Historical/EB questions

[duncan.gill]

I had a number of questions relating to the historical aspect of EB (some of there relate to gameplay).

1. Given the phalanx's obvious weakness at the flanks/rear why was this the dominant tactic used amongst the ancient Greeks? I can understand that meeting a phalanx head on would not be successful but would it not always be vulnerable to flanking actions (i.e. you have slow moving troops who have to maintain a formation carrying very long spears).

2. Why did the phalanx die out? What was the military innovation that prevented it from being the main tactic used by the Greeks?

3. Why in EB are slingers better than archers? Why did the sling (as far as I know) die out as the dominant missle weapon compared to the bow in the dark/middle ages?

4. Why in EB can there not be battles with realistic unit sizes (e.g. with only 60 or so men per stack it is difficult to have a battle with 10,000 per side).

Thanks for any input,

Duncan

[Landwalker]

1) I don't know about this, but presumably smart commanders protected their flanks with cavalry and skirmishers. Thus, all that was left against a competent commander was either to defeat these screens, or to meet head-on (or, preferably, both). And since the best thing for meeting a head-on attack is a phalanx, and the best thing for making a head-on attack against a phalanx is... another phalanx...

2) The military innovation was: Mobile heavy infantry. Infantry that could move faster (since they weren't carrying those big honkin' pikes) and operate well out of formation. Encounters with barbarian tribes that didn't rely on the phalanx, and thus forced some sort of innovation to account for more mobile enemies.

3) I think this is because of the relative weakness of bows during the period, since it was a fairly undeveloped technology. I'm not up to speed on my military technological history, but I believe the bows of the classical period were frankly just small and weak--they may have been more accurate (and were probably used in hunting small game), but when you're firing at a gigantic clot of men, precision isn't as important as knocking a guy on his butt.

4) Because computers can't handle it while simultaneously providing anything remotely close to satisfactory graphics. Aside from that, it would be incredibly unwieldy for the player. I don't think that this really constitutes a characteristic of EB so much as it does the RTW engine in general. It's just a practical issue.

Cheers.

[Admetos]

1. You protect the phalanxes flanks with other troops, eg. Hypaspists.

2. Because the Romans conquered the phalanx using nations.

3. Slingers are better in EB as they have the armour piercing attribute.

4. Could you imagine running a battle with 10,000 men?

[Bellum]

The phalanx continued to be used, just by different people. The Germans continued to uses the shield wall, and later in the medieval period, pikes became popular again as knights dominated the battlefields.

EDIT:

And I don't think battles which can have 3000 men on each side are that unrealistic.

[mlc82]

I've always wondered why the sling died out by the "Medieval" period as well (good question btw!). I figured it was more to do with using a sling being more difficult to learn that using a basic hunting bow, and that the latter would be the easier choice to learn for some poor peasant dragged off of his farm and conscripted into a war. I've always heard slings took quite a while to master along with the more advanced bows, but wouldn't think your basic hunting bow would be that hard to learn quickly (I used to have one as a kid and could shoot it somewhat decently, just from messing around with it).

[Elthore]

there was a thread regarding slings a few months back, try the search function, it should come up with the keyword slings

[Cheexsta]

1. Depends on which "phalanx" you're talking about. Typical Hellenic phalanxes (edit: pre-Philip/Alexander) consisted of a thick body of troops with 8ft spears thrust over big shields (aspes - commonly referred to as hoplons) into the enemy. Both sides' formations would push into each other and try and break the enemy formation and would mostly be a contest of discipline; if one part of a Greek phalanx broke, the rest would also flee.

The Macedonian phalanx, first implemented in the professional Macedonian army by Philip II, also used big blocks of infantry but with massive 18ft pikes, smaller shields and lighter armour. The key aspect of Macedonian armies, though, was its combination of pike-armed infantry and cavalry; have a whole bunch of cavalry on your flanks and your enemy isn't going to want to attack them there. The idea was to funnel the enemy into the infantry centre before encircling him with the excellent - and highly disciplined - Macedonian cavalry. Where most cavalrymen would have a tendancy to chase after fleeing enemies to get to their plunder-rich camp, the Companions under Philip II and Alexander II were far better than this and were able to wheel around and hit the enemy right when/where they were needed.

