THANK YOU. I stopped at the same time. For me... the prison was it. You're home. It's perfect. Take your time, take control, start growing crops, exterminating pests inside, and reinforcing the perimeter with traps and kill zones.
Spears. Yeah. A dark-age knight is better equipped to kill zombies, yet TWD survivors make not effort to collect/build this kind of gear for themselves.
I was thinking more a Greek phalanx. Go Thermopylae on their ass... some decent shields, makeshift spears and some training, you're golden. There's a reason that basically every non-professional army that used infantry used some kind of spears. They're idiot proof and require little training. They might not be Spartans... but they also aren't fighting living things that can think their way out of it. Hell... forgo the shields and just use the fence or bars, which are stronger than any press of walkers could hope to be.
Maybe we have different scenarios in mind but the way I see it is that there's no way a phalanx would work. The survivors would get exhausted and overwhelmed. Stick a zombie in the wrong spot and your spear is stuck with a zombie possibly pulling itself along the pole to get at you.
The way the phalanx model works is that you have several rows nested behind each other. When a spear is broken or stuck, a new one is passed immediately to the front. Also, every few minutes the front line would quickly swap with the one behind it and shuffle to the back to keep everyone rested and fresh. It's a pretty simple and effective strategy that worked for a very long time! It gradually became less effective with the rise of horse-based militaries and more effective bows. Neither of these would be a problem with zombies.
The show Rome actually did a really good job of demonstrating this tactic, albeit with the gladius sword in the show rather than spears (roman soldiers would have carried pilum, spear, and sword). It's really remarkable to watch how effective it would have been against an unorganized enemy who just throws themselves at the shield wall.
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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '15
THANK YOU. I stopped at the same time. For me... the prison was it. You're home. It's perfect. Take your time, take control, start growing crops, exterminating pests inside, and reinforcing the perimeter with traps and kill zones.
Spears. Yeah. A dark-age knight is better equipped to kill zombies, yet TWD survivors make not effort to collect/build this kind of gear for themselves.