Greece hoplite *i wont stop calling it that*

Well I have perused and read some quick texts by historians and I can't find any evidence that the hoplon and pelta were "interchangeable"

The hoplon had a very unusual system for holding it which forced half of it to tick out to the left of the wearer. The pelta and other shields of the period has "center grips"

The big difference is that the hoplon basically leaves you exposed, meaning you are relying on your neighbour for protection, thereby encouraging the phalanx to stay cohesive and tight. The biggest weakness of the spear formationa t the time was that it would break apart. The introduction of the hoplon meant that this rarely happened since the Hoplon was pretty bad at offering protection when out of formation.

The "crecent" style pelta was used more like a buckler and was carried by light trrops and mounted troops and provided both light spear and javelin support. In fact the Holon and metal reinforcement while the pelta was usually hide and wood.

It has been a long long time since I did classical studies so I had to go refresh my memories.
 
CitizenCain said:
More importantly, we should all be outraged that the spear carried by these Civ IV units are clearly no longer than 6' tall, when the spears used at the height of Greek phalanx dominance were twice as long! LET'S GET OUTRAGED TOGETHER!!!
Click to expand...
yes, i allso have noticed it.

thay used pikes not spears!:mad:
 
They used both a spear that could be thrown and the massive pikes Although I don't think any one soldier carried both maybe even by phalanx.

Also I think alot of people think that pike==spear considering the favourite thrown weapon at the time was the javelin.
 
The Greek unit unit the Phalanx looks NOTHING like a hoplite. The normal spearman looks more like it.
 
I might go so far as to swap the models :D

Wouldn't be hard at all to elongate the pike either.
 
how whold u make them longer?
 
editing the the model file.
When I first modded for NWN pre release we hand edited the ascii data for thos ekind of things. Although there is already a converter of some sort for the Civ model format for other games so getting hold of that would be even easier.
 
To me, and I could very well be wrong, the model looks less like a Hellene hoplite than a Macedonian one.

Philip II, when redesigning his army, prefered his hypaspists to be more mobile; he made their armor lighter, their spears longer and their shields smaller. To keep pace with the cavalry, Philip added significant amounts of lightly armed (and armored) troops to his formations. In addition he increased the length of the spear from 8 to 14 ft. As the new spear was both longer and more unwieldy, both hands were needed to control it: breastplates and greaves shrank and the shield became smaller and either attached to the arm or hung around the neck.

So... yeah it's not a Trojan War era bubba, but it is one from the high point of Ancient Greece.
 
I came across some cool articles discussing how the phalanx was used and how it played a greater part in battle tactics, especially in combination with smaller skirmish groups at the flanks of the massive phalanx

I forgot how much I loved studying this era...

Here is the article
http://www.livius.org/pha-phd/phalanx/phalanx.html
 
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