Ah, crap, I posted a prototype post again. Here's the full one.
Sea Skimmer wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:
At the end... oh hi, Skimmer!
The "pike phalanxes" in question have... evolved heavily, they have a good deal less depth than a historical tercio and the flanking musket formations do have the training to form some semblance of a firing line. The only reason pikes have survived to this point in the Ohioan Empire, which is quite capable of turning out flintlock muskets with ring bayonets, is literal magic; specifically, the magic that allows the Ohioans to send infantry armed with nothing deadlier than a smoothbore musket against firebreathing beasts and demon wizards and voodoo zombies without getting them massacred. Said magic works better on the pikemen for idiosyncratic reasons, so the Ohioans have been very conservative about phasing them out.
If those are the threats, then one might still ask why bother with a square. Zombies would be a joke, and the other threats I would muse, are 'not swarming' and thus present little danger to your flanks or thin lines in general. The square defended against cavalry and allowed advances into the heart of large enemy formations without having a flank turned, both situations require a large number of mobile enemies whom aren't mindless.
The original threat profile was fairly fast zombies, magically animated and actively marshalled by necromancers. The necromancers would usually provide support for them by directing death magic against enemy soldiers. Said zombies were capable of hysteric strength, generally of using crude tools. Most of them would tear themselves to pieces after a sustained period of exertion, but by that time against a typical medieval army they'd produce enough corpses to replenish their armies and permit the necromancers to repair some of the damaged ones by black magic. There were also, in many cases, human or humanoid levees, and they were often used as archers or cavalry auxiliaries to the zombie swarm, because the zombies couldn't handle tasks like that.
So basically, it was an actual recognizable military force, not just a swarm of mindless directionless shamblers a la
World War Z. The necrocracies of the Tennessee Valley
were actual countries, in the same sense that, oh, ISIL is. It's just that they were governed by lich lords whose subordinates and apprentices ran and maintained the country by terror and the slave labor of easily controlled zombies rather than bothering to cultivate the art of leadership or governance as we know it.
A hedge of pikes stopped human auxiliary cavalry, of course. It didn't deter the zombies but did at least physically delay them, if only because a zombie can't impale itself and slide up two spears pointing in different directions at once. Thus, it acted as a defense against zombies in a respect that a shield wall would not have done.
But this would not have made much difference by itself. What really made victories possible was the clergy figuring out how to turn the whatever spot the pike block stood on into
de facto sacred ground, deflect the death magic by doing so, and drastically weaken the zombies so that organic damage inflicted by hand weapons would actually stop them reliably.
All this was being done with roughly 1400-1500 level technology, so the 'shot' component of the pike-shot team was limited to a handful of matchlock arquebuses at best- and probably crossbows to counter living enemy archers. By the end of this round of wars against the zombie masters, the gunners were becoming more common, among other things because they did
enough raw damage to actually stop a zombie reliably, especially on 'sacred ground.' An arrow sticking out of a zombie generally wouldn't do that.
As time went on in the wake of the scouring of the Tennessee, the Ohioan Empire expanded further, and the basic pike block was augmented with arquebusiers, then more of them, following a roughly historical path of reform over a period of about 200-250 years, evolving into something Maurice of Nassau, and later Gustavus Adolphus would have recognized. They still call 'em tercios, though.
It is
necessary, for the given magical defense method to work, for the soldiers to be tightly concentrated. If anyone invents the Minie ball the Ohioans are going to
have to find another way, and I'm not sure they can... but with incremental evolutions of the magical defense tactics, it should work tolerably well against anything short of Napoleonic field artillery, and might even screw up that surprisingly effectively. I would, again, prefer not to just infodump all the details about how things work
now rather than actually showing them in the story thread.
But then the square was also supposed to have heavy cavalry support anyway, to prevent multiple squares from being enfiladed by enemy artillery, which was a threat even at the earliest points. It was just frontal fire, and fast moving forces initially were not such a threat.
The squares
were designed to come with heavy cavalry support, as the bluegrass country of OTL Kentucky supports, in this game, a thriving heavy cavalry tradition. Still do; there are lancer formations attached to quite a few of the existing regiments. Also light cavalry who are, essentially, the mercenary Cossacks of Illinois; I've mentioned them in passing
Even then I'd contend a lot of the effectiveness of the Spanish tercio was about how well paid, led and trained the men were, and the large cavalry support they had which was itself very expensive, all as part of a superior military system, more so then the actual tactic itself.
Agreed. The Ohioans don't normally form squares anyway- but they're a traditionalist culture and they try to cling to whatever bits of a tradition they can even when they know they have to change. In this case, they kept a name which we'd translate as 'tercio' well after adopting a fundamentally different system of pike-and-shot coordination. And, again, they haven't abandoned the pike component because they have an actual need for it, whereas a real world army with the same technology probably wouldn't need it, and would abandon them.
Anyway just trying to guard you guys against having more nonsense then you need up front. 1800 and pre industrial is a non sequitur, and yet it seems unlikely much of what people really want actually requires 1800 tech anyway. Setting a lower limit would make peoples google fu more effective.
Thank you and I agree.
That idea of 'equal to 100,000 spearmen' thing too. I mean, what are 100k spearmen supposed to be worth? If you really had a force that was exactly that it would for example simply be incapable of storming a major walled fortress. No way to break the walls, and no way to fight with a spear on a ladder! Its a serious abstraction problem when the other side actually could have 32pdr guns that fire more then once an hour.
I agree. Honestly, I'd just say "one well armed soldier," the sort of thing that a PC nation with its functional economy and (presumably) successful military tradition might reasonably consider baseline. If we're talking screaming hordes of peasants waving clubs (or something else unlikely to actually take down an armed and trained man one-on-one, such as a mind-controlled wolf or a shambling zombie), I'd say having more than a hundred thousand is reasonable, especially since we potentially have national populations of several millions.
We just find creative ways to exterminate people. 
