Completely ineffective in online battles

because using too many arrows back in the day was considered against the rules of war, If persians went full parthians Alex would have been fucked

How do you even stop this? I mean serious-ACK

completely ineffective in online battles

Real battles have a frontline a few kilometers long and no all-seeing eye above.

Alexander

Nepo baby. His daddy built a nice army and Alexander just moved it east until he died.

longbow was so OP head dev had to intervene so france didn't get btfo

Bows are overrated. The English only used so many of them because they were cheap. Every English man had to train and when called to war, they even had to bring their own arrows.

based

Just fight them in anything that is not fkat terrain.

Which is what the Romans did. Afterwards they ditched their swords and went back to spears.

Even longer pointy stick

I win.

breaks the whole game for several seasons in your path

flank

romans used pilum and won

You win by maneuvering around them and forcing them to fight on uneven terrain so that they cannot hold formations.

Bows are a meme.
You lost the Hundred Years War to a teenage girl.

There's like 4 kilometers of spearmen, flanked by cavalry.

The English only won a few meme battles, where the French knights were so dumb to go by foot through mud or uphill. Just so they could have dibs on capturing noblemen.

Just attack them from behind, they can't turn fast enough with those long ass pikes. ggez

kills you from across the map

absolutely no counter

There is nothing more unfair than this

Just throw big rocks, lets see these guys manuver so close togethor.

Phalanxes were supported, Zoomie. They were strong because you were basically being forced into a death box but they were much less effective on rough terrain when gaps would form in the lines.
The Romans exploited this by using flexible manipular legions to break up the death box and more easily deal with individual units.

To be fair, chariots were meta back in the Bronze Age, and they looked cool as hell.

spend 60 years developing increasingly advanced weapon systems

warfare just loops back around to trenches and shelling

What a soulless outcome

But with drones !

The Romans exploited this

The Roman just baited them into rough terrain. They had this flexible frontline where they were constantly falling back, hoping that the enemy frontline would rupture.

Chariots were really lame in reality. Drive forward, shoot arrows, fuck off if they try to catch you.

unless we figure out how to make a perfectly invincible human that's impervious to bullets and explosions, we are just gonna keep looping around to safe and sneaky warfare because thats the most efficient use of resources

Medieval knight? Dig a trench!

WW1 zerg rush? Dig a trench!

Russian tanks? Dig a trench!

I prefer going for the meme units

Almost all of human history circles back around to digging holes and boiling water

Fight Phalanx with Phalanx

Bows are overr-ACK

Rome sissies litteraly never recovered from the Calvary archer chads

Everything usually does not go as planned.
Germans expected France to break in a week in WW I and spent 4 years sitting in trenches.
Hitler expected years of fighting the Frwnch and they surrendered in a couole weeks.
We expected a cool war in Russia and we got caveman-tier stuff.

frenchies bailed-out during WW2 by a bunch of islander rapebabies

still seething ever since

How do you even stop this?

BLU-82 "Daisy Cutter".

In the end, you always need soldiers to hold the ground anon. And for some unknown reason soldiers don't like dying for their countries... Go figure!

Discover a method to break the fundamental component of reality

Use it to boil water

why would a medieval knight need a trench

marches towards you slowly

how do you beat this?

THEY HAVEN'T STOPPED FIRING CRASSIUS

You're analyzing this with 2500 years of hindsight and technological development.
For a man of this time, who didn't have the total war eagle view and had to rely on light cavalry to "see" and order troops around, in a time still a thousand years before stirrups, you'd have to gamble on gimmicks against this battle tested strategy.

in the future they will find even more advanced methods for boiling water just to turn a wheel really fast to boil some water in space

It's to stop the knight

why would anyone think it a good idea to just stand in a line 100m in front of the enemy and shoot at each other with 0 cover whatsoever?

also reminds me of this from waterloo

22 June. This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; but on arrival there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return. The multitude of carcasses, the heaps of wounded men with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to take their surgeons and waggons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never forget. The wounded, both of the Allies and the French, remain in an equally deplorable state.

it's against knights.
there were a lot of trenches and digging in medieval warfare.

why would anyone think it a good idea to just stand in a line 100m in front of the enemy and shoot at each other with 0 cover whatsoever?

If you didn't, you lost.

They were "gentlemen". Cover was for cowards.

Have your own phalanx come out to meet them then have hidden calvary surprise flank theirs
gg

why would anyone think it a good idea to just stand in a line 100m in front of the enemy

because you need close range volley fire for muskets to do anything, they were too inaccurate otherwise

with 0 cover whatsoever

muskets go through cover

couldnt you at least go prone

gets shot for cowardice

You underestimate the arrogance of a modern major general.

why would anyone think it a good idea to just stand in a line 100m in front of the enemy and shoot at each other with 0 cover whatsoever?

I'm biting the bait: muskets were incredibly inaccurate and you needed the mass of an infantry formation in square to not get massacred by cavalry.
The hope was for, of the 400 guys firing at once, maybe like 10 kill someone and the mass and sound will panic the foe.
Yes, this lead to horrendously costly slugging matches where infantry spent hours fusilading each other until one side was spent and tactics didn't really improve until close to WW1.

Totally false eastern horse archers never even engaged with ancient phalanx are you retarded?

To calm the soldiers' nervousness and to improve his army's defensive position, general Nuno Álvares Pereira ordered the construction of a system of ditches, pits and caltrops. This application of typical English tactical procedures had also been used by the Portuguese in the previous battle of Atoleiros and was especially effective against cavalry.

On the morning of the following day, the true dimension of the battle was revealed. In the field, the bodies of Castilians were enough to dam the creeks surrounding the small hill.

honestly, warfare should be done with swords.

You need to stand up to reload, which is what you do most of the time there.

volley fire

Battles at that time were mostly about scaring the other side to run away. Like in the Napoleonic wars only 15% of the deaths were from battle actions.

The seleucids lost to the damn parthians.

Nuclear fussion?

Boiling water

Dark matter?

Boiling water

Antimatter?

Boiling water

Dyson sphere?

Boiling water

This is literally how Alexander conquered the rest of Greece by way, he called it the hammer and the anvil

boils 1/3 of your total population

refuses to elaborate

implodes a generation later in the ensuring succession crisis

muskets were incredibly inaccurate

which only makes a bigger target (wide as fuck line) even more stupid

I mean, if you attacked the sides instead of running up front on it like a retard there's a big chance you can beat it with horses and arrows

do phalanxes normally not have cavalry?

it's still used today by modern infantry.
suppressive fire while another squad flanks.

You want to maximize output of firepower, a wide line = more men shooting = more enemy casualties = less shots coming back.

crazy how pike square meta disappeared for like 1600 years only to suddenly come back for a while

no. more guns in a given front = more firepower.
if you spread out, cavalry gets you.

also they did have units that spread out.

Everyone knew that, especially the leader of the phalanx.
That's why they have support troops and cavalry so you can't just flank them.

take the jezailpill

brain the enemy commanders from nearly a 200m out with the family arquebus on a stick

of course they did. it was a few kilometers of spears, flanked by horses.

how do you stop this?

that's why God invented Napalm

There's plenty of power generation methods that don't involve boiling water

I mean

implodes a generation later in the ensuring succession crisis

Happened with Alexander as well.

the longer wars actually did have massive problems replacing officers.

