How would you adopt the Macedonian phalanx for indoor use?

You wouldn't even need armour, just push a big shield with wheels. You could also put some spikes on it for damage I guess.

That's a good way of doing it, always kind of disliked the Dwarves in Dragon Age (only played the 1st) for not just collapsing tunnels. Cavern warfare should be very easy for creatures that don't need to go up for food, water, or air.

I don't have any dwarves in my setting but the closest human group to dwarves survived by just hiding because fighting underground is a nightmare and no one wanted to go in after them. My PCs just stealthed in and dropped the caves on their heads using freed tunneling worms everyone thought were dead. The only reason this wasn't done before was a sort of MAD scenario, the cave dwellers collapse spread out including under fortresses and cities, wrecking a ton of infrastructure and killing quite a few people. No one was very happy with the players after that.

Kind of like how historical phalanxes were vulnerable to cavalry attacks from the rear and side. What stops the dwarves (or other underground dwellers) from using those things though? It could be part of their strategy, much like how macedonians themselves used cavalry to great succes. I can think of your rank and file dwarven phalanx locking the enemy in a real shit position while elite dwarven sappers dig around to attack the enemy from their rear. Or, if they're even more patient, dig under the enemy to have the floor collapse under them. Or the roof on top of them. On top of that, I imagine shit can get real intense when two enemy sapper groups happen upon eachother.

The person setting you on fire is in the same room. Very close to you. You are indoors. The ventilation works only this much.

tl;dr good luck with killing yourself by trying to set up enemy on fire. And that goes without mentioning the obvious part - it's fucking impossible without petrochemicals.

You set something else on fire and then throw it at them.

Throw? How? In a corridor? In a cave? You can't exactly use arc patterns for your favour to go above them, because you are indoors.

It's like you are too dense to understand phalax formation is pretty much indestructable if set up in a position where it can't be flanked. Unless, of course, you bring in guns. But I doubt that's the solution you were asking for.

Then just wait them out.

More or less straight. We're not talking about atillery here; Just throw a molotov coctail from like 20 ft. away and then run off.

>my skin is not my own

Indoor where? In a cavern? In a wooden castle?

The problem with both is that people breathes. It is easy to fill enclosed spaces with fire, smoke or angry bees. Then everyone inside dies, the end.

You cannot use long lances in enclosed buildings, turning is a hassle. And maintaining formation while crossing several rooms, with narrow doors and multiple vector entries is impossible.

Once inside, there's no phalanx to be had, just people going around killing and being killed, until something catches fire and everyone needs to get out.

No need to adapt it. It's already expertly suited for holding a corridor.
I think it was polybius who wrote about a phalanx holding off a roman assault after a breach in the walls of a city. As there was no way for the romans to flank the formation, which was firmly planted on the level ground of a road, the phalanx was impenetrable.

Look into how miners were used in ww1 for some properly horrifying shit on this

This. You just jam as many people as you can inside the room.

This is probably how the beard-things fought off clan-rats for so long...

>assuming that's an option

Shit also gets real awkward when they start walking towards you

So Dwarven subterranian warfare is just a big game of Dig-Dug.

Why not adapt the architecture instead?

Architecture is hard.

How do pikes behave against heavy armor ? Because your phalanx will sure look silly if the pikes can't penetrate the other side plate armor and you're back with hitting each others with hammers.

Later pikemen wear some decent armor, it just doesn't cover everything. Pikemen wouldn't be able to afford full plate.

>Implying phalanxes were supposed to kill their enemies and not just lock them in place
Any kill you get is a nice bonus, but phalanxes are mostly about keeping the enemy away from you. This is why Alexander was famous specifically for the hammer and anvil (that admittedly his dad invented, more or less).

>that admittedly his dad invented, more or less
I will always say that Philip had more impressive accomplishments than his son.

The whole fucking syntagma?

You'd be right.

he was definitely fighting less challenging armies and generals than his father.

>alexander's march through asia minor tho
ever heard of the ten thousand nigga like really

Good luck navigating tight turns with an 18 foot sarissa. Maybe some sort of folding or easily-disassembled spear?

You know it actually kind of annoys me that I had never heard of Philip of Macedon before that Hegemony game a few years back.

Feels bad man

So throw underarm

Everyone around Alexander was more interesting than him.

Just like in most Mary Sue stories.

How does this make you feel?

>Expenditures of Alexander the Great

Missiles are not a good counter to phalanxes, at least not the Macedonian one. The amount of pikes combined with the heavy armour of the phalangite would essentially render the formation invulnerable to missiles, even when fired upon from behind. The best bet to defeat a Macedonian phalanx is to break up the formation through morale shock or an opposing phalanx of deeper depth.

>How would you adopt the Macedonian phalanx for indoor use?
Shorter spears, smaller soldiers. Just hire gnomes or dwarves, I guess.

Magic flexible spears. Turn around corners automatically.

>Expenditures of the Imperium of Man.

The Macedonian sarissa could pierce the Roman scutum and maile which was essentially the best protection one might have at the time. Pikes do transfer a good amount of energy so armour isn't such a hindrance.

Well enough.

You don't have to kill to render someone combat-incapable, and enough pikes stabbing will find something to jab through/into even if it's just a foot or hand.

I'm now having a chuckle imagining Alexander telling biographers how stupid and pig-headed his dumb boyfriend was, calling Ptolemy a fatty, etc.

I don't know about that. I would love to see some real life demos of it though.

