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Uh, I don’t know, Facebook possibly? I don’t label the origin of things I download. There seems to be a signature of some sort as ‘SW HG’, look that up, I guess.

Is it true though? In the above example, the attackers could just concentrate their attack on one side forcing the defenders to support there

Generally, there’s only so much ‘pressure’ that can be applied across a given width of troops. While Greek and Macedonian phalanxes benefitted from increased depth (and even then, very far from a 1-1 benefit for committing more troops), as befits their tightly-packed shoving-match style of fighting, most armies would not immediately benefit from committing more troops to a portion of the line, except to relieve exhausted troops or replace losses. This is also why reserve forces are common, to shore up any unexpected weakening of a section of the army.

On the charge, some amount of advantage is gained by increased depth, such as seen in the shoving-matches of Greek phalanxes and the focus on depth for 18th and early 19th century French troops to overwhelm enemies with a bayonet charge, but there’s only so much after that initial charge you can do with that depth in most cases, since people, even trained soldiers, are generally reluctant to be shoved into the metaphorical meat grinder for prolonged periods of time.

Imagine you and 20 other friends in the front line are facing off against 21 enemies, with (for the sake of simplifying the example) no room to maneuver left or right to outflank each other. Will another 20 friends behind you with swords give you an advantage commensurate with their numbers? They can’t ‘reach’ over your shoulders while you’re fighting to strike the enemies. The best they can do is wait for someone to fall, or withdraw due to wounds or exhaustion, and replace them. Which is a large advantage if your enemies lack that, but not as simple as “More numbers = more immediate pressure”.

If you and your 20 original friends all rush the enemy with all your might, you might disrupt the enemy formation, allowing some of your 20 reinforcements to join in, putting the disordered enemies at a disadvantage, but that’s both (psychologically) difficult to sustain, and runs the risk of your aggression exposing yourselves to the strikes of the enemy - what good is an extra 20 troops if you lose 20 troops trying to get them into a position to fight?

Wasn’t that the great advantage of the Romans that they trained this kind of stuff a lot and thus were actually able to more or less hold these formations.

Holding a rough formation isn’t as difficult as it sounds - while the Romans were obsessive about it, their foes were generally clustered in more-or-less equivalent blocks, just less neat (or just as neat, in the case of fighting Hellenic foes).

The big advantage of Roman drilling was what’s called in the modern day command-and-control. A pike phalanx of the kind the Hellenic states used could be committed to combat, but not easily adjusted. Romans trained to respond with small units (maniples of ~160 in the mid-Republic, cohorts of ~800 in the Late Republic and Early Empire) to take advantage of changes in the battlefield. Roman troops could (and did) reorient and reorganize themselves as developments in the battle occurred.

At the Battle of Cynoscephalae, a small Roman force (around 2,500 men, or 10% of the army) saw changing battlefield conditions and made an obvious choice to take advantage of them (“We are now literally behind the enemy, it would be simple to run into their rear and rout them”).

However, many ancient armies simply would not have been capable of doing so - to get a large mass of men to suddenly change direction and objectives requires more than just a strong voice and the necessary authority - you need men to stay together in combat-effective groups, you need them to pass along orders quickly and coherently, and you need everyone to know their literal and metaphorical place in the new set of objectives. This is what drills and low-mid-level officers help with. In that very battle, even, the Macedonians they were facing could not react quickly enough to confront several thousand men coming up from behind them, and were utterly crushed, turning what had appeared to be a draw into a complete, war-ending defeat for the Macedonians.

But I would guess most battles ended up looking more or less like the lower example.

Very rare. Even in tribal-style warfare, like that of the pre-Christian Irish and Scots, there were generally coherent lines, with a small gap wherein individuals might duel or skirmish, retiring behind their own battle line when exhausted or defeated. People in dangerous scenarios tend to cluster around friendlies even without training, with the animal mindset of “I would like to know whoever is behind me will be safe and not dangerous”.

You have to keep in mind no one had this kind of bird view and no one could directly tell every soldier what to do while at the battlefield. So every soldier in the end is just fighting for their own survival eventually resulting in chaos.

Once lines break in a battle, the side that has kept the more coherent line generally wins. If you can’t be guaranteed to have a lad on your left and your right, and perhaps most importantly, behind you, you’re fucked. Skill can’t make up for the limitations of human senses and focus. Once the enemy can use their (safe, mutually covered) troops to isolate pockets or individual enemies, those pockets and individual enemies will be attacked on multiple sides, and that is a very difficult thing to fight off.

Hence why flanking maneuvers are so vital when they’re successfully executed. No one wants to get blind-sided by someone on their left or right while they’re trying to focus on the angry blade-wielding fellow to their front. And no one wants to turn to the left or right to confront a foe and get shanked by the fellow in front of them.

NCO-equivalents were also immensely important once it became apparent that low-mid level command could still be effectively exercised in the heat of battle. Roman centurions, for example, got paid 16x an enlisted man’s salary by the time of the Early Empire precisely because it was recognized just how vital they were (and also because centurions took massive casualties and needed a bit of an inducement for anyone with a bit of brains in their skull to still want to stay in that front-line position)

B, wishing for F

A little victory and a little drinky to go with it would both be nice.

Unfortunately, I just share memes I find, I’m not the creator.

As a side note, togas are distinctly Roman (as thick semicircular cloth that’s folded over/around a tunic) and the Romans actually disliked wearing them because they were uncomfortable and unbearably hot formal wear XD

The Greek exomis, a simpler and more comfortable garment that’s worn on its own, is sometimes confused for a toga in popular culture.

Did you not follow the entire Obama-era policy on Gitmo?

It was attempted to be closed, multiple times.

Not yet invented

No, because they’ll immediately vote conservative the next chance they get anyway.

No amount of suffering will cure the vast majority of these people. They will be licking the boot even as it crushes their skull in their final moments.

Do you not understand the phrase or its history? Is there any additional information I could provide to help you better understand what is being communicated?

No, don’t worry, I understand just what’s being played at. But you keep playing at purity politics in the hopes of putting fascists in power.

Once when playing a D&D game, my character was a very ‘civilized’ guildsman who constantly went on about the superiority of urban mercantilist civilization (his counterpart, the other player in the group, was a half-orc barbarian who found this whole civilization thing very appealing; we made a good team). When one quest sent us to a halfling village in the middle of the woods, and they rebuffed all my character’s offers to buy land for ‘productive enterprises’, he, of course, came to the wholly normal and completely correct conclusion that ‘these people’ did not even have the concept of private property, how sad! and resolved to educate them (by force if necessary) after the quest was finished of the benefits and necessity of a thriving bourgeois society.

Luckily for the halflings, our two-miscreant party was locked up by the local lord afterwards for a combination of kidnapping/theft/attempted sale of halflings who had been turned into stone by the cockatrice we had slain; and we were set loose on another problem (though not before committing unlawful commerce and gambling our unlicensed profits away at the local tavern playing dragon poker).

Which is the rooster, which is the hen?

Yes, scratch a liberal Jew and a Nazi bleeds, you really nailed it. /s

US, USSR, China, the UK, France, was there any major power not selling to both sides of that fucking conflict?

Not sure, couldn’t comment anything beyond the notes of the source for sure, but acid-etching would also have been an option at this time, if a cutting-edge one.

De gustibus non disputandem est - I like a little sealed surface now and again.

I think it speaks more to how shallow policy questions tend to be.

A few weeks later, it was fully censored in all of the books.

Next level losers there, goddamn.