A Couple of Greek Flavoured Questions

[Zenith Darksea]

Ok, I have some more questions, and a couple of points of my own to make. But please bear with me, being the civilised and intelligent people that you are.

Ok, the first one is about the phalanx. Aaargh! Yes, it's that question again. Now I read somewhere that the Greeks will employ three different fighting styles. Some will use the old phalanx, some will use the Macedonian one, and some will use the trendy new free-form version like a poem by Carol Ann Duffy (but not quite as shockingly bad, though I'll try to stay off that topic). However, with the old phalanx, have you developed your own animation for this? I have heard that previous ones have had problems with soldiers bunching together and doing weird things with their spears etc. Can we expect a fun and feasible phalanx for our old-style hoplites?

I have another question about hoplites; the Spartiates Hoplitai, to be precise. Now, you go in for anal levels of historical accuracy, and that's perfect for me. So I wanted to know, will the Spartans wear their red cloaks in battle? I have seen numerous mods (even total realism ones) portray the Spartans wearing their cloaks into battle, when they did not do this. I had always thought that it was well known (but then I would, studying Classics at Oxford as I am; sorry, I just love to drop that in, so don't think any less of me for it, please) that they did not wear their red cloaks into battle, but only wore them while marching. And will they wear armour? I find it highly difficult to believe that they had ditched armour altogether (I understand that the source for this was a single stone engraving that is at best highly ambiguous) as RTW portrayed them to have done.

And finally, I'd like to end by saying how frustrating I find it when people try to impose modern Greek pronunciation and spelling (o oplitis? What the hell is that?) on Classical Greek, and if you don't want to release any of this information for fear of spoiling the surprise, I can well understand.

EDIT: While discussing unit recruitment with someone, a thought suddenly occured to me. It is often said that a 1 turn recruitment time is too slow, while 0 turns is far too fast. What if you were to combine the RTR style cultural recruitment system with 0 turns? Then you would get the best of both worlds, I am sure, without millions of elite units being produced at once. What do you have planned for recruitment?

[Simetrical]

Originally Posted by Zenith Darksea

And finally, I'd like to end by saying how frustrating I find it when people try to impose modern Greek pronunciation and spelling (o oplitis? What the hell is that?) on Classical Greek

We have had to adopt a policy of no discussing Greek pronunciation with Greeks lest we all be driven insane. As you may or may not have determined from our big red announcement, we're looking for speakers of tonal languages in particular, and if you were exceedingly clever you may recall that reconstructed ancient Greek is a tonal language, whereas modern Greek is not, and nor is any other major language of the period; furthermore, you may have noted that the announcement stressed a native Mandarin/English speaker, and that configuration is peculiar in that the speaker would be familiar both with tones and with contrasting [t]/[tʰ]/[d]/[k]/[kʰ]/[g]/[p]/[pʰ]/[b], both of which are features of the reconstructed ancient Greek language and very few others. That we put particular stress on these aspects as opposed to others could also possibly be interpreted in light of the fact that ancient Greek was the most important language of the time and region.

Originally Posted by Zenith Darksea

What do you have planned for recruitment?

A combination of regional, factional, and date-based factors will play into recruitment in a generally rather complicated way. We will not be using zero-turn recruitment. I haven't investigated our system, actually, despite being a member, so I can't tell you more than that.

[Rosacrux redux]

[rant on]
Ah, ok, we'll have Greek with a Latin accent and German umlauts... damn, there goes the voicepack down the drain - I'll turn it off in my game, of course, but for heaven's sake, why do you go with erasmian? it is not correct, period.
[/rant off]

I am anticipating EB as no other mod, of course, but I am quite dissapointed that you went that way - although it was expected, as you are all westeners and not native Greek speakers, so your throat can't cope with the β, γ, δ and have learned Greek through its Latin transliterations... Oh, whatever. Keep on the good work and don't let the yammering of a single man (even if it is for historical accuracy reasons) to distress you (not that it could, but anyway...)

[Khelvan]

We are going with the contemporary academically recognized classical Greek pronunciation, as agreed upon by the multiple modern, native Greek speakers on our team (who can't do the voices, unfortunately), and our resident teacher of classical Greek (at a university); the consensus of our team, researchers, Greek speakers, and professional historians, as well as the consensus of the academic community as a whole, because our aim is true historical accuracy.

Any and all references to the so-called "Erasmus" are political in nature, and further discussion regarding this will be locked. If anyone feels the need to debate this, do it outside of the EB forum. If I have to, I will start deleting posts. I would do this for any small, outspoken community pushing their particular beef with modern historical research, so please don't take this as some sort of bias against those members of the Greek community who believe in this particular thing. This is one of those things where no matter what evidence is presented, no side will ever change; No one will ever agree, and arguments only lead to further angst.

Again, to make sure people understand: Like all things, we go with what we determine to be the most historically accurate, and in this case our research (including people who make their living doing it) agrees with the consensus of the modern academical community, excepting a small community with a claim to cultural inheritence. This particular point has been debated ad nauseum, and no further benefit can be derived from continuing it; it is purely political, and like most political arguments, no one wins, and everyone loses. There is no use beating yet another of a large herd of dead horses.

Either accept, as we have, that contemporary academia has as close to a reconstruction of classical Greek based on evidence as possible, or do not accept it; but don't raise the point here again.

Further posts claiming that we lack historical accuracy due to this will be deleted as trolling. And if you must debate this post in the non-EB political forum, don't bring us into this, we want no part of that argument.

Thank you for your time.