Fucking loves some helms deep action

Cavalry and archers. Also flanking.

It’s oddly telling that despite this style of warfare mixing new technology and old school formations, borodino was one of the bloodiest battles of the Napoleonic Era. The real brutality wouldn’t kick in until the Crimean War, or the Sino-Rus War.

I mean, burning liquid fuels isn't that far off.

Yeah you burn petrol.

mogged by castle spam

Yes, but most of them involve spinning a wheel very quickly. And the best way to spin a wheel very quickly is by boiling water.

Hydro and wind both just use the physical force of the movement of water/air masses to turn a turbine

Cavalry is still a threat, so your men need to be in a tight formation for mutual protection,
Stuff others mentioned like inaccuracy,
What doesn't usually get much mention is morale

a lot of explosion noises, massive clouds of smoke, as well as very likely threat of bayonet charges means the average man will break and run and lose you the battle if he doesn't feel his unit are present to back him up

light infantry capable of fighting in looser order existed but the above means they're a small, skilled and specially trained elite

And communication/coordination

if they were all free to take cover, they wouldn't be able to move quickly and in organisation to support each other or bayonet charge (very important, if you charge and they don't you usually win)

big lines are also better able to protect officers who need to keep up communication with command and other units

that's what you get when you have two massive armies fighting to the death without running away.

Superior force generation and logistics. As always.

But seriously though, sarissa phalanx wasn't even the decisive arm in the army that incorporated it. For Macedonian/Hellenistic armies it was the cavalry that was expected to "win the battle" (and not in a flanking maneuver behind the army: as anon mentioned, frontages in large battles might have been a couple of kilometers, "flanking the enemy" is a gameism that rarely turns out to be feasible solely on account of realistic scale alone, before any other considerations like flanks of the army often being anchored to natural obstacles like rivers and forests, and protected by the opponent's own cavalry force). And it's not an attack box that kills you if you touch it: even in Alexander's famous battles against Persia, Darius' Greek mercenary hoplites performed well against it, in some cases they were actually winning. And the Romans, who by and large were more heavily equipped still, usually just engaged it head-on and either inflicted unsustainable casualties (against Pyrrhus) or simply crushed it (against Hellenistic states). In some battles like Cynoscephalae the terrain combined with Roman army's organizational structure (junior officers and NCOs with command independence) did help, but by no means does it have to be lured into rough ground or anything of the sort. Fuck, look at topgraphical map of Greece and Anatolia: that's the terrain Macedonian army was designed to fight in!

muskets go through cover

Not if you make it strong enough

Reminder had Alexander (pbuh) not died so early, he would've formed the GRECO-PERSIAN-ARABIAN-INDIAN-CHINESE empire and we would be in space by 300 AA (AFTER ALEXANDER)

Dysons are still the apex but you won't be seeing their implementation anytime soon. No decadent worth his weight in gold would be willing to invest in that. Just for his distant ancestors a few thousand years down the line to enjoy the kickbacks of having essentially unlimited power.

What doesn't usually get much mention is morale

it's how wars until the 20th century were almost always won/lost. it was a game of chicken.

And communication/coordination

yeah. many battles had frontlines several kilometers wide. with gunpowder it was also filled with smoke.

fighting in any formation that can't quickly form into a square means you get trampled by cuirassiers and lancers

Nah, they got mogged by retarded succession bullshit. Mongols (wisely) caught on that chinks were pretty good at siege warfare bullshit and kept thousands of them close for that purpose.

It always astonishes me that people think linear battle is retarded when it coincided with Europe conquering the world (including dumpstering the Ottomans, Indians, and Chinese who also had guns but didn’t use them the way Europe did).

Massed gun formations inflict tremendous damage and make armor irrelevant while protecting you from cavalry charges.

that worked for taking Asian fortified cities but in Hungary and Poland the tiny little castles everywhere forced them to either waste time sieging down 50 guys or expose their rear to ambushes

ACW too. Still had to fight in traditional Age of Reason formations with guns that were extremely accurate up to 400 yards.

How do massed gun formations protect you from cavalry?

grenades

80% of alexander's life is completely made up by the romans
+ he was a homo

Sure, white-ish populations resisted much better than chinks, gooks or turks, but the mongols were still steadily advancing until they had to fuck off back half the world away to discuss succession. I'm not saying they would have conquered western europe but they certainly would have fucked them up for a bit.

they came back after the kurultai and lost even harder

You can form square, allowing you to forn a phalanx with the bayonets that horses won't charge and you can shoot out of.
If cavalry catches you in line, well best you don't think about it.

bayonets

Right now we're switching over to using supercritical CO2 as the working fluid in our heat engines...

So we've actually progressed past boiling water.

mogs on you

Any massed formation protects you from cavalry especially if you have spears (and later, bayonets for your muskets)

I guess the knights would fall into the trenches,
But arent knights armours way lighter than they seem? Also you would get trapped in a trench with the equivalent of a tank

More like that's what you get when you go from smoothbore muskets to rifled barrels. They were fighting with the same old tactics but with weapons that could accurately hit a man from several hundred yards away.

"knight" = mounted Calvary
horse hate hole

We are boiling gases now?

Naruhodo, so horses are big cowards, thats why camels are the superior mount!

skirmishers

archers

flanking by cavalry or swordsmen

all of the above (horse archers)

Phalanxes are overrated by themselves, it's the cavalry that did most of the work

yes but camels also have their problems

trenches

square formations

phalanxes

it's all just counters to cavalry

the real meta defining threat, horses are just that good

loads sling

nothing personnel kid

plapposting was a lot older than people initially realized

I don’t know if I’d call them trenches instead of just being more like a moat.
To me a trench is something you fight out of.

Reminder that longbows werent even a major factor at the Battle of Agincourt

Explain to me why there hasnt been a multiplayer video game based on warfare where you fight in armies using weapons and tactics like in real life.

M&B Napoleonic Wars

Holdfast Nations at War

War of Rights

Mongols were perfectly fine with Siege warfare, especially when they were using gunpowder weapons.
Hell, even the Hassan's infamous assassin fortess that was so tough to breach was invalidated by Mongol's Engineering force

There have been attempts, but getting people to actually stay in formation and follow tactics in a game is impossible

Modern Warfare was already about Beyond-Visual-Range combat multiple decades ago. And now our Advanced fighter jets are basically drone commanders

The thing is, cavalry loses against infantry. Horses are big and take a lot of space so if the infantry actually stands firm, they can basically 3vs1 any given horseman. You don't even need spears or pikes although those do help (Romans for example, while they did later start using spears again presumably on account of increasing predominance of cavalry, have a really really good winning record against cavalry-based armies using swords and shields), and a musket with a bayonet is essentially a short-ish spear. If a cavalry force actually charged home against infantry that didn't waver, the first rank of infantry would basically be crushed under the weight of the horse, and then they'd get stuck and get mobbed by the infantry.

However, horses are big and frightening when they are coming at you fast, combined with thundering of their hooves and glittering breastplates of cuirassiers. Individual soldiers can't stand the terror, or if someone miraculously does then that's some"one" and you no longer have the benefit of ganging up on cavalrymen and you are exactly where the cavalry wants you to be: whether using sword or lance, they can ride past you and pick you off on the move. The way humans can stand the terror is unit cohesion (the carrot of wanting to protect your comrades and the stick of embarrassment of showing yourself to be a coward to your peers), and for that you must fight as a unit.

