The civilization series has always done many things well. The medieval period has never been one of those things. From the very beginning in civ1 the units appeared in odd, ahistorical orders with odd relative strength values, missing or anachronistic units, and general logical and historical flaws.

Civ 4 is of course no exception to this. The first units you get in the medieval era are generally longbows. In reality of course longbows didn't show up in wide use in real life until the hundred years war, generally recognized as the end of the middle ages and just prior to the introduction of gunpowder. Similarly pikemen are flash in the pan counter units when pikemen ruled the battlefield for centuries and were only phased out in the 1700s when musket technology developed to the point that pikes were less viable and the invention of the bayonette finally rendered having separate pike units pointless. In the thirty years war there were not knights in shining armor riding into battle next to musketeers as you might see in civ3 or 4, there were however huge pike formations.

In order to remedy this I've changed units as follows:

Aztec Jaguar -
Now replaces axemen, loses bonus to city raiding but gains bonus vs melee as normal axeman, costs 5 shields more than axemen but doesn't require iron. - this seemed to be just a much better fit for the jaguar unit than being a swordsman replacement for both flavor and balance purposes.

Pretorian- Strength decreased to 6, gains +10% attack vs cities, +25% attack vs archers. The roman legion consisted of well disciplined soldiers who were skilled in many forms of combat, especially against missile using enemies. They dominated the world around them during their prime. They were not however on a level with medeival pikemen or heavy infantry in terms of weapons, armor, or combat capability by any means. For balance purposes their overall strength has been reduced but their capacity to attack cities and combat archers has been increased.


Crossbowmen - Remain as is. Crossbowmen were among the first and last types of soldiers used in the middle ages. While often out of favor with the major powers, crossbows provided an easy way for a smaller power without access to large numbers of knights to equip peasents and yeomen with a weapon capable of causing significant damage.

Macemen - Now available at feudalism, require metal casting instead of machinery. Heavy infantry was among the first widespread type of unit used in the middle ages. As armor and weapon technology progressed units such as norse huskarls and similar units began to come into fashion. These well organized and equipped heavy infantry would be the mainstay of medieval armies until armor,weapon, and riding technology progressed to a level where fully armored knights were practical. This is reflected in game by introducing them along with crossbowmen as the gateway units to the middle ages.

Knights - Now availible with civil service. Require horseback riding, feudalism, metal casting. Mounted knights came to be the dominant military force in the high middle ages for a number of reasons. One was the introduction of the stirrip, chain mail, and the lance, which would make fighting in the saddle much more viable. Another was the feudal beurocracy which developed in Europe, allowing kings to reliably muster knights to fight wars and knights to have a reasonable expectation of payment for their services through land grants. In game this is reflected through making knights available at civil service and require feudalism.

Longbowmen - Now availible with civil service. The longbow was entirely a reaction to knights as the english kings and nobility realized that they simply could not put enough knights in the field as their french opponents in the hundred years war. The solution was to require farmers and peasants to train in the longbow from birth. As longbowmen were a direct response to knights, it only makes sense for them to become available at the same time.

Pikemen - Now available with guilds. Require metal casting. Strength changed to 8, price increased to 70, bonus vs cavalry reduced to 75%. It was the pikeman, not the knight, who was the champion of plutocracy at the end of the middle ages and it was the pikeman, not the knight, who would continue to fight on for centuries after the renaissance dawned. The increased strength means they can compete with musketeers and will be better at defending against mounted units than anything until riflemen come along and finally retire the last melee weapon.

Cannon - now availble with gunpowder. Require metal casting and engineering. Strength reduced to 8. The cannons rang over europe far earlier than did the musket, and to have them not be availible until destroyers is silly. Putting them at gunpowder removes the rather odd cavalry+catapults scenario present in the original game.


This is my first real mod, so feedback is welcome, I've tried very hard to keep things balanced making sure a defensive counter for a unit becomes availible with or soon after the unit keeping any one unit from running away with the game, but my playtesting has been limited so I'd appreciate comments on how things seem to work out. Ed - and of course I forgot to mention but all of the unique units should also follow the above progression, if I happened to miss any please let me know.

103311

Edit: I've added the following changes for the reasons detailed in the thread:

Praetorians: bonus vs archers changed to bonus vs melee
Spearmen: Base strength = 5, bonus to cav = 50%
Axemen: Base strength = 4, bonus to melee = 85%

AI: Unit roles edited to match above.

At the advise of woodelf I'll stop changing things now until this has been playtested some :).

I like your mod. I would disagree on the praetorian guards and the pikemen

http://www.livinghistory.com.au/images/praetorian.gif

and

http://www.lunsfords.fsnet.co.uk/gallery/upton/drill/pikemen.jpg
http://www.tombridge.com/photos/londond4/pikemen.jpg
http://www.ecwsa.org/images/Stralsund03/Stralsund%20For%20Website/Pikemen.jpg

The pikemen equipment was in no way superior to the legionary. Each unit was adapted to the era it ruled.

The legionary were the soldiers that were to go against the phalanx. nothing more nothing less. the strength they developed figting Pyrrus was then adapted and honed fighting Hannibal. Scipio Africanus was Hannibals very able student and he learned everything he could before salting Carthages fields.

the fall of the Roman empire was not in their armies. Although their armies were later poorly adapted to figting skirmishing huns, gallic warlords and germanic axemen and lancemen.

The pike was the answer to the axe and the lance. Only cause you could set it.

I would also change the name from Praetorian to Legionairy. Praetorian units were basically glorified firefighters and town guard.

------------------------

None of that maters. I like your balancing mod


of course pikemen differed in their equipment and

Interesting changes. Did you happen to change the research time for this era and the next as well? In my games it seems that these units aren't useful for very long since musketmen, ect come too quickly.

I like the fact that the units are coming sooner and more historically accurately. Too bad I'm at work now.... :(

I didn't really think about that but since you brought it up I should probably slow research down a bit. Would 125% be about right? I'll play with it a bit and see what feels good.

I honestly like the research in the early era as is, but once you get to swordsmen I think it could be slowed down at least 125%, maybe more. I'd love to see the macemen, knights, pikemen, longbowmen, ect part of the game last at least double what it is now before gunpowder overruns it. Maybe combining a decrease in number of years per turn along with an increase in tech cost would yield the same timeframe in the end, but allow for more turns with these units?

Pretorian- Strength decreased to 6, gains +10% attack vs cities, +25% attack vs archers. The roman legion consisted of well disciplined soldiers who were skilled in many forms of combat, especially against missile using enemies. They dominated the world around them during their prime. They were not however on a level with medeival pikemen or heavy infantry in terms of weapons, armor, or combat capability by any means.Alternate history is always fun to argue about, but I think you're quite mistaken. The Roman legion's strength was manifestly not against missile-using enemies―the disastrous Battle of Carrhae shows that when you can't catch your enemy, you're toast, and legionaries can't catch horse archers. The testudo/tortoise formation was not effective against more powerful missile weapons such as Eastern composite bows of Roman times or the later English longbow; the arrows would simply plow straight through the shields.

On the other hand, against pikemen Romans were well-equipped. Rome fought against the overwhelmingly pike-oriented Greek successor states as it started to expand, and in the end it decisively crushed them. Quite simply, pike phalanxes must remain rigid to remain effective, since if they break up their flanks will be vulnerable; legions, on the other hand, can break into multiple groups without such dramatic drops in effectiveness. This gives the legions more mobility, and thus the ability to outflank―a line of pikes must be solid to be effective.

Furthermore, if legions withdraw at full speed, pikemen can't pursue without slowly disrupting their formation, leaving them wide open to flank attacks by other parts of the legion. Thus, retreating Romans couldn't be chased down, and would live to fight another day, whereas in the reverse situation, the Romans could chase the pikemen to their heart's content in the full knowledge that pikes are useless at close range. A pike formation that's retreating and being actively pursued simply can't reform, while legions could―at substantially reduced effectiveness if they had routed and dropped their shields, true, but they would still have their weapons and armor, which routing pikemen wouldn't (having dropped their cumbersome pikes and not having worn much armor to begin with).

Now, it's true that there are those who argue that while legions beat pikemen alone, pikemen plus strong cavalry (in the style of Philip, the pioneer of pike warfare) could have beat legions. This may be; history has not been so kind as to give us a test case. Certainly, legions would butcher melee cavalry alone, assuming equal amounts of money are spent to equip and maintain both sides, but if the cavalry can effectively stop the legions from retreating from the pikemen, the legions will get diced. (Quite simply nothing could stand a frontal attack by a Macedonian phalanx, except of course another such phalanx.) This is plausible. But legions will beat either pikemen or cavalry alone, to be sure.

I'm also betting, by the by, that the well-trained and honored pikemen of the successor states were probably superior in equipment, morale, and training to most medieval peasant pikemen. All the more so would legions defeat them.
The pike was the answer to the axe and the lance. Only cause you could set it.Not in the least. Pikes would only conceivably be set against a cavalry charge―against infantry, set pikes would be pushed aside. And anyone who charged cavalry into pikes would have instant slaughter on his hands, anyway, if the horses were even willing to do it. The primary mode of fighting for pikemen was holding the pike in both hands and stabbing―it's very difficult to push aside a pike that's actively attacking you, particularly since a) pikemen generally had tighter formations than most non-pikemen and b) even if you got past the first row of pikes, there would be more rows right behind them. Pike phalanxes are impregnable from the front; it's the flanks that get them killed.

Edit: qwerty is spot-on about the Praetorian names, incidentally. Legionaries they should be.

On your successor states vs medieval pikemen point you are probably correct, a pike is a pike, though it is important to note that ancient phalanxes generally used iron and bronze weapons and armor while medieval pikemen used steel weapons. Cast iron and steel were not developed in europe until well after the fall of the roman empire. Also it was only when Phillip came on the scene that phlanxes actually set pikes and used them two-handed, prior to this smaller spears were used along with shields in one hand. And again do not underestimate the power of materials technology, steel is simply worlds ahead of non-cast iron and bronze.



By what method could a legion have any chance of defeating a real heavy cavalry force (and by real heavy cavalry force I mean medieval knights, armored, with lances, equipped with stirrups)?

The legion had no pikes to set. I find it hard to believe that they would not break from a charge immediatly, roman discipline or no roman discipline. And upon breaking the knights would eat them alive.

This is part of what I mean when I say medieval infantry were better armed an armored, they were equipped to deal with threats the romans never faced. A legionaire was armed with a simple javelin and iron gladius (carbonized only on the very outside by simply coating it with coal dust) a bronze helmet, and bronze scale or chain armor (though Iron plate was used it was extremely expensive and only in service breifly). An english or scandinavian huskarl would be armed with a 4 to 6 foot long axe or sword made of much higher quality cast iron (or steel in later times) capable of cleaving chain mail. The same huskarl would have a chain or ringmail hauberk, also of quality cast iron or steel. The latter existed in a world where good metals and metalworkers were much more commonly availible using similar tactics to the romans and macedonians themselves (formations, shield walls, flanking with shock infantry and cavalry, etc)



The bonus against archers in civ4 doesn't apply to mounted archers, it applies to simple foot archers which the legion could in all probability deal with adequately. Against horse archers or knights or medieval infantry the legion should go down, and that's what happens in game. But it's true they were much more a counter unit for phlanxes


I might take a look at the ancient age in general. Spears don't seem powerful enough in general and perhaps should move up to 5 atk and their bonus vs cav reduced to 50%. They should get beaten by swords but routinely beat cavalry and be about the same vs archers.


