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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>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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