Phalanx got BTFO'd when Romans realized you can just walk around it

War of Rights Napoopan Edition soon

newest meta is just to 360NOSCOPE the opposing army general

If a cavalry force actually charged home against infantry that didn't waver, the first rank of infantry would basically be crushed under the weight of the horse, and then they'd get stuck and get mobbed by the infantry.

However, horses are big and frightening when they are coming at you fast, combined with thundering of their hooves and glittering breastplates of cuirassiers. Individual soldiers can't stand the terror,

sure the first guy gets killed

can't stand the terror

it's not terror when you said they will fucking die.

Yes they were.

Anon, their fucking 'scouting' force was able fuck up a large part of europe, and the force ONLY went back because a Khan died of alcoholism and caused a succession issue

war of rights is such great fun

completely kills the meta to the point that nobody even queues up for matches anymore

manage to bypass the no singles policy to see this

bunch of father and son duos getting to see Napoopan on the big screen

2 hours of watching Commodus wheezing around the set and slapping away at some old cunt like a horny jack russel

boomers probably saw Waterloo in its prime and assumed it would be the same here

I'll never get my $20 back for watching this piece of shit film. The only cool parts were the cossacks and the frozen lake sequence.

No, ask historians. The french knight have far far more issue with the muddy terrain and basically didn't care about the longbow because it was actually ineffective against their armor

because they were too stupid to ride a horse

horses weren't big enough to ride until the 400s bce and weren't widely available until the 330s bce, near the end of Alexander's reign.
the saddle and the stirrup wouldn't be invented for another 600 years.

There have been multiple but only autists play them

Rather just heating a supercritical fluid.

Anon Babblefags hate this one simple trick!

NTA but terror works both ways. Cavalry, and especially horses, are not inclined to charge directly into a line a sharp, pointing things being aimed at them that will almost certainly result in their deaths for little gain.
So, that’s why cavalry was almost always used to attack the flanks instead.

Ask historians

Which ones? The historian I respect when regarding the battle of Agincourt and the battle of Crecy is Mike Loades. If you have someone else I can look into I'm open to suggestions.

All the greats were homos
The best were pedophiles

Indeed they do.

He won't reply to this because he's trying to bait you into giving as many (You)s as possible.

and basically didn't care about the longbow because it was actually ineffective against their armor

implying kinetic energy isn't transferable

Using your analogy it would be like saying "bullets can't hurt me because I'm covered in kevlar". The kinetic energy of the arrow is still transfered through the plate. Now add several sections firing in unison; even if you're wearing plate you're still getting rocked. Now add to that the muddy terrain and limited visibility in the plate helmet.

historyfags are almost as easy to trigger as trannys

And you use that power to boil water.

It's how people like him operate, they work on generalisations and retreat when you ask for specifics.

His boytoy drowned himself to get away from his old balls BTW lol

Why is it that the kantai kessen doctrine works so good on certain time periods while fails miserably on others

...he said, in english.

you are welcome.

screws up your formation

Realistically the cavalrymen (or the horses - apparently warhorses are trained by getting some guys to always move away from the horse, so the horse is conditioned to think humans will always give it way: if this didn't happen in real combat scenario and the horse somehow survived, it would likely be done for as a warhorse) don't want to die either so, if the infantry did stand firm, they'd pull out at the last moment.

Obviously bows don't actually work like they do in most games, "having high DPS output that just kills the enemies". And in e.g. John Keegan's reconstruction the decisive factor, as I recall, was attributed to the sort of battlefield dynamics that we don't really understand because it hasn't been relevant in war for some centuries, but basically the formation of the advancing French knights lost cohesion, and for this reason the front line was squeezed between stragglers pushing them from behind and the English, in such a way that they couldn't fight effectively.

But a point that also comes across in these reconstructions is that longbowmen did contribute to this coming into pass! The French cavalry charge was defeated by having horses shot beneath them (at this point of the war the French had begun to fight mostly dismounted) and dead horses and knights retreating through the mud would have disrupted the formation. And while breastplates and helmets are proof against arrows, the knights would felt the need to try to cover their weaker spots like breaths and vision slits of their helmets, further disorganizing the attack, or did suffer minor injuries that would have tired, demoralized and weakened them. And finally, the longbowmen did join the fray to assault straggling and wounded knights they could gang up on, and finally fully envelop the French knights who were already struggling.

So it's not wunderwaffe, but not useless. Who whould have thought.

SUP

Correct me if I am wrong because I am a military history brainlet, but I can't believe it took until Napoleon to realise "Huh, if I split my forces into smaller companies and ration off of the land, then we can be more mobile".
Of course, as always, Russia + Winter hard countered the strat.

so the horse is conditioned to think humans will always give it way: if this didn't happen in real combat scenario and the horse somehow survived, it would likely be done for as a warhorse) don't want to die either so,

LAMO!!!!!!!!
do you fucking hear yourself?!

How do you think horses are trained to gallop at sharp pointy things?

artillery (the concept of delivering an explosive through the air and landing it on the enemy)

rockets (artillery minus the gun)

missiles (rockets but guided)

bombers (artillery but slower and guided by humans)

modern jets (artillery, propelled by a jet engine, guided by human)

drones (artillery but slower and uses little rotors, guided remotely)

Good thing it didn't take until napoopan.

It's not that simple because small groups of men were very vulnerable to cavalry raiding parties among other forms of warfare. Travelling in force not just for logistic purposes but it was as a general rule far safer.

Scale. Until the French revolutionary armies, nobody in Europe really tried to mobilise forces in such large numbers.

Reminder had Alexander (pbuh) no-

dies from common cold

Heh

Should have gone with agnatic-cognatic succession. Skill issues.

You know he was definitely the best Roman emperor when, 2000 years later, Tel-Aviv still feel butthurt about him.

Alexander actually did give his father a lot of credit.

youtube.com/watch?v=RlKJDwViNKs

Online battles...? As in, video games? I can only assume you are joking, and, I dare say, baiting.

macedonian bros...not like this...

France would've been an English county if not for the Black Plague. And then it almost happened again when a dude with the worst haircut in history almost entirely conquered France and was only halted because God inflicted him with like 50 different diseases so France could continue existing.

Trebuchets.

denuvo.jpg

Not the anon you're talking too but I think you're in the wrong camp. Bullets also don't do anything if they're weak and hit a sufficiently armored target. Arrows are worse than bullets at transferring kinetic energy against plate armor, they do a pathetic "plink!" and get deviated. Kinetic energy wasted. I don't see why a squad of archer could "rock" a completely arrow-immune target. Imagine a guy holding a bigass curved metal tower shield that completely covers him. A squad of archer is shooting precisely into the shield. The arrows do "plink", nothing even gets stuck. Does he get rocked by the kinetic energy? No he feels a breeze against his shield.

Gonna need an explanation.

inb4 yt historian

There's a reason why horse archers dominated in the steppes.

He was poisoned. By someone or by alcohol considering he drank kegs of wine every day and got injured plenty

Sometimes you do the opposite of digging a trench and build walls out of bags of wheat and barrels of crackers.