How does this sound?

Switch axemen and spearman places in the tech tree. Axemen require hunting, bronze working, spearmen just bronze working.

Axemen reduced to stength 4, bonus vs melee increased to 75%. (axemen are actually pretty decent against both spears and swords, but ancient age axemen with no shields should get eaten alive by chariots, horsemen, archers etc.) Axemen did occur historically earlier than spears and swords but fell out of fashion later.

Aztec jags remain as is.

Spearmen increased to strength 5. Bonus vs cav reduced to 50% (about the same in total). Hoplites also bumped up to maintain the same relations with spears as they have now.

Swordsmen remain as is, legion bonus vs archers replaced with a 25% bonus vs melee.

This seem about right?

Edit: Bronze working not hunting for spears, silly me.

Feudalism is not required for civil service. Knight can come in 7 tech steps. Long before the macemen.

The knight itself requires feudalism.

The entire path to knights is 13 techs -
7 to feudalism
+1 for civil service
+3 for metal casting
+1 for iron
+1 for horseback riding

The praetorians were the best of the best, chosen to defend the Imperial palace. Certainly more than mere firefighters. Look at http://www.roman-empire.net/army/army.html and find on that page 'Praetorian Guard '

If anything, praetorians should be changed to have a really good city defence bonus.

@Joh:

I'd have to disagree about the Praetorians. They were touted as crack troops simply because they were the emperor's imperial guard. The truth is that they spent most of theire time on "soft" garrison duty, and had nowhere near the experience of the combat tested Legions. They also were plagued with politcally appointed leaders- the ones you can find in any peace-time army that quickly disappear when the going gets rough.

I like where you're going with this, Dracleath, but I'm worrying that you might be getting carried away. For instance...


I might take a look at the ancient age in general. Spears don't seem powerful enough in general and perhaps should move up to 5 atk and their bonus vs cav reduced to 50%. They should get beaten by swords but routinely beat cavalry and be about the same vs archers.

Actually, this is the way things should work as is. With a 4 strength and a 75% bonus vs. cavalry, spearman have the advantage against horse archers and Keshiks (a strength of 7 vs. 6) and should slaughter chariots (7 vs 4). Against swordsmen, spearman have a disadvantage as long as they are not heavily fortified (4 vs. 6), plus there's the swordsman's bonus on city attack to add to give them a little edge. The only thing that changing the spearman's strength from 4 to 5 would do is strengthen it against swordsmen and archers, making it have a distinct advantage against archers and decreasing its disadvantage against swordsmen. The advantage vs. cavalry would only go up .5 (50% of 5 = 2.5, therefore 7.5 strength vs. cavalry as opposed to 7). But hey, if that all sounds good to you, then go for it.

Also, if you make these changes and the Aztec Jaguar, as you said, "remains as is," will it still be replacing the axeman? Will it come with hunting and bronze working, or just bronze working? I'm unclear on what you're planning for it. I liked your idea of moving it back to axeman (was thinking of doing that myself), but now I'm just confused, and a bit skeptical.

On the subject of BOTH knights and longbowmen coming with civil service, I'm not sure about the balance or the accuracy. On the gameplay side, getting two strong units from one tech kind of overpowers that tech; a minor point, but one to consider. As for accuracy, longbowmen being a response the armored knight, I'd think they should come later rather than at the same time. Perhaps they could come from Engineering, but require civil service and/or feudalism? or some other techs?

I'm not so sure about chaning the axeman's strength and position either. I kind of like him where he is on the tech tree.

Oh, and the problem with cannons coming with gunpowder -- wrong era cannon. I'd love for the cannon to come earlier, bu the cannoneer looks pretty damn Napoleonic to me. At most, it could be moved back to chemistry and not look out of place. Hopefully a reskin job could fix this issue (though it would be tricky with that hat). If so, it might be nice to have an early cannon unit, the "bombard," that is replaced by the later-age cannon.

This is part of what I mean when I say medieval infantry were better armed an armored, they were equipped to deal with threats the romans never faced. A legionaire was armed with a simple javelin and iron gladius (carbonized only on the very outside by simply coating it with coal dust) a bronze helmet, and bronze scale or chain armor (though Iron plate was used it was extremely expensive and only in service breifly).

Roman legion was armed and armoured often far better than medieval army. Medieval army consisted of leived peasants with chain mail, shield and spear. Pikes were rare in the middle ages. And, no Lorica segmentata (the "plate armour") was in service for over an century and it was used very much. It was expensive but losing a highly trained legionary was more expensive.

Roman legionaries were certanly far better armoured than medieval army. Medieval army was made of few professional men-at-arms, (who were well armoured and trained, but in induvidual arts not in group based combat) few knightly troops and large number of levy peasants. The levy peasants were not well armoured. They were armoured in whatever their village could afford.

An english or scandinavian huskarl would be armed with a 4 to 6 foot long axe or sword made of much higher quality cast iron (or steel in later times) capable of cleaving chain mail.

The gladius, which was extremely powerful sword, was designed for stabbing. The legionaries would bash the shield on the enemy while stabbing from the sides of the shield, to the stomac or chest. A stab from gladius was much deadlier than a strike from axe. Gladius left very wide wounds.

The same huskarl would have a chain or ringmail hauberk, also of quality cast iron or steel.

Well, Roman legionary would have a large shield, excellent helmet, and better armour. Also, you are only looking at the medieval elite, the huscarls were not numerous, they numbered around 6000 - 7000, IIRC. While there were 150 000 Roman legionaries. Roman legionaries were the common troops.

The latter existed in a world where good metals and metalworkers were much more commonly availible using similar tactics to the romans and macedonians themselves (formations, shield walls, flanking with shock infantry and cavalry, etc)

The medieval army didn't use Roman tactics but they did use something like the macedonian tactics. The Roman army was completely different, IMHO. Also, medieval army had very poor organization, discipline, and often it was lead by kings rather than professional commanders.

On your successor states vs medieval pikemen point you are probably correct, a pike is a pike, though it is important to note that ancient phalanxes generally used iron and bronze weapons and armor while medieval pikemen used steel weapons. Cast iron and steel were not developed in europe until well after the fall of the roman empire. And again do not underestimate the power of materials technology, steel is simply worlds ahead of non-cast iron and bronze.

Wheather the pike is made of steel or iron isn't as relevant as you say. Roman shield was originally designed against pikes of the phalanx line. No, the macedonian sarissa wasn't made bronze, never. That would be illogical, since bronze is more expensive and iron is more powerful. But, bronze was still used in armour because it could be banged in to different forms.

The quality of the iron isn't so important. The macedonian army used very good tactics which combined lancers with phalanx lines.

Also it was only when Phillip came on the scene that phlanxes actually set pikes and used them two-handed, prior to this smaller spears were used along with shields in one hand.

Medieval armies used pikes rather rarely. Most of the time the infantry carried large kite shields with spears. The medieval pike was also much shorter compared to sarissa which was a long as 21 feets.

Oh, btw Roman legion was quite bad against archers, but it improved later on.

I like where you're going with this, Dracleath, but I'm worrying that you might be getting carried away. For instance...


Actually, this is the way things should work as is. With a 4 strength and a 75% bonus vs. cavalry, spearman have the advantage against horse archers and Keshiks (a strength of 7 vs. 6) and should slaughter chariots (7 vs 4). Against swordsmen, spearman have a disadvantage as long as they are not heavily fortified (4 vs. 6), plus there's the swordsman's bonus on city attack to add to give them a little edge. The only thing that changing the spearman's strength from 4 to 5 would do is strengthen it against swordsmen and archers, making it have a distinct advantage against archers and decreasing its disadvantage against swordsmen. The advantage vs. cavalry would only go up .5 (50% of 5 = 2.5, therefore 7.5 strength vs. cavalry as opposed to 7). But hey, if that all sounds good to you, then go for it.

Also, if you make these changes and the Aztec Jaguar, as you said, "remains as is," will it still be replacing the axeman? Will it come with hunting and bronze working, or just bronze working? I'm unclear on what you're planning for it. I liked your idea of moving it back to axeman (was thinking of doing that myself), but now I'm just confused, and a bit skeptical.

On the subject of BOTH knights and longbowmen coming with civil service, I'm not sure about the balance or the accuracy. On the gameplay side, getting two strong units from one tech kind of overpowers that tech; a minor point, but one to consider. As for accuracy, longbowmen being a response the armored knight, I'd think they should come later rather than at the same time. Perhaps they could come from Engineering, but require civil service and/or feudalism? or some other techs?

I'm not so sure about chaning the axeman's strength and position either. I kind of like him where he is on the tech tree.

Oh, and the problem with cannons coming with gunpowder -- wrong era cannon. I'd love for the cannon to come earlier, bu the cannoneer looks pretty damn Napoleonic to me. At most, it could be moved back to chemistry and not look out of place. Hopefully a reskin job could fix this issue (though it would be tricky with that hat). If so, it might be nice to have an early cannon unit, the "bombard," that is replaced by the later-age cannon.

Jag would come with bronze working, really after looking at it there's no point in changing the techs since spearmen now require bronze working anyway. It would just be a cosmetic change.

Well, spearmen *should* be better against archers than axemen. The axemen in civ4 are lightly armored 2 handed axe users with no shield, similar to what egyptians or some germanic armies used. They should get slaughtered by archers. Phlanxes for the most part carried shields that they'd hold until the enemy came into pike range. And only the legion which was designed to fight phalanxs really had a strong, distinct advantage over them.

Spear and pike formations were the mainstay of ancient forces until the legion came about and even then sopped being used not particulary because they were abandoned but because the romans conquered most everyone who was using them :). Now if you don't have iron in civ4 you generally use axemen as your main army and spearmen still just have a specialized role, it should be the other way around.

Roman legion was armed and armoured often far better than medieval army. Medieval army consisted of leived peasants with chain mail, shield and spear. Pikes were rare in the middle ages. And, no Lorica segmentata (the "plate armour") was in service for over an century and it was used very much. It was expensive but losing a highly trained legionary was more expensive.

Roman legionaries were certanly far better armoured than medieval army. Medieval army was made of few professional men-at-arms, (who were well armoured and trained, but in induvidual arts not in group based combat) few knightly troops and large number of levy peasants. The levy peasants were not well armoured. They were armoured in whatever their village could afford.


This was not true everywhere, and depending on location and force composition, medieval armies most definately did train in group based combat. Sheild walls, flanking, combined arms tactics, formations both in groups and entire armies, all of these were used.


The gladius, which was extremely powerful sword, was designed for stabbing. The legionaries would bash the shield on the enemy while stabbing from the sides of the shield, to the stomac or chest. A stab from gladius was much deadlier than a strike from axe. Gladius left very wide wounds.



