column and that leads to a morals check only in 41,28% of the cases. That means out of 10 attacking battalions only about 4 would do a moral check at all and with the usual base moral value of C only 1(1,33) out those 4 would fail their moral checks and become disordered."
The "morale check" loss/(loss+base) is the switch for automatic disorder. The following resolution is the rout test I was referring to. So, in this case the program reads a threat value disorder switch the same way it would for having failed the combat morale test. Thus you are always disordered after failing the [0, 1] rand value. Then quizzically the manual also calls the rout test I refer to as a "morale check". Ignore the poorly written manual and think about the concept from experience is the best advice I can offer. This second 'morale check' with a [0, 5] rand is probably done with a +1 modifier. I think I may have read this from another series of the game.
To also further confuse the issue these checks are probably done from seed results generated at the beginning of the turn. That is why similar values like remote opportunity fire triggering on the player's moving units will occur in pairings. The program quickly generates a seed list of test results and those results are so poorly timed by our high powered processors (compared to the old prog's architecture) they fall into close value sequential ranges during generation. The player's attack resolutions are the only random values which are generated per function call I believe.