Well his catamite certainly was butthurt.

roman KDR was often so insane

pröööööööh :D

It's not really until the Napoleonic wars when large (as-big-as-logistics-permit) echelons were maneuvered to join up and fight in truly massive engagements like Leipzig, that is true.

But there's a lot more going on here. One obvious limitation is the capacity for force generation: By the time of the Punic Wars, Roman Republic along its Socii "allies" could simultaneously mobilize up to 250k something troops in several armies with something like 400k still left in reserve (out of some 5M inhabitants) and they could deploy them across several armies operating in multiple theaters. The Chinese could also accomplish similar mass-mobilizations. But these are exceptional numbers! The largest of the hellenistic successor states, the Seleucids, with total population of some 30M could mobilize 50k-72k troops to Magnesia... with no reserve left (they were recruiting from ethnic Macedonians only). And while most states weren't as disastrously enfficient as Seleucids, most were also smaller, and closer to Seleucids than Rome. Basically, in Western Eurasia, between the time of Rome and large conscript armies of the French revolution, there were no states that COULD mobilize more than a single army's worth of troops anyway. So no point splitting them into echelons.

If you think that's cringe, true modern warfare between superpowers would be even lamer and gayer. ICBMs are even more horseshit than artillery because at least artillery has to be somewhat close to the target. The US or Russia, if they wanted to, could just wipe out cities halfway around the globe with no recourse.

To put it simply: to beat a formation that's unbeatable from the front, you need to go around it.
Beating the Phalanx meant developing methods of organizing and controlling soldiers on the battlefield to the extent that 'go around' is actually something a formation can do without getting confused or losing cohesion. This is not as easy as it seems. For much of ancient history, armies were essentially angry mobs guided by flags and loud noises. The Phalanx was ingenious because it was small team coordination that scaled up near-infinitely, meaning you could make a large force highly coordinated at one specific thing and practice a repeatable skill until everyone could do it in their sleep. These were not professional armies, Greek states built this training into their culture, their sports, their education so that when they were called to war everyone would already know what to do.

It wasn't until Rome, and the actual formalization of a standardized professional army with state-funded training that there was a force with the coordination and Command & Control to go around the phalanx without devolving into a confused mob. And when they did that, the Phalanx got fucked.

And actually, funnily enough, the phalanx returned in various forms throughout the medieval ages, because that kind of cohesion just didn't exist after the fall of rome for a long time. It's staggering sometimes seeing the difference in scale of battles that shook the roman empire vs battles that shook all of medieval europe. The former is often larger by a factor of 10. Europeans didn't match and surpass roman logistics until after they learned to use gunpowder.

they hated him because he told the truth

with no recourse

If both of them can do it then the recourse would be the other side doing it back to you, no?

damn they did better than i did in the vidya
probably because i played on highest difficulty and they wouldn't rout when they normally would in a real battle

Bullets also don't do anything if they're weak and hit a sufficiently armored target

Arrows are worse than bullets at transferring kinetic energy against plate armor, they do a pathetic "plink!"

completely arrow-immune target.

The arrows do "plink",

Anon...what. Literally what the fuck are you saying? What do you base any of this on?

ICBMs are even more horseshit than artillery

Until modern shit countered even this.
If lasers get a smidge faster and tracking gets a smidge better, it's kinda over for artillery potentially.
Light is faster than a bullet or a missile.

Imagine the laser show.
I think drones would suddenly become less effective too.

But then again, missiles with heavy fallout that explode when attacked might become a counter to such a thing, preventing laser usage because of the threat to surroundings when intercepted.

Can armchair generals of Anon Babble point me to which armies should I study to really understand military tactics? I want to use this skill in strategy games and maybe implement this stuff into my own creative projects. I, unfortunately, am a person right now who loves the aesthetics of warfare but have no clue where to start to get to the real meat of warfare.

Bodkin arrows could penetrate mail while plate was largely out of question, true. But medieval arrows could hit much harder than just a feeble ‘plink’ tho.

watch a few games of starcraft 2 and regurgitate memes about war crimes from various internet comment sections like "more like geneva suggestions" everyone will think you are witty and charming and a deadly killer of men, be assured

That anon seems to believe that medieval french armour was enough to prevent an arrow's penetration in all circumstances.
I'm not sure that's right, but I did hear that the mud at Agincourt was the main contributor to English victory - that was definitely correct. But my idea of it was that longbowman were like mongol horse archers in such a situation. Quick and able to flee easily in such conditions.

The history of the renaissance Tercio is interesting. Lots of innovations going on.

There's also a limitation of command: until late Republic with Sulla and Pompey and Caesar, Roman legions were loyal to the senate, and the Roman political system generated large numbers of capable senior officers (the two consuls elected annually, extending the command of existing commanders as promagistrates, but basically all senior senators had gone through the cursus honorum and could in theory be assigned to lead armies). But in most states you had a King (and if you're lucky then maybe the heir also, although you also might not have wanted to risk succession) and then what? If you delegated command to someone else, what's stopping him from deciding to become the King/Emperor instead? So basically these states were limited to one army, the one commanded by the king. Again, it's not until the modern period when you again start having the sort of institutions that could support multiple armies.

And then, the logistics are damn hard. Romans could coordinate multiple large armies (both on account of their advanced military institutions, and road system with regular forts where couriers could exchange horses, etc), the Steppe empires could (one rider moving with a small herd of mares, drinking their milk and exchanging horses so they don't get tired), etc. But logistics of fielding a big army is difficult as it is, and coordinating multiple of them over distances of possibly thousands of kilometers is harder still. Again, it's not until the modern period when you again start having dense road networks, but also e.g. new inventions like optical telegraphs that made long-distance communication and coordination of armies more feasible. It's not that nobody could have contemplated the idea, but that the idea is unironically 2hard to pull off.

There actually isn't rofl. We burn shit and the only way to contain and use the pressure mediation is to use boiling water and a turbine. This is on top of the fact that all that energy has no part in the the wheel of lodestones it turns. That the heat and pressure lost in the process has no actual physical "transmutation" or conversion into the copper archforms and magnets that simply manifest archaic hertzian waveforms into existence to be conducted to your toaster.

He has never heard of a "warhorse"

So in normal domestication of really fucking large heavy animals, they have to train them to actually move out of the way because believe it or not once they figure out how bigmclargehuge they really are and start using the weight. Now imagine one of these animals being trained to not only use its weight but to also wear bigmclargehuge armor with impalement spike and being bred by other toadline horses.

Literally just surround them in a circle formation. They'll be trying to lift the spears over each other to cover every direction, breaking their own formation.

These threads always make me feel like such a barinlet. How do you guys know all this? Is everyone here have a history major? WTF?

longbows being some medieval wunderwaffe is just *nglo propaganda just like how they pretend that the royal navy in ww2 wasn't an outdated collection of shit.

You can have a lot of fun just by being a nerd who love reading interesting books.

Literally just surround them in a circle formation

Yo dawg, I heard you liek circles.

