Even Mel Gibson couldn't lead this disorderly mess of highlanders to victory.
The Total War series does a great job of representing this fact in its battles. Unlike a lot of other RTS games that build individual units, units in Total War games are already a group. For instance, a spear militia unit contains 75 spearmen who move and fight as a group. Many units also have special abilities that change how they are deployed. Many spearmen can set themselves into a schiltrom formation where they form a bristling circle of spears and deploy their shields to defend themselves as best as possible. Pikemen can brace themselves into a pikewall that shatters any cavalry unit foolish to charge them.
Not the best place for a lord's weekly countryside ride.
Maintaining a formation is critically important when defending against an enemy attack. The most vulnerable units need to be protected by heavy infantry and cavalry units. These includes archers, catapaults, and other ranged units that tend to have little armor but provide critically important long range firepower. If they are not defended by the shields and pikes of the heavy infantry, they can be slaughtered by an enemy cavalry charge and quickly rout, leaving an army without any ranged support. This can quickly lose a battle for a commander.
The image below shows an example of a good defensive formation. The English commander has placed his archers behind a wall of spears as the rebel commander charges to meet him in battle. His archers get to fire on the charging horde with relative impunity as the rebel commander cannot get his troops past the English spears. The heavy casualties taken from archer fire eventually will break the morale of the rebel force and result in an easy English victory.
It doesn't help that the rebel force also moves as a mass that would be hard for an archer to miss.
It's just as important to maintain proper formation when engaging an enemy offensively. A bunch of charging lunatics may be impressive to behold but end up being rather ineffective when they don't hit an enemy position together in a coordinated fashion.
Even if they bear shields as intimidating as this fellow.
A good way to think of a proper offensive charge is as normal waves hitting a sandbag barrier compared with a tidal wave hitting the same barrier. The normal waves will hit the sandbags here and there frequently but they aren't able to sweep over it to flood the area protected. A tidal wave that hits with all its power all at once can sweep away the entire sandbag wall, devastating everything behind it. Similarly, sending your cavalry in small groups all along the entire wall of an enemy will probably not manage to penetrate anywhere, you'll just get pushed back and take heavy casualties. A cavalry charge that puts all its power in one spot and maintains a wedge formation can do a great job of breaking through enemy infantry, splitting them into divided vulnerable groups.
Here the charging heavy cavalry unit has split the spearwall apart, leaving all of its individual members easy prey for the swords and mounts of the heavy cavalry.
The other reason that it's important to keep an offensive in an organized formation is that heavily armored infantry, light cavalry, heavy cavalry, and lightly armored archers all march and run at different speeds. If they all move on the offensive in a mixed formation they get tangled together and cannot fight at their best. It's hard for an archer to fire his bow when he's trying to dodge the horses of cavalry and a swordsman's shield keeps hitting him in the back.
This army that decided to pop out of the city's walls en masse illustrates this problem. It's hard for a cavalry unit to form up for a charge on the besieging army when half of their men are stuck behind the archers!
The final realistic depiction the Total War series makes is that when a unit's formation is split their morale tends to drop precipitously, leading them to break and run from the battle. This simulates how vulnerable troops in a spearwall become when they are no longer able to deploy effectively to protect themselves. It ends up being every men for himself, and men in a war stuck fighting alone tend to find that discretion is the better part of valor.
This may leave them as easy victims for cavalry, but fortunately they don't have to run faster than a horse, they just have to run faster than their fellow foot soldiers.
Conclusion
Whether fighting offensively or defensively, it's critically important to keep your army organized. When an army loses its formation the defensive benefits of shield and pike walls are lost and its easy for an enemy general to outflank, surround, and slaughter each unit piecemeal. Just remember that a man who fights alone dies alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment