Main Menu

Field of Glory II

Started by Anguille, June 13, 2017, 04:40:37 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.

Gusington

I am looking forward to playing the Picts. Psyched for the timeline of this new DLC.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Jarhead0331

Quote from: Gusington on March 09, 2018, 09:54:13 AM
I am looking forward to playing the Picts. Psyched for the timeline of this new DLC.

I'm looking forward to the Jews. Hope hot IDF girls are included in the OOB.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


Gusington

Is Masada included as an epic battle? I actually think I saw it listed while perusing the game last night.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

MengJiao

Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 09, 2018, 09:28:17 AM
Quote from: MengJiao on March 09, 2018, 09:11:45 AM
Quote from: FlickJax on March 09, 2018, 08:19:18 AM
To be fair they did win a lot of battles against superior numbers, the ones they lost were normally excellently planned or traps/ambushes.


  To be really fair, a lot of the Roman aptitude for Empire sprang from their legal system, administrative expertise and engineering brilliance.  Militarily in the long run they relied on immense defensive systems and eventually armed those with plenty of ballistae.  When their armies were caught in the open (as often in the East), they did only so-so.

Defensive systems don't do much when it comes to conquest and the Roman military conquered most of the known world. I think history and the vast majority of academia would disagree with your view that the Roman military was only "so-so".

While many modern people probably have an inflated view of the Roman army, the Roman army itself seems to have thought it needed immense defensive systems and to hire as many barbarians as possible just to hang on to what it had and even start contracting (in Pannonia and in Mesopotamia).

Cyrano

Masada??!!

What does that look like?  Six months of ramp building followed by mass suicide?

Oooh, the drama.

Sergeant at Arms of La Fraternite des Boutons Carres

One mustachioed, cigar-chomping, bespectacled deity, entirely at your service.

You didn't know? My Corps has already sailed to Berlin. We got there 3 days ago and we've been in the Tiergarten on the piss ever since. -- Marshal Soult, October 1806

Gusington

I can't confirm but I thought I did see Masada...I could be wrong.


слава Україна!

We can't live under the threat of a c*nt because he's threatening nuclear Armageddon.

-JudgeDredd

Jarhead0331

#261
Quote from: MengJiao on March 09, 2018, 10:05:28 AM
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 09, 2018, 09:28:17 AM
Quote from: MengJiao on March 09, 2018, 09:11:45 AM
Quote from: FlickJax on March 09, 2018, 08:19:18 AM
To be fair they did win a lot of battles against superior numbers, the ones they lost were normally excellently planned or traps/ambushes.


  To be really fair, a lot of the Roman aptitude for Empire sprang from their legal system, administrative expertise and engineering brilliance.  Militarily in the long run they relied on immense defensive systems and eventually armed those with plenty of ballistae.  When their armies were caught in the open (as often in the East), they did only so-so.

Defensive systems don't do much when it comes to conquest and the Roman military conquered most of the known world. I think history and the vast majority of academia would disagree with your view that the Roman military was only "so-so".

While many modern people probably have an inflated view of the Roman army, the Roman army itself seems to have thought it needed immense defensive systems and to hire as many barbarians as possible just to hang on to what it had and even start contracting (in Pannonia and in Mesopotamia).

Defensive systems were necessary to MAINTAIN the empire, not to conquer it. Conquest was the province of the Legions, which although suffering several catastrophic defeats over a period of many centuries (usually due to poor leadership, not any inadequacy of the fighting man), by and large, was one of the most successful military organizations in the history of the world. Barbarians and mercenaries were necessary because the empire was so vast that the legions simply couldn't be everywhere all at the same time. I think you're letting your pro-Asiatic bias show.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


MengJiao

Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 09, 2018, 10:10:06 AM
I think you're letting your pro-Asiatic bias show.

  It's true.  As ways the image of brave little Persia, the much, much smaller Empire that trounced the Romans more often than not -- not to mention their Muslim successors -- springs readily to mind.

Philippe

A lot of the vaunted Roman military superiority had to do with the fact that by the late Republic they were using a permanent standing army, and before they eventually went broke they had a logistics system that could usually keep larger armies in the field than their opponents.

