Bug Reports for 3.3.4

[Jamey]

There appear to be some problems with temple descriptions. Quinn and I are on top of the issues with the descriptions of the Priests of Nike. We are also on top of all of the issues with the names and descriptions of the Epirote temples.

If you see any other errors in building names or descriptions, please give us a heads up so that they can be fixed ASAP.

[Wien1938]

I assume the skirmish class for all general's bodyguard cavalry is to prevent the AI generals from suiciding?

[Quinn Inuit]

The temples and a couple of other things are fixed in the new hotfix (save game compatible!). Thanks Jamey (and Caldarium, who caught a unit bug)! Jamey did pretty much all of the work on that.

Wien1938: Yep, bingo. And also because of some very complicated edits I did to the formations file that take advantage of the fact that only general's units are now "skirmish cavalry"...all other relevant units are "missile cavalry."

[Jamey]

Quinn, the Carthaginian Sacred Band has dramatically different pictures for its large and small unit cards. I suspect that the small one is correct and the large one wasn't updated when you changed to a new model for the Sacred Band.

[Wien1938]

Are there supposed to be mercenary phalangites (Pezoi) in 3.3.4?
I'm fairly sure that mercenary pezoi did not exist in 280 BC.

[Quinn Inuit]

Re: Sacred Band
Oops. I'd better look into that. That'll be an easy hotfix change.

Re: merc phalangites
Really? I thought there just weren't merc Persian phalangites. I thought I read today that Antigonus (the Asia Minor one) used them, and I'm pretty sure the Ptolies used merc pikes to supplement the Mac-heritage ones.

[Wien1938]

Antigonos the One-Eyed did use them, but I'm fairly certain that twenty years later the surviving mercenary phalangites had taken up permanent employment in the service of the monarchies. There weren't phalangites floating about the mercenary pool - they were too valuable to leave, especially if a local rebellion hires them! Macedonian style foot were the ace in the hole for the kings.
There is an exception for the Ptolemies but this is a reference to the Battle of Raphia (217 BC), when (and I emphasise this) Ptolemy IV's ministers reorganised the army, mainly by expanding the phalanx and recuiting Egyptians.

Polybios, Book V,
" First of all they divided them according to their ages and nationalities, and provided them in each case with suitable arms and accoutrements, paying no attention to the manner in which they had previously been armed; 2 in the next place they organized them as the necessities of the present situation required, breaking up the old regiments and abolishing the existing paymasters' lists, and having effected this, they drilled them, accustoming them not only to the word of command, but to the correct manipulation of their weapons."
The numbers are here.
"Eurylochus of Magnesia commanded a body of about three thousand men known as the Royal Guard, Socrates the Boeotian had under him two thousand peltasts, 3 Phoxidas the Achaean, Ptolemy the son of Thraseas, and Andromachus of Aspendus exercised together in one body the phalanx and the Greek mercenaries, 4 the phalanx twenty-five thousand strong being under the command of Andromachus and Ptolemy and the mercenaries, numbering eight thousand, under that of Phoxidas."
Egyptians.
"They also armed in the Macedonian fashion three thousand Libyans under the command of Ammonius of Barce. 9 The total native Egyptian force consisted of about twenty thousand heavy-armed men, and was commanded by Sosibius,"

The mercenaries by implication had not been armed as phalangites as they were rearmed with no regard to how they had previously fought. So these could have hoplites, theurophoroi, slingers, archers or javelin skirmishers; the point is they were retrained as phalangites and the new regiments of the army established from these.

So 3,000 guard phalanx; 2,000 peltasts (could be phalanx or peltasts?); 25,000 settler Macedonians; 8,000 mercenaries rearmed as phalangites; 20,000 Egyptian phalangites.
At no other time in any source do mercenaries appear armed as phalangites after the Diadochi wars end. My guess is that they were absorbed into the standing royal armies. Ptolemy IV's mercenary phalangites were created by his government, not recruited as such.

Forgot: Are the elite phalanx units meant to be 40 strength as opposed to regular 60? Not something that works in my opinion.

[Jamey]

The mercenaries by implication had not been armed as phalangites as they were rearmed with no regard to how they had previously fought. So these could have hoplites, theurophoroi, slingers, archers or javelin skirmishers; the point is they were retrained as phalangites and the new regiments of the army established from these.

I'm not convinced by this logic. Saying that you're training everyone to be phalangites doesn't imply that no one being trained was already trained as a phalangite. I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just not convinced by the passage you cite.

