More Roman units please. :/
Missing camillan slingers, rorarii, pedites extraordinarii, 1 or 2 more medium level italian allies... I mean, I hate to be that guy who goes "anti-roman bias!!" but Greeks already had a lot of units and it seems they're getting a lot more, and from what I read you're thinking of not even giving Extraordinarii cavalry their own independent unit, it just starts not making much logic and you can't really go "Romans already have more units than many factions" now.
Last edited by HarkonRules; September 08, 2015 at 05:20 PM.
? Camilian slingers are in, pedites extraordinari will be in the autumn release (but not with the round shield, with the scutum) and rorarii were considered ahistorical and wont be in EB2.
Then, as throngs of his enemies bore down upon him and one of his followers said, "They are making at thee, O King," "Who else, pray," said Antigonus, "should be their mark? But Demetrius will come to my aid." This was his hope to the last, and to the last he kept watching eagerly for his son; then a whole cloud of javelins were let fly at him and he fell.
-Plutarch, life of Demetrius.
Arche Aiakidae-Epeiros EB2 AAR
No, camillan slingers are not in. Only javelin throwers, Leves. Still missing quite a few.
There will be no other Camillian Roman skirmishers than Leves. Rorarii and Accensi were camp followers at best, an ahistorical fiction at worst.
The Camillian roster is almost complete from a Roman perspective, but missing lots of Italic units. The Polybian roster is missing various socii/allied units.
Last edited by QuintusSertorius; September 09, 2015 at 03:28 AM.
Yeah, honestly I don't really give a about Rorarii and Accensi; it was cool from a gameplay perspective to have readily available and cheap slinger and reserve spearmen but not worth it if they were ahistorical as it seems. The Italian Allies are the major thing here.
I went through the export_descr_unit file. If all the Italic units mentioned there get made, the Romans will have a huge roster to draw upon from Italy alone. Rorarii and Accensi, who needs them?
You'll have the Lucanians, for example, who can more than fill the role of light spearmen. I don't think there are any proper missile troops (ie archers or slingers) amongst the Italian troops, though. You'd have to go to the Greek or Celtic rosters for those.
Wait, what? Did the Romans during the first two Punic Wars make absolutely no use of long-range missile troops like slingers? Polybius, being the chief source for the Punic Wars, seems rather ambiguous about the matter in some passages, and explicit in others. When referring to Greek campaigns in his history, he explicitly mentions archers and slingers, but rarely does this for the Romans. From what I've read about the Romans, for instance his passage in Book X on the Siege of Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena, Spain) in 209 BC, the Roman forces on land were led by Scipio Africanus while Gaius Laelius commanded the fleet that blockaded the city along the coastline. Polybius writes that the ships in the fleet of Laelius were "furnished with all kinds of missiles" on board. He doesn't say specifically what these were, though. However, in Book VIII, he does mention that, during the earlier Siege of Syracuse (214 - 212 BC), the Roman commander Marcus Claudius Marcellus was "attacking Achradina from the sea with sixty quinqueremes, each of which was full of men armed with bows, slings, and javelins, meant to repulse those fighting from the battlements." So it appears the Romans did have slingers and archers, although I'm not sure if these were ethnic Greek mercenaries or Sicilian auxiliaries.
I'm sure that I could find more examples if I combed through Polybius a bit more carefully, but I'm too lazy to do that. Plus, I think you get the point. It is entirely historically accurate to represent the Romans as having access to slingers and archers long before the period of major expansion throughout the Mediterranean starting in the mid 2nd century BC.
Last edited by Roma_Victrix; September 09, 2015 at 06:25 AM.
I think the implication is that they didn't have any native missile troops, beyond javelineers. I've seen suggestions that post-Marian legionaries carried slings, for example, but nothing on a Roman/Latin/Italic equivalent of the Greek psiloi.
Our historians seem pretty certain on the point, so I think we have to surmise that those missile troops described were mercenaries or auxiliaries. Just as the later Roman armies used auxiliaries for non-line-infantry roles.
There's little doubt that the missile troops fighting for Rome in the siege of Syracuse were auxiliaries or mercenaries instead of Roman citizens. However, it is perhaps an important distinction to note where they came from. Were they Celtic in origin, Greek in origin, or drawn from one of the various Italic allied city-states on the Italian peninsula? Did the Etruscans, Umbrians, Samnites, etc. have their own slingers and archers inspired by Greek influence?
I've seen some concepts for other Italic troops - they're all infantry of various weights, none of them missile troops. I've asked the question, but it does appear that there are no plans for native Italian missile units.
EDIT: In fact I did raise this point, which resulted in the changes to Roman recruitment to have more skirmishers available. The upshot was this:
So yes, foreigners were generally the missile units.There is no mention of Sagitarii or Funditores prior to the 2nd Punic War and even then it was by hiring foreign specialists that the Roman army acquired them...
Having learnt the hard way how important such troops were during the previous wars...
Last edited by QuintusSertorius; September 09, 2015 at 08:16 AM.
How reliable is the export_descr_unit file about units that will be in eb? cause there is some amazing and exciting stuff in there =D
Not too reliable, I'm afraid. Most of the undone unit entries in the EDU are either outdated or just copied from EB1. In fact, our own internal lists aren't too accurate either, since units are taken out or added to it all the time. So there aren't any accurate lists of what units will or will not be in EBII at all.
EDIT: Ninja'ed by Quintus
New Late Lybian Skirmishers.... VERY NICE!
Just one question:
why exactly are rorarrii and accensi considered ahistorical troops in EB2 and what sources are used for that conclusion, because I'd like to read more about it.
Thanks in advance.
ddd
Last edited by Rad; September 09, 2015 at 03:57 PM.
NOTE: totalwar.org, and the EBII dev forums hosted on it, are currently down. As such, Twitter updates are currently suspended until the forum gets back up.
I like the new Extraordinarii pics. Great! The Roman roster is going to be really fleshed out this time around.