So I played my first Lasalle game on Tuesday with Adam and I gotta say I would lean to giving the Reserve Arty support option a try before the infantry.
We only had one Arty Bat per and his Brit arty wasn't that effective, but my Division (Md) battery did pretty well and I never even hit average on it with rolls.
So to put it in gaming terms, at long range you'll get 5 die per battery, short gives you 10 with cannister. Your Positional bat's have a cannister range of 15inches (10BW 40mm = 15"), your light batteries (which are NOT light) have 12". Your full long range is 33" for the Positionals and 30" for Lights!
Infantry only move 6inches per turn in column, and they won't be coming at you any faster, I promise - you get double dice at long range if in march.
So, if enemy infantry start 33" away in column and move towards you every turn (assuming every battery has an eligible target at Full Long) you can shoot 15 dice per turn for at least turns 1-2 with the Heavies, 10ea for turns 1-3 with the lights. That is not including bounce throughs. So just in turns 1-2 that is 50dice! Statistically that 25 hits that will result in about 12 or so points of disruption. more likely, each of your batteries will give out one disruption point per turn, so more like 10 disruption points, so maybe 5 units being disrupted to level 2. French battalions die after 4 disruptions and can't charge after 3. Sure, they will have some recoveries, but this means they have to keep plodding along in pretty much a strait line. I am also not factoring in bounce through.
The canister shots for turns 3-5 (5 ending with infantry charging you) will double the dice above, subtracting SK value unitl they charge you. You could easily get 8 dice per battery with canister per turn. That is 40 dice, so 20 hits at 4 per target! Any kind of lucky rolls will give the targets 5 hits and therefore 2 disruptions. If they made it out of long range with 2 already, they are dead. With one they can't charge. With none, you are still killing them since you will get 3 turns of canister at least. If you shoot 2 targets with canister and they have SK2, you still have a good chance of killing the unit outright - (9 hits out of 16 dice with 4+).
Sure, there are a LOT of assumptions above, but If you were fighting say someone who takes a French Guards Army with Core + Old Guard you would probably have them near breaking point before they get to your guns (which would then run behind your line of musketeers. And if you have 25 bases of arty, that is 38 inches of frontage - more than engough to cover the whole board (because you are being attacked lengthwise) with arty and manuever for massed fires.
I don't have really any experience with this game, but on # of dice thrown at targets alone - it would be beautiful.:)
The massed arty may give you trouble when attacking as you will be moving slow and have to rely heavily on destroying stuff at long range (they will just hide from you). I agree with the above poster that your Cav option may help better in the attack.
Matt