Forgot: Are the elite phalanx units meant to be 40 strength as opposed to regular 60? Not something that works in my opinion.

Yes, some of them are base size 40 instead of 60. I play on Large size, where it is 80 instead of 120. I like this unit size since 40 man infantry units tend to get chewed up very quickly. Anyway, I find an 80 man elite phalanx unit anchoring each end of my pike line works nicely.

There is at least one phalanx unit with a 20 base size, the Chaeonian Agema for Epirus.

[Wien1938]

Well, the critical factor in this is that after the army of Antigonos the One-Eyed, I have not heard of an account or a mention of mercenary phalangites. And the only time we actually hear of mercenaries being armed as phalangites is in response to a critical threat to the Ptolemaic monarchy - I mean, they armed the Egyptians! Desperate measures! This lead to Egyptian rebellions soon afterwards.

I play on Huge scale now (personally think that it represents combat with those units better). Well, I don't agree with the elite units being smaller (have upped all to 60 men). Is there a rationale behind the smaller elite unit sizes? I'm fairly sure that phalanx units tended to be of the same basic strength.
Open for discussion, I'm sure.

[Quinn Inuit]

Two questions:
1) Why were there no merc phalangites but more merc hoplites than one could shake a stick at? Higher training requirements for the former?
2) Given the changes in hoplite warfare, how do we know that some of them weren't fighting as phalangites (Mac style)?

As for the unit size, I've gone back and forth on that in the last couple of years. I used to make all of the elite units normal size, but awhile back I was convinced that they should be smaller to reflect the lower number of troops that were so elite. What's the general opinion on this?

As a side note, I actually got into modding because of that issue. I ran some tests and discovered that an 80 man Athenian hoplite unit would lost to a (cheaper) 120-man normal hoplite unit in a straight fight. That struck me as uncool.

[Wien1938]

Question 1) reply
1. The hoplite was more flexible than the phalangite as he could fight effectively out of formation and was still superior to most foot. The phalangite could beat all foot, but was only truely effective on level ground and in formation.
2. Yes, the amount of drill (and therefore time) required to fight effectively for a (phalangites) phalanx would preclude mercenaries from this trade. Mercenaries were hired for their immediate availability to fight; a mercenary phalangite unit would have extreme difficulty in replacing battle losses as it had no resources on which to train.
3. As I've pointed out earlier, the pre-280 BC mercenary phalangites disappear as they were probably regularised by the kings as settler/army units. A mercenary would be far more likely to accept terms of settling and regular service for a number of reasons:
a.) The mercenary trade was uncertain and employers could be unreliable or unforthcoming with backpay.
b.) Settling usually involved being given land equivalent to that of a yeoman farmer in Medieval England - the income would mark the settled soldier as a man of worth in his neighbourhood with all the social benefits of that role. The income from the land would not be as high but would be guaranteed (harvests and such).
c.) The mercenaries would also likely have not had a choice in the matter - kings were prone to bloody vengeance against slights. Mercenaries refusing to accept terms of settlement could be massacred. For the kings, settling the mercenaries also means peace on the land - no wandering soldiers as happened in Greece.
4. The sources of phalangite equipment were the royal arsenals (the kings controlled the distribution and production of equipment). We know from Philip V's reign that the equipment was stored in the local fortresses and that if a soldier lost or damaged his equipment, he would be fined.

Question 2) reply
1. The changes in hoplite warfare were confined to the armies of the kings. None of the sources reveal Greeks fighting in Macedonian style (phalangites) until the late 3rd Century and usually following two ways of reaching this change.
a.) Massive rearmament - Cleomenes III of Sparta achieved this in 227 BC, but after a military coup and making himself absolute ruler of Spara. This also involved land redistribution and state rearming and retraining of hoplites as phalangites. Even then, he only produced 4,000 phalangites. We also know that Philopoemen (Achaean League) rearmed the League's army in the Macedonian fashion in the very late 3rd century (around 207 BC), but this was after a collective effort by the league to rearm.
b.) The other way to get hold of phalangites was to have a monarch rearm and retrain your troops. Antigonos III Doson rearmed 2,000 Megapolitians in this way for Sellasia, while Antigonos I Gonatos had rearmed the Boiotian League in 245 BC.
2. To have phalangites was to possess the best and most expensive army. It needed state support and constant training - which needs money. The Greek states are primarily the source of Greek mercenaries, but they were too poor for much of the period to achieve this.
3. There are no records of mercenaries identified - directly or indirectly - as phalangites from prior to 280 BC until the demise of the Hellenistic World, with the exceptional exception of the Ptolemaic army at Raphia. I would repeat my assertation that the mercenaries there were then incorporated as regular units into the reformed Ptolemaic army - the monarchy would not go to the expense of rearming and retraining men, only to let them go afterwards with battle winning skills.
The phalangites would have been too exceptional for a historian to miss in a battle account - these were battle winning troops. They were not going to be floating around in the mercenary pool of the Mediterranean - if they were, the Carthaginians would have hired them - yet there are no records of phalangites in Carthaginian armies.

