Not to mention that to this day we still don't entirely understand the minutiae of how various pike and shot formations functioned in actual practice, not to mention things such as caracoles, which were executed in battle despite the fact that they may seem baffling or unlikely to us. The best way to portray a Tercio would probably be to use a semi-abstracted model in which the unit is represented graphically but is not reliant on certain individual models being in certain places at certain times as that is a surefire recipe for chaos and a broken game.
As to why people want a 30 years war TW, they probably think the weapons and accountrements are cool. I don't think they'd enjoy the stately pace of battles, immobile artillery and the stodgy and somewhat toothless cavalry if they come from a Rollerskates: Total War background.
Agree.
That is the problem of ancient warfare as well. We don't really know how "melee" formation fight actually work. All we get is historian educated guess and some modern re enactment guess.
Like how long they fought, is it a push battle or other types of battle? do people stand off or actually engage like madlad ?How long they fought in melee before they break off?
I sometimes wondering this kind of question when I saw some random group machete street fight video. There are lots of phychological thing playing in those fights and extremely complex.
How could this mass psychology actually work when that sword and spear is really lethal but not just some re enactment toys?
Not to mention the completely guess work on how ancient cavalry actually charge. Always a mind blowing topic to me.
However, in ancient warfare, you could find some resemblance of formation/shape advantage /disadvantage that is written in historical books. If we don't focus on how melee actually fight in ancient warfare.
And when you model "two blobs of formation shape" melee fighting each other with abstract atk and def stats, How they actually "fight" isn't that important, essentially the entire ancient warfare in TW dodge most of the question and details.
It is bad, but not as bad as doing pike and shot warfare with TW model.
If you don't make pike and shot into one abstract single formation unit like most of the larger scale tabletop wargames, the player need to control both pike and shot separately.
And we can't even perform the educated guess pike and shot warfare.
We can't even dodge the "how they actually fought" question like in the ancient TW games. We need to actually control the pike and shot and perform detailed tactical move.
Which is immersion breaking for me.
I think for pike and shot warfare it is best to make mixed unit formation that is very abstract, however, that would not be TW anymore.