Added to that was the light infantry (peltasts, Thracian mercenaries and the like) that kept the flanks of phalanx infantry protected for long enough to let the cavalry do its job.

2. I wouldn't say it was a military innovation that outshone the phalanx so much as the later Successors' inability to utilise something so potentially powerful. Constant warring between the Diadochoi bled the Companions dry and, while you can always replace infantry, it was becoming increasingly hard to get cavalry of that quality during this timeframe. So the Successors tended to try and make up for this just by adding more and more infantry, but a phalanx is just so slow and inflexible that any weak point could potentially be exploited by a more efficient enemy.

For example, in the major battles that Rome fought against Macedon in the late 3rd century and early 2nd century (207 and 168 from memory), the Romans only really won because the Macedonian lines weren't properly formed and the more flexible Roman infantry was able to punch through with minimal casualties.

It should also be noted that "phalanx"-type formations also had a massive comeback during the early modern period (16th century AD? I don't recall) in the form of pike and musket formations. Pikes in front, muskets at rear and light cavalry on wings led to quite an effective battle group.

3. Numerous reasons: bows got better as time progessed, slings were a very un-prestigious weapon, bows allowed a more reliable high-angle shot over peoples' heads etc. Don't know the specifics, though.

4. If you go to the main menu (before starting a campaign) and click on Video Options -> Show Advanced Options -> Huge Unit Scale you can get battles with generally around 2,000 men per side (max around 4-5,000) but that requires that you have a decent enough computer to run it. You can't have battles of 10,000 and so on simply because the game doesn't allow us - we are restricted to units of 240 men (plus up to 2 officers) and armies of 20 units and can't do anything about it. I normally justify it in my mind to say that the battle is actually representing one that would be roughly 5 times what you see in RTW/EB. Not a perfect system, but eh.

[Watchman]

It should also be noted that "phalanx"-type formations also had a massive comeback during the early modern period (16th century AD? I don't recall) in the form of pike and musket formations. Pikes in front, muskets at rear and light cavalry on wings led to quite an effective battle group.

Late 1300s actually. Also, the muskets and crossbowmen were in fact usually outside the pikes - something of a redshirt job obviously. Military historians often enough use the term "soft cushion" in the context, even if the shooties now benefited from the pikes leveled over their heads.

...beats me what part of period line cavalry is supposed to be "light" though. The pike went out of use before cavalry body armour.


As slings go, they didn't particularly disappear anywhere later; in Don Quijote you have the eponymous hero at least once nearly killed by some angry shepherds' slings for example, and that was written (and set, more or less) in the 1500s. Peasant children commonly used them to chase birds off sown fields. It's just that the presence of large amounts of shock cavalry tended to make the life of infantry skirmishers rather precarious, the lower ranks of peasantry were a rather peripheral military presence, and the crossbow did the armour-killing part at least as well and quite a bit easier.

In some parts - say, the heavily forested northern Europe - the weapon was barely known anyway, and many of the commoners were deft hands with bows instead.

I've read slingers were in fact fairly useful in sieges; their basic ammunition (stones) was inexpensive, and as the most you could usually hit of a defender behind the crenellations was the head against which the sling tends to be quite lethal even through a helmet...

[Arzeal]

http://slinging.org/articles.html
this is the link to the article which every1 agreed on when discussed about slinging few weeks ago. However I can not find the exact articles fully explain in details what happened w. slinging, but basically it can be sum up to some points:
- Improved fortified defense restrict the use of slings (towers w. small holes for archers to shoot through but hard for use of slings, and the towers r 2 small for slingers to operate the sling as well)
- The "volley" effect which archers had, the sling can not archieve due to several reasons (arm legth, momentum, the weight of stones, etc.) so it had less morale effects on enemy -( the speeds - numbers of bullets/min however can reached equally by a experienced slingers to experienced archers)
- extensive use of tight formation limited to slinging due to the needs of clear area for slingers to throw their stones.
- New development of bows made them deadlier w. less practices while slings, through centuries, remain the same.

[Watchman]

I doubt very much developement of the long wooden self-bow above and beyond what was the norm already in the Stone Age was even possible, mind you. But then again where that one was common slings were almost never used anyway, already because the device isn't very well suited for forested terrain AFAIK.

