How effective is loose formation in combat?

[Bert Preast]

Casse sword-masters default to a loose formation. Odd really, as slingers still take them down like skittles yet when they get into melee it's like watching a lawnmower at work.

[geala]

Try to imagine what would happen if a bunch of sword swinging attackers would meet a relatively dense formation of spearmen or swordmen. They would perhaps outflank the denser troops but in the center every attacker would be confronted with defenders in front of him, at the left and the right, without support from his comrades and without the pressure of a denser formation. That is like suicide. I highly doubt that we have to think of the Celtic or Germanic assaults as wild runs without cohesion, at least after some experience with southern foes. Therefore I would not like loose order for melee infantry.

I use loose order for my skirmishers in front of my phalanxes (I'm obsessively playing Greeks ). It exposes the attackers to longer missile fire, disturbs their order and spares my better troops a bit (poor akonkistai however...), protects my cavalry and flanks from sudden attacks and so on. Loose order is not only for protection against missiles but also to control the space of the battle field.

[the_handsome_viking]

Try to imagine what would happen if a bunch of sword swinging attackers would meet a relatively dense formation of spearmen or swordmen. They would perhaps outflank the denser troops but in the center every attacker would be confronted with defenders in front of him, at the left and the right, without support from his comrades and without the pressure of a denser formation. That is like suicide. I highly doubt that we have to think of the Celtic or Germanic assaults as wild runs without cohesion, at least after some experience with southern foes. Therefore I would not like loose order for melee infantry.

I use loose order for my skirmishers in front of my phalanxes (I'm obsessively playing Greeks ). It exposes the attackers to longer missile fire, disturbs their order and spares my better troops a bit (poor akonkistai however...), protects my cavalry and flanks from sudden attacks and so on. Loose order is not only for protection against missiles but also to control the space of the battle field.

The nature of longsword combat pretty much revolves around flexibility, in the case of battle naturally you would want room to swing. I don't think the Celts necissarily just mad rushed everyone, it may have seemed like a mad rush but really, loose formation charges and fighting is quite frankly better for certain weapons, such as long swords, I recall reading about the transition from more tightly packed Germanic formations in classical times to much looser formations in the migraiton period, essentially due to the change in strategy and weaponry.

For example, classic Germanic shield bosses would be curved so that you could naturally punch someone if you needed to and smash their face in, however if you accidently brushed it up against the back of one of your own men, it wouldn't necissarily hurt them, however during the migration period what you saw in Germanic armies more and more was a spiked shield boss, this implies that combat was much more loose and physical, because you really would run the risk of stabbing your own men in the back in a dence formation with these weapons.

It seems very logical that the ancient Celts fought in a similar mannor, especially those wealthy enough to use long swords, I could see spearmen naturally trying to fight in a more tightly packed formation due to the nature of their weapons, but the advantage of a skilled longsword user is that he is quick, flexible, and has a highly verstile weapon that can adapt to many situations.

I don't really need to explain the fact that the Romans adopted an Iberian Celtic short stabbing sword for their tightly packed formations and why it had so much success against the Gauls. In short, if one of the most powerful aspects of Gallic warfare revolved around loose formation, warriors that needed lots of room to swing their deadly longswords, the answer to this was obviously a tight sheild wall with a short stabbing sword so that the loose formation enemy would have to cluster against their enemies shield wall and their longswords would essentially become useless, unless they didn't mind using their own weapons against their own men.

What I'm getting at here is, the Celtic way of warfare wasn't exactly stupid, it makes a lot of sense to use these long bladed weapons in such a fashion, heck, this method of combat didn't really ever fall out of use, however what the Romans did essentially found the loophole in this otherwise highly effective tactic.

I'm not sure if it's just pot luck or game code that allows my loose formation Celtic swordsmen to have so much success against certain foes, but it does seem somewhat more historically accurate that way.

I definitely think that longsword units should have some sort of boost when it comes to loose formation, and some sort of penalty for using dense packed formation, this is especially true when it comes to the Celts.

As for the Germans? from what I've read they were very fond of their dence formations at this time and seem to be represented in EB quite well, that said, I could and probably will for the creation of more unit types for the Sweboz.

[Watchman]

Speaking of the shield bosses, Byzantine military treatises apparently at one time recommended giving the front rank of an infantry formation spiky ones and the men behind them "flat" ones. The idea obviously being that in a close shieldwall push the spiky front ranks would be that much nastier for the enemy, while the rear ranks could still use their shields to physically push their comrades forward (the ancient hoplites apparently used the same approach).

This sort of creative mix-and-match approach seems to have been fairly typical of the lot.