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Right gentlemen, your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to try and engineer a TL which is technologically speaking similar to the IOTL second half of the 19th century, but in which military technology is lagging behind compared to our world. Line infantry firing smoothbore muskets would be good, pike blocks even better. :D

Having thought about the matter a bit, I don't think that keeping tactics in the line infantry phase should be too difficult: butterflying away the Minie ball and breechloading gun mechanisms should be enough to do it, as without at least one of these inventions rifles wouldn't really be feasible for anything except skirmishing weapons. Keeping them in the pike era would, obviously, pose more of a difficulty. The only plausible way I can think of would be to go back right to the early gunpowder era, and butterfly things so that handguns don't really take off, at least not to the degree they did. Possibly you could have European armies adopting Chinese-style fire arrows instead after seeing them used by the Mongols, although then again maybe these would just follow a course similar to IOTL firearms and advance to a stage where they make deep formations and close-quarter combat obsolete.

Assuming, though, that you can retard or alter military progress, what do you think the effect on world history and geopolitics would be? European armies would have less of an edge over the various native peoples they encounter, so we'd probably be less likely to see a Scramble for Africa equivalent, although then again not having rifles didn't stop the Spanish conquering most of South America, so maybe not.
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