Yeah, I heard about that "decimated." Interesting.
The camp set-up in Spartacus that I mentioned, was by Roman soldiers. They were going into battle against the gladiators. It had quite a bit of detail though I don't remember any specifics.

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Thanks for the great post!
they thought this was such a poor tactic they didn't even train their soldiers in this style.
Very interesting. I really know nothing much about the history. Except what little I may have gleaned from entertainment vehicles. Spartacus the novel describes some military activity in some detail with perhaps fair accuracy including the setting up of a camp.

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Please delete your account.

Recently I posted on the Soapbox board about a problem with Google Search. The first reply (and only because I then deleted the thread), called me a beep.
Interesting. I didn't type "beep." Imdb changed it. I typed six letters starting with "f" that has to do with sexual orientation.

I know right, what a waste of life having knowledge of history is.
Please get educated.

Please get a life

You're correct.The Romans fortified their camps while on campaign.

Read Julius Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" for all you need to know about Roman fighting tactics.
By and large the army traveled and moved in fairly concentrated groups. Pretty much everywhere they stopped, they fortified their positions with earthworks, palisades and walls.
In the case of this battle, Commodus wagon stops at camp and is told they are at the front. My guess is that in this case the Romans had a substantial base camp and had built field fortifications which they moved their forces in and out of as they harried the Germans and sacked the villages in the surrounding area.
Like the Gauls, the Germans probably rounded up as much of a force as they could muster and when they felt like they had something of an advantage thought they'd move on field fortifications, which had about the same results as the Gauls had when they did it.
I think the use of artillery was probably overdone for a field fortification such as this. I would accept it better if the battle took place outside of some better defined fortified encampment, but where they were in the movie seems like an outlying fortification.

I think it's not so much that they attacked head-on, it's that the Romans knew exactly where they'd do it. They set up an
extremely
elaborate position with a single point of focus.

Sometimes in history, if the tribes had had great success in ambush tactics (ie. Boudicca's huge tribe of warriors in ad60) they get overconfident and face a foe in pitched battle. Disastrously.

Hi Panzer,
I don't know much about tactics, but it doesn't take much knowledge to figure out it's better to stand BEHIND someone with a gun, rather than in front of them.

The Germanic tribes hadn't invented the tactics of "Blitzkrieg" or the "kesselschlacht" yet.