Well, Roman legionary would have a large shield, excellent helmet, and better armour. Also, you are only looking at the medieval elite, the huscarls were not numerous, they numbered around 6000 - 7000, IIRC. While there were 150 000 Roman legionaries. Roman legionaries were the common troops.




The huskarl should also have a large shield, and Cast iron and steel armor is simply better than bronze no matter what configuration it's in. A danish axe could sever a man's torso through chain mail. A gladius was used for stabbing because they couldn't actually sharpen it enough to make it an effective slicing instrument. Medieval swords and axes were worlds ahead of ancient ones, if you don't believe it go look at real life examples of these weapons. A frankish longsword could do everything a gladius could do, was 2 feet longer, was much sharper, was made of superior metal, and could be an effective slicing weapon. There's just no comparison.





Wheather the pike is made of steel or iron isn't as relevant as you say. Roman shield was originally designed against pikes of the phalanx line. No, the macedonian sarissa wasn't made bronze, never. That would be illogical, since bronze is more expensive and iron is more powerful. But, bronze was still used in armour because it could be banged in to different forms.



The quality of the iron isn't so important. The macedonian army used very good tactics which combined lancers with phalanx lines.





Sarissa was made of an iron tip surrounded by a bronze lip.


The quality of metal is hugely important. If you're fighting people with steel or cast iron armor you better have something that can actually pierce through it. You vastly underestimate the impact of materials on weapons effectiveness, people didn't spend thousands of years developing better iron-working methods because they were bored and liked shiny things.




Medieval armies used pikes rather rarely. Most of the time the infantry carried large kite shields with spears. The medieval pike was also much shorter compared to sarissa which was a long as 21 feets.



Swiss and german pikes were 18-20 feet standard, and were used 2 handed. Pikemen did not carry shields into the actual melee and used their pikes 2 handed just as macedonian pikemen did.

Ed: And after the 100 years war, pikemen generally comprised the preponderence of medeival armies.

On your successor states vs medieval pikemen point you are probably correct, a pike is a pike, though it is important to note that ancient phalanxes generally used iron and bronze weapons and armor while medieval pikemen used steel weapons. Cast iron and steel were not developed in europe until well after the fall of the roman empire.Certainly, but overall, the metal tip of the pike would be expected to break pretty infrequently either way. The sharpness would be a minor issue only; the main power of the pikes was a) the force of a big piece of wood being swung, and b) the simple obstruction a wall of pikes presents to anyone without pikes.
By what method could a legion have any chance of defeating a real heavy cavalry force (and by real heavy cavalry force I mean medieval knights, armored, with lances, equipped with stirrups)?

The legion had no pikes to set. I find it hard to believe that they would not break from a charge immediatly, roman discipline or no roman discipline. And upon breaking the knights would eat them alive.They would not break. The Roman legions faced down cavalry roughly equivalent to medieval knights, although doubtless with inferior equipment―cataphracts, for instance, were used by the successor states. But the point is, for the amount of money it costs to equip your knight with his heavy armor and top-notch weapons and highly-trained warhorse, you could afford to train and equip at least five legionaries. How many knights were there in a typical medieval army? A large Roman army would generally consist of perhaps 20,000 legionaries and 20,000 other troops (skirmishers, cavalry, etc.).

So probably the front legionaries would crouch down, hold their shields up and away from themselves, and hold their pila (javelins) set in front of them. The row behind them would prepare to throw their own pila as soon as the knights came within range, disrupting their charge at least slightly. So the knights' lances would strike the front legionaries, killing quite a few, then the survivors would jam their pila up at the horses, killing quite a few, and then the knights would quickly become totally surrounded by legionaries who still outnumber them four to one. The knights would be butchered.
This is part of what I mean when I say medieval infantry were better armed an armored, they were equipped to deal with threats the romans never faced. A legionaire was armed with a simple javelin and iron gladius (carbonized only on the very outside by simply coating it with coal dust) a bronze helmet, and bronze scale or chain armor (though Iron plate was used it was extremely expensive and only in service breifly).The equipment of legionaries varied dramatically. In general, over the history of Rome, iron chainmail was most favored. (As you say, the lorica segmentata banded armor was used only for about two centuries, as opposed to chainmail being in wide use for something more like eight.)
An english or scandinavian huskarl would be armed with a 4 to 6 foot long axe or sword made of much higher quality cast iron (or steel in later times) capable of cleaving chain mail. The same huskarl would have a chain or ringmail hauberk, also of quality cast iron or steel.How numerous were they?
The bonus against archers in civ4 doesn't apply to mounted archers, it applies to simple foot archers which the legion could in all probability deal with adequately.Oh, to be sure. Archers using simple bows should be butchered by pretty much anything, really―composite bows would stand a chance, but foot archery was still mainly just good for support. Horse archers can only realistically be defeated by an army equipped with large numbers of good bows or slings, though.
Against horse archers or knights or medieval infantry the legion should go downDepends on how large you assume the units are. If you assume the knights are, say, half as numerous as infantry, then of course they should kill pretty much anything from the era one-on-one. But Roman infantry versus an equal number of standard medieval infantry should be able to hold its own (elites would be a different story, obviously).
I might take a look at the ancient age in general.Indeed. For one thing, pikemen should be available much earlier. They should defeat rigid-formation spearmen handily, but be at a disadvantage against more mobile units of swordsmen, axemen, etc.
Spears don't seem powerful enough in general and perhaps should move up to 5 atk and their bonus vs cav reduced to 50%. They should get beaten by swords but routinely beat cavalry and be about the same vs archers.Spears should not necessarily be beaten by swords. Units that need to stay in rigid formation should be at a disadvantage against more flexible units, yes, of course, but a spear unit that doesn't depend upon its formation (e.g., Roman triarii) should be able to take on a sword unit just fine. Spears are not in any way inferior to swords.
Pikes were rare in the middle ages.Depends on the era.
And, no Lorica segmentata (the "plate armour") was in service for over an century and it was used very much.It was hardly ubiquitous even in the two centuries where it was widely used (roughly 1-200 CE). Chainmail was still used by many legionaries when segmentata was in use, particularly in the hotter climes, and it was also used for about three centuries before segmentata and three or more centuries after (depending on what you consider the end of the Empire).
Medieval army was made of few professional men-at-arms, (who were well armoured and trained, but in induvidual arts not in group based combat)Not at all. Formations of various sorts were definitely used extensively in the Middle Ages. Whether they were as well-trained as the Romans, I don't know, but they were certainly trained and experienced in group-based combat.
A stab from gladius was much deadlier than a strike from axe. Gladius left very wide wounds.Not particularly. An axe definitely has more penetrative power. Gladii simply could not pierce chainmail, for instance. And if we're talking light or no armor, an axe can dismember and decapitate, causing pretty much instant incapacitation no matter where it hits, whereas a gladius would have to get a direct hit on the heart, neck, or head to kill instantly.
Also, you are only looking at the medieval elite, the huscarls were not numerous, they numbered around 6000 - 7000, IIRC. While there were 150 000 Roman legionaries. Roman legionaries were the common troops.This is the important point. The Romans didn't really use "elite" troops like the successor states' cataphracts or Silver Shields or whatnot. They depended on the strength of their common troops, and so their common troops outnumbered the enemy elites and outmatched the enemy grunts.
Also, medieval army had very poor organization, discipline, and often it was lead by kings rather than professional commanders.You're making dramatic generalizations again. Arguably there were fewer great medieval commanders than great ancient commanders, and if so doubtless the dominance of the nobility would be a major cause, but medieval armies were reasonably organized as a whole.
bronze is more expensive and iron is more powerful. But, bronze was still used in armour because it could be banged in to different forms.To the contrary, bronze is superior to iron for armor. It's just more expensive. Thus, the officers of ancient armies ("ancient" in this context meaning perhaps 400 BCE–400 CE or so) would often be equipped with bronze, while the ordinary soldiers would bear iron.
Oh, btw Roman legion was quite bad against archers, but it improved later on.Again, foot archers were never used as the dominant force in an army in classical times, only as support. Archers just couldn't do much damage. Look at the Battle of Carrhae: 50,000 Romans were forced to sit under fire from 10,000 archers for perhaps six to eight hours, and while their ranks were devastated, they still kept half of their original strength. That's a rate of one kill per archer per three or four hours. Now consider the number of losses the Romans would have taken had they been able to simply charge the archers and reach them in a minute or less, and you'll see that archers weren't very effective against legions.

(Of course, the numbers for Carrhae casualties and army strengths are pretty shaky, but they probably aren't too far off; certainly the Romans would have known their strength and losses, and both Plutarch and Cassius Dio were Romans. If anything, of course, the Romans would have understated their losses, but they would also have overstated the enemy's numbers and understated their own, so the bias doesn't necessarily prejudice the account toward either side in particular.)
A danish axe could sever a man's torso through chain mail.Indeed? What's the evidence for that?
A gladius was used for stabbing because they couldn't actually sharpen it enough to make it an effective slicing instrument.Hardly. Romans could have used longer swords if they wanted; indeed, later on they did. The Celts certainly used longswords since before 400 BCE. Furthermore, Romans did in fact use their gladius for swinging attacks as well, but thrusting was the preferred method of attack simply because of their large shields. If you have your shield in front of you, with your left arm and leg forward, swinging a short sword is much less awkward than thrusting with it. While the medieval swords were certainly of higher quality than their ancient equivalents, the ancients were certainly capable of making perfectly effective slashing weapons.
A frankish longsword could do everything a gladius could doExcept be used in conjunction with a very large shield, arguably one of the legion's major strengths.

This was not true everywhere, and depending on location and force composition, medieval armies most definately did train in group based combat. Sheild walls, flanking, combined arms tactics, formations both in groups and entire armies, all of these were used.

I dont doubt that they did train, but the training was very poor compared to training of the legionaries. Roman army was trained as highly effective regiment force, Roman army was shared into cohorts lead by centurion and optio. This made the Roman army highly flexible in the battlefield.

The huskarl should also have a large shield, and Cast iron and steel armor is simply better than bronze no matter what configuration it's in.

Huscarls had many kinds of shields. later on, they used kite shields, they used large rounds shields, smaller round shields, oval shields...

A danish axe could sever a man's torso through chain mail. A gladius was used for stabbing because they couldn't actually sharpen it enough to make it an effective slicing instrument.

Nonsense. The Gladius was made a stabbing weapon because stabbing was far more effective in Roman combat. The Roman swordsmanship based on using large shield to give excellent protection, basically a wall between the enemy and the legionary.

When the legionaries get close, they bash the shield on the enemy, and then they stab from the side of the shield, because of this the sword was short. The legionaries used the sword in tight conditions where longsword was useless.

When fighting against armies which wielded longer swords, the Roman could, by using their shields, make the battles so tight that there was no space to use the long slashing/cutting swords. They did this when they fought against the celts.

Also, it should be remembered that medieval armies didn't use swords often. Swords were expensive and most of the time used by nobles. It was sometimes, indeed a symbol of nobility.

The Romans did have longswords too, BTW

http://www.odinblades.com/Pages/Spatha.html

Spatha is the prototype for European longswords. It was used at first by the cavalry, however later on, as Roman tactics changed (Romans struck over the shield, not from the sides), it was taken into general use.


A frankish longsword could do everything a gladius could do,

Again, as I descriped above, no it cannot. It isn't designed for the same tactics.

Sarissa was made of an iron tip surrounded by a bronze lip.

Oh, wonder why... The reason for it is probably good one, since iron is much cheaper.

Other sources say otherwise...

"The sarissa was a 3 to 7 meter (13-21 feet) long double pointed pike used in the Macedonian phalanx. It was very heavy for a spear, weighing over 5 kg (12 pounds). It had a short iron head shaped like a leaf and a bronze shoe that would allow it to be anchored to the ground to stop charges by enemy soldiers. Its great length was an asset against hoplites and other soldiers bearing smaller weapons, because they had to get past the sarissa to engage the phalangites."

Also, there were many sarissas used by many different factions in mediterranean and middle east.

The quality of metal is hugely important.

It depends.

If you're fighting people with steel or cast iron armor you better have something that can actually pierce through it.

Well, chain mail, which medieval levies used, if they indeed had armour cannot take a stab from gladius. Plate armour wasn't pierced by medieval swords either.

While the Romans, Celts and others didn't have a vast understanding of carbonizing iron to make steel, they used coal in their furnaces at first simply because it helped create high heat and later as a matter of course. The Romans were working with steel even though they may have thought that it was iron.

You vastly underestimate the impact of materials on weapons effectiveness, people didn't spend thousands of years developing better iron-working methods because they were bored and liked shiny things.

True, in some ways and some ways not. But, the reason why during the middle ages iron quality improved dramatically was because Europeans had to find ways to replace larbour. The Romans had large number of paid larbourers and slaves, the medieval society had very low population and urbanization. So, the medieval society had to use technology to get more metal production. Europeans invented and learned, from others, such advanced methods like wind powered hammers, out of neccesity.

This also made the iron, unintentionally, of much better quality.

Muslims, for example, didn't need to do this because they had so high population.


Not particularly. An axe definitely has more penetrative power. Gladii simply could not pierce chainmail, for instance. And if we're talking light or no armor, an axe can dismember and decapitate, causing pretty much instant incapacitation no matter where it hits, whereas a gladius would have to get a direct hit on the heart, neck, or head to kill instantly.

Gladius penetrated chain mail easily, it was one of the reasons why it was such a powerful and feared sword. Gladius' stabs were deep and wide, and if in the chest area, they would kill fast.

This claim is based on the words of military experts, not mine.

Again, foot archers were never used as the dominant force in an army in classical times, only as support. Archers just couldn't do much damage. Look at the Battle of Carrhae: 50,000 Romans were forced to sit under fire from 10,000 archers for perhaps six to eight hours, and while their ranks were devastated, they still kept half of their original strength. That's a rate of one kill per archer per three or four hours. Now consider the number of losses the Romans would have taken had they been able to simply charge the archers and reach them in a minute or less, and you'll see that archers weren't very effective against legions.

(Of course, the numbers for Carrhae casualties and army strengths are pretty shaky, but they probably aren't too far off; certainly the Romans would have known their strength and losses, and both Plutarch and Cassius Dio were Romans. If anything, of course, the Romans would have understated their losses, but they would also have overstated the enemy's numbers and understated their own, so the bias doesn't necessarily prejudice the account toward either side in particular.)

This depends on the area. For example, in the pre-Roman-Imperial western mediterranean there was no archers. Greeks had relativly good archers, Persians had good archers, Indians and other far eastern peoples and steppe peoples and excellent bows.

The Roman legionaries were in testudo formation during Carrhae, and they were bombared by horse archers who used small bows, and because of this the arrows were small and couldn't penetrate the shield. But, later on, during 200+ archers improved in the west, Romans took the Sarmantian bow in to use.

To the contrary, bronze is superior to iron for armor. It's just more expensive. Thus, the officers of ancient armies ("ancient" in this context meaning perhaps 400 BCE–400 CE or so) would often be equipped with bronze, while the ordinary soldiers would bear iron.

No, the ancients didn't know how make iron plate armour, large plate pieces. Thats why the lorica segmentata is made of small pieces. But bronze could be made into large plates and it could take severe damage. Also, the solidness gave it protection from certain forms of attacks better than chain mail or leather armour.

Edit: also, the theory that bronze was, at some point, better than Iron isn't true.

Re: danish axe severing a man's torso

First hand accounts of hastings state that huskarls at hastings used danish axes with two hands and that a huskarl could take down an armored knight and his horse in one blow. While this is probably hyperbole, william the conqueror himself had three horses killed out from under him in the course of the battle. Other accounts refer to the huskarls as "killing the horse with his first stroke and then the knight with his second stroke, as they charged at him". A common technique was to swing the axe in a figure 8 pattern at the enemy horse, first killing the horse with a blow to the head and then killing the knight as he fell forward from it.

Regardless, do you agree with the point about spearmen vs axemen? With the setup I describe above, ancient spearmen would be about the same as they are now against horsemen, would with against swordsmen 45% of the time rather than 33% of the time prior to bonuses, and greek phlanx formations would be even with non-legion swordsmen prior to terrain or defense bonuses. They would go from failing the majority of the time against archers in cities with no walls or culture bonus to having a slight edge, though with swordsmen would still be the superior city assault troops by far unless the spearmen was specifically promoted for the role.


Axemen would perform at similar levels against swordsmen and spearmen, still beating those units, but in contrast to now would regularly lose against archers in cities without a culture bonus and would be approximately equal in combat to chariots.

I think that the axemen should be as effective against spearmen as swordsmen...

(Of course, I dont know about this since I dont own cIV)

I think that the axemen should be as effective against spearmen as swordsmen...

(Of course, I dont know about this since I dont own cIV)


They are as of now and would be similarly effective after the change I'm proposing, I'm just taking one strength away and converting it into a general bonus against melee units.

I think that if axemen base strength is decreased to 4, then their bonus vs. melee units should be increased to 100%, making them remain very effective against infantry for longer (up until the advent of macemen, and not falling out of usefulness sooner), but remain weak against archers and cavalry throughout.

I'm currently running them at 85%, I think I agree with you simply because reducing their base strength reduces the effectiveness of promotion, so they should get a bit higher starting value. 100% puts them at 8 vs melee troops which would make them very slightly edge out unpromoted legionairres and hold their own with pikemen (macers will still outclass them though but that's as it should be).

100% it is then.

Not reading the entire post I will respond to soem of the earlier ones.

The Phalanx of Alexander could arguably have beaten any army up to the gunpoweder eara. The generals under alexander did not truely understand the strenght of combined armed tactics. He used Heavy/Light infantry, Phalanx, and heavy and light calvary all playing critical roles in battle. The other commanders at the time had the same tools he did, they just did not understand how to utilzie them together. If you look at the trends in warfare after Alexander, the emphisis was placed on one Arm, and the others played secondary roles. There were brief resergancies of combined armed tactics, and all were succesful, but normally was phased out when the commanders that utilized them were gone.

If I remember right, both battles fought between Rome and Macedonia, the Macedonians had the upper hand until they reached broken ground, at whcih point holes formed in the lines which the Romans exploited. There is no way the Romans could have done what they did to a Alexander led Macedonian army. Hannibal and Alexander were very similar in that regard. Hannibal understood the value of Heavy ifnantry and calvary used together. The battle Hannibal lost, he did not have the same resources and calvary that he had in previous campaigns were he had been so succesful.

The Roman heavy infantry was made obsolete by Horse Archers, which dominated the battlefield and replaced Heavy Infantry as the primary tool of Military leaders.

The Legionarre were especially adept at repelling calvary charges. Heavy calvary was used for one purpose...shock. A diciplined block of dense infantry could withstand the shock impact of a Calvary charge. The success of a Heavy Calvary charge hinged on breaking the enemy formation and driving through and breaking them, cutting them down as they broke. Kataphracts and Midevil knights had very similar mass, and therefore had similar shock effects. Later Legionarres carred a different type of Pilum, in addition to the type that were ment to be thrown. This other type of Pilum was actually a short spear. There were several reported cases of calvary being driven off by Legionarres using the throwing type of Pilum as well.

Once Horse Archers started to dominate the battlefield, the Romans were forced to adapt, and the days of Heavy infnatry dominating the battlefield were over for a time. Next came the domination of Heavy Calvary, and then Heavy shock infantry made a return.

You know, the information that is being bandied about and used to refine this mod, while interesting, is all very Western-based and thus Western-biased. If we could get some aficianados on non-Western military-tech in on this thread that would be fantabulous.

In regards to looking beyond Europe, I think that the makers of Civ4 set up the tech tree with this more global view in mind, trying to mimic history as best they could while limiting the complexity. Certain medieval units are available without the Feudalism tech (namely Pikemen and Macemen), since feudalism was really a phenomenon that was limited to Europe, and only really arose elsewhere, coincidentally, in Japan. One of my methods for testing the strengths and weakness of the tech tree is to see if I can mentally reconstruct a civilization during a certain era of its history by mapping out the techs and units it would have. If China couldn't have medieval-level infantry without researching Feudalism (which they can), it wouldn't sit quite right with me. This is the same reason that the default tech tree bothers me with the Wheel being a requirement for roads and the pottery-tech -- "Hey, game devs, you know those Inca you included in the game? Guess what they had WITHOUT the wheel!" -- but the Wheel conversely being NOT required for mathematics OR construction. Ever seen a wheel-less catapult? Etc. etc. Don't get me started; a topic for another thread.

I've been looking at the tech tree in-game, studying it, and my mind boggles at the how exactly to arrange the units and preserve the historical paths by which major civilizations came by those units or their relative equivalents -- particularly since my knowledge on this is admittedly that of a layman.

A solution to the problem of that somewhat Eurocentric "Feudalism" tech could be as simple as changing the name to something slightly more universal. That was my approach to the tech in Civ3, where the nature of the more rigidly structured tech tree made it a more integral technology, or at least made it feel that way. That might not be the way to go in Civ4, since "Feudalism" IS the most reasonable and logical name for a technology that enables Vassalage and Serfdom.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention that Europe was not the only place where military history and and development took place. Encouraging a more holistic, global view and all that nonsense. ;)

Not reading the entire post I will respond to soem of the earlier ones.

[QUOTE]If I remember right, both battles fought between Rome and Macedonia, the Macedonians had the upper hand until they reached broken ground, at whcih point holes formed in the lines which the Romans exploited. There is no way the Romans could have done what they did to a Alexander led Macedonian army. Hannibal and Alexander were very similar in that regard. Hannibal understood the value of Heavy ifnantry and calvary used together. The battle Hannibal lost, he did not have the same resources and calvary that he had in previous campaigns were he had been so succesful.

Well, Romans utterly destroyed phalanx many times. Many times when they fought against the Seleucids and Carthaginians.

The Roman tactics, however, were not only in the battlefield, so you can't say "if Hannibal had his cavalry Numidian cavalry troops he would have been victorius"... Roman tactics were also political, logistical and other types... Hannibal lost.

The Roman heavy infantry was made obsolete by Horse Archers, which dominated the battlefield and replaced Heavy Infantry as the primary tool of Military leaders.

:lol: Horse archers did not make Roman infantry obsolete, and it did not replace heavy infantry!

