Pushback and melee

I decided to dust off the RTW disk and do some pushback tests. In the past I've seen some pushback effect due to mass in the regards that units actually do get forced forward or back, at least for the heavily armoured units. This has seemed important to me for phalanx units. And we all know what elephants and cav can do...

Tonight I decided to test some light falxmen, then phalanx pikeman each vs. their own, with the only difference being mass on each side (2.0 vs. 1.0 for the other.) I controlled Dacia for the falxmen (to avoid war cry usage by either side since the Thracian falxmen lack the ability.) I then reversed the masses and tried again. I have lethality cut by half.

Results:
Battles were very close, I seemed to detect a mass advantage for the charge fairly consistently. After that nothing was clear. The higher mass unit won 7 of 8 tests for falxmen but it was so close that it appeared the initial charge effect might have swung the balance somehow. For the phalanx pikes I only ran two tests, and the higher mass unit lost both (one with, one without guard mode on.) I was not seeing evidence of actual pushback, which surprised me. Only death was moving things, and since they were evenly matched, this was of little consequence.

Preliminary Conclusion:
Pushback is not a factor in the RTW combat calcs. It's effect on killing doesn't seem to be modeled (or my tests were flawed and failed to detect it.)
I would be interested in hearing if others get different results.

Background:
Common sense would suggest being force backward at the point of a weapon would put one at a serious disadvantage, weakening both attack and defense for individuals and seriously disrupting formations. Neither people nor formations are designed for operating at peak efficiency in reverse. Going backwards is prone to lead to losing balance or tripping which would likely prove fatal. I thought this was an important part of MTW's calcs, but I'm not intimately familiar with them.

Ok I just did a test and came up with these results:

I did a 2v1 giving the enemy one unit. The computer attacked as they normally do in a custom battle when town watch vs town watch - head on.

I arranged my units accordingly:



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The computer attacked my thin stretched line and it did not buckle. They had about 6 rows (or whatever the default is). My unit coming up from behind didn't push forward as you think it would. The unit came to the rear of the other unit, paused, and then they filtered through the front unit and within their ranks to get to the enemy, and once they began fighting the enemy it's as if their mass suddenly meaned something and it pushed all of their OWN units away from them as if to make room for them. Very odd.

But listen to this! Then I did it with two rows and got some very interesting results.

I made both lines as narrow as possible, one horizontal to the enemy and one vertical. The enemy attacked. just as my line began charging - the front lines meet, my line stops the enemy, then my second comes up and my guys and their guys start at it and that's when things got crazy. The middle of the line was buckling slowly (but only because I had less ranks of men to waste on attrition losses as their think line could, their larger mass didn't play any factor), and there came units from the wings which had easily wrapped around the enemy but were not needed to keep the integrity of the unit together, so they were rushing back from the wings automatically to aid the buckling center.

:charge: