GW News: BIG N' SMALL WAAAGH! COMIN'

Yeah. I don't like ranks. Mass armies are blobs as soon as the fighting starts.

 

You mean if they want to die. Because outside of Asterix stories not even Romans did that.

 

All of those did still "flow" towards the sides if possible, for example to get more people into the fight/circle the enemy, and of course they shifted to fill gaps, either because of own losses or because the enemy line broke up. The guys who didn't have an enemy right in front of them wouldn't just stand around doing nothing.
Of course they stayed together if possible, but viewed from above their formations would have looked more like an amoeba than a rectangle.

Historical texts from Macedonian times describe that and Romans even had drills for who would fill which gap and how.

I can dig up some sources tonight but from the top of my head one of them was "De Bello Gallico" and dynamic phalanx fighting during the battle of Leuctra is described in Xenophon's "Hellenika".

 

Rectangles, "U" shapes, circles, triangles, even shapes that had a few warriors (groups of six or so) protruding forward like the fingers of a hand into empty spaces to create mini-flanking pressure on the enemy.

In some of them it would be hard to even see "ranks" because in a fairly equal fight the front ranks would die quite quickly and not all at the same time, creating a bit of chaos no matter how disciplined the army was. It is just the nature of battle.

 

Yeah definitely not something I would want to be in.
Especially with tactics like pushing from behind (phalanx did that as well).

 

Haha yeah that describes it pretty well I guess! Except everyone had spears.