I have 1000 sword fighters and the enemy has 1000 sword fighters. If they form a 20 * 50 rectangle, only the 136 people on the sides can actually fight. When I encircle them with a longer, thinner formation, I should be able to do more “damage per second”. For example in the games Age of Empires and Starcraft, you would want as many melee units in contact to enemies as possible.
Why does the “oblique order” work in real life? What advantage does a solder have from having someone stand *behind* him instead of fight *beside* him? Assuming they have spears instead of swords, they could fight from the second or third rank, but they did historically form more than three ranks.
Do they maybe *push* the enemies over with their shields and having a comrade push themselves in the back makes them better pushers? Maybe you would get *holes* in your line and having holes is worse than being flanked? But isn’t the point of diminishing returns earlier than fifty ranks? Is it a *psychological* advantage?
As a concrete example, you could consider the [Battle of Leuctra, 371 BC](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N8vDnVJU1Lk).
Edit: I read that historians are not quite sure how phalanxes worked exactly. So maybe it makes sense to also consider more modern armies, before the use of gunpowder. They also had formations with multiple ranks.
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what youre describing did happen. it was like Julius Cesar or alexander the great who was against a larger army and just encircled them and won. bold move at the time, but it did work. having squads of soldiers standing deep instead of wide meant that your army was less likely to be taking out by the enemies archers. if you are all standing in single file, 200 soldiers long, then lets say the volley of arrows will take out 50%, then you have 100 men, some standing alone with 5 bodies around them and no one to help them out. instead, you have 10 groups of 20 soldiers, all standing in 5×4 formation, with gaps between the groups. now the archers are aiming at smaller lines, further apart, so the number of people they can hit is only 50, and theyre spread out, so now the archers will only hit 20% if them, so you lose 10 soldiers.
The front line was the most dangerous place to be, because you were the ones who had the highest chance of being killed immediately by arrows or swords. if everyone stoown shoulder to shoulder, then the army is comprised entirely of front line, and no one left to fight after they fall
A few things to note:
It’s not necessarily possible to just extend a line indefinitely. At some point you’ll run out of ‘battlefield’. Of course, this is why many battles have one or more flanks ‘anchored’ against some kind of terrain – hills, rivers, shoreline, marsh, etc..
A very long line also leads to command & control problems. How does a general observe and get orders to soldiers a mile away? A tight block of soldiers is easier to command, an army spread over a smaller area is easier to command. This is much less of a problem you have in a game like Age of Empires, where you have (theoretically) perfect control over each individual.
The physical force of large blocks of soldiers was certainly an issue in cases, though I think how important it was is often open to debate. In the pike & shot period you have what’s called “push of pike” where pike blocks might engage each other for quite long periods without all that many casualties.
However even into the gunpowder age you can see the impact of deep columns – the famous columns of Napoleon’s army that were able to keep advancing and smash through enemy lines. There’s definitely a morale effect to this kind of formation, on both sides. The flipside of limiting the number of your soldiers who can fight the enemy is that only a portion of your soldiers are exposed to danger at a time. Knowing an attacker is just going to *keep coming* is a morale blow for the enemy.
There are a couple of other things to note that you can illustrate with a battle like Leuctra. One is that it’s not just mass but quality. In fact, trying to line up your best quality units against the opponent’s weaker units was a well-known tactic in ancient Greek warfare.
Another is that having a deep formation gives you a reserve that can exploit the breakthrough. Your breakthrough is immediately followed by fresh troops who can fall upon the enemy’s flanks and rear, while the initial (tired, injured) wave can screen off any threat from the forces they pushed back.
There are definitely pros and cons to different depths of formation, both at a unit level and an army level, and this is the kind of thing that goes backwards and forwards across history and even within individual wars. (You could see Leuctra as a forerunner of Macedonia pikemen with even longer spears, who later came up against more flexible Roman formations, etc etc.)
One mistake you do is to assume that people had sward as primary weapons.
Swords are what we often see about ancient time because they look nice and was common alongside axes for weapon carrier if you need to be armed but not in battle. They are also quite efficient weapons to use if it combats a few individuals. But when you talk about pitched battles with the close-order formation of large numbers of soldiers polar arms and shields is the common armament.
It movies you often see meant just running forward toward the enemy. That is a very bad way to fight. In reality, the efficient way is to keep troops in a formation so they can help each other. You then just have the enemy in one direction. If two groups of people just run towards each other you can have enemies all around you.