First of all, horse archers were very expensive. They did not require a lot of costly armour, but they did require training, very much training. To fire a bow from horseback and to do it effectivly required masterful horsemanship, and when the horse still moves, and you have to fire...:eek: this is why Europeans abandoned horse archery.

Now, when combined with standing archers, heavy infantry can deal with horse archers.

Parthians did not win Romans because of their horse archers, they won because they had enough resources and men to hold back the Romans.

The Legionarre were especially adept at repelling calvary charges. Heavy calvary was used for one purpose...shock. A diciplined block of dense infantry could withstand the shock impact of a Calvary charge.

The success of a Heavy Calvary charge hinged on breaking the enemy formation and driving through and breaking them, cutting them down as they broke. Kataphracts and Midevil knights had very similar mass, and therefore had similar shock effects.



Later Legionarres carred a different type of Pilum, in addition to the type that were ment to be thrown.

No, late Roman legionaries used the Kontos, which was a pike-like weapon devopled from a lance, if they faced cavalry armies. Roman legionaries carried javelins and the Plumabatarii carried small, deadly darts which could be carried tetached to the back of their shield.

There were several reported cases of calvary being driven off by Legionarres using the throwing type of Pilum as well.

Maybe, but they probably used the Contos (http://www.fectio.org.uk/shows/vechten2004augustus3.jpg)
Once Horse Archers started to dominate the battlefield, the Romans were forced to adapt,

When did the horse archers dominate the battlefield? The Goths didn't use them, Germanics didn't use them, Vandals didn't use them, Sassanids reduced their use significantly ETC.

Only Huns, Sarmantians and some other steppe peoples used horse archers in mass. This is why Romans didn't train horse archers in large scale.

and the days of Heavy infnatry dominating the battlefield were over for a time. Next came the domination of Heavy Calvary, and then Heavy shock infantry made a return.

Well, Romans didn't start to train cavalry, in even more larger scale then before, because they couldn't beat the enemy enemies. They trained them because they needed more mobile armies to counter the Germanic mobile armies.

The infantry was made more lighter, so it could march faster and could run with the heavy cavalry. The Romans, BTW, took this tactic in to use before they started to face the steppe cavalrymen.

Roman infantry was not made obsolete by the heavy cavalry, Roman infantry continiued to be very important part of the army and very successful.

They are as of now and would be similarly effective after the change I'm proposing, I'm just taking one strength away and converting it into a general bonus against melee units.

Oh, BTW, I dont care. Its your mod do whatever you think is right.:p

Well, one plus about making things more feudalism dependent as per this mod is that it does provide a structure in which things did evolve in real life, even if they did not evolve that way everywhere.

The default settings are quite silly and seem like they just randomly dispersed the units among techs that come at sort of the appropriate time.

Macemen with civil service and machinery? Exactly how much machinery is involved in attatching an iron head to the end of a wooden or metal stick?

Pikemen with engineering? Que? Pikemen evolved primarilly because militaries looking for a way to make common soldiers effective against knights discovered classical texts on macedonian phlanxes and emulated them. They didn't evolve because leonardo da vinci came up with some magical superpike.

Knights with guilds? Could there be any more completely unrelated things in the entirety of medieval history?

Personally I'd like to see you keep it simple Dracleath, release something, and then let playtesting fiddle with it. You can balance gameplay with history with Civ4 limitations eventually.

Ok, I've released what I consider to be the best way of arranging things as far as units go for the medieval and ancient ages, I'll probably let people play it and see if there are any comments.

Excellent! If there is any disagreement then people can alter your mod for themselves. I know I usually did in Civ3.

Good work Dracleath.

If I put this in customassets, would it work with my saved games?

Well, one plus about making things more feudalism dependent as per this mod is that it does provide a structure in which things did evolve in real life, even if they did not evolve that way everywhere.

The default settings are quite silly and seem like they just randomly dispersed the units among techs that come at sort of the appropriate time.

Macemen with civil service and machinery? Exactly how much machinery is involved in attatching an iron head to the end of a wooden or metal stick?

Pikemen with engineering? Que? Pikemen evolved primarilly because militaries looking for a way to make common soldiers effective against knights discovered classical texts on macedonian phlanxes and emulated them. They didn't evolve because leonardo da vinci came up with some magical superpike.

Knights with guilds? Could there be any more completely unrelated things in the entirety of medieval history?
Just to be clear, I was NEVER suggesting that the default tech-tree is better, or even all that great. I was merely pointing out that it is the way it is for a reason, but that doesn't mean it can't be improved upon, or that we shouldn't try. And, I was hoping to bring a more global perspective to things -- on average, I would say I play more frequently as non-European civs than as European ones, so I like to include them in my considerations when making these kinds of modifications.

My own proposed solution to the "Feudalism problem," which I came up with ironically soon after my above post about it, involves adding a new tech, "Fealty," in between Monarch and Feudalism. In case you're interested, I described it at the bottom of page 6 of the "Realism Mod" thread, which I've linked here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=137650&page=6

On a related note, not that I condone the placement of pikemen with Engineering, but I would say it's pretty likely that medieval societies would never have developed engineering in the first place if it weren't for that same ancient learning that taught them about phalanx formations. I suppose you could argue that the two are unrelated, but if classical texts had remained in obscurity because they were "heathen," then there would have been no Engineering OR Pikemen.

The big change from the Ancient-to-Medieval in warfare was the adaption of Stirrups by the Europeans people. It was invented in China, and bring to Europe by the avars, the Huns and other nomadic people. The stirrup allow a Heavy Calvary attack; direct, frontal. The stirrup gives stability to the rider, making the hands free to attack. This system were Highly effective during the Dark Ages and Early Medieval Ages, because the main army of those times where short-range infantry, like swordsmans, axemans and Huscarls. But the Knigths were expensive and based in a chilvary code, so their number in battles were often small but decisive. And because of the heavy nature, they were basicly outflanked againts armies like the Mongols or the Ottomans. In the same model were desing the Cathrapacs of the Byzantines. The complete dominance of Knights developt alternatives to minimize their impact. The Crossbow and the English Longbow were made massive in order to stop the charge, eather Knights or un-mounted heavy infantry. Infantry became either heavier or lighter, like skimechers. The re-adoption of polearms (pikemans and halbediers) to the battlefield was a mayor change during the late medieval ages, and was efective againt calvary, but vulnerable to infantry and range units. That stayed until gunpowder, and the rise of the cannon and the musket.

about: Axemen: Base strength = 4, bonus to melee = 85%, since is reasonable, but consider negate effect for stupid AI, i think if not necessary the "bonus vs XX" should not more than 75%...

the vanllina verson is ok, or just low down 10% precent bouns?

Some of the improvements that need to be made to the ancient units in particular could be facilitated if there was an additional category of units.
Melee, mounted, and archer just doesn't cut it, melee needs to be broken down into offensive melee (swords,axe) and defensive melee (spear).

Anyone know if this is possible, I know civ4 is supposed to be very mod friendly, can this be done or is the unit categories hardcoded?

For that matter are the promotions moddable, in other words, can you create new types of promotins, obviously the effects you can choose from are probably hardcoded, but this would be another avenue for improving the combat.

screen shots?

Units Categories:

Meele: Warrior, Swordsman, Axeman, Maceman

Polearms: Spearman, Pikeman, Halberdier

Ranged: Archer, Crossbowman, Slinger

Mounted-Light: Horse Archer, Hussars

Mounted-Heavy: Knights, Cathrapachs

Siege: Catapults, Ballistas, Trebuchets, Rams

Axemen need a counter in the Ancient Period, not more bonuses. Giving them +100% melee is a sick and twisted plan!

Considering that Archers have strength 3, chariots have 4, and mounted archers a measly 6, axemen (with strength 5) were certainly out of wack as these were their only counters.

Although you have (properly) lowered their str to 4, you have increased their bonus even further! No matter how dangerous you think axes are or were, you cannot believe that they were the dominant weaponclass in any army (as any unit with an effective str of 8 will rapidly become). A 4+50% bvm starts off well prepared to take down melee units. With a few promotions, it will be more than capable of maxing out the value of that bonus. But the massive advantage a 4+100%bvm would have against the primary units of most armies is simply disgusting!


In regards to looking beyond Europe, I think that the makers of Civ4 set up the tech tree with this more global view in mind, trying to mimic history as best they could while limiting the complexity. Certain medieval units are available without the Feudalism tech (namely Pikemen and Macemen), since feudalism was really a phenomenon that was limited to Europe, and only really arose elsewhere, coincidentally, in Japan. One of my methods for testing the strengths and weakness of the tech tree is to see if I can mentally reconstruct a civilization during a certain era of its history by mapping out the techs and units it would have. If China couldn't have medieval-level infantry without researching Feudalism (which they can), it wouldn't sit quite right with me.

Patently false. The warlordism of the Medieval Period in European history developed all over the world. In specific, the Chinese bureaucracy was a famously feudal system, in which suzerain states were awarded for high scores and faithful service.

A perfect literary example of the feudal structure in China would be the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms)... basically, read the wiki article that I linked it to if you haven't read the books.

The problem with the Western view of Feudalism is that it refuses to see it as warlordism with pretty names. Africa, for example, is currently in the throes of this very phenomenon... but I digress.

... also, because I am a commie bastard, read this article about the modes of production (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_of_production) if you want some more evidence. Uncle Karl has to come into this! ;p

EDIT: Just realized you guys might think I'm crazy, but I'm part of the 'broad interpretation' school with regards to the term feudalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal#Karl_Marx_on_feudalism).

PPS: I heart wiki! ;p

The big change from the Ancient-to-Medieval in warfare was the adaption of Stirrups by the Europeans people. It was invented in China, and bring to Europe by the avars, the Huns and other nomadic people. The stirrup allow a Heavy Calvary attack; direct, frontal.

Nope! The real big change was mentality and organizational ability. Instead of mass armies of well trained soldiers, the Middle Ages got us small numbers of individual fighters (usually called knights, but far more commonly mounted sargeants at arms or men at arms). As the pike showed, and as Francois I showed at Marignano, cavalry is fairly useless except in a support role. In fact, at Marignano Francois famously ordered his knights dismounted (who were thereby forced into greater obedience), which directly resulted in his victory over the Swiss Pikes.

You don't have to believe, but here is another way of looking at it:
1) Cavalry has always been the smallest branch of any non-nomadic people.
2) The most famous and deadly cavalry armies, those of the Huns, Saracens, Mongols, and Persians (Sassanids, I believe, in this case) were not, in fact, heavy cavalry. They were light cavalry using horsebows, and they managed to effectively steamroll everything that opposed them.
3) Agincourt and Crecy. nuff said. Disciplined infantry, dismounted knights, and archers.


edit: Changed Swedish to Swiss...

Quoth wikipedia about bronze vs iron:


Bronze was also stronger than iron, another common metal of the era, and quality steels were not available until thousands of years later. Nevertheless the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age as the shipping of tin around the Mediterranean ended during the major population migrations around 1200 – 1100 BC, which dramatically limited supplies and raised prices. Bronze was still used to a considerable extent during the Iron Age, but for many purposes the weaker iron was sufficiently strong to serve in its place. As an example, Roman officers were equipped with bronze swords while foot soldiers had to make do with iron blades.