Throughout antiquity most people used essentially militia armies.  Ancient militias were very tough, but unless you spent a lot of time working on your close order drill, there were a lot of things that professional standing armies could do on the battlefield that militia armies simply couldn't.  In Classical Greece everybody used militias except the Spartans, and you can still hear the jaws dropping in the  ancient descriptions of a Laconian counter-march executed in the middle of a battle.  It's not that Spartans were significantly tougher than Argives or Athenians (though they probably had an edge), but they could do things that would cause anyone else's formation to fall apart.

Something like this was going on with the Romans.  They had a standing army, it spent a lot of time practising ("their drills were bloodless battles, their battles bloody drills"), and most of their opponents fielded armies of part-time reservists.

But there's more than this going on with ancient warfare, especially when it comes to Romans fighting barbarians.

Numbers in ancient texts are problematic.  They're unclear, hard to read, and pretty much at the mercy of one manuscript copyist being familiar with the writing conventions of his predecessor (who may have been literate but probably wasn't numerate).  The resulting numbers, even from the best ancient authors, are tinged with an element of medieval fantasy.

To make matters worse, the Romans themselves were often clueless (or lying) about how many barbarians they were actually facing.  If a Greek general looked at the army of another Greek city state drawn up for battle, he could usually come up with a pretty good estimate of how many men he was looking at, simply because his own troops used the same formations and his units had the same footprint on the battlefield.  When Romans were fighting a civil war they could give accurate estimates (if nothing else you probably knew how many legions the other guy had shown up with, and that was more useful than the raw numbers),  but when faced with an array of Gauls or Germans they entered the realm of wild guesses because the other side used different formations (if they used them at all) and probably didn't stand as close together.

The Romans had a logistics system.  We don't know as much about it as we would like because it wasn't fashionable to write about that sort of thing in antiquity.  But they did have one, and from time to time you encouter traces of it in some of the ancient writers.  Apart from people like Deceballus and the Dacians, most barbarians on the northern frontier didn't.  What that basically means is that the Romans could field larger armies and keep them in the field for longer periods of time than most of their barbarian opponents could.  They could also project power over long distances if there was a good network of navigable rivers, an accessible coastline, and (to a lesser extent) some kind of road net.

In practical terms what that means is that the Romans might plan a campaign into a neighboring area, and be able to keep their army fed, in the field, and assembled in one place for several months.  Their barbarian opponents, even if they were defending on home ground would only be able to keep their own army in the field for a few weeks before it would start dwindling away as its troops scattered to forage.


Every generation gets the Greeks and Romans it deserves.


History is a bad joke played by the living on the dead.


Senility is no excuse for feeblemindedness.

Sir Slash

I've been to Masada. No way the Romans could do two in a row! Two crippled old shits like me could hold that mountain against everything short of Genghis Khan and the 101st Airborne.  :cowboy:
"Take a look at that". Sgt. Wilkerson-- CMBN. His last words after spotting a German tank on the other side of a hedgerow.

Cyrano

Sergeant at Arms of La Fraternite des Boutons Carres

One mustachioed, cigar-chomping, bespectacled deity, entirely at your service.

You didn't know? My Corps has already sailed to Berlin. We got there 3 days ago and we've been in the Tiergarten on the piss ever since. -- Marshal Soult, October 1806

Nefaro

Quote from: Cyrano on March 09, 2018, 05:28:50 PM
How long do I have?

Until the end?   ???

Does anyone know?

jomni

Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 09, 2018, 06:21:35 AM
I suck at this game. Shouldn't romans be able to walk through anything????

Almost. They're one of the easiet armies for beginners. Less need for fancy tactics.  You probably just need to learn the system.


Zulu1966

Quote from: Gusington on March 09, 2018, 10:06:56 AM
I can't confirm but I thought I did see Masada...I could be wrong.

No Masada. That would be beyond the current engines capabilities. I guess something could be strung together but it would be Masada only in name. That would apply to anything siege type. Though there is a user made Alesia scenario out there it is largely concerned with the battle on MT Rea in the open. There are very basic fortifications in the game but largely can only approximate her basic field fortifications not anything more substantial or complicated.

Be great if they added this to the game...especially when they get to the medieval
"you are the rule maker, the dictator, the mini- Stalin, Mao, Hitler, the emperor, generalissimo, the MAN. You may talk the talk and appear to be quite easy going to foster popularity, but to the MAN I say F*CK YOU." And Steve G is F******g rude ? Just another day on the BF forum ... one demented idiots reaction to BF disagreeing about the thickness of the armour on a Tiger II turret mantlet.