When flanked, rotate, or hold phalanx position?

So I was playing a game as the greeks against the AI. First off I gotta say it's always lovely to see the AI smarten up like this. Anyways, my phalanxes were formed along a line. well what do the horsemen do? They run towards my flanks and try to hit the outer phalanx columns from behind.

Now I see them doing this, so what I try to do is rotate my phalanx column to face them, albeit they're doing this slower than the horses are running. As I'm rotating, the spears are up, not down, and they get bruised real badly by the oncoming horses.

Now with that said, I've seen some really crazy fights where horsemen charging into the side of a thickly formed phalanx column fared worse than a phalanx column facing them, but in mid rotation.

I'm tempted to start adopting napoleonic tactics, like if I see cavalry coming, form up into a square.

Does anybody else have experiences like this? Faced with flanking cavalry, rotate or hold?

I generally turn off phalanx, then tell them to run into the new position, then reactivate phalanx.

-Simetrical

Have enough of your own cavalry to at least delay their flanking maneuver. Or you can hit there cavalry in the rear or flank right as they're about to smack into your phalanx.

One tactic I have tried sometimes is to just pile four phalanx onto each other, until there are ouly four little holes for the enemy to charge through.

with the greeks and there phalanxes being flanked the best thing i have found is to keep skimerishers behind the phalanx the can stop the calvary untell one of your phalanx units turns around to make the horses in to shish kabobs

If you only got a phalanx army without any supporting cavalry/infantry, or the support troops can't compete against the enemy's cavalry(because of significantly fewer numbers or quality), try "bending" the flanks of your line so that the flanks are also a line a spears. If you're defending, you'll have plenty of time to deploy your troops in this fashion, preferably on higher ground of course.

It doesn't work very well on the attack though, and I don't have a solution to that, always bring a significant cavalrysquadron when attack ~:)

There is a way to delay cavalry from attacking u from behind. You simply place archers behind ur phalanx, and leave them with fire at will on. It works for me very well.

what's the easiest way to rotate a phalanx unit? are there any hotkeys or something? (rotate unit left, rotate unit right) because i hate making phalanx units go to standard formation when enemy cavalry are charging their sides...

The hotkeys are . and , to rotate a unit in each diection. You just hold down the key and a ghost image starts rotating. When it reaches the desied position release the key and teh unit will rotate.
The only problem with this is that a phalanx unit will raise their pikes before rotating, so that flanking cavalry may hit them before they are ready.

You can form a full square.

I use that with Germans and archers in the middle.

The rear of the square is only one spear band two deep, but basically the horsies never get there anyways.