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[Hanslanda]

I landed near Brundisium with an army of 1300 Spartans, Perioikoi peltasts, a token force of Thracian Warriors, and Cretan archers. Echestratos was the inexperienced General of the force, having poorly chosen his landing zone. A brief march inland and they are set upon by 3120 Romans.

Echestratos immediately orders defenses deployed and a Hoplite circle. The mighty spears and stout shields of Sparta comply and are swiftly surrounded on three sides by Romans. As the enemy cavalry finally exhausts their numbers on the cleverly placed Sudes caltrops and fire pits, Echestratos orders the cleared area of the circle to unfurl and envelope the embattled front, Thracians leading the breakout alongside his meager 80 cavalrymen.

The encirclement turns, and the horde of Romans senses their change in fortunes. Howling Thracians and freed hoplites race along the edges of the battle, encircling and pinning the force in place. The hoplites still locked in formation started advancing.

And the killing blow moved in. Leves and Velites scattered as the cavalrymen of Thessalia charged deep into the Romans' heart. They struck the generals of their enemies from behind and killed them. Word traveled in the ranks immediately. They were nearly surrounded, hemmed in, leaders dead, fire arrows falling, crushed from the fore by advancing hoplites in formation, and terrified by vicious, falx bearing Thracian flankers.

The Romans broke and fled as the Spartans exulted in the victory. Calls for Echestratos revealed that he had died valiantly in the center of the line, fighting to the death. A more glorious death had not been known since Leonidas though, and Echestratos' name would live on!

I captured 1200 of them, killed 1500, barely 300 of them managed to flee. I lost 7 shy of 500. This is going to be a fun invasion.

TW:R2

[Madman198237]

Standard Issue Roman Tactics (usually pre-Marian Reforms, but still applies afterwards):
1. Massively outnumber enemy
2. Fall for dumb/simple/well really any kind of trick
3. Lose the Equites (cavalry) to: A, desertion; B, bad tactics; C, numerically superior enemy cavalry; D, worse tactics; or E, superior enemy cavalry (there's probably also more of them, too, because Rome cannot into cavalry).
4. Lose battle to the dumb trick.
5. Raise new army out of the next 2% of Rome's population.
6. A, If enemy army no longer has sufficient troops to set up a dumb trick, rout army and declare victory; B, If enemy army still has dumb tricks, return to 1.


My personal own? Got ambushed (again, darn you British woodlands and rebel field armies) with no time to set up. This means that my army was deployed into a marching column formation (no, it's not a very intelligent marching column setup) and the enemy gets to attack wherever.

They picked the middle of the column, which was made of my best spearmen companies (the guys you put front & center in a battle anyway), flanked by my elite swordsmen.

Final score: Me, 1 field army remaining 80% intact. Enemy, zero field armies remaining.

Once again, EBII mod for M2:TW

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Was Rome the historical equivalent of min-maxing your character build??? Also playing money-ball with their military?

[Hanslanda]

Was Rome the historical equivalent of min-maxing your character build??? Also playing money-ball with their military?

IRL pretty much yeah. "Oh I gave up Individually Superior, Fast, and Spears for Group Fight, Tactics, and Large Shield/Stabbing Sword. Also I traded Raiding for Encampment and Warrior-Lords for Combat Engineers."

[Madman198237]

Not really? If they did try to min-max anything they forgot what they were minmaxing to GET and instead minimized their decent generals and maximized their tendency to consume lead (yes, they literally drank lead as a flavoring for wine), their infighting abilities, and their ability to mess up their I-think-it-was-actually-kinda-functional bureaucracy.

Post-Marian Reforms and especially into the Roman Empire (as opposed to the Kingdom or Republic), the Roman Legions became *absolutely terrifying* machines of war. Iron plate armor (lorica segmentata), or mail (lorica haumata), or even the really cool iron scale armor (lorica squamata) made them basically invulnerable to arrows and getting stabbed/disemboweled/impaled/cut anywhere on the torso (rather like the richest of the Classical Greek hoplites, since Greek warfare was usually a bring-your-own-armor sport), then they tend to fight in these massive blocks of guys covering each other with shields, and THEN they all run at you in this great big charge that results in a guy with a sword being closer to you than your spearpoint is, which is a spearman's worst nightmare.

However, hope is not lost, because the Roman Legions were still terrible at having cavalry support or archers or even slingers (which were often considered to be BETTER than archers because the lead shot used by the best slingers will knock over an armored man straight through the helmet, or bruise and fracture ribs through the cuirass). Parthia demonstrated this quite well when what's-his-face decided to pull an Alexander and go to India.

