Would this be a viable tactic? Historically speaking of course

>How to lose a battle in 10 seconds

Not enough elves.

What was the point of the shield wall?

element of surprise, duuh

>countercharging a giant charge
>with your backs against a spear wall
yeah no its utterly retarded

Well...

First off, it's relying absolutely perfect timing on everyone's (including the enemy) part. A few seconds late and the homosexuals don't have anywhere to jump in. A few seconds early and all you're accomplishing is replacing your sturdy front line of heavy infantry with formation-less light infantry.

Next, watch as those spearmen barely flich as grown men in metal armor springboard off them. Real world physics just isn't going to let that shit fly, and the orcs will charge straight into a pile of tangled idiots rather than a coherent line.

Hollywood rules dictate that the bad guys must use predictable methods while the good guys use cunning and balls to triumph. In any real scenario, though, this tactic would be roughly as effective as selling your swords to buy anal lube. Those orcs with their boring, brainless conventional shock charge are going to rout the pretty-people coalition with these tactics.

No

>is jumping over spearmen viable

are you actually retarded

Putting this retarded movie aside, what's the best strategy against shielded pike-men in wall formation assuming you have no way of flanking them?

Fire

Surrounding them I suppose. Or does that count as flanking?

Get your most agile troops to jump on the pole of the enemy pikes and use it as a springboard to flip over the whole formation and attack them from behind.

double handed pikemen (longer pikes) with plate armor

You withdraw, or you get your own pikemen, or you get some artillery

There isn't really a good counter which is why it remained the standard battle tactic across the world for hundreds of years

>Jump over the fucking defensive shieldwall
>Get pushed back by heavily armed infantry charging at you
>Have a spear puncture your back

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

The only viable thing is to use calvary charge. Sure, you're gonna incur losses when they hit but at least they can break that shit up.

Longer pikes. See: Philip II

throw fire on them, call them names, ballista, maybe try just walking around them.

mate I don't know what to tell you, spear walls are pretty much the textbook counter to cavalry.

>I love the sound of 300 wounded screaming horses.

Guns

They are a counter to infantry - they can just march and poke them.

A charging calvary incurs loses upon clashing but they break the wall and trample the majority of army behind it.

Get an elite squad of great big men with long two handed steel swords to go up and just start breaking pikes and skirmishing.

>horsemen will break heavy infantry

not necessarily. Those men are front-line soldiers with good discipline, and they are indeed heavy.

Maybe cataphract-type armored horses could do a job like that.

Have a think a little harder about what happens when a line of horses meets a line of spears, and then what happens when those horses die on the spears and fall down in front of another row of horses running in behind them

Artillery. Cannon the shit outta the fuckers.

>Calvary counter pikes formations

You're fucking retarded. What else, do you counter fire by pouring lighter fluid over yourself?

First off, it's actually quick difficult to convince a horse to charge headlong into a wall of spears, but even if they don't buck and spook before reaching the pikes, that first row of cavalry who makes contact with the pikes will go down, and the row behind them's moment will be ruin and they will either breakoff or try haplessly to try the same damn thing. Even if the first row of pikemen are disoriented by the charge, the rows behind them were not, as pike formations always incorporate multiple rows of pikes for this very reason.

The best way for cavalry to counter pikes is to flank around while the pikes are engaged with heavy infantry or another pike group.

With enough speed the first line with fall down upon pikemen. Another line can have a bit of distance after the first so the horses can jump over the mess.

Forming the charge in shape of an arrow breaks the wall with less losses too.

The only hope of beating a pike formation head on is if you somehow break their unit cohesion. If you have gunpowder weaponry or some kind of heavy ranged weaponry, use those to hammer the formation and break their cohesion and then exploit weaknesses in the line. If that cannot be accomplished, save yourself the defeat and just withdraw.

Good luck trying to get a tightly packed formation to vault over obstacles en masse you fucking idiot, even then, they will still get gutted.

>the pikes are engaged with heavy infantry
Engaged as in slaughtering your guys with march-and-poke?