Macedon, Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms maintained phalangites. I have my suspicions that following Pyrrhus' death in 272 BC, Epirus slowly ceased to maintain any phalangites as they were too expensive and the kingdom was slowly breaking up. The Achaean League and Sparta rearmed without outside help in the late 3rd century but these are exceptional cases - the AL was strong and wealthy at the time and engaged in a long running series of wars with Sparta. Sparta rearmed following radical political change including large scale social engineering.

In sum. Phalangites are too expensive and time consuming to be mercenaries and the kings would not have tolerated phalangites as mercenaries - danger of local revolts or of rivals hiring extra elite troops.
Hoplites were cheaper (provided their own equipment) and fought in a fairly familiar fashion (comparatively easy to train). Phalangites absolutely fought as an established body (drill was incredibly central to success with phalangites) and mercenaries were not hired as units but a random number of men.


On elite unit numbers, when if comes to phalangites, there is definately a fixed unit scale. This comes from the late Hellenistic manuals on warfare and importantly the information is borne out by the contemporary and later historical accounts of the armies and battles. The "Guard" phalangites tended to be important both numerically and in skill - the name Agema means "those who go ahead (of the rest)". I don't think this fits the idea of a unit to shore up a flank, nor would that concept fit with the idea of the right hand position of honour. The Agema/Peltasts of the phalanx would instead be the crack troops intended to beat everything in their path on the battlefield.
This would argue for the same unit strength establishment as the "line" units.

[Wien1938]

Seperate note. Had the game hang on me when pressing "start battle" at the very tip of the peninsula south of Maronia. Hang, not CTD.
The reason, I think, was because the Seleucids had reinforcements from the south (across the land bridge) but could not actually reach the battlefield or started in the sea. Game hangs... I restart computer when keyboard is locked out.
Might not be a solvable problem.

[WTC]

Great mod. I've been playing it for awhile now and like the new changes you've made. I did notice that the unit card and unit info for the Etrurian Hoplites were mismatched but other than that everything is working fine...so far. Thanks for making this and keep up the good work!

P.S. I'm running the mod on Vista

P.P.S. I saw the other post about unit size and I thought the elite units were a bit undersized as well so I raised the 'normal' unit size by 10.

[decimator22]

Yes the mod runs okay in Vista. I changed comp and can play at huge with all aspect maxed out. Wien you a living encyclopedia have some rep

[Jamey]

Quinn, I think we need to revisit the decision to make generals Skirmisher Cavalry. The AI seems to be running them around like they're javelin cavalry without the javelins. It improves the survivability of the generals at the price of the AI never actually using them to engage. I've had to employ missile cavalry as general killers because nothing else can run them down and kill them.

[Wien1938]

It is damned annoying trying to kill them.

[Quinn Inuit]

Quinn, I think we need to revisit the decision to make generals Skirmisher Cavalry. The AI seems to be running them around like they're javelin cavalry without the javelins. It improves the survivability of the generals at the price of the AI never actually using them to engage. I've had to employ missile cavalry as general killers because nothing else can run them down and kill them.

It is damned annoying trying to kill them.

Oops! Sorry. I'll redo the EDU and AI formations for that. I didn't know that would happen. I played 4-5 test battles and never saw anything like that.

Question 1) reply
1. The hoplite was more flexible than the phalangite as he could fight effectively out of formation and was still superior to most foot. The phalangite could beat all foot, but was only truely effective on level ground and in formation.
2. Yes, the amount of drill (and therefore time) required to fight effectively for a (phalangites) phalanx would preclude mercenaries from this trade. Mercenaries were hired for their immediate availability to fight; a mercenary phalangite unit would have extreme difficulty in replacing battle losses as it had no resources on which to train.
3. As I've pointed out earlier, the pre-280 BC mercenary phalangites disappear as they were probably regularised by the kings as settler/army units. A mercenary would be far more likely to accept terms of settling and regular service for a number of reasons:
a.) The mercenary trade was uncertain and employers could be unreliable or unforthcoming with backpay.
b.) Settling usually involved being given land equivalent to that of a yeoman farmer in Medieval England - the income would mark the settled soldier as a man of worth in his neighbourhood with all the social benefits of that role. The income from the land would not be as high but would be guaranteed (harvests and such).
c.) The mercenaries would also likely have not had a choice in the matter - kings were prone to bloody vengeance against slights. Mercenaries refusing to accept terms of settlement could be massacred. For the kings, settling the mercenaries also means peace on the land - no wandering soldiers as happened in Greece.
4. The sources of phalangite equipment were the royal arsenals (the kings controlled the distribution and production of equipment). We know from Philip V's reign that the equipment was stored in the local fortresses and that if a soldier lost or damaged his equipment, he would be fined.

