Ecnomus: The largest naval battle of the ancient world

Well i like naval battles, but i am trying to remember what naval battle i saw in the second 300 movie, that is if anybody saw it.

  Maneuvering is an obvious approach and given that the Carthagians were a lot more experienced that is something they could have done.  Reading the Wiki article on it the Romans had used the corvus before so the Carthaginians obviously knew about it.  In fact it says that they tried to attack ships from their sides to avoid it.  Possibly with so many ships the degree of maneuvering required was impossible.

  The other factor is that their flanking forces, which attacked the transports and the 3rd fleet defending them, seems to have put a lot of effort into attacking the transporters.  As such when the 1st two Roman forces defeated the Carthaginian centre and returned they were able to overwhelm the flanking forces.  Possibly if they had concentrated on the military units and defeated the reserve fleet before the Roman van units returned they would have been able to win then?  Even if most of the transports had escaped they would have posed less of a threat without the warships to escort them.

  I'm less certain about more marines to be honest.  As I understand it the Roman 'marines' were largely normal legionary men, just operating at sea once the corvus had fixed a Carthaginian ship so it couldn't move.  Not sure if the Carthaginians could carry that many extra troops without seriously encumbering their movement, or to train that number of men up to the necessary standards to fight Roman HI in such a battle?

  Very true.  Some were actually better, such as Greek phalanx, as long as it was on fairly flat ground and face to face.  As the Roman maniples tended to be more flexible in maneuvering and able to operate quite well on broken or forested areas say which seriously handicapped the phalanx.  Also since many Greek and other armies of organised states were profession one with experienced officers the Romans often had problems with what were basically amateur leaders who were political appointment.  However the Romans were highly disciplined, had a lethal method of tactical combat, especially as it gained experience and being a mass army [in the bulk of the republican period anyway] could moblise a lot of men and replace heavy losses.

  They have a lot of good quality heavy infantry than, if it can be turned into basically a land battle at sea by locking the ships together can be very effective in such combat. 

  As I understand it that was the basic purpose of the corvus?  To nullify the greater Carthaginian skills at actually rowing and maneuvering and enable two interlocked ships to become a 'land' battle between the marines on both sides.  Yes this means both ships are vulnerable to being rammed by others.  However that assumes that a Carthaginian ship is not too busy dodging other corvus.  Also if one ship is hit so badly its left sinking wouldn't there be a danger that it drags the other down with it?  Hence your likely to sink one of your own ships even if you take out a Roman. 

  As I say my knowledge is a bit basic, going back to what I learnt as a child, which unfortunately is a bloody long time ago.  Could have it all wrong but that's what I learnt of the tactics from assorted books.

weaponsandwarfare.com/2018/04/15/battle-of-ecnomus-256-bc-largest-naval-battle-in-history/

Perhaps not the largest of all time, but it certainly was huge in ancient terms.