That's from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze, which I happened to have read a few days ago (I only just noticed this thread today). Of course, perhaps it's not accurate, in which case perhaps someone with more knowledge of that could correct it... It is, after all, wikipedia. :P

Rather than trying to tweak axemen, swordsmen, etc, based on what materials various civilizations used, what do you think about actually giving bonuses for using steel or bronze for those units, and requiring you to have city buildings, for example a "steelworks", which adds a special upgrade to certain kinds of units built in cities with said buildings. There could also be a bronzeworks which gives a upgrade which isn't as good as steel's - also this upgrade wouldn't be added if you have a steelworks, since it would be bizarre to benefit from having both a steelworks and bronzeworks.

Since most units which require a metal require either iron or bronze, it could be set up like so (Numbers are arbitrary and can be adjusted for game balance, but I've tried to be conservative - little adjustments can have a large effect over many turns of war):
A new resource, tin.
bronzeworks or forge is required for building metal-requiring units, as well as either copper+tin or iron.
bronzeworks: Requires forge. If you lack steelworks but have copper and tin, adds +10% strength upgrade to units built at this city.
steelworks: Requires Forge, Steel tech. If you have iron, adds +20% strength upgrade to units built at this city.

The units it would affect would be only melee and mounted units which require metal to build. Later units (armor, gunships, etc) would require steelworks, unless it becomes obsolete later to simplify things.

Tin could be abstracted out if that seems better, and probably that's why it doesn't exist in vanilla Civ IV - The copper resource probably represents copper+tin.

Good idea? Bad idea? Thoughts?

.... which directly resulted in his victory over the Swedish Pikes.Mmm yes....the famous swedish pikes....:rolleyes: ;)

Oh shaddap ;p

I was high when I wrote that, so be proud of me for the quality!

From playing this everything seems to work well except crossbowmen, the ai seems to skip through and just go straight to civil service. Anyone know how to get them more interested? I reduced machinery's tech cost a bit.

Spatha is the prototype for European longswords.1) Spathae are not longswords. They're about three feet long, counting the hilt. Longswords would be more like four to five feet long.

2) Spathae were not prototypes for European longswords any more than any of the other longish swords of the period.
While the Romans, Celts and others didn't have a vast understanding of carbonizing iron to make steel, they used coal in their furnaces at first simply because it helped create high heat and later as a matter of course. The Romans were working with steel even though they may have thought that it was iron.The iron they were using was of better quality than simple, plain iron, but nowhere near blast furnace-quality. It had strips of steel in it. See here (http://www.unc.edu/courses/rometech/public/content/special/James_Hurst/THE_ROMAN_SWORD_IN_THE_REP.htm). So it may have been about as good as bronze, or perhaps even better; bronze was, however, definitely superior to simple wrought iron. See this (http://www.claytoncramer.com/Iron2.pdf):
Iron is not superior to bronze for tools. Wrought iron, the form first encountered by Near Eastern smelters, is roughly equivalent in hardness to annealed 10% tin bronze, and inferior to all cold-worked tin bronzes. It is only when carbon dissolves into the iron (carburization) and the artisan quenches the resulting steel that ferrous metals have a definite hardness advantage over bronze. [emphasis in the original]Gladius penetrated chain mail easily . . .This claim is based on the words of military experts, not mine.Indeed? Which experts in particular?
For example, in the pre-Roman-Imperial western mediterranean there was no archers.Overly broad. There were some archers. They just weren't very effective.
The Roman legionaries were in testudo formation during Carrhae, and they were bombared by horse archers who used small bows, and because of this the arrows were small and couldn't penetrate the shield.Pardon? Have you read the accounts of Carrhae? The arrows very much did penetrate the shields, pinning soldiers' arms to their scuta. How else were there tens of thousands of casualties? Furthermore, the Parthian cataphracts stopped the legionaries from forming testudo, according to the account.
No, the ancients didn't know how make iron plate armour, large plate pieces. Thats why the lorica segmentata is made of small pieces. But bronze could be made into large plates and it could take severe damage.All plates were expensive, though. Mail was overwhelmingly preferred throughout most of Roman history.
Edit: also, the theory that bronze was, at some point, better than Iron isn't true.Not according to the paper I cited above. Do you have a source?
Re: danish axe severing a man's torso

First hand accounts of hastings state that huskarls at hastings used danish axes with two hands and that a huskarl could take down an armored knight and his horse in one blow. . . .All very nice, but no mention of severing armored torsos.
Regardless, do you agree with the point about spearmen vs axemen? With the setup I describe above, ancient spearmen would be about the same as they are now against horsemen, would with against swordsmen 45% of the time rather than 33% of the time prior to bonuses, and greek phlanx formations would be even with non-legion swordsmen prior to terrain or defense bonuses.Spearmen should, in general, perform about as well as swordsmen and axemen, perhaps slightly worse. All the weapons had their advantages and disadvantages, but none was qualitatively worse than any other in simple combat.
They would go from failing the majority of the time against archers in cities with no walls or culture bonus to having a slight edge, though with swordsmen would still be the superior city assault troops by far unless the spearmen was specifically promoted for the role.If we're talking realism, you know, why exactly are Swordsmen better against cities and Axemen better against Melee?
Axemen . . . would be approximately equal in combat to chariots.Well, we come back to numbers. Presumably each unit of chariots is much smaller than each unit of axemen. One chariot per axemen would mean near-certain death for the axemen, five axemen per chariot would mean near-certain death for the chariots, so how will you slice it?
The Roman heavy infantry was made obsolete by Horse Archers, which dominated the battlefield and replaced Heavy Infantry as the primary tool of Military leaders.There were two primary problems with horse archers. First, they relied on mobility, and on rough terrain they were hampered―there's a good reason that the steppe cultures favored horse archers so strongly while they remained little-used elsewhere. Second, all things being equal, a horse archer can't use a bow as large or powerful as a foot archer, and therefore foot archers could quite simply outrange horse archers if using bows of equivalent sophistication (slingers could work too).

In general, I think it's pretty silly to say that horse archers in any way "replaced" heavy infantry―heavy infantry remained a major combat tool throughout Europe up until the advent of gunpowder-based armies, while horse archers were used only sometimes, in some places, by some civilizations. Of course, heavy infantry's heyday in Europe ended sometime during the Roman Empire period, but it was hardly unused, which is more than could be said for horse archers in the region.
You know, the information that is being bandied about and used to refine this mod, while interesting, is all very Western-based and thus Western-biased. If we could get some aficianados on non-Western military-tech in on this thread that would be fantabulous.Indeed. I know bugger all about any non-Western civilization.
Well, Romans utterly destroyed phalanx many times. Many times when they fought against the Seleucids and Carthaginians. But, the argument runs, the Seleucids and Carthaginians didn't use combined arms to the extent of Philip and Alexander. They relied heavily on their phalanxes, not much on their cavalry. The legions were more maneuverable than phalanxes, and this was their winning attribute, but cavalry was still more maneuverable than legions, and so some speculate that this could have countered the Romans' advantage, used properly.
The big change from the Ancient-to-Medieval in warfare was the adaption of Stirrups by the Europeans people. It was invented in China, and bring to Europe by the avars, the Huns and other nomadic people. The stirrup allow a Heavy Calvary attack; direct, frontal.This is a surprisingly common misconception. Stirrups were a nice bonus, yes, but heavy shock cavalry most definitely existed before they were invented. Cataphracts, anyone? They were basically ancient knights―heavily armored, with a lance for the charge and then smaller weapons for the ensuing fighting. Their equipment just wasn't as good, of course, due to the technological inferiority discussed earlier in the thread. Heavy cavalry before stirrups used special saddles and their legs to hold on in a charge.
From playing this everything seems to work well except crossbowmen, the ai seems to skip through and just go straight to civil service. Anyone know how to get them more interested?I've only glanced through the XML files to date, but isn't there some kind of "value" toggle? Or does the AI draw its own cost-benefit analysis? If the latter, you could always reduce the cost.

There is a wieght field, but this generally is left at 0 so I assume it's the latter based on flavor and what the ai needs. I reduced the cost a bit, haven't gotten to the middle ages in my latest test game so we'll see.

Ok, I just wanted to through in some of my views on this whole issue of Romans and medieval warfare.

There are so many fundamental differences between the imperial Rome and the warfare of the medieval era.

First of all, it is a big difference in economy and numbers between the two types of warfare. The Romans were very rich compared with any of the western powers of the medieval period, then there was the diminishing number of people because of the many plagues.

Now, the Roman Legion was invented by the Romans to fight the Phalanx in the rough and broken terrain that portray the Italian peninsular. So that was the early Legion, and during this period large part of the Legion was even inferior to most of their opponents in weapons and armour. What they had was knowledge of the terrain and used that to its advantage and outmanoeuvred the phalanx.

During the early to mid period of the Roman Empire, Romans used very little ranged troops as part of the Legion. They usually had skirmishing troops with light javelins and slingers. Slingers remained very effective for a long time compared with archery. Many of the early bows were simply not effective enough.

Cavalry was only used by the Legion to chase a routing enemy, they had no cavalry worth the name chock troops until much later.

What the legion did have was (most of the time) brilliant leadership and well trained soldier. They were not levied peasants but well trained and drilled soldiers with high morale.

A late roman army did have heavily armoured horsemen and also armoured archers, all who were well trained and drilled soldiers.

Now I will go over and compare with some of the western medieval forces.

The early medieval army was usually very poorly equipped, I obviously don't know the differences in numbers here, but at least 50-80% was untrained peasantry, armed with what they could afford. Perhaps soma rudimentary mail armour a spear (a sword or axe if they could afford it) and a shield.
They commonly fought in a shield wall, very similar to a phalanx, but nothing as sophisticated as that.
Some was armed with Crossbows, a very powerful weapon used during all of the medieval period and very good against heavily armoured troops that was few in numbers; one of its disadvantages was its rather slow rate of fire. Though it was cheap to both train and equips a soldier with a Crossbow

The rest were elite soldiers with full armour fighting on foot or on horse, these warriors were devastating to all other forces. They used full mail armour, the wealthiest used reinforced mail and large metal plates that even could withstand a crossbow bolt at medium to long range.
Heavy foot infantry rarely used a shield in melee combat, but they might have one before the melee begun.

There were no Roman Legionary, even during the late Imperial period that could stand a reasonable chance against a fully armed medieval heavy infantryman (Noble on foot).
Once the stirrup was introduced the Noble warrior more frequently rose to the saddle since that gave them an additional advantage. The same armour as before but also the power of the lance.

Before the Stirrup the Great Dane axe was the death of many cavalrymen, it was long enough to kill the horse and rider, and the armour of an infantryman was usually better than that of the horseman during that period.
There were many other types of combat tactics against cavalry before the stirrup, and the long spear was used very effectively against cavalry.
Now the peasantry could not afford to buy good enough spears to be effective against a mounted charge from Heavy Cavalry during the middle Ages.