DEVS

NERF THIS FUCKIKING SHIT NOW

Prussia, particularly in the 7 years war. Just read Clausewitz. That was basically the birth of modern maneuver warfare.
Close second would be Napoleon. Not the man himself, he's an autistic manbaby tyrant. But the way the french army had organized itself entering that era, and the tactics of French army units at the Corps level and below is basically a masterclass in how to move a land force, and how to win through movement. NAPOOPAN man is wrongly credited for a lot of brilliant independent action taken by his Marshals but those Marshals are by and large very worth studying.

And of course there are lots of modern war examples. Just deep dive into any battle from the first or second world wars and you'll find there's lots to learn from them. The problem with modern combat is that its extremely complex and multifaceted, which can sometimes obfuscate the important lessons, especially regarding tactics, reconnaissance, logistics and organization. History often wants to dramatize battles that are won or lost on boring questions like who better mapped the terrain or whose roads had a higher tonnage throughput but those things matter. The Kaiserslacht is probably the most informative modern offensive to study because it demonstrates the consequences of virtually every armchair misconception at once.

Sorry couldn’t find the original engravings

Literal daily show level propaganda

youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE

What happened at Agincourt is that a lot of archers let loose a lot of arrows at knights and watched them tumble and fall. It *does* makes sense from their uneducated medieval perspective that they won the fight. Feels pretty great for their pride and it makes a good story. But we have the magic of modern perspective so we know what happened: the knights rushed into muddy terrain which is instant self-defeat by default due to bad luck/retardation, and arrows do fuck all damage against plate armor. Always did.

cope, chariotstation atendee

Everyone knows that. And in order to pull that off, you need to hold their attention in the front AND hit them from the side. So you need to have more troops than them. The final result: all warfare devolves into polearm spam until guns.

Horse archery is cool and all but the real cool shit about the Mongols is that they had absolutely insane operational range from their main encampments and herds. A Mongol raiding party would have each warrior take an entire train of horses (usually mares) with them, so that they could extend their range and stretch rations by supplementing with mare's milk, or in a serious pinch, blood. They also would stick meat under their saddles as they rode which would absorb the salt from horse sweat and basically be turned into jerky, so along with milk, cheese, camp rations, and jerky, they had zero need for campfires and could practically materialize out of thin air when raiding.

Clearly shows arrows hitting the gap

Clearly shows kinetic force being transfered to the balistic gel.

Anon...

Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.
In all seriousness though? Just look up "eight classic battle tactics" and that should do for 99% of war games.
I'd suggest to 1) look up things separately 2) look up everything Napoleon did from 1793 until 1805 where he was at his peak.
Also, don't listen to this guy . Citing Prussia and Clausewitz is a massive red flag of an illiterate retard. Clausewitz is modern day Sun Tzu especially whenever he says the most obvious shit in the most dyslexic way to sound smart. If you actually want a good grasp on basics of military tactics and operations, read Jomini's works.

To the original point it's not only about penetrative force but transferal of kinetic energy. No one in this thread is arguing that longbows won agincourt, but they were a big advantage and a major factor for England winning. The terrain was surely also a major factor, but not the only factor.

Is everyone here have a history major?

Yes, we are also unemployed

hitting the gap

The arrow stuck at the bottom? There is no gap there. No, medieval knights did not wear sexy crop top plate armor. You're trying to invent a reason to dismiss the evidence in front your eyes and you're not even trying to think anymore. Ah, yes, the infamous belly button gap weakness on medieval knights, yes I see I understand everything now.

You don't necessarily need to outnumber them. The fixing force can be smaller than the force that it's fixing, as long as it's large enough to not instantly die on contact. Flanking is a huge force multiplier and often allows an overall smaller force to defeat a larger one, but that requires a lot of organization and coordination between the fixing and flanking forces and a lot of ancient armies just didn't have that.

When successful flanking maneuvers happen in ancient warfare it's usually because the flanking force is a mobile detachment (ie cavalry) whose leader is given total freedom to act independently and observes from their position how the battle is going and when and where they can join it to maximize impact. Adrianople is a great example of this.

There is no gap

Are you legitimately implying plate armor does not have gaps?

every single STALKER thread in the past 3+ years

first it was

That anon seems to believe that medieval french armour was enough to prevent an arrow's penetration in all circumstances.

and then immediately

actually no one was talking about arrow penetration!

For me it's a mix of

A honest attempt at trying to stick with "serious" pop-history like professional historians doing public engagement (such as Bret Devereaux's ACOUP blog, various podcasts, leddit AskHistorian threads) and good YouTube channels like World War Two, SandRhoman History that are either hosted and researched by professional historians or at least well-sourced, in favor of unserious shlock (sourcing would be a key difference between serious and unserious pop-history). Generally, once you get your foot in the door, recommendations of more author-approved sources come up naturally.

Reading some academic history books accessible to mainstream audiences (for example, I've read a complementary duo of books regarding the fall of Roman Empire in the West: The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, as well as The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization - it's just a slice of historiography about the topic, but gets both sides of the arguments across), and well-annotated editions of some primary sources (e.g. Landmark editions of classical history)

Sometimes going to listen history lectures in university

Like, you are making both the mistake of actually fairly shallow knowledge as deep (deep knowledge would go beyond spouting some factoids), and assuming that a guy who has e.g. read about battle x is intimately familiar with topics other than battle x. If you read just one book, then you are well-equipped to talk about the topic seemingly knowledgeably. What you don't see is lack of knowledge about the topics said anon doesn't talk about because he's ignorant of them. It doesn't take that much.

Of course, memory also plays a role (one guy recollects everything he's seen once, another needs to cram)

mankind invents firearms

close quarter combat become irrelevant

melee bros... will we ever return?

and are not the same poster anon.

are you legitimately implying that you can quote a sentence incorrectly and pass this as wits

We just need to invent firelegs so you can close the gap faster

Chariots were really lame in reality. Drive forward, shoot arrows, fuck off if they try to catch you.

Yet when a 40k Ork buggy does this, you cheer, wolf whistle, and piss and shit your pants.

Let me put it this way: You are legitimately autistic and can't see the forest for the trees.

Gonna need an explanation.

brawling against armsmen carrying warhammers in a muddy field is no way to employ cavalry

You can watch Waterloo for free on YouTube. It’s way better than the recent gay movie that just brushes over so much of the man’s history in favor of his wife.

They never really amounted to anything in developed Europe.

uh, they were totally just too busy visiting a funeral and would have totally not been fucked I promise

I don't believe that and I hope you don't either.

No man, you're totally right. It's just people back then were really fucking stupid and even though there was a thousand ways to do it better not a single person had the intelligence to think of it or try it. Also did you know they used to use their hands to hammer in nails? Same reason.

Macedonia had an elephant general, but not elephant troops?

Kinda makes them getting btfo even more embarrassing then doesn't it

for their countries

Speaking as someone from a country that has done a lot of "dying for their country" combined losing the war I can tell you that the country actually doesn't go anywhere, it's just the government that gets replaced.
So you are actually dying to protect your government, not the country.

Let me put this the same way again: there is no gap there. Medieval knights didn't wear sexy crop top armor. The arrow that didn't hit the mark in the youtube video is not part of the demonstration. You are looking at a video that proves you wrong and don't like it. You COULD argue that you have SEEN a video in which people shoots hundreds of arrows at armor and compute the statistical odds of hitting a "gap", but you're not posting that because you don't look up the things you argue. You probably hope right now that this video exist. I'll let you go find it and come back.