[Hanslanda]

I was referencing the fact that they developed and used advanced group fighting tactics that played to their strength. E.g the early triplex acies, with skirmishes leading, followed by young, inexperienced hastati, then experienced principes to relieve the hastati, finally triarii for the killing blow. Often deployed quincunx, with small gaps between maniples to allow reinforcements to attack and tired soldiers to rotate back to rest and rearm. Thus turning their army into a constant meatgrinder as opposed to the more common long battle line or human wave, like the Greek hoplites or Gallic tribes typically did.

[Madman198237]

They actually started from a very Greek conceptualization of proper formation: The Classical Greek phalanx goes richest to poorest, so the best-armored troops hit first, and then the formation basically turns them into bronze-clad battering rams capable of knocking over anyone in their path. The Romans used a similar formation but looser IIRC, and started by deploying principes and then hastati (in plain phalanxes with spears, not swords), with obvious negative results (if the best guys lose, the second-rates enter battle already terrified of their honestly-less-than-great chances).

Phalanxes are not a "long" formation, but are instead densely packed (eight ranks deep is the standard, and as each guy covers his neighbor with part of his shield, the spacing is narrow both side-to-side and, because each man in the lines of eight pushes the man in front of him, front-to-back spacing is very close as well) and thus well-suited to the typically narrow valleys of Greece.

The Romans made their formation deeper and, unlike the Greeks, relied on shock tactics (the initial charge of the maniple was intended to break the enemy's phalanx up, make him lose cohesion, which makes the entire enemy unit vulnerable to the close-in fighting style of sword-and-board warriors, unlike the keep-him-away-from-me that spearmen use).

However, they still cannot beat out my favorite rework of the classic phalanx idea: When fighting the Spartans, a Theban general exploited the tendency of the phalanx to creep to its right as it marched forwards (each guy was trying to get more protection from the shield of the next soldier to the right, resulting in a slight rightwards creep as they march)….by ordering his soldiers to move a little to the left. The Spartans noticed the same thing, deploying their best men on the right of their line, so when they met an enemy phalanx, their best men wrapped the flank and killed their way through the enemy formation. The Thebans moved far enough left that the Spartan right wing didn't overlap anything...and the Theban left flank (facing the Spartan right flank and Sparta's best soldiers) was 50 ranks deep. The Spartans lost that battle. Badly.

[EnigmaticHat]

Romans were something resembling a nation state, surrounded by a bunch of tribes and city states.  From the point where they took over most of modern day Italy onwards, they had a numbers advantage.  They could have 10 legions suffer crushing defeats and then beat the enemy army once, and the war would be over.  Because that was the only enemy army.

[hector13]

Excuse me, the Romans died so you’re in the wrong thread.

[TD1]

Hold on Justinian a minute!

[Madman198237]

Enigmatic is pretty correct, yeah. "We have reserves" is not a Soviet way to wage war---it was the Roman way. The Soviets just borrowed it.

Counterpoint, hector:
In what language is the motto on the dollar bill? How about your state's flag? What about the appearances of many government buildings? Modern borders? The language of medicine and biology and a couple other sciences?

Rome did not die, it *owned* the entire fabric of world culture so thoroughly that we still haven't got rid of them.

[Emma]

However, they still cannot beat out my favorite rework of the classic phalanx idea: When fighting the Spartans, a Theban general exploited the tendency of the phalanx to creep to its right as it marched forwards (each guy was trying to get more protection from the shield of the next soldier to the right, resulting in a slight rightwards creep as they march)….by ordering his soldiers to move a little to the left. The Spartans noticed the same thing, deploying their best men on the right of their line, so when they met an enemy phalanx, their best men wrapped the flank and killed their way through the enemy formation. The Thebans moved far enough left that the Spartan right wing didn't overlap anything...and the Theban left flank (facing the Spartan right flank and Sparta's best soldiers) was 50 ranks deep. The Spartans lost that battle. Badly.

That was the Battle of Leuctra, right? I was taught that it was such a bad loss that it kinda ended Sparta's hegemony pretty much completely.

[Madman198237]

I can't recall. I thought Leuctra was after Sparta reformed its military (because it'd atrophied horribly), so during the Hellenistic period. I could have my battle names all screwed up, though. IIRC, Leuctra was something about Sparta losing to its allies and cavalry failing in the center despite the flanks' standard-issue Spartan infantry performance?

I'm afraid that my knowledge of the actual history is limited, far eclipsed by my knowledge of how the Greeks killed each other and a few tidbits about how it all went really wrong or really well

[Hanslanda]

Hey I learned something so this was an effective derail!

[TD1]

Ahh, Leuctra. That was their defeat at the hands of Thebes. Rather a surprise defeat, but it destroyed a large portion of the remaining Spartan fight force.

Also, won more on the strength of Theban strategic ingenuity under Epiminandos (apologies if incorrect spelling; been a while) than anything else. The Sacred Band was used quite well, though it could have backfired horribly.