Did people back in the day really just fight in formation blocks? Or did Total War make that up?
>>744637063Organized militaries did yes. It was the easiest way to maintain control over hundreds of men. Frequently more men could be lost by panicking and retreating, which would panic the men they would run through than actual casualties from the enemy. Keeping the men in order and confident was incredibly important. Keep in mind battles would progress much more slowly in general and you would not be able to instantaneously give orders to sub-units as a commander.
To add to what the previous Anon said you can think of these units as being something like squads on a modern battlefield. The general cannot micromanage every movement so there is a lot of initiative on the ground expected of junior leaders regarding how to handle the men in their command. The general gives them something like an outline of what they should do at the start but as things progress its more and more about what they think is right at the time rather than a grand plan having been laid out before. Thats why big plans like with Hannibal are something worthy of being recorded for posterity.
It's difficult to portray just how much of a difference it is from the ground versus the God View you get in total war games
>>744637063It depends on the society and type of warfare, but for general pre-industrial combat, yes they didno radios = you are having one big meeting right before the battle with only as many moving parts as your war council thinks is necessary to win because doing more than that is likely to cross some wires and fuck the whole thing upyour adjustments on the fly are limited to flag signals, drum/horn calls/ a handful of your best horses and riders who hopefully have excellent memory as well as navigational skillsThe large blocks of men have to be self-sufficient enough in a prolonged combat that they don't simply disintergrate once shit hits the fan, they need to maintain a front and have extra men to brace them against a pushing shieldwall and rest so they can be somewhat ready for a big move if its called forthats not even getting into the feudal politics of who is allowed to boss who aroundbut for game purposes, it is well within the bounds of historical authenticity without compromising the gameplay
I like it when you click on them and they say hastati
>>744637063Fighting in formation is essential in melee combat because people on the very front need space around themselves to be able to fight both at their sides and behind them. If they have no space then they will end up tripping over other peoples feet your bumping them when trying to pull back an arm to stab. The 'having room' part is really really important because you want to avoid a "crowd crush" type situation which was one of the most horrifying things that can happen to an army in ancient war, it was when people in a large group would be falling over onto each other like a big blob of dominoes and all tangling up with each other. Its hard for a group to separate themselves when they fall like like, and next to impossible when there are hundreds of guys with swords or spears stabbing your group as they are trying to stand up again.This happened to a tribe that invaded rome, they had like 5x the Romans numbers and had beaten rome several times but they had a crowd crush happen when their cavalry ran back into them and the romans ran up in the chaos and pushed them so that their whole group fell ontop each other in a stampede.The same thing happened at Cannae, people like to talk about hannibal and call him a genius but imo Cannae had more to do with the roman consuls being stupid and throwing caution to the wind inviting a crowd crush with their unique formation technique they tried using for that one battle, they set aside formation fundamentals and out meta gamed themselves
Kinda sorta yes, kinda sorta not. The critical difference is that the omniscient direct control you have in the game is utter nonsense: before telecommunications generals would have little to no control over forces that are already engaged, being largely relegated to deploying reserves, or the unit they are leading personally (like Alexander leading the Companion cavalry while Parmenion commanded the phalanx). The sheer physical scale - ancient battlefields could stretch several kilometers - would also make it physically impossible or at least almost insurmountably difficult to have a good overview of the battle and even in principle send actionable orders in time. Then there's the matter of command: if you think of the Greeks for example, Sparta stood out in that it had any maneuver units whatsoever: all Greeks had organisational units, but basically what a hoplite phalanx could do is to form up in a line and then push forward and that's it - so it's a formation block, but a singular. The Macedonians and especially the Romans for example had a more sophisticated tactical system and Roman triplex acies "checkerboard" formation recalls the visuals of what you see in the game, but again, you must understand the command limitations: whatever battlefield-maneuvers happen outside of general deploying reserves are mostly about pre-arranged orders (like Caesar's hidden fourth line in Pharsalus) or subcommanders given command independence leading the maneuver units (cohorts, later the maniples), and while the Romans *could* execute battlefield-maneuvers (Battle of the Sabis from the Gallic wars is a good example: the Romans get ambushed, but manage to coordinate a response), this is exceptional even for the Romans who were the best pre-modern army at this sort of thing. Usually they just defaulted to the triplex acies tactic, because what you really want is robust reliability, while trying to fancy can go wrong in all sorts of ways.
>>744637063They tried to, and had different methods to maintain cohesion, but often they ended up breaking apart during the crash and the ensuing melees.
>>744640319Might talk about the block itself, too. So, it was typical that formations have depth. Macedonian sarissa phalanx was 16 ranks deep, Roman formations were usually about 10 ranks deep (but recall that they had lines in reserve), and this was fairly typical. Combine that with maneuver units (not all armies had any) and what you get is a "block". But here you must understand that this arrangement is for morale reasons: casualties before one side broke were usually in the order of 5%, so even if you think about the 16 ranks deep sarissa phalanx, even the first rank might not be ground down, and really only the first couple of ranks might expect to see fighting.In other words, the 5-16th ranks are essentially there to provide moral support, but this is crucial if you imagine the counterfactual: if you are 4 ranks (say) and you see a formation 16 ranks (or more) deep, then what are you going to think? Probably something like "Even if me and my buddies achieve a famous KDR of 4, we'll assuredly be ground down and perish to the last man. You know what, I don't want to be in this battle anymore", so they'll leg it. Armies with higher cohesion and troop quality could do away with thinner lines (Caesar for example does this with his veterans at Pharsalus, drawing his 20k something troops thinner than Pompey's 40k something, to match his width) but this too is something that a general would do at their peril.Coincidentally, this is the genius of the Roman three-line formation: the second and third line were close enough to reinforce, and with gaps to let the defeated lines pass through (they probably closed or narrowed the gaps when engaging), but far away from the terror of battle, and with cultural expectation that hastati routing was perfectly all right and not a sign of a lost battle, and the principes were there to finish the job, while most armies, focused on sheer sense of personal bravery rather than systems, would simply collapse.
*changes the war meta completely*
>>744637063My dude people 700 years before Rome fought huge chariot battles that require more precision and battlefield control than maintaining a a formation.
>>744641454Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean (the collapse of which is rather timely) saw greater sophistication of civilization and military systems than the region would see until the Romans, really. Sure. Where Spartans were incapable of laying protracted siege on Athens during the early parts of Peleponnesian War despite allied Corinth being less than a hundred kilometers away (Wikipedia has it that "The longest Spartan invasion, in 430 BC, lasted just 40 days"), the neo-Assyrians for example had developed a siege textbook that would enable them to take any city: overcome the defences with siege engines or by building a ramp up the walls. Staggering amount of effort that takes enormous logistical burden, but It Just Werks, you literally walk over the walls.But battlefield coordination? It's not like the Pharaoh is microing the chariots like mutalisks, he tells his driver to go ahead and the other chariots follow and mostly just do their own thing. It's logistics of fielding and supplying an army outside your home territory that's difficult, not the tactics per se.
>>744639041TRIARII!
>>744637063Fun fact; formations engaging each other would often rotate during battle and end up turning even 180 degree or doing complete spins as time passed.
