Shield Wall Fighting - how would you model it?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

I'm increasingly becoming doubtful that battles, outside of specific examples, involved massed ranks of soldiers clashing together. It just doesn't mesh well with alot of things. The Polybian legion and it's strange deployment schema, for example. I'm pretty sure that alot of battles consisted of the bravest of men facing off, with the slightly less brave miling about and the cowards hanging in the rear.

That's is probably fairly accurate. The point was a comparative one. Horses will not impale themselves to break a formation. A man will if brave enough. More important, even when horses had brestplates, they did not know what they were for. A man with a heavy shield and breastplate and comrades on either side similarly equipped could crash into an enemy formation.

Much of the last experience with wide scale hand-to-hand fighting was from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which there were weapons but no armor. While there is plenty of reportage from that, it is not quite applicable to eras when there was plentiful armor.

Be that as it may it is true that a lot of shock was simply psychological.