Just how effective was the Macedonian phalanx in battle?

At least the graphics for that game are pretty.

No idea. Only Rome 2 mod I've played is Divide et Impera.

And the Captain Obvious award of the year goes to...

tactics>strategy

Can you buy me a dominos e gift card

It's not a Rome 2 mod, it's a Rome 1 mod.

It was very effective during Alexander's time. There are a number of advantages. The first is since the formation relies heavily on teamwork it discourages individuals from deserting because they can't slip away unnoticed, likewise it encourages soldiers to kill (despite what movies show this is actually very difficult) due to the peer pressure from comrades next to them. It allows a smaller force to gain an advantage over a larger one and is more efficient since the front 3-4 ranks are all contributing to the battle, rather than just those at the front. It makes command and control easy. It lends itself well to a defensive battle in narrow terrain.

It has obvious weaknesses including its lack of flexibility, poor flank/rear protection, vulnerability to missile attack and tendency to fall down like dominos once a gap was created. Many of these were not exploited early on either due to lack of technology, inadequate command&control structures, or simply the novelty taking opponents by surprise.

As time went one opponents became more familiar with the formation, new technology (ballistas, compound bows, crossbows etc.) started to become available, and factions such as the romans and horse-archers with the ability to outmanoeuvre and isolate the phalanax emerged.

Well, considering Alexander the Great used it. Surely it was effective to some extent.

All this Skopje revisionism.

...

They were very effective in their job, but I don't think they were primary source of Macedonian hegemony. Most records of Alexander's tactics demonstrate that Alexander used them as "mortars" to hold the lines while Alexander lead his shock troops to make the decisive blow. They were important tools, but they were not primary offensive power that dealt the needed blow. This is pretty different from the early Romans, who were less reliant on cavalry and used legionnaires for offensive end pretty well.

I feel like the Successor States didn't quite "get" what made Alexander's army so successful because most records seem to show that they went to comical length to strengthen the phalanx and reduced the size of auxiliaries and cavalry compared to Alexander. They got stuck in the mannerism of fighting each other and never really evolved their tactics (Sure the Eastern states used some eastern arms, but they never really escaped their own framework of warfare) in the scale the Romans have through fighting a diverse set of enemies.

I can't find references to the decline of Hellenistic Warfare. I remember reading ti, but I can't remember where I found it. So if anyone can call out my bullshit or substantiate that will be great.

The biggest problem with your analysis is you're treating it as a purely tactical problem when a lot of the problems that lead to the overemphasis of phalanxes in Diodochi kingdoms were political.

This is an era where you don't have widespread state sponsored training of people in a particular arm. You don't have a king sitting in the Macedonian capital going

>Hmm, we need more archers, better train some of those new recruits how to shoot a bow.

If they needed more archers, they recruited more heavily among population segments that were already training with bows on their own for whatever number of reasons. Building your army was mostly about which population segments you wanted to trust with arms and to mobilize like that.

Alexander had a mostly Macedonian army with his second most important contingent being Greeks. They were politically reliable, and for all their rivalry, at least spoke the same language and had a mostly similar set of cultural values. He could ensconce himself in the Companion cavalry, because those guys were drawn from the ranks of Macedonian aristocracy which generally supported him to a T.

Once you have the Diodochi states, especially the Ptolemiads and the Selucids, a lot of that goes out the window. You have a pretty small Greek/Macedonian minority ruling over a huge population of non-Greeks. It's enormously risky to arm and mobilize and organize too many of these foreigners, or they'll overthrow you, and at least the traditional Greek fighting form was the phalanx.

So the Diodochi used phalanxes. Because they had to rely on their Greeks, and that's how Greeks fought. It wasn't based on some notion that infantry is king and we should put everything into the phalanx, and the ability of the Diodochi to change the way their societies worked was way more limited than somewhere like Rome, one of the reasons Rome rose to superpower status.

>muh meme sticks

I am not eschewing the political aspect as well and understand that there was a strong emphasis to keep their Hellenistic traditions to maintain their status as ruling culture. It also makes sense that constant warfare and unrest would make it difficult to train and secure elites and foreign auxiliaries.

However, regardless of the circumstances, successor states weren't able to field an army as capable and diverse as Alexander and their reliance phalanxes was not a tactical development.

Also, I do not think their political limitations is an unassailable reason for this development. Moderate reformation in style of warfare overtime shouldn't be impossible for unwieldy states. There are records of different infantry types like thureophoroi and Thorakitai in Hellenistic states that appear to be more flexible in their roles so reforms within the Hellenistic scope shouldn't be impossible. Even the Byzantines with their fucked up political intrigue and bureaucracy managed to maintain their claim as being "Roman" after becoming something else entirely. Maintaining pure Greek-ness in such a large state far from their homeland seemed like an impossible feat anyways.

I guess it really depends on how much the states hands were tied in maintaining their status quo. I don't know too much about their political history besides it being a series of strenuous struggle of maintaining their Hellenistic hegemony and infighting.

why does uneven ground cripple it?

couldnt other people just jump over the phalanx and flank them?

Leap that formation. If you're so great

To note with the vulnerability to missiles, the pikes that were raised up from the men in the back rows would actually deflect them (well not all of them, but a decent amount)

think about it yourself. just visualize a phalanx on rough ground in your head. Remember these are tightly packed formations that use momentum to just run over the enemy with their wall of spears.

EB 2 is accurate

Excelent against ancient rigid melee tactics.
Impervious against cavalry charges.

Not so good agains mobile infantry and heavy projectile fire.

Yeah I've heard that, I don't know how effective that would really be though.I guess it could work against longer projectiles like javelins and sporadic arrows/stones but I don't see it being much use against massed arrows/bolts moving at high speed from an angle.

why did no one ever thought of throwing ropes and nets into the spear formation?

>one and is more efficient since the front 3-4 ranks are all contributing to the battle
Nigger. It's sixteen ranks deep. 16. For every 4 fighting, you have 12 who can't even see the enemy.

>There are records of different infantry types like thureophoroi and Thorakitai in Hellenistic states that appear to be more flexible in their roles so reforms within the Hellenistic scope shouldn't be impossible
This shift came about before those states existed, and is EXACTLY the sort of thing he's talking about. It was a culture reacting to new realities of war, and not something that was or oculd be ordained form the top down.

Fuck, entire city-states in greece fought in that manner, while other fought with pikes and some still fielded traditional hoplites.

You have what you have, and you arm the ones you trust.

Shooting at them did jack shit. Didn't work for the persians, didn't work for the steppe warriors who tried to stop them, and it didn't work for the Romans at magnesia.

Men who have helmets, armor, and shields tends to be resistant to being shot at even before you give them a roof of pikes.

which is why the greeks completely dropped the pike phalanx later.

Where is the stream?

>which is why the greeks completely dropped the pike phalanx later.
No they didn't.

let me clarify. The successor states that fought with other successor states used pikemen.
The peripheral states like the bactrians completely dropped it due to the far higher numbers of skirmishers in the east.

I'd be willing to bet money that was a direct result of them not having the greek manpower needed to field a decent phalanx in the first place.

very effective head up
very ineffective once they met the roman checkered formation

you can always train more people to use the pike phalanx.