Good points, especially the last one.

One question: what about the Libyan pikemen mercs the Ptolies used? Were those actually hoplites?

Question 2) reply
1. The changes in hoplite warfare were confined to the armies of the kings. None of the sources reveal Greeks fighting in Macedonian style (phalangites) until the late 3rd Century and usually following two ways of reaching this change.
a.) Massive rearmament - Cleomenes III of Sparta achieved this in 227 BC, but after a military coup and making himself absolute ruler of Spara. This also involved land redistribution and state rearming and retraining of hoplites as phalangites. Even then, he only produced 4,000 phalangites. We also know that Philopoemen (Achaean League) rearmed the League's army in the Macedonian fashion in the very late 3rd century (around 207 BC), but this was after a collective effort by the league to rearm.
b.) The other way to get hold of phalangites was to have a monarch rearm and retrain your troops. Antigonos III Doson rearmed 2,000 Megapolitians in this way for Sellasia, while Antigonos I Gonatos had rearmed the Boiotian League in 245 BC.
2. To have phalangites was to possess the best and most expensive army. It needed state support and constant training - which needs money. The Greek states are primarily the source of Greek mercenaries, but they were too poor for much of the period to achieve this.
3. There are no records of mercenaries identified - directly or indirectly - as phalangites from prior to 280 BC until the demise of the Hellenistic World, with the exceptional exception of the Ptolemaic army at Raphia. I would repeat my assertation that the mercenaries there were then incorporated as regular units into the reformed Ptolemaic army - the monarchy would not go to the expense of rearming and retraining men, only to let them go afterwards with battle winning skills.
The phalangites would have been too exceptional for a historian to miss in a battle account - these were battle winning troops. They were not going to be floating around in the mercenary pool of the Mediterranean - if they were, the Carthaginians would have hired them - yet there are no records of phalangites in Carthaginian armies.

Macedon, Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms maintained phalangites. I have my suspicions that following Pyrrhus' death in 272 BC, Epirus slowly ceased to maintain any phalangites as they were too expensive and the kingdom was slowly breaking up. The Achaean League and Sparta rearmed without outside help in the late 3rd century but these are exceptional cases - the AL was strong and wealthy at the time and engaged in a long running series of wars with Sparta. Sparta rearmed following radical political change including large scale social engineering.

In sum. Phalangites are too expensive and time consuming to be mercenaries and the kings would not have tolerated phalangites as mercenaries - danger of local revolts or of rivals hiring extra elite troops.
Hoplites were cheaper (provided their own equipment) and fought in a fairly familiar fashion (comparatively easy to train). Phalangites absolutely fought as an established body (drill was incredibly central to success with phalangites) and mercenaries were not hired as units but a random number of men.

Interesting. Ok, let's remove the merc phalangites, then. I think only the AoR Mac phalangites are left.

So, if phalangites were this good, is that reflected accurately in the game? In-game they're currently useful, but easily flanked and a much better anvil than hammer.

On elite unit numbers, when if comes to phalangites, there is definately a fixed unit scale. This comes from the late Hellenistic manuals on warfare and importantly the information is borne out by the contemporary and later historical accounts of the armies and battles. The "Guard" phalangites tended to be important both numerically and in skill - the name Agema means "those who go ahead (of the rest)". I don't think this fits the idea of a unit to shore up a flank, nor would that concept fit with the idea of the right hand position of honour. The Agema/Peltasts of the phalanx would instead be the crack troops intended to beat everything in their path on the battlefield.
This would argue for the same unit strength establishment as the "line" units.

Great mod. I've been playing it for awhile now and like the new changes you've made. I did notice that the unit card and unit info for the Etrurian Hoplites were mismatched but other than that everything is working fine...so far. Thanks for making this and keep up the good work!