My understanding is that most fatalities would occur by exploiting weaknesses in armor such as the face, arms, or upper legs. I could see it penetrating lorica hamata, but lorica hamata behind a scutum? I dunno....

I didn't mean to imply that it could pierce both. But the sarissa would often pierce shields and impale people behind them, this has been mentioned in contemporary sources. The Macedonian phalanx was pretty much unstoppable from the front and would plow through the enemy. At Pydna the Romans were speared like pigs and while their armour offered little protection, Paullus himself later wrote about the fear he felt at seeing the phalanx advancing towards his army.

>always kind of disliked the Dwarves in Dragon Age (only played the 1st) for not just collapsing tunnels
The tunnels are their religious temples, they can't collapse them without insulting their gods and their ancestors.

>Slingers could kite the advancing phalanx with impunity since they could not be flanked

Slingers need room to operate their slings. A tunnel where even phalangites must fight in a formation 3 files wide at most, is not ideal for slinging.

Even the shorter spears of pre-Philip hoplites could reliably penetrate thick bronze helmets. Many armies even went back to using them after the Successor Wars to add mobility to their forces and had success against Roman armies with those mixed tactics. Ultimately it was Roman manpower and the fractured nature of Greece that allowed the Romans to secure the Peninsula quickly.

>not just leveling whatever building is in your way with your 12 foot spears

Interesting! I can't imagine how hard it would be to pierce armor. These must have been incredible weapons.

Apparently not that hard. I remember getting linked to some video of a moderately Veeky Forums guy punching through a car door with a bronze head spear.

>5 foot wide tunnel
>at most 2-3 pikes
>get large shield
>press enemy pikes against wall/ceiling
>run in
>butcher pikemen with sword
there is a reason they stopped using it after the romans came

Not because of that. It's because the phalanx required extremely strict conditions to function the best, namely all the units need to move at the same time to avoid opening a flank up.

The Romans exploited this by fighting on uneven ground, where their maniples could exploit breaks in the line and open gaps to roll a flank.

The Macedonian phalanx allows for 4-5 different pikes to level against the front line of the opposing force. There's no way you can press against that.

It's not the weapon, but the furious bronzed homosexual manlet wielding it

>4-5

That was during Alexander, the Diadochi would have around 7 ranks of pikes presented. The phalanx could work in more difficult terrain but the Romans were lucky to fight Macedon after Alexander. Phillip V and Perseus had to conscript nearly the entire adult population to raise an army and therefore the training wouldn't have been as good as other Hellenistic nations. At Magnesia the phalanx didn't fail but rather Antiochus III leadership (for some reason he decided not to do a single intelligent thing).

What now?

>bowmen in a tunnel
>falling for the "just cut off the pikehead" meme
>actually believing his shield can protect against a pike

Just fucking use pikes of your own, fucking retards.

Pikes are a fortification, on their own they can't kill

Just stop, I know Veeky Forums outside of /hwg/ are a bunch of retards but just STOP!

>Phalanx
>Indoor
A U T I S M
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If it were that easy, do you not think that the many hundreds of years of phalanx warfare people would not have come up with that?

They fought house-to-house in several cities during Alexander's campaigns. Pezhetairoi were trained to fight with javelins and swords when a proper set-piece formation was inappropriate, including patrols, convoy-escort, recon, and siege operations.

Most Mediterranean and Balkan peoples were very familiar with using javelins anyway, for hunting and recreation, and a skirmishing/ambush style of warfare was traditional in Macedon before Philip II's Phalanx reforms, so it didn't require that much additional training for rank and file infantry to use two different fighting styles on different occasions.

They weren't exactly impervious to missile-fire, but far more resilient than one would expect. In a proper fighting stance the shield only leaves the lower legs (covered by greaves) and the head (helmet, often with face coverings, including a popular face-mask variant) exposed. The linothorax has been recreated and tested and found extremely resistant to arrows and javelins, in case anything gets past the shield, and in the open the rear ranks kept their pikes raised over the front five to disrupt the trajectory of downward-arcing projectiles (written sources relate phalangites batting javelins and arrows out of the air with their pikes).

Frontally, only elephants, maneuvering blunders, and other pike phalanxes broke them, flank and rear attacks rendered the formation almost helpless.

The main difficulty in a tunnel would be the fact that a phalangite requires a minimum of about a yard and a half to either side in order for him, and the four men behind him, to wield their pikes at once. Also the inability to raise and lower a 16- to 20-foot-long pike, presumably.

Standard hoplite panoply would probably perform better in that environment, with spears and larger shields.

I had an idea for a group of Kobolds that would use a phalanx for holding main halls, and have smaller crawlspaces that individuals would sneak through with bombs and the like. The Phalanx blocks the invaders long enough for the flankers to drop things from the murder holes or trigger hidden traps.

The other key would be that there's always another phalanx a ways down the corridor, so when the lead phalanx inevitably breaks, they get blocked and given the opportunity to reconsider their retreat.

That is, quite literally, how the Persian immortals fought. The phalanx just kept going until they ran over the shield dudes and it was stabby time on the archers.

...

True, the length makes the whole idea different, but folding spears would disrupt the structural integrity of the weapon too. Disassembled could be a cool concept, make it a one size fits all ceremonial weapon too. Kind of like Zulu short spears (which are admittedly a less effective weapon than most others) but different lengths can be bolted into one another with spear heads of various sizes and shapes so one could have a short range weapon at the expense of spear length.