Empire Greatswords are the guys breaking the phalanx with Greatswords.

Pikes work when the guy you're fighting doesn't actually want to face check a phalanx. Turned fights into shoving matches, save the occassional oddball Landsknecht who decided **** it I'll just break the pikes on my way in. It worked to prevent momentum, neither horse nor man really want to be impaled. Pikes are **** for obvious reasons once someone was actually inside the phalanx. Having said that there is a historic precedent for them not being exactly functional here. And that faction crashed harder than Tomb Kings. As pointed out above it was really a Southern States pike and shot kind of thing. Referencing historic examples of pikes while excluding Spanish Tercios is. The pikemen company use in battle by southern army and DOW. They began to rely solely on large pike formations and began to lose because they started using cavalry, missiles, and other infantry types less and less. Part of the reason for the decline of Hellenistic martial supremacy during the Classical period was their abandonment of combined arms tactics.

Yes, the pike can be used defensively and excel if used properly with combined arms. The Swiss became very good at this practice and won a number of notable battles using three columns of pikemen charging into combat for a successive shock effect. When pikes made their resurgence in the middle ages, the idea was to charge the formation at the enemy. A pike phalanx is not very maneuverable and it's only strong from the front it's uni-directional which makes it ideal for attacking an enemy formation, but it's vulnerable to the rear and flanks making them poor defense against cavalry (unless your enemy is a complete idiot). The idea was to get more spear points engaged in the fight which would result in higher casualties on the opposing side. Pikes were developed as an offensive weapon by the Macedonians in order to tip the scales in their favor during a phalanx scrum. I know some will make the case for spearmen which are effective as both defence/offence but sometimes you just need purely defensive force. That's interesting i had always assumed there would be a need for pikemen given the amount of cavalry/monsters/heavy infantry, as say an Empire soldier i would want too keep Hung/Kurgan/zombies/Chaos warriors as far away as possible. One could argue that they could have interpreted Martial Prowess into making High Elf spearmen into pikemen instead, but they didn't. 2K A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britanniaīecause most races in Warhammer don't have pikemen, just regular spearmen.847 A Total War Saga: Fall of the Samurai.

Pike vs skeleton army