Quote Originally Posted by gurakshun
The one I'm talking about is a tactic I've seen on youtube and later fully optimized it for my own usage (optimal physical position of the phalanxes, optimal angle to keep them, etc.)


If you're not familiar with it, it kind of remembles this :
iiiii
\i/
Where "i" represents walkable areas, and the slashes represents where the phalanxes are places - basically you use them at chokepoints like bridges and gateways/wall breaches.

The enemy that walks in gets almost instantly killed because they are getting stabbed from 2 directions at the same time, and the "vertex" of the formation is virtually unbreakable because the pikes are crossed and there is virtually nothing but pike points in that area.

It's been really effective, you can use it with any units that are able to phalanx. It does get broken however...due to a couple of reasons
1) enemy missle units that fire up on your now exposed flanks
2) medium amounts of bodyguard cav/cataphract level cavs are able to push past the pike points and can stay significantly longer than any infantry.
3) the enemy sometimes DOES flank you by crossing at another location (it even happened to me once in a bridge battle, I was so impressed i gave them the victory)

I was undecided whether this was actually an exploit or just a good formation to use in bridge/city battles, because I have a hard time believing that V-formations werent used in history by significantly outnumbered defenders of narrow chokepoints like thermopylae, city walls, or other areas - with proper flank and missle fire, it is unbreakable.
The strategy to form up your men in such a manner past a river crossing, a bridge or a ford, has been used historically at several occasions. Hannibal probably used it at Trebia, and the battle of Stirling bridge in the Medieval period used it. However, in both those cases, the defender would let the attacker cross the bridge with a large portion of the army before closing such a half circle around the attacker. No attacker in his right mind would even think of crossing the river if that formation was visible from the beginning, but a lot of overly eager and undisciplined commanders have made the mistake of crossing a river when the enemy has been a little distance a way (even if visible), or partly hidden.