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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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.)
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