The single most affective weapon against a knight was the crossbow (accept of cource the Longbow, but that was a very rare weapon) before the Pike was introduced yet again, fighting in a very similar form as the Greek phalanx, though the pike formation was somewhat more manoeuvrable and smaller. Also the armour had evolved to the point of arrows being very useless against the breastplates of the late medieval period.

Now to sum things up, a highly drilled and well equipped late Roman Legion could easily destroy an early medieval army on the sole basis of its morale and better overall equipment, leadership and training.

No Roman army could defeat an Early Medieval Army that consisted of 50% Elite and 50% Peasants, the weapons and Armour of the Elite was much heavier than the Romans used. You can’t compare the power of a Long sword or a Dane axe and full mail (medieval metalworking had improved very much) armour and steel plated chest armour.
The Crossbow alone is so superior to any ranged weaponry used by the Romans because it is so simple to use.

By the way, Romans did use auxiliary heavy spearman troops as part of the Legion during the later ages. This was mainly to protect their flanks from enemy Cavalry.

You just can't teleport one army out of context like that, one of the strength of the Roman Legion was its adaptability. And if the Western Roman Empire had prevailed, it would have bin the most powerful army during the middle Ages to, though they would probably have used more Heavy Cavalry and less Heavy infantry, more like fifty-fifty perhaps and then add Archers, Crossbows and whatever have you.

The Roman Legion was never really beaten, once they was on the field they ruled it more than they didn't in any time period, more in some than others, but the Legion is perhaps one of histories most victorious combat formation ever, even when it was outdated. The Eastern Roman empire continued to use its heavy infantry until its destruction and their armies was the most powerful armies in all of Europe.

Slingers remained very effective for a long time compared with archery. Many of the early bows were simply not effective enough.Western bows, it should be noted. Eastern composites were very effective, and existed there since prehistoric times.
Some was armed with Crossbows, a very powerful weapon used during all of the medieval period and very good against heavily armoured troops that was few in numbers; one of its disadvantages was its rather slow rate of fire. Though it was cheap to both train and equips a soldier with a CrossbowWell, it wasn't that cheap; one major advantage of early guns was their lower cost. Crossbows involved complicated mechanisms that needed to be made by an expert. However, I'm guessing they were still cheaper than longbows, which took years to make (although mostly just sitting around, granted), and the training was certainly cheaper.
The rest were elite soldiers with full armour fighting on foot or on horse, these warriors were devastating to all other forces. They used full mail armour, the wealthiest used reinforced mail and large metal plates that even could withstand a crossbow bolt at medium to long range.
Heavy foot infantry rarely used a shield in melee combat, but they might have one before the melee begun.All, unfortunately, rather dramatic overgeneralizations. Armor varied greatly by period; basically all mail in the 6th century, up to the cap-à-pie corrugated plate of the 15th and 16th. The best examples of the latter could typically withstand crossbows and early guns from any range, at least most of the time, and more or less the only way to kill the wearer was to tire him out to the point where you could overwhelm him with superior numbers, tackle him to the ground, and stab him through his eye-slit (or make him surrender and take him hostage).

Shield usage, too, varied widely by time and place.
There were no Roman Legionary, even during the late Imperial period that could stand a reasonable chance against a fully armed medieval heavy infantryman (Noble on foot).
Once the stirrup was introduced the Noble warrior more frequently rose to the saddle since that gave them an additional advantage. The same armour as before but also the power of the lance.The stirrup was first developed in ancient times, and reached Europe at the beginning of the medieval era. There were doubtless exceptions, but as a rule, I'm fairly sure European nobles of the medieval time always fought mounted.
Now the peasantry could not afford to buy good enough spears to be effective against a mounted charge from Heavy Cavalry during the middle Ages.Any spear formation is sufficient to completely stop a cavalry charge, unless the riders have longer spears. Horses were not trained to charge into spears, and I've heard that they would typically refuse―that's if their riders were feeling suicidal enough to try to get them to. Regardless, there would always be much more effective and less costly ways to disrupt a peasant spear formation than a full cavalry charge.
Now to sum things up, a highly drilled and well equipped late Roman Legion could easily destroy an early medieval army on the sole basis of its morale and better overall equipment, leadership and training.I would tend to suspect you're right, but of course we'll never know.

I tend to agree on most of your point there Simetrical, first of all I was generalizing about the armour for the period. And secondly there were allot of heavy infantry from the North, the British Isle and today’s France, why??? because most of the horses were to small to actually keep the weight of a fully armed soldier with heavy armour.
As far as my knowledge goes, the really big warhorses come from the Germans who used them first and then they spread from there throughout most part of Europe.

I was also talking about the bows in and around the Italian peninsular when I mentioned why they used slingers. If the Romans had lived in Egypt for example, they would have used bows I'm pretty sure about that.
Romans did use very powerful bows during the later stages of their reign. One of the Romans strength was their willingness to adapt new technologies that they thought would better their overall chances. Such as heavy cavalry, archers and heavy spearmen.

Now, a peasantry line would often be to broken and not enough long spears to pose a decent threat against a knight during the middle ages. Now this is a general statement, there was of cource exception to that rule.
A wealthy noble might understand the importance of army the peasants properly, but they favoured the crossbow to giving the good armour and spears. The Crossbow was much more useful, also as a peacekeeping weapon in the cities. It was small and very effective for shooting at an enemy from the walls.
The crossbow itself was not to cheap, no it was not. But compare the total cost of training and equipping a good archer with a crossbowman. And the crossbow saw some refining through the years also making them both faster and more powerful as time went on.
There is a reason why the church banned them, probably because the church relied on heavy knights and the crossbow was too dangerous in the hand of even an untrained peasant to pose a serious threat against a knight.

I've been playing with the religions and time scale a bit of late, I slowed tech down to 140% which worked well for extending the middle ages, but ended up worsening the problem of having buddhism, hinduism, and judaism take over the game.

I've finally decided to edit spread rates to combat this (don't worry, the ai still uses missionaries and often times early religions still become major because of this.

I've made the first 3 religions spread at 1/4 the original rate, the 2 chinese religions spread at 1/2.5x the original rate, and christianity and islam spread at 2x the original rate.

I was thinking also that maybe there needed to be an incentive to use the later religions, so I was thinking of adding a couple of units now that skins and models are availible:


Crusaders:

as Macemen, str. 9

Answar warriors:

as Knights, 25% bonus vs mounted units.


How does this sound?

Sounds good. How do you alter the spread rate?

It's in xml/gameinfo/religioninfo



One thing I've also been trying to figure out is a way to make the ai prefer one religion type over another if it's in it's borders so that it'll know to switch over to a later religion if possible to get the advantages.

I was also thinking of a random event to spread christianity and islam randomly to a city every few decades to help seed them if the nation isn't a theocracy, and maybe another if the nation is a theocracy that would remove a non-state religion and its buildings from a random city. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do this in python now though, so I don't know if it'll ever be in or not.

I found the right xml spot, but have to admit that I'm not sure if I should go higher or lower with the number. So far lower has meant faster, correct?

I believe so, and that seems to be the case.

Oh, I was also trying to figure out what to do about the persian's UU. The immortal cavalry is out of place and made up so I'd like to replace it with a foot immortals unit and use it for the answar warrior, the problem is that the only foot unit available is the hypsasist that doesn't really look persian at all. Alternatively I could just ask frontbrecher if I could use his mujadeen skin and leave the immortal as is or do something else entirely.

1) Spathae are not longswords. They're about three feet long, counting the hilt. Longswords would be more like four to five feet long.

This is arguable. I havn't found any exact minimal lenght for longsword.

2) Spathae were not prototypes for European longswords any more than any of the other longish swords of the period.

"The Spatha is a type of straight sword, measuring between 75 and 100 cm, in use throughout the 1st millennium AD. Introduced in the late Roman Empire in the 1st century AD as a cavalry weapon, the Spatha remained popular throughout the Migration period and the Viking Age, until it evolved into the knightly sword of the High Middle Ages from about 1100."

The spatha was most produced sword during the migrational period, IIRC. It was from spatha which most swords of the time evolved. Indeed, word spatha is found in many romance-languages, in Spanish... spada, etc.

The iron they were using was of better quality than simple, plain iron, but nowhere near blast furnace-quality. It had strips of steel in it. See here. So it may have been about as good as bronze, or perhaps even better; bronze was, however, definitely superior to simple wrought iron. See this:
Iron is not superior to bronze for tools. Wrought iron, the form first encountered by Near Eastern smelters, is roughly equivalent in hardness to annealed 10% tin bronze, and inferior to all cold-worked tin bronzes. It is only when carbon dissolves into the iron (carburization) and the artisan quenches the resulting steel that ferrous metals have a definite hardness advantage over bronze. [emphasis in the original

Oh, btw, that quote were not my words, I forgot to put the " " to it-:)

I still doubt the claim that iron was worse than bronze, since hoplites, iirc, for example, used bronze armour while they used iron spearheads. And there are many other examples.

Indeed? Which experts in particular?

I refered to these words.

"Gladius' stabs were deep and wide, and if in the chest area, they would kill fast."

These were based on the words of military experts. Indeed, they say that the wounds left by gladius were probably most deadliest left by a hand-held weapon untill the invention of more advanced gunpowder weapons. Is that true or not, is not relevant, however gladius' stabs were deadly.

Just look at the blade, imagine that inside you.:p

http://www.odinblades.com/Swords2k/Gladius.jpg

When Greeks saw the blade in action, they were horrified by the wounds it left. Chain mail, IMO, protects well from many attacks, but I dont think it protects from that kind of a stab.

Overly broad. There were some archers. They just weren't very effective.

No, there really wern't. IIRC, Carthaginians did not prefer archers, Iberians and Celts were not the most likely archers and so on. There were of course, bows used for hunting, but archers were very rare in the western mediterranean armies. In theory they had but it practise they didn't.

Slingers were much better, they had longer range, better damage and they were much more numerous than archers.

Pardon? Have you read the accounts of Carrhae? The arrows very much did penetrate the shields, pinning soldiers' arms to their scuta. How else were there tens of thousands of casualties? Furthermore, the Parthian cataphracts stopped the legionaries from forming testudo, according to the account.

Of course I've heard them, otherwise I would not make such comment.;)

The claim that the Parthian bows penetrated scuta and especially claim that the shield was pinned to the hand are dramaticisations (sp?) by the writers, IMHO. Parthian bow was powerful, but it wasn't that powerful. The Scythian bow which Romans adapted, IIRC, did not penetrate scuta, and I doubt that Parthian bow was significantly more powerful then it.

The Battle was decided by the cataphracts working in combo with the horse archers. The battle lasted for a very long time, if the bow would have really penetrated it, the battle would have lasted for much shorter time.

All plates were expensive, though. Mail was overwhelmingly preferred throughout most of Roman history

Bronze chest plate was still more expensive that lorica segmentata, IMO.

The chain mail was of course much preferred because it was economic. Also, it was cheap and it did protect very well.

However, lorica segmentata was still much protective. No bow of the time penetrated it, swords had problems and so on. The problem with the armour was that it was expensive and took alot of maintaince.

Not according to the paper I cited above. Do you have a source?

No, but thats based on my believe. :p If iron was really less effective that why was iron used as spearheads, while the troops wore bronze as armour?

