I don't want to capture the world with a brush, I want to change it!

- Leonardo da Vinci (typical artist of the Renaissance)

The above facts mean that the shortcomings of the Macedonian dense phalanx are also obvious, such a dense phalanx has to rely on cavalry and other arms to protect its two wings, but the cavalry is stronger than defensive, once defeated, the flanks or back of the dense phalanx are vulnerable to enemy attacks, then this rigid formation may collapse and get out of control. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

Moreover, the phalanx lacked coordination, and it was difficult to use it for encirclement operations, so it could only be used with cavalry; Alexander himself did not use this phalanx, his cavalry was in a sense the real main force, and it was strong enough.

Ditches, woods, ridges, rivers and other obstacles often divide the dense phalanx or block the advance of the formation, once the formation is destroyed for this reason, then the resulting gap is easy to be used by the enemy's melee troops, and the result should be known to everyone.

Although Alexander the Great solved the problem of the mobility of the phalanx, it did not mean that the phalanx was no longer a problem, in fact, the cavalry, as a reserve, the pursuer, and the protector were easily defeated and the whole battle was lost, because Alexander himself was in the cavalry formation (the phalanx needed to be kept in formation).

This problem arose in several of Alexander's battles against the Persian army, but the Persian king did not seize these opportunities, cautiously believing that Alexander had broken through his front and center armies, when in fact Alexander had strayed into the Persian rear.

As fate would have it, Alexander did not die in battle, but thousands of years later, during the Thirty Years' War, King Gustav II of Sweden used similar tactics (musketeers, artillery phalanxes, cuirassiers to protect the flanks), and was killed by mistake......

The Macedonian phalanx adapted to the structure of the Macedonian as a new slave state, with a large number of peasants and a very small number of nobles, so the heavy armoured soldiers, mainly composed of noble citizens, were not Macedonian's forte, and the low mobility of the heavy armoured array in the battlefields and mountainous and hilly areas could not meet the needs of the Macedonian conquest.

The core of the newly formed Macedonian phalanx was a spear formation of about 100 people, in which the heavy armor was completely eliminated, and the shields of the front-line soldiers were greatly reduced, and the reduced shields allowed the soldiers to stand closer, and at the same time, the spears in the rear were gradually lengthened, and finally all the spearmen could attack the enemy in front of the opposing formation, the longest reaching 10 meters long!

It would be a big mistake to think that the Macedonian phalanx was only spears, in fact only one-third to one-quarter of the spearmen included in the phalanx in the army, and the rest were all archers, warriors, slingers, spear-throwers, and these soldiers were usually civilians who were not citizens, soldiers of allies, slaves waiting to be freed.

In battle, they attacked the enemy with arrows, stones, and spears to reduce the pressure of the phalanx's charge, and when the enemy was overwhelmed by the phalanx, they followed to kill and wound the scattered enemy.

In fact, in the Spring and Autumn Period, Wei Shu's battle method of destroying chariots was very similar to that of the Macedonian phalanx, except that Wei Shu replaced the spear formation with a sword and shield formation of armored soldiers who abandoned the chariots, but they also achieved brilliant victories.

Relying on the combat ability of the Macedonian phalanx, Philip unified Greece, and Alexander destroyed Persia and established Alexander's empire; however, the weakness of the Macedonian phalanx is as special as his advantages, the biggest weakness is that its combat effectiveness is concentrated in the front, and the flanks can only rely on each other's protection.

The Romans were the first to taste this in their battle against the Gauls, when the Gallic sword and shield men broke through the Romans' flanks, and 30,000 Romans and allies were killed in their positions without resistance.

This crushing defeat made the Romans realize that it would be difficult for the spear formation to resist the attack of the swordsmen if it was broken through, so their revolutionary improvement of the Macedonian phalanx led to the production of the Roman tactics of the small infantry phalanx, that is, the Roman legions!

Years later, the tactics of the Roman legions, much more flexible than the Macedonian phalanx, easily unfolded in a narrow valley in a war against the last powerful enemy in the Mediterranean, the Kingdom of Syria of the Greeks, and annihilated the 40,000 Syrian troops with the Macedonian phalanx, which was also crowded in the valley but could not be deployed, and after this battle, the Macedonian phalanx completely disappeared from the face of the earth.

The main reason for the disappearance of the Macedonian phalanx is precisely because of the progress of projection weapons, so that the enemy side can kill and injure the soldiers in the formation by shooting arrows and throwing guns far away from the phalanx, and disintegrate the attack ability of the Macedonian phalanx.

Rows of spears are raised, sixteen rows in front and behind, and the end of the spears also has sharp edges to prevent you from coming up from behind, and the tips of the spears in the first five rows are all on the shoulders of the first row, and the whole phalanx is like a hedgehog.

Because there is no room for movement, your best posture is to stand up straight, do not lie down, lest you be trampled to death; the people in the formation cannot run, and if they run, they will die first, in fact, most of the war dead at that time were not hacked to death, but trampled to death.

The core army of Rome is definitely a system army summoned from the system, but the population size of Rome greatly limits the number of troops that can be recruited in Rome, which directly leads to the temporary inability of Rome to rely on the system army to become stronger.

The Roman legion, which is composed of a large army of the system, is definitely a more powerful existence than the Macedonian phalanx, but the crux of the problem is that the Roman city cannot accomplish this goal in a short period of time, and Bai Feng, who is forced to helpless, can only put his hope on these barbarian warriors.

If the army of barbarian warriors was built according to the standards of the Roman legion, then it would be impossible to form a large-scale army with the production capacity of the Roman city, which involved another fatal problem.

How the Western Roman Empire in real history fell at the beginning was not that the barbarian armies hired by the Western Roman Empire learned everything about the Romans, and finally the Germanic barbarians, who completely overrode the Western Roman Empire in force, completely wiped out the Western Roman Empire.

With the limited strength of the city of Rome, did Bai Feng really teach the core of the Roman legions to those barbarian warriors? The temple warriors that the city had never mobilized were not only used to defend against external enemies, but also to guard against enemies that might come from within.

It just so happened that the blacksmith shop in Rome City could produce spears of more than three meters on a large scale, and Bai Feng naturally wanted to use the sharp battle formation of the Macedonian phalanx to arm the Cheetah Legion of Gatus, and the most important thing was that this powerful battle array was absolutely effective against the barbarian army that lacked long-range attack means, and the fatal weakness of the battle array was controlled by the Roman legions.

Based on all these considerations, Bai Feng decided to implement the Macedonian phalanx in the Cheetah Legion, but he himself did not know how to list the phalanx, and the Roman army did not have a phalanx army, so the only thing Bai Feng could turn to was the Temple of Apollo.