Is there a similar show without the fantasy/supernatural elements that you might recommend, if you see what I mean?
I don't need it to be historically accurate (if anything I'd prefer it didn't even pretend to be about 'Romans' or whatever, like GoT doesn't, since then there's an historical truth for it to (likely) miss) but the more GoT went on the more dragony, visiony, giants-y, etc. it seemed to get, and while I enjoyed it I do find it harder to engage (or perhaps rather easier to disengage, take a while to get into, etc.) with that sort of stuff.
It really was terrible, but the aspect of the fighters getting pushed ever closer together, to the point where it's hard to watch it's so terrifying, really did happen. The battle of Cannae was apparently like that, where soldiers were so terrified they started digging holes to crawl into.
The article mentions this as possibly one of the things that make a flanking attack so terrifying -- it would squish the ranks together in a way that a frontal attack didn't.
I don't need it to be historically accurate (if anything I'd prefer it didn't even pretend to be about 'Romans' or whatever, like GoT doesn't, since then there's an historical truth for it to (likely) miss) but the more GoT went on the more dragony, visiony, giants-y, etc. it seemed to get, and while I enjoyed it I do find it harder to engage (or perhaps rather easier to disengage, take a while to get into, etc.) with that sort of stuff.