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

Besides the reasons explained above, the main reason for the sling decay was the necessity for extreme periods of training required to be proficient with it. Extensive training was even more demanding that for bows. So much that sometimes it would take a lifetime to master it. No wonder the Balearics were the best of them in ancient times. They trained from childhood and used it every day to hunt in order to survive.

[TWFanatic]

Since 1.0, some archers can beat slingers in a 1-on-1 missile exchange battle because they often have higher attack stats, and the ap stat doesn't matter too much if neither unit has much armor. Slingers are still better against heavy infantry and cavalry, though.

If you think slingers are powerful in 1.0, you shouldve seen them before. Cataphracts were like sheep before their mighty stones.

[konny]

Late 1300s actually.

Actually allready in the late 12th Century: Italian citizens used them with some success against Barbarossa and, with lesser success, two generations later against his grandson Friedrich II.

The difference between the Ancient phalanx and the Mediavel/Modern model was, that the later phalanx was a pure anti-cavalry weapon and not meant to fight against other phalanxes. The infantry combat was usualy done by the missle/gunpowder troops and special sword fighter units, the later disappeared around the 16th Century.

...beats me what part of period line cavalry is supposed to be "light" though. The pike went out of use before cavalry body armour.

In fact light cavalry, for example horse archers, never came out of use. Even for the kinght-heavy Mediavel armies we can assume more light (i.e. unarmored) horsemen than knights, because usualy every knight was accompanied by at least one or two of them.

[Watchman]

Actually allready in the late 12th Century: Italian citizens used them with some success against Barbarossa and, with lesser success, two generations later against his grandson Friedrich II.

Those were heavy spearmen of the classic shieldwall pattern, not pikemen though. The Northern Italians in fact borrowed, unwittingly no doubt, a page off the Achaemenid infantry manual as their normal pattern of infantry deployement was a few ranks of heavy pavesari spearmen with crossbowmen behind.

In fact light cavalry, for example horse archers, never came out of use. Even for the kinght-heavy Mediavel armies we can assume more light (i.e. unarmored) horsemen than knights, because usualy every knight was accompanied by at least one or two of them.

Europeans were kinda short on horse-archers though. Around the closest they got was mounted javelineers, and mounted crossbowmen apparently sometimes shot from horseback rather than acting as "dragoons".

There was certainly no shortage of cavalry lighter and humbler equipped than true knights in Medieval armies, but those were normally also armed with lances or spears and acted in shock capacity, typically as the follow-up support wave for the heavy horse.

And by Late Medieval and Early Modern times the difference between "light" and "heavy" cavalry was mainly whether they wore a full plate harness and rode a barded horse or not, and if they had the full-sized heavy lance or a lighter one. Even when the pistol replaced the lance as the primary shock weapon heavy armour for line cavalry didn't start going out of use before halfway into the Thirty Years' War.

[konny]

Europeans were kinda short on horse-archers though.

That is probably a cliche since they are often mentioned as axulia, for example in treatesies of alliances. I would rather say that the javelin came out of use, at least I can't recall to have seen those units been mentioned somewhere - but my knwoledge in this topic is very much limited to Germany and, to a lesser degree, Northern Italy.

But, certainly, 'horse archer' must not mean that these men were shooting arrows from horseback like Mongols, but might more often refer to 'mounted foot archers'.

[C.LVCIANVS]

The combination of pikemen and musketeers in the same unit was the spanish Tercio infantry, in 16th century. Tercios dominated battlefields until better guns+bayonets were avaiable, cavalry definitively lose its primate, and better fire discipline and troops training changed warfare. At the end, it was better to have 600 well disciplined brown bess armed men than 300 pikes and 300 muskets.

[MerlinusCDXX]

The combination of pikemen and musketeers in the same unit was the spanish Tercio infantry, in 16th century. Tercios dominated battlefields until better guns+bayonets were avaiable, cavalry definitively lose its primate, and better fire discipline and troops training changed warfare. At the end, it was better to have 600 well disciplined brown bess armed men than 300 pikes and 300 muskets.

yes, I agree, as the poster mentioned, the bayonet effectively gave each of those 600 musketeers their own "short pike", add to that rigorous discipline and courage (it takes real cojones to face down a pack of horsemen thundering down on your lines) they were able to neutralize the shock effect of the cavalry charge.