rbodleyscott wrote:This may be true, or it may in fact be an artifact of the simplification of historical battle accounts by retellers attempting to give a coherent account of the battle. Few battle accounts are in sufficient detail to relate what happened to each individual "unit" in the battle line.jlopez wrote:Individual units did not break without serious consequences to neighbouring units and the evidence I have to hand suggests that "serious consequences" was the swift collapse of at least a flank if not the whole army. The breaking and pursuing of individual units whilst the rest of the battle line carried on fighting, as far as I know, just did not happen.
Clearly it must be possible for adjacent units to survive friends breaking - otherwise in cases where a wing broke long before the centre, why didn't the centre break when the adjacent wing units broke? What would be the point in having a (partial) second line, as the Byzantines did, if the entire front line must collapse all at once? Why would it be necessary (cf Maurice) to keep that second line far enough back to avoid getting mixed up with routers and pursuers if the enemy would not pursue until the entire front line had routed?
When a historical battle account records a wing (say) breaking, this does not necessarily mean that it all broke at once - it may instead represent the point at which resistance finally collapsed on that wing.
I think you may be drawing conclusions from simplified and sanitized accounts of battles as if they were blow-by-blow accounts - which, in the main, they aren't.
I agree that neighbouring units should be able to survive friends breaking but they should also be at a severe disadvantage in the subsequent rounds of combat. Combining the test for routers with the extra overlaps will do that, the rules as they stand don't. My preferred solution would be to look at overall battle line results to decide the "winner" of that melee (as described in a previous post) but I understand it's a bit late to test that thoroughly before publication. The proposed alternative is a simple and esthetic way of achieving the additional pressure on the edges of a gap.
No idea why centre commands carried on fighting when wings collapsed. Maybe because they were not in actual physical contact with those troops (ie. shoulder to shoulder) or because they couldn't see exactly what was going on through the dust or they expected that kind of behaviour of cavalrymen...etc I just know they did, as reported in the sources. You may be right that they didn't bother going into the minutiae of which unit ran and when but I get the impression that most collapses were swift, in game terms one or two turns at most.
Interesting what you have to say about the Byzantines , a period I know little about. However, I would like to know whether these second lines were expected to fight or whether it was somewhere to put unreliable or raw troops (as Caesar did with his newly raised legions) and are there any accounts of real battles where these second lines actually behaved as they were supposed to do according to the manual?
Regards,
Julian