Why didn't they build trenchs?
They just let their soldiers die.

And most important: Why didn't soldiers in front line revolt? They knew they are going to die and they just went to die.

no singles policy

lol what the fuck kind of shit theater is that

oceanofpdf.com

go there and become a white man

I mean even as recently as WW1 the bayonet was the infantry's main killing weapon. There's actually a whole saga of WW1 weapon development where rifles were too long to maneuver inside trench assaults and had to progressively redesign infantry weapons to be more suitable for CQB. Early in the war soldiers were improvising all sorts of melee weapons to use in trench fighting because the rifle was basically only good as a very heavy spear. A lot of people don't realize just how much of WW1 was people beating one another to death with jagged hunting knifes, broken bottles and other improvised melee weapons. There was an old soldier trick of tacking a strap of leather, folding it over and pounding nails through it to swing around in the trench as a makeshit spiked club.

Even modern military manuals refer to a squad's close assault element as "bayonet strength"

Volleys of arrows, I assume.
Maybe a cavalry charge from the flanks?
A little pit with some spikes.
A catapult rock right in the middle of it.

This. The lost art of civilized White warfare.
That's why it was such a colossal shock when guerilla tactics starting getting used--no one was expecting that tribal bushman shit

there is no gap there

Again, the placement of the gap is irrelevant. There are gaps where arrows can hit. Even if they don't hit the gaps you still have the demoralising factor of having projeciles rained down on you. England having longbowmen gave them a clear advantage on the field. You are just arguing semantics at this point.

TL:DR England had an advantage because they had Longbowmen. There's nothing more to it than that.

They did build trenches you ignorant fool, but how long do you think that takes? It would be for sieges or something, but the enemy isn't gonna just sit there while you're digging a hole all day long. Fucking think man

why didn't the front guys revolt

I mean soldiers broke all the time but you're still asking a stupid question, which has the same answer regardless of the period of time. Soldiers with strong discipline and training and organization have always been able to stand in a line of battle up to a certain point.

knew they were going to die

These battles didn't have 100% fatality rates you fucking retard. More like 3-5%.

There are gaps where arrows can hit.

Post the demonstration videos. I post mines when I argue.

Standing around and waiting for an hour isn't all that fun it turns out. Especially not if things fall apart the moment people aren't playing along.

Because you can't translate 99% of soldiering into a game? How do you mimic the fear of death and the sense of safety from being in a crowd in an online game? Without that this type of warfare wouldn't make much sense. How do you account for shit like soldiers spending days or even weeks marching trying to out maneuver an opponent and then standing for hours on sentry duty cold and miserable and then being too tired to clean their weapon so it fails and they get killed? All of that plays a part and goes into these battles but ain't nobody gonna do that shit in a game

They did.
Since the renaissance siege warfare involved a lot of trenchbuilding from both sides, because the cannon basically made the walls of fortification trivial.
Trenches worked to some degree, but there were many limitations. For one, your trench could be surpressed by cannon fire and then stormed by opposing infantry who just slaughter you while you're packed into your own graves. Trenches could also collapse from cannonfire and bury men alive, or be isolated from their supply lines by volume of fire, isolated and destroyed.

There were several technological developments in the Great War that made trenches so much more effective. Locomotive and motorized logistics helped sustain entrenched infantry indefinitely, better engineering made trench networks more stable and resistant to shelling, and machineguns made it very very difficult to storm a trench over open ground even if your artillery could otherwise suppress it. This is part of why trench warfare caught so many commanders by surprise; the trenches were familiar, but familiar tactics weren't working.

Whoops meant for the guy you were commenting at

At the end of the day it's a propaganda piece and it doesn't really go into detail about tactics (and of course games are about game-specific knowledge first and foremost), but I enjoy Caesar's commentaries. But Caesar does stress "celeritas" ("speed", I would call it decisiveness) for his success: decisiveness, I think, is one of those game-independent skills that some people lack to their huge detriment, e.g. simply failing to mobilize their resources when faced with possibility of a defeat. And some of his victories come down to plain good old maneuvering and logistics (my favorite instance is in Civil War in Spain, where Caesar daily shuffles around his forces with the Pompeians, until he manages to maneuver to a position where Pompeians don't have access to water, and they surrender without a fight).

Fourteenth Army in Burma. Probably one of the most successful and impressive military campaigns in history and sadly forgotten and overlooked nearly entirely.

Why didn't they give their infantry like 5 big caltrops spike things to throw in front of themselves to stop horse charges, are they stupid?

Post the demonstration videos.

At least use a secondary source, even wikipedia.

to protect themselves as much as possible from the arrows, the French had to lower their visors and bend their helmeted heads to avoid being shot in the face, as the eye- and air-holes in their helmets were among the weakest points in the armour. This head-lowered position restricted their breathing and their vision. Then they had to walk a few hundred yards (metres) through thick mud and a press of comrades while wearing armour weighing 50–60 pounds (23–27 kg), gathering sticky clay all the way. Increasingly, they had to walk around or over fallen comrades.

Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle [US title: Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle that Made p.301

Caltrops were used, but what? Is every soldier going to carry a bunch of large heavy jabby metal objects everywhere they go so they can litter the battlefield and impair their own mobility when they already have a workable solution to the cavalry problem in the form of squares and bayonets? I swear you people ask just the dumbest questions

Also the article if you want to read for yourself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt#Main_French_assault

I think it’s important to note that WW1 introduced a lot of new technologies to warfare that previously hadn’t existed. The first mass mobilization of troops using cars was the French paying Parisian taxi drivers to get troops to the front asap. The first fighter planes were made only after the scout pilots kept throwing shit at each other then progressed to stealing machine guns from the infantry. It was a wild time.

There is nothing wrong with the idea, it’s just very hard to achieve. That guy was underplaying Alexander’s strength as a commander which was his grand strategy and being able to force these sorts of decisive engagements instead of endless skirmishes.

As for Kantai Kessen, the original idea was to bait the Americans closer to the Japanese home islands where they would have very long supply lines and then crush them there, not closer to the American coast around Hawaii and Midway.

kills you through fog of war

Fuck sudden strike

quoting wikipedia

not the anon but you stupid nigger please

is explicitly told to use Wikipedia as a source

nooo you can't use it as a source

What's worse, using a youtube video as source or using a wiki article with clearly outlined primary and secondary sources?

No thank you. I will take the video. The video demonstration of the statistical computations of hitting gaps in different kind of armor with different kind of bows in different kind of context, which proves it to be a significant thing worth blah blah blah about. I will take nothing else. I hope you understand. I, too, once use to believed people saying and writing stuff that they never saw.

France is protected by God

Is the invasion of Muslims punishment for the French Revolution?

What's worse

The wiki.

meat under their saddles as they rode which would absorb the salt from horse sweat

mmmm... uma delicia

Whichever one disagrees with the guy you're arguing with, duh.

By fucking shooting them you idiot.

