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
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