[Scarlioni]

Pikes are a truly ancient weapon system dating back to at least the Sumerians. To be in front of a pike square on level ground was a very bad place to be as the romans found Cynoscephalae. On the other hand, as the romans showed at Cynoscephalae the pike could be soundly defeated if fought on uneven ground and/or flanked.

Pikes offerd signifigent protection against massed archers in the form of the back ranks using their pikes to knock incoming arrows aside.

I have to admit one of the first things I tried in Dominions3 was mass MA Ulm pikes and was very disapointed in their performance against enemy infantry in the independent territories.

In a fantasy context I had for a long time assumed a pikes vs monsters would be a bit like a cat vs a hedgehog. ie very inconclusive. Hollywood changed my opinion on this with the movie Alexander. In that movie a Macedonain phalanx was treated like so many galley slaves getting their oars clipped by an elephant marching perpendicular to the phalanx.

My revised opinion, according to earlier statements in the thread, would be that the treatment of tramplers vs pikes is fairly accurate in dominions3.

Pikes were never defensive, but always an offensive weapons, being the very definition of a shock weapon. A wall of spear points approaching at a charge worked for the Sumerians right up to the swedes under Gustavus Adolphus.

Two greek hoplite armies, traditionally sixteen ranks deep impacting each other at a dead run was a terrible experience. Pikes shattering on shields giving off the noise of gunfire, the warcrys and screams of the dying mixed with the smells of blood. Men dying from the sheer crush of bodies, the smell of the recenly deceased loosening their bowels mixed with the stench of the merely terrified loosing control of thier bladders. This led Hippocrates to describe a condition that in later times was called shellshock.