I have never seen someone display such ignorance regarding battle tactics in my life.

Please tell me you are baiting.

...

Ask yourself, why would the horses end up running into a line of pointed spears?

>march and poke

Not that guy, but you're fucking retarded. Tying down a phalanx with heavy infantry while your cavalry flanks them is literally a textbook way of handling a spear wall. The fucking Romans perfected that shit, read a book.

Heavy infantry as in infantry that can reasonably hold their own and tie up a pick formation. Heavily armored masses of troops don't just die from a poke retard. Additionally they don't need to break the pike formation or even kill any of them, really, they just need to keep the pikemen's pikes engaged while they are flanked and slaughtered from behind, either from other infantry or cavalry. It's how the Romans defeated Hellenic pike formations.

>If that cannot be accomplished, save yourself the defeat and just withdraw.

>well guys it seems we have no clean way of defeating them, so we need to let them sack the city

yeah, thought I would see some battlehardened troops try to defend wave after wave, but no >hurrdurr elves fucking hell

Throw pots with burning marijuana inside into the formation.

>implying he wasn't talking about an open field battle
>implying walls of pikes can be applied to a siege situation for the besieger

I'm sure they'd have loads of fun being shot so full of arrows they look like reverse porcupines.

Are you retarded?

>using a defensive formation to attack a city

memes
youtube.com/watch?v=oimIMZHNRVI

>Me brave brothers lock shields and assume phalanx formation
>I can see the damned orcs gettin' close
>Plan's to skewer as meneh of em as we can and hold fer a miracle
>Feel a sudden weight on mah shoulder
>Dozens of those faggoty tree fuckers are goin over our heads and straight into the enemy like a buncha retarded kids jumpin into the shallow and ofa pool
fackin' NIFE EERS

>just touching a pike is enough to kill you

Fucking Rome 2

This why elves are made for raping, no for fighting.

>Implying charging into a wall of spears at full sprint while completely naked won't instantly tear your shit up.

German skin, folded one mirrion times.

But they'd be impaled on the fucking spear, or they'd stand for a few seconds, you nerd.

That shit literally shows them

>touch front of pike
>instantly fall to the ground dead

the...the spears could well be poisoned
t.CA apologist

That's just because the new Total War Engine can't handle collision physics for shit. The old engine was superior in every way for handling melee combat.

I know, hence
>fucking Rome 2

Ditching Warscape shit fucking when, CA?

They're gonna milk a couple more games out of it yet, then they'll probably make a new engine that's even worse than Warscape

They introduced that shit with fucking. Empire. A game that is seven years old. CA is a bunch of lazy bastards and I've gone from a "buy on release" Total War fan to knowing I will be disappointed in every release past Napoleon.

It's not a "defensive formation." In real life nobody was dumb enough to run into a wall of pikes. The point of the formation was to advance.

TW:WARHAMMER CRACK WHEN

>the phalanx isn't a defensive formation

What in the fuck am I reading

A true statement.

Shogun 2 and Attila were good though. I still prefer Rome 1 and Medieval 2 to anything CA puts out now, though, but they're solid games.

Now if only they'd make their battle AI not retarded or a cheating bastard. They've been at this for, what, 15 years? And the AI is still pants-on-head retarded.

I never played Attila, I was still hurt from the disappointment of Rome 2 (which I stupidly pre-ordered to get the Greek states dlc) that I didn't want to buy anymore games from them, it looked far too similar to Rome 2 to have actually been an improvement like Napoleon was to Empire, I might be wrong though, haven't played TW:W either

No, you're actually retarded. The only time the phalanx was applied offensively is when faced with another phalanx in an open field, e.g. the battles between Greek city-states. When used in warfare between nations it was applied to protect and defend chokepoints. And your reasoning that "nobody was dumb enough to run into a wall of pikes" is equally retarded, because how the fuck else are you going to advance in a mountain pass with a phalanx blocking the way and no alternative routes?