Not anything against Slim, but Japan's operations in Burma were tantamount to suicidal especially when you consider the overall strategic situation when they launched that campaign.
Dan Carlin has a great bit on the Burma campaign and surrounding context where he lays out pretty well just how baffling that campaign was. The US had broken through their pacific defense perimeter and the battle of the Philippines was imminent. Their airforce had almost ceased to exist at this point. Their navy was hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched and barely had enough fuel for one final operation. Their land army had been ground down from years of inconclusive fighting across China and had suffered nothing but costly defeats for almost two years at this point across the pacific at grievous loss to personnel. Their industry was running on fumes, short of materials and struggling to replace the huge losses to equipment and ammo from so many years of war. The US had strategic bombers flying direct kinetic missions over japanese cities. The Japanese war machine basically had only enough juice left for one last hail mary effort to reverse the tide of the war and save themselves, or at least get better terms in the peace deal.

And where do they aim this last great strike? Fucking Burma. Burma was unironically Japan's Battle of the Bulge and when you realize that's what it was genuinely meant to be for them it's just mind blowing. Whole units were rendered combat ineffective because they didn't have enough of the jungle mapped to bring supply through. Soldiers starved to death in the jungle after weeks without rations or died of dysentery drinking muddy puddlewater. The depth of the incompetence on display in that campaign is just so mind blowing it kind of overshadows the achievements of the british forces opposing them.

how come soldiers pre-ww2 were very respectful of their enemies but since then its the exact opposite

the actual formalization of a standardized professional army with state-funded training

Rome didn't have that until after the Maniple system had already trounced the major practitioners of the Phalanx though. Rome was still using a conscription system based on land ownership when it had pretty much beaten the militaries of Greece, Macedon, Antioch, and Carthage. It didn't have a standing army when it's primary opponents were Phalanx users.

guns and artillery ridiculously more efficient than ever, the latter accounts for the majority of WW1 casualties

cavalry becoming useless

tanks were also only in their infancy in the middle of the war as well

enough people together and how do you fight them. Behind them? Oh well they formed a wall. Want to run around them? Okay but they'll walk towards your army slowly trying to murder you.

Marines fighting on hills.

This guy made a faulty premise saying that the English only relied on the English Longbow for the Battle of Agincourt. False.
They use the Terrain of woods on either side of the battlefield, the English planted stakes in the ground directly in front of their battle line in a reverse wedge formation funneling the French Knights right down the centre.
The ground was muddy.
There was a slight declined from the French position to the English postion.
There were hidden English forces in the woods who flanked the French when the French fully committed.
The English Knights were dismounted.
The English longbow was capable of penetrating the armour of French Knights at medium range, contrary to modern popular belief the standard for forging was not Universal and armour was not mass produced as we think of it today, there were a lot of imperfections in the forging process which weakened the grade of metal used and the armour itself, it was not necessary for the English Longbow to hit a joint they had a force at 80 to 150 pounds (360-670 Newtons).
All of this together mixed with the French own strategy is what won the battle, it wasn't any one thing, it was all of it.

Not to mention the mares could provide sexual relief during these long journeys.

the English only relied on the English Longbow for the Battle of Agincourt.

Quote the anon who made this claim. I can't see anyone making this claim.

That Japanese were pretty retarded that's for sure but the Fourteenth still managed to defeat a force more than 5 times their size in the most bullshit terrain imaginable, which up to that point the Allies had been getting routinely slapped around in. But yeah, virtually the entire allied victory in the Pacific is overshadowed by just how insane mid to late war japanese decision making was.

Anon nobody is arguing this point, you're just too fucking autistic to realise that there are several contributing factors to the battle, not just the landscape.

The entirety of the Pacific Front was suicidal incompetence by Japan, so it's fitting Burma ended up being the coup de grace.

When I played Rome Total War (not the gay new one) my strat was to hit these guys from the side, then from the back with cavalry. You can also hit them from the front, but you need to hit them with cavalry *immediately* or else they'll shred you and route you. So you are constantly coordinating multiple units to hit at the right time, and from the right angle.
Now that I think about it, probably the most interesting combat in that game.

The Japanese strategy is very baffling when you realised they didn't even have a manpower shortage as all the way until the last days of WW2 they had over a million man army in Manchuria mostly sat dicking around keeping the Chinese in line or sat at the border staring across from Russia.
They could have used that man power and easily repelled the Americans in the Island hopping campaign if they so desired. It would have meant giving up Manchuria yes, but I would argue that it was inevitable as it was so they might as well have relocated those forces to prevent their own invasion.

All of that is Irrelevant. The French lost because God willed it.

In real life you don't have a bird's eye view of the battlefield and your orders aren't instantly acknowledged and carried out. The fog of war was basically anything outside of your immediate line of sight and for the soldiers mid-battle, anything within ten feet of them.

The idea that people in the past used to show respect to their enemies is an historical meme. The romans buried these things (pic related) and had people walk on them on the battlefield. Do many people now that? No, because the romans won the battle and then went home and sung songs of how they won because of strength and courage, against cowardly barbarians who fought without honour. The side that wins the battle is the side that wins the propaganda war, and they're always gonna say they won with virtuous respect. Everyone fought dirty and disgusting.

blue eyes

Is this a legit albino or just dyed hair? Or is it an albino wearing contacts?

completely ineffective in online battles

Online battles lacks the fear of death and retarded decision making that comes after an adrenaline dump.

Aye, 'tis true God willed it. If only Kings of men were to lead them from the front once again then great nations of men we could be again.
youtube.com/watch?v=bvFHRNGYfuo

DAS RIGHT

Caesar was a bastard to the Gauls but he showed great respect towards Vercingetorix multiple times.
You can hate your enemy and respect them.

those weren't for people retard, they were for horses

Well a legit albino has red eyes so you know the answer to your question. Yeah 99.99% sure that girl's got dyed hair and make up.

What's stopping these guys from getting hammered by arrows, falling down, and destroying the entire formation?

That's why I mentioned contacts, because some albinos do not like their red eyes.

Albino eyes are blue if you actually look at them, they only look red depending on the angle of the light source when it's catching the blood vessels at the back of the eye. This is also why they look red in flash photography, because a light source is catching them from the front.

Just your average albino blue eyed autist (who needs to start posting more than once every year)

youtube.com/watch?v=eh1HF1x7sB8

Their helmets and armor. Arrows weren't shit back then.

Their helmets, armor and massive shields?

but what about the trANsFERAbleENErGY?! YOUFORGOTABOUTTHETRANSFERABLEENERGY!!!!!!

Anon, I don't know if you're aware, but video games aren't real life.

Transfer that energy into muh dick

Calvary charge the back. Only dumbass charge into the spear. Most ancient battles were decided by morale and once the army start routing, the rest would follow too. The problem with Phalanx is that they basically has no mobility and very slow turn rate, especially in large battle where battle command is hard to be delivered and executed.

Joke's on you, I'm greek.

In most cases the island garrisons were about as large as they could reasonably be for the size of the island and amount of food and water that could be stored there.
The early part of the pacific war, the Gaudalcanal campaign, was basically a slugout war of attrition between the US navy and the japanese navy recently minus all its carriers and predictably the US came out on top. After that the Japanese never had the naval strength to contest the US navy during their island hopping, which in turn meant that the soldiers on those islands were entirely cut off. Many islands where wholly bypassed and their garrisons just left to rot for the remainder of the war. The amount of japanese soldiers deployed in the pacific who just never got to fire a shot was pretty staggering.