P.S. I'm running the mod on Vista

P.P.S. I saw the other post about unit size and I thought the elite units were a bit undersized as well so I raised the 'normal' unit size by 10.

Fair enough. Should we increase the cost commensurately with the size, or a little less? I'm inclined to a little less.

[Wien1938]

Well, in my experience, excluding stupid AI use of phalangites, they do work best as the anvil, which seems to have been their historical role. In ExRM, they do work well, once you can either tempt the enemy onto your pikes or, less often, the stupid sods actually hold still long enough for your phalanx to make contact.
The problem with them in this game system is the daft "phalanx" mechanic used by the RTW designers (lower pikes and creep towards the enemy). The chief selling point of a phalanx (phalangites) in the Hellenistic world was the strength of the charge - which we cannot simulate, except by the roundabout method of increasing the melee factor.
Overall, I cannot see how to improve them and they're really tricky to use in a street fight as they take an eternity to settle into formation and if engaged before set, then either they must fight it out with swords (losing) or suffer heavy losses being persuaded not to try and advance into the enemy facing sideways or backwards (!). Those are again, hardcoded issues.
On unit numbers, the numbers should be the same, the costs of the elites are already very high. If any higher, then you'll likely never see any of the elite phalanx units; if lower, there is the risk of too high a proportion of the Hellenistic phalanxes being elite.

[Quinn Inuit]

That's good, at least. I guess they're working about as well as we can hope for, then.

What about the Ptolemaic Libyan Pikemen, though?


Update: Hotfix 3.3.4c is uploaded, with a removal of all skirmish cavalry traits from generals and the appropriate descr_formations_ai.txt edits to support that.

[Wien1938]

Sorry, missed the Libyans. There's no record of Libyans fighting as phalangites before Raphia but they do fight as javelin skirmishers and this is thought to have been their "national way of war". My guess is that the Libyans at Raphia were rearmed in the same way that the mercenaries were rearmed.
They'd be good to go but the model is really nice...so we could introduce a little more realism here, methinks, by having an inefficient Ptolemaic phalanx before 217 BC, which would also be high upkeep to represent the army being reguarly outnumbered. Then we could use the Libyan model for the "new" or reorganised phalanx, which would have lower upkeep (less corruption) and cost less (more available manpower). If we could tie the Egyptian phalangites and the "new" phalangites to higher level buildings, then we could simulate army reform in Ptolemaic Egypt.
Not sure if it would work, but it would mean we could keep the Libyan phalanx model.

If we were to go totally anal... we could also start renaming some units as unit formation names. An example would be the Antigonid phalanx: the basic tactical unit was the speira (256 men), four speirai formed a unit of about 1,000 called a chiliarchia. So hypothetically, we could have a Leukaspides Speira, a Chalkaspides Speira and a Peltophoroi Speira. It would be like having X Battalion, Y Battalion etc. Alternatively we could use chiliarchia, but I would prefer speira as it is shorter, more memorable and is mentioned by Polybios at Sellasia (222 BC) where to tackle the rough ground on one of the Spartan-held hills, Antiongos Doson alternated the speira of the phalanx with Illyrian mercenaries who could handle the terrain. This was apparently successful.
Given Pyrrhus used Macedonian as well as Epirote phalangites, we could speculate that he used a similar system or that the system evolved between the two monarchies. The Ptolemies used syntagmata, above which chiliarchia are present and seem to have had established names as British regiments do today (7th Chiliarchia, for example). Not too much is known about Seleucid organisation; it is speculated that formations called semaiai (semaia singular?) are the equivalent to speirai.
Of course, we could just label this as completely academic and ignore it as a fun exercise in semantics...

Anyhow, onto hotfix c!


I'm not sure that the Tarentine phalangites should be wearing breastplates given the expense and the noted inefficiency of the Tarentine army before Pyrrhus reorganised the Tarentine militia. Pyrrhus could not have paid for such an expensive rearmament, when his kingdom was Epirus (noted for being hilly and poor).
They would likely have worn lininothrakes (linen or leather armour) as worn by most hoplites and phalangites. At Heraclea in 280 BC, Pyrrhus fights with his Macedonians, his Epirotes and his mercenaries as well as the Tarentines. I believe that would leave their total strength as 6,500 as a minimum and no more than 8,000 at a maximum. Reading Plutarch on Pyrrhus, I don't think that he suffered many losses from the crossing to Italy, so I would estimate a maximum of 7,000 Tarentines present. His cavalry are all accounted for, so the Tarentines seem to have contributed no cavalry.
This would argue for no more than a handful wearing breastplates - and most likely the officers.