Also, if you applied the whole "the point of the formation was to advance" thing to actual battles, you realize that is as equally retarded as your other proposals, because a phalanx can only advance at a slower than walking pace, meaning it would be shredded by skirmishers and other light infantry or, even better, flanked by the enemy before it could engage.

Attila was what we hoped Rome 2 would be. Also, playing as Western Rome in that game is extremely challenging, especially one higher bonuses.

Romans took pike formations head on. Just push the pikes away with shields and stab stab with gladiua

It's a completely retarded tactic, even for a movie, but it doesn't matter because Tolkien's elves are all grossly overpowered. Part of why LotR is flawed.

>Implying charging into a wall of spears at full sprint while completely naked won't instantly tear your shit up.
Yes, but that requires you to be both retarded and suicidal. Someone who isn't a retard will use his shield and attempt to manouvre past the pikes rather than charging in like a moron.

Not saying it'll work per se, just saying that shields exist for a reason. That reason isn't to act as a counterweight for the sword btw.

>Dwarves form perfect shield wall
>Orcs got all focus on it
>Just jump straight over it instead of flanking
What was peter Jackson thinking?

>What was peter Jackson thinking?

About how much fucking money he was making from schmucks who eat these stupid battle scenes up, and probably how it will wind u p in a WatchMojo "Top 10 Most Epic Battle Scenes" video.

Yeah, and what happened to those guys?

Not the guy you're responding to, but Jesus, you're retarded.

>The only time the phalanx was applied offensively is when faced with another phalanx in an open field, e.g. the battles between Greek city-states.

And, you know, lots of other times. Asculum, Issus, Cynosephalae, that battle in Thrace as part of the Delian war that I'm blanking on, etc. You know, battles where phalanxes charged and weren't fighting other phalanxes.

> When used in warfare between nations it was applied to protect and defend chokepoints

Yeah, like those famous swiss pikemen.... oh wait.

>because a phalanx can only advance at a slower than walking pace,

Herodotus and Xenophon both mention that the prime thing that made the Spartans so dangerous is that they would have their phalanxes advance at a dead run, with a bigger impact than a slower advance. Xenophon remarks that lots of other forces would also charge at a run, except they didn't have the Spartiate unit cohesion, which led to a lessened impact, but they were sure as fuck not restricted to a slower than a walking pace.

I like this answer, but...

this is true, although there may be an inference that the orcs are significantly lesser.

No, it's not a good tactic for normal human beings. Other people said throw rocks and spears instead of elves, and indeed this was done, as with arrows, sling munition, dead bodies...

>I have never read Tolkien: the post!

You should look up how those ancestors of the Silvans did against normal orcs in the 1st and second ages when they weren't protected by people who had actual metal weapons and armor.

Tolkien elves aren't "overpowered" at all, if anything, they're often mentally/spiritually crippled and ineffective, and require the humans to pull their shit out of the fire time and time again, because magic in his world doesn't actually help you fight very much.

The one time the Elves really are militarily effective on a grand scale is when the Noldor come over for the first time, and that's strongly implied to be a result of their smithing expertise, a "tech advantage" if you will. When they start arming either more primitive elves or humans, those guys do just as well as the Noldorin do.

just encircle them and wait for them to either starve or attack your own shielded pike-men

i think he meant that hackson's elves are grossly overpowered, which is true

I'm pretty sure most people get this sense because of Legolas' unreal speed and proficiency with a bow, plus, in general, what appears to be exceptional martial skill with swords by elves in general, while other races are rather lumbersome and brutish. Elves are depicted as exceptional combatants while the individual Orcs are rather not, save the exceptions of the leadership.

To be fair, when I play a hellenistic faction in EB, I usually put a good old 240 man unit of light infantry in front of my phalangites, simply to soak up arrows and slow down the enemy. Placing elite immortal elves in this position is the worst possible move in the history of warfare. This is the job of light auxilias you never intended to pay in the first place.

To keep the elves stuck in the meat grinder until they are fully depleted.
No retreat. No surrender.

Gunpowder.

Or if we are talking about the times, then do what the Romans did with the short sword and grab the spear with one hand and get in close and stab around the shield.