It wasn't the kind of battlefield where you could just throw more manpower at the problem to turn things around. If anything the Kwantung Army could have gone to better use in China but the stalemate there was about far more than manpower or force concentration. Japan's logistics were fucked and they had a deep shortage of a lot of vital supplies because their industry couldn't meet demand, which meant they had to go through long periods of passive buildup between campaigns, in which they'd rapidly burn through those stockpiles to take some ground and inflict a few defeats on the nationalist army only to run dry and lose all momentum again. All the chinese needed to do was avoid losing too badly before the japanese ran out of steam and they succeeded in this repeatedly throughout the very, very long war on the mainland.

They never really amounted to anything in developed Europe.

They were checked in 2 major battles, but we never saw the kind of concerted effort they did to China because Genghiz died.

That's right.
The English didn't win because of longbows, but because the F*ench were retarded.
It was a sure win battle even if they didn't fight because half the english were shitting themselves to death.
But through sheer F*ench ingenuity they managed to turn it into one of the biggest military blunders in history.

youtube.com/shorts/GyV1fxgIAfc

youtube.com/shorts/GyV1fxgIAfc

Anon, any reason why you picked this clip in particular hmm?

horses are animals that wont willingly charge into a mass of spikes and men.

Greek Fire mogs

Supposedly the spears pointed upward would protect them as well.

I shit your not, the dudes with the pikes pointing upwards swatted away projectiles by wiggling it.

To be fair if you let infantry get within 20 yards of your archers you are unfathomably fucked.

It works against anyone and anything, but metal is expensive so they do want to prioritize horses, especially chariots, depending on resources available. That does not mean it's all they used them for, it's what they would claim out loud it's what they use them for. But everyone knows what they did with them. They buried them in sand which is to trick people not horses. They also placed them in front of walls, places that clearly horse riders weren't going to crash into at full speed, but places that people on foot would try to scale, and regret it. The romans knew what they were doing, but those don't make a good story when bragging at home.

horses are animals that wont willingly charge into a mass of spikes and men

they will, but only one time

I literally just searched it on youtube and it was one of the first results. There's one with more different kind of arrow designs against modern riot shields, and they just blow past the metal shield. I didn't post it because these are modern examples: youtube.com/shorts/XyAC-4Hj8NA

Sure, but what if they're just being peppered by arrows from far away. Getting them rained down on them is bound to start having arrows leak through.

that is actually the ideal range for archers.

that is actually the ideal range for archers.

If we're talking ideal range for longbows that would be around 100 - 150 yards (with an effective range of 300). Anything as close as 20 yards would mean that the infantry could close the gap. Also you can't have your own infantry in front because you'd just be shooting your own guys in the back.

What if you space them out slightly

At the end of the day we're still animals, a box of spears that refuse to stop being a box of spears is spooky and it'll break the average soldier's morale

Why did they fear the slingers?

Draw me a very crude ms paint diagram so I can get a sense of what you mean.

rock go smash

I really don't think that spear wiggling would have the slightest significant impact but I bet it did a really good job at keeping up troop morale and making them feel brave and protected and ready to march on. I can picture the squad commander spewing these memes with his face all red with shame.

g-g-guys it's okay we're not fucked because of the arrows, just keep on wiggling, woosh woosh wiggle your spear, see we're fine we're okay GO GO GO! Fuck them up, boys!

War really used to be like fumbling children at the playground being bullied and pressured to awkwardly stab each other.

100-150 yrds is the outlier, its effective at that range but even skirmishing were often done in less than a hundred.
Unless they're going for the flanks that infantry going in the front are going to get mowed, demoralized and rout.
Even in Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers the Archers were ordered to fire when they see the whites of their eyes.

As deadly as an arrow, projectiles that can be easily sourced and incredibly mobile with respectable killing power. Their major downside was that slingers were much harder to train and use effectively than archers and required more room to use en masse to avoid them getting in one another's way, which could be a problem in situations where formations are getting tight.

Reasons why slingers were annoying: 1% because sometimes they bonked a guy on the head, 99% because your troops would break formation to go after them and it was obviously a fucking trap.

A method so powerful it became the meta for all modern day battles, the fields are online.

Invaders don't even have the courtesy to build a giant wooden horse to get into the city, as the city gates are wide open.

Is WW2 when France lost the mandate of heaven?

nah that was 1871

was

You are such a fucking retard

To give the short version, fortifications, trenches, cover, and more complex formations were extremely common, but as a rule if the enemy had a really good position, you'd be less prone to fight them.

So lots of battles that actually happen instead of one commander going "Oh dear that looks dicey chaps let's not engage." occur when neither side has a great position. So you end up with all of the problems mentions. Being spread out doesn't actually help you avoid getting shot.

In closure, any commander who gives up a advantageous position like a good hill, trench, or a rock fence around a farm, was harshly judges for any losses incurred. There was none of this "Honorable standing and getting shot at" nonsense in any military doctrine I'm aware of, and before some jackass talks about "British officers not ducking" they explicitly state it's to keep morale up by making the situation appear less dangerous, and are at the same time teaching them about cover, concealment, and all the same things every other military is teaching.

I wasn't the biggest fan of Pope Francis but I really liked it when he said no to the gays becoming Seminarians because "there's too many faggots already".

too expensive

does not heal itself easily

doesn't literally fall from the sky

Water is good enough anyway, nuclear generates such fuck you levels of energy already, and once we control black holes it'll be even more efficient

The weaknesss of the phalanx, being flanked, is incredibly hard in real life. Army formations are massive compared to the extremely compressed versions in games and they are specifically designed to cover your weaknesses, such as preventing your phalanx from being flanked. So you had to be able to either destroy the flanks of the enemy without sacrificing too much in the center or you had to have very professional soldiers in the center capable of actually manipulating the battle lines to draw the phalanx out of formation enough to break them. The later only being possible for Rome for quite a while and the former accomplishes the exact goal of the phalanx, being an unbreakable unit at that point in your formation.

France has basically been embarrassingly bad at war since Waterloo. The Franco-Prussian war was a humiliation ritual and WW1 was just a brief resurgence of french martial excellence before they regressed to being the laughingstock of europe. Losing a pitched kinetic war to the vietcong and then needing to beg the UN to rescue their encircled troops from 4ft communists with pitchforks is the jewel in the french military crown.

Once we transform into a Blackhole civilisation we'll be able to power an entire planet on Single Wattage of energy for millions of years.
Download our brains into the digital space and then use the time dilation effect of a black hole and you now have infinite energy for the most of the rest of the lifespan of the Universe.

if that happens in our lifetime what are you going to do with eternity,anon?

Jerk off a lot more.

Amen, anon!

or you just throw oil on them and light them up on fire.

More like such a ridiculous story never happened while the tale of "enemies within the gates/city" has persisted through all of settled civilization from every time.

I've never seen a worse take.

CO2 is nearly as cheap as water.

I have no idea what you mean by 'heal itself'????

It's literally abundant in the atmosphere.

It has all sorts of benefits, too. Being more efficient, allowing for smaller turbines, and since it is a single phase it causes less wear on the blades, meaning less maintenance.

Are you being retarded on purpose?

More like breaks the meta so hard it would break the game itself if used by anyone once, so we just loop back to old meta anyway