It is weapons with a high rate of fire initially machine guns and ranged explosive weapons that resulted in combat as we see it today. Even in the US civil war, the fire rate of the rifles was not enough to stop close-order formation to be efficient. The last attempt to use something like that was WWI it was clear then that it no longer works.
Officers and other leaders often had diffrent weapons because moving around and commanding was their primary task so fewer shields and polearms more swards. That practice continued in the battle to a very recent time when officers had revolvers and swords while the men they command had rifles. That is what is commonly used in WWI. Even today higher rank military commanders typically have a pistol as a side arm but soldiers have automatic rifles
The linked example the Battle of Leuctra is between ancient Greeks, their main formation was [Hoplite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoplite) which use spears and shields as primary weapons, not swards
With pole arms, multiple rows can point them out the front of the formation at the same time. A lot more recent pike formation is the same thing, they get replaced with bayonet-equipped muskets and later one where you get a range attack method too, Pikes existed for a long time alongside muskets.
Romans did use swords a lot more in the legion but they also had their Pilum, a 2 mere long javelin line you could use as a spear to for example defend against cavalry. Because it is a range weapon too and the was often thrown before you reach an enemy infantry line more lines resulted in more weapons being thrown.
Even if everyone had swords you do not what a too-thin line. It is a lot easier to break through it and if you do the thinner the line the fewer is there so try to stop the. The extreme example is just a 1 man thick line where a breakthrough of an enemy with a thicker line can result in you men needing to fight an enemy in front and behind them, which quite certainly results in death.
Another factor is in a compact rectangle it is quite hard to flee for someone on the front. Inexperienced troops might do that in contact with the enemy, so the enemy can get through the line because of that. When a unit starts to flee it is no longer organized and people get far apart. If the enemy has cavalry this is the perfect opportunity to use them and kill everyone that just run away. Keeping unit cohesion is more important than that some formations might be a bit more efficient.
Keeping the formation even in combat when people get afraid, and their friends die around is hard, especially with inexperienced soldiers. So a formation taht is more efficient with experienced and well-disciplined troops might be terrible if used inexperienced men. Humans soldiers are not like soldiers in computer games that can follow orders all the time. You need to take human behavior into consideration and a compact rectangle has the advantage is simple to command and keeping the troops fighting, Troops just running away is the work that can happen
Add to that maneuvering, you can have a line that goes on forever so you need the ability to proter from enemy infantry on the side of your unit or even cavalry that got around the line completely. The corners of a formation are countable o you need some depth on the sides.
The development of a compact rectangular formation is a hollow square where you get more from an area with fewer men. The drawback is maneuvering is a lot harder and if they break apart they are vulnerable to cavalry. The famous usage of this formation is in the Napoleonic wars. Hollow Square requires more training and troops that do not run away.
>Do they maybe push the enemies over with their shields and having a comrade push themselves in the back makes them better pushers?
Pushing like you may have seen in some movies is probably not accurate. Pushing would not be beneficial to individuals on either side. For starters, they can literally suffocate from the force from all the bodies pushing. Imagine being a roman and suffocating directly face to face with a ‘barbarian’. Neither side can attack, they just get crushed.
Even if you win a ‘push’, they means the enemy fell over backwards, but your men are falling forwards, on to the enemy, with more allies falling onto his back.
Other than pushing,
There is a 60 sec video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8vDnVJU1Lk) on oblique order. Basically it is a flanking maneuver but on a larger scale and slower then what we are used to seeing or acting out in video games
Also note, that we see these battles from above, *when on ground level you can screen and hide your numbers* (depth). Skirmishers were sometimes used to blur the numbers behind them.
Flanking is supposedly best when approaching from your left/their right. This is their sword-arm, which is easier to flank attack than the shield-arm. So if you were able to hide a big force on their sword-arm flank, then in theory this assault group should be able to wipe the side of the formation and clear there way across the front line while also getting some units wrapping around behind too.
1v1 fighting in the frontline could take seconds, or minutes to kill the guy in front of you, this stays generally ‘1v1’ because of the formation (they can rotate with the guy behind). But a group of soldiers coming from a flank means the victim is going to be fighting 1v3 or maybe more, and all of them are coming at his vulnerable sword-arm, potentially meaning they can take down their target in a few seconds and move to the next poor soldier down the line.
edit: there was pushing on the front line, but not having the whole army push against another army pushing
‘1v1’ on the frontline is metaphorical, they obviously would attack the other targets next to their primary opponent.
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