Does that work on phalangites or just hoplites? Because phalangites have 3 other guys already pointing their pikes at you and a whole lot more behind them even if you get the first pike.

People get this sense because of the movies. There are no scenes in the book where Legolas 360 noscopes orcs and. In the entire trilogy the amount of combat is like what, 1/10th of what there is in the movies? Not even Aragorn comes off as an amazing warrior, instead of a one-man army he is depicted as a great ranger and a great leader, those are his main attributes.
3rd Age Orcs aren't amazing in combat on average because they're small and not really intelligent, nor care about much else than brute forcing. Uruks and the like are much more dangerous, and again even with the low power Orcs there are no scenes where a trillion of them get taken down by just a handful guys, all that shit is Hackson's invention.

You suddenly reveal to them that 70% of their forces were your guys all along and win. I thought this was your area of expertise, Alpharius.

That's not ENTIRELY right, although I do agree with the thrust of your assertions.

If you posit that Aragorn can fight around as well as Boromir, you've got a guy who could kill 20 orcs, alone, before they deal with the problem by standing way off and shooting him full of arrows.

And he and Eomer hold the gate at the Hornburg alone until they shore things up from the inside and escape through a postern door.

And he, Imrahil, and Eomer are stated to be the only three who managed to be in the thick of the melee at Pellenor and escape unwounded, so he is pretty tough, but you're right, combat in the books is a lot less "intense" and frequent. If you go back and look up that fight with the orcs in the chamber of Mazarbul, instead of a huge bloody free-for all followed by a cave troll, its

>Orcs charge
>Fellowship fights a bit
>The nine of them kill about 10-11 orcs of an undetermined number
>Orcs run.
>One last guy makes a stab at Frodo but gets chopped down.

>3rd Age Orcs aren't amazing in combat on average because they're small and not really intelligent

They also tend to be cowardly and undisciplined.

>Uruks and the like are much more dangerous

Even Uruks are implied to be smaller and weaker than a normal human, albeit tougher than regular orcs.

Just... why?

>he actually fucking thought BotFA was going to be good after the second movie was utter shit

>If you go back and look up that fight with the orcs in the chamber of Mazarbul

My recollection of that was the fellowship literally escaping out a back door. Am I misremembering something?

How did we go from this

to this

Even from a LoTR standpoint why would the dwarves agree to let the elves jump on top of them?

>Next, watch as those spearmen barely flich as grown men in metal armor springboard off them.
Elves weigh 0kg or some shit apparently. That's why Legolas can platform on falling rocks.

...

Well, if you want to re-read it

malikammar.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/j-r-r-tolkien-lord-of-the-rings-01-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-retail-pdf.pdf

It starts at about page 450.

A brief summary is

>Stop to read book
>Hear orcs approaching because they stood around and read a book like a bunch of dumbasses
>Bar most of the doors except the easternmost one, that's the escape path
>They don't want to run though with enemies just behind them, especially given how bad the light is in Moria.
>Decide to make a brief fight before retreating.
>How many there were the Company could not count. The affray was sharp, but the orcs were dismayed by the fierceness of the defence. Legolas shot two through the throat. Gimli hewed the legs from under another that had sprung up on Balin’s tomb. Boromir and Aragorn slew many. When thir-teen had fallen the rest fled shrieking, leaving the defenders unharmed, except for Sam who had a scratch along the scalp. A quick duck had saved him; and he had felled his orc: a sturdy thrust with his Barrow-blade. A fire was smouldering
in his brown eyes that would have made Ted Sandyman step backwards, if he had seen it.
(Sorry for misremembering)
>Fellowship bolts
>Orc chief makes a stab at Frodo, gets head chopped off by Aragorn
>Gandalf tries to cast a spell to magically lock the door behind them.
>Balrog (although unseen at the time) counter-spells his spell
>Gandalf tries a "word of command", to regain control of the door
>All that magic proves too much, door bursts, ceiling caves in, and it buys time as the Balrog and friends have to go around an alternate route. Gandalf severely exhausted by the magical struggle.