But, the argument runs, the Seleucids and Carthaginians didn't use combined arms to the extent of Philip and Alexander. They relied heavily on their phalanxes, not much on their cavalry. The legions were more maneuverable than phalanxes, and this was their winning attribute, but cavalry was still more maneuverable than legions, and so some speculate that this could have countered the Romans' advantage, used properly.

True, however, a Legion can be turned into a effective anti-cavalry unit too. Indeed, it often was.

Second, all things being equal, a horse archer can't use a bow as large or powerful as a foot archer, and therefore foot archers could quite simply outrange horse archers if using bows of equivalent sophistication (slingers could work too).

Wrong. In fact, often the bows used by horse archers were far more effective than the ones used by standing archers. The Goths were horrified by the "Hun horn bows" (recurved, composite bows). And, Mongol bow has significantly longer range than the longbow.;)

1. About spathaes and swords. Spatha is the prototype for later swords, having badder steel used in blade of sword. Later, in the end of 1 millenium until 13th century most used type was "caroling" sword type, larger and heavier then spatha, and in 13th-16th "roman" sword called so because it has length and proportions compared to spatha.
I don't know what exactly you mean under term "longsword", but there are some sword types that can be used by two hands. They have lenght 100-150sm, and in mass use appear in 15th century.

2. About the mod at all. It's unreal to make "medieval weapons" mod, it's real only to make great and big, medieval mod. Medieval weaponry greatly depended from civilizations types, their needs and encounters. For example Mongols didn't need infantry, because of great territories. Russian and Golden Horde 13-14th centuries cavalry body armour was heavier and harder then European, but almost all of helms hadn't face protection compared to european helms, because of battle characters.
So why do not make a mod using each medieval civilization unique way of developing, armouring and weaponing. Hard work but great work.

With best regards.

"The Spatha is a type of straight sword, measuring between 75 and 100 cm, in use throughout the 1st millennium AD. Introduced in the late Roman Empire in the 1st century AD as a cavalry weapon, the Spatha remained popular throughout the Migration period and the Viking Age, until it evolved into the knightly sword of the High Middle Ages from about 1100."Wikipedia is not the most impressive of sources, I'm afraid. You still might be right, of course.
"Gladius' stabs were deep and wide, and if in the chest area, they would kill fast."

These were based on the words of military experts. Indeed, they say that the wounds left by gladius were probably most deadliest left by a hand-held weapon untill the invention of more advanced gunpowder weapons.Please quote these military experts. Give exact names and places, give exact quotes.
No, there really wern't. IIRC, Carthaginians did not prefer archers, Iberians and Celts were not the most likely archers and so on. There were of course, bows used for hunting, but archers were very rare in the western mediterranean armies.Well, yes, of course. Some used them, but mostly they were marginal or entirely ignored.
The claim that the Parthian bows penetrated scuta and especially claim that the shield was pinned to the hand are dramaticisations (sp?) by the writers, IMHO. Parthian bow was powerful, but it wasn't that powerful. The Scythian bow which Romans adapted, IIRC, did not penetrate scuta, and I doubt that Parthian bow was significantly more powerful then it.I'm sure I've seen studies of penetrative power somewhere. Buggered if I can remember where, though. I'll try to get a source.
The battle lasted for a very long time, if the bow would have really penetrated it, the battle would have lasted for much shorter time.It's fair to say that people weren't being skewered left and right, but I have no doubt a Parthian bow would penetrate a scutum if it struck head-on. That's not to say that the shields wouldn't provide a good deal of protection, but not enough to render the bows less than deadly.

In general, it's true that ranged weapons are less effective than hand-to-hand weapons, since if you have a sword you can slit your enemy's throat once he's incapacitated, but arrows don't work that way. So if people are just getting hit by arrows, you may well have more wounds than kills at the end of the day, with more people dying of blood loss and infection than organ trauma. You also can't effectively track down and kill the healthy soldiers, since your arrow isn't that accurate at long distances, which means a lot of people will probably survive due to dumb luck.
Bronze chest plate was still more expensive that lorica segmentata, IMO.Of course.
If iron was really less effective that why was iron used as spearheads, while the troops wore bronze as armour?Because iron was cheaper to start with, and later on (once it started becoming more like steel) it did in fact become a superior material.
True, however, a Legion can be turned into a effective anti-cavalry unit too. Indeed, it often was.Yes, but not against horse archers.
Wrong. In fact, often the bows used by horse archers were far more effective than the ones used by standing archers.I said "all things being equal", and that means the foot archers have to be using the same type of bow. Given any type of bow, you'll be able to use a much larger and therfore more powerful one on foot. My understanding is that horse archers often carried a second, larger bow to use while dismounted. Obviously ancient Western bows of any kind would be horribly outclassed by Eastern composites.
And, Mongol bow has significantly longer range than the longbow.;)Not according to this page (http://huntingsociety.org/BowPower.html), which looks authoritative. That he doesn't mention the specific branch of the University of California whose Anthropology Department he was assisted by is slightly worrying, however. Anyway, I may do a bit more investigation on this guy later, or you could.

Wikipedia is not the most impressive of sources, I'm afraid. You still might be right, of course.

Wikipedia, IMHO, is often more reliable than the random sites in google.

Give exact names and places, give exact quotes.

That's a problem, since I read them in an article, not exact quotes. I have to dig it up.

Actually, after thinking it while, I read the article 3 years ago, so it might no longer exist.

Well, yes, of course. Some used them, but mostly they were marginal or entirely ignored.

In practise the western mediterranean armies had no archers.

It's fair to say that people weren't being skewered left and right, but I have no doubt a Parthian bow would penetrate a scutum if it struck head-on. That's not to say that the shields wouldn't provide a good deal of protection, but not enough to render the bows less than deadly.

Well, you see, the bows could pierce the shield, however, I feel such happening would rare. A tiny minority of the arrows actually would pierce the shield, many would be diverted by the curving, many would miss and many would simply absorbed. The battle lasted for a long time, the Parthians carried uh, very large amounts of arrows, even for an eastern archers, who traditionally carried alot arrows with them and several extra bows, because in battle bows would often break.

You also can't effectively track down and kill the healthy soldiers, since your arrow isn't that accurate at long distances, which means a lot of people will probably survive due to dumb luck.

Well, people dont aim in the battle in the same sense as you would do with a rifle "pick your target!" They aimed to the direction where the enemies were.:)

Because iron was cheaper to start with, and later on (once it started becoming more like steel) it did in fact become a superior material.

Yes, but the Hoplites used bronze armour (or chest plate) while they used iron spear heads. Why didn't they use bronze spear heads if it was better?

Yes, but not against horse archers.

Well, cavalry archers were rather rarely used in combined arms with a Phalanx (although there were exceptions, like Armenians and Bactrians). The Hellenics used the Hetaroi (aka, companion cavalry), which were lancers with something like 30+ feet lance. The Seleucids also used bronze covered cataphracts.

And, the legion was, when with good cavalry-arm and archers, capable of defeating a horse archer army as it did several times.

I said "all things being equal", and that means the foot archers have to be using the same type of bow. Given any type of bow, you'll be able to use a much larger and therfore more powerful one on foot. My understanding is that horse archers often carried a second, larger bow to use while dismounted. Obviously ancient Western bows of any kind would be horribly outclassed by Eastern composites.

"All things being equal" Well, in technology the Chinese were more advanced compared to the Mongols, however, the Mongol bow still had longer range than the Chinese crossbows. IIRC.

Not according to this page (http://huntingsociety.org/BowPower.html), which looks authoritative. That he doesn't mention the specific branch of the University of California whose Anthropology Department he was assisted by is slightly worrying, however. Anyway, I may do a bit more investigation on this guy later, or you could.

http://www.coldsiberia.org/monbow.htm

Some sources say otherwise.

"The Mongol bow is not as large and long as the English one, but it is vastly more powerful. The draw weight of an English longbow averages around 70-80 pounds, whereas the Old Mongol bow had a pull that, according to George Vernadsky, averaged at around 166 pounds. Chambers states that the pull varied from 100 to 160 pounds. This seeming discrepancy certainly reflects the fact that draw weight varied with the strength of the user, and with what use the bow had been made for. As could be expected, there was a considerable difference in shooting range. Whereas the English longbow could shoot at distances up to 250 yards or around 228 meters, the Mongol counterpart can hit its target at 350 yards or 320 meters and, if the archer is well trained for the task, even beyond that."

And if you wonder how they fired it accurately...

"The Old Mongols have their own technique for shooting, known as the "Mongolian release." The Mongols, if right-handed, keep their bow in the left hand, pushes it forward as the right arm pulls the string all the way back to behind the ear. The left arm is now fully extended, and the release is near. However, now comes an interesting part. Since this bow has immense power, the Mongols have to use a special technique to hold the string during the drawing of the bow and before the arrow is released. The technique is as follows: The string is held by the thumb, since this is the strongest finger. Still, it is not easy to hold 166 pounds comfortably. Thus, the thumb is supported with the index finger curling around, placed atop the outermost joint, exactly at the base of the nail. The other fingers are also curled, forming a fist. Even so, this is not enough. Hence, the Mongols use a special ring on which the string is hooked before release. This thumb ring, a cylinder that fits around the outer part of the thumb and protects its pad from damage as the string is released, is typically made from Chinese jade or agate, but leather, metal and bone is also known to have been used"

I've already explained in another thread why a 160 pound horsebow is absurd :) Just because something can be built doesn't mean it was standard issue. No one's going to use a 160lb bow in real combat because generally in real combat you're expected to aim and fire the bow more than once without your shoulder becoming dislocated from the socket.

Mongol bows were similar in construction to chinese bows and turkish bows. Bows with draws of up to 200lbs were made in these tradtions for TRAINING (building strength) and COMPETITION (distance contests). Not warfare.

Edit: And modern reproductions actually used in competitions in mongolia today made by traditional methods tend to draw from 50-75 lbs, going up to about 100.

Wikipedia, IMHO, is often more reliable than the random sites in google.I don't pick random sites. I pick sites that are authoritative in some way, or if I don't, I mention the problems with my source.
That's a problem, since I read them in an article, not exact quotes. I have to dig it up.

Actually, after thinking it while, I read the article 3 years ago, so it might no longer exist.Ah, well, it's not that important anyway. I think it's fair to say that the gladius was an effective weapon, but probably not nearly as damaging as being hit by a big axe, which would have its own disadvantages. I wouldn't, a priori, expect particularly good armor penetration from the gladius, but it would be easier to aim for vulnerable points than with an axe or spear.
In practise the western mediterranean armies had no archers.I believe a few smaller tribes or what have you did. The major powers didn't, no. But I don't think we actually disagree on this point, except perhaps very slightly.
Well, you see, the bows could pierce the shield, however, I feel such happening would rare.As long as we're clear that both of us are pretty much working on feelings. :D I'll see if I can't find that study.
Yes, but the Hoplites used bronze armour (or chest plate) while they used iron spear heads. Why didn't they use bronze spear heads if it was better?I don't know. Possibly bronze was harder to forge but easier to cast, and that factored into it somehow?
Well, cavalry archers were rath