Historical accuracy: Questions about Parthia and Thrace

[Parzival2211]

Hi, first of all thank you very much for this amazing mod that I downloaded last week and got totally addicted, too.

Coming from RTW vanilla and knowing a little bit about ancient history, I have a couple of questions about some changes you made and the historical background:

1. Parthia starts with 2 settlements, in one of which you can't recruit HA... seems like the HA and cav character of the Parthians has been reduced compared to vanilla, and inf plays a bigger role. Why was that done?

2. The Thracians inhabit an area North of the region, which bears their name. (More where the Dacians were in vanilla, which of course, doesn't represent the situation in 280BC) Did they kind of migrate to Thrace only later?

3. Swordmen play a larger role in the army of Macedon than I expected. Where swordmen an important part of Macedon's armies in that period?


Thank you very much in advance.

[Carados]

1)
There was a lot more infantry in Parthian "armies" than you might think. Though they mostly performed garrison duties and the like. There was one idea that the Parthian army at Carrhae was actually the first time they had used a 100% cavalry force, and that it was somewhat unintentional because all of the infantry were taken on campaign into the Armenia region which is somewhat unsuited for cavalry. Thus, all the cavalry was left behind leaving the 10'000 horsemen to deal with whatever (which happened to be Crassus, as it turned out).

2)
The Thracians actually inhabit Thrace and there are some in Bithnyia as well. So roughly all of region inbetween all that except for the Greek colonies. The "Thracians" in
RTRPE should really be the Getai-Dacians or something along those lines.

3)
Nope. This is something they got wrong. The Hypaspists with spears should be the only one available for all of the Diadochi that have access to them.


RTRPE is a finished mod. No one works on it anymore but there are still lots of historical inaccuracies. The original team has broken up and gone off on their own endaevours. The current RTR team is working on RTRVII. RTRVII only goes from Spain to the far West of Asia Minor, and from North Africa to Central Europe - so no Britain or parts of Scandinavia are present. There are some other mods that continue the work of RTRPE but none of them are members of the team that created RTR.

I would suggest you have a look at the current RTR work (near the top you should see this: Total War Center Forums > Total War: Eras > Rome: Total War Hosted Modifications > Rome: Total Realism (RTR) > RTR Gold & Platinum - you want to click "Rome: Total Realism (RTR)" - that should send you to the newest stuff). Alternatively, you can try ExRM which is a completely seperate entity that continues modding RTRPE to their own end making it even more historical accurate (indeed, ExRM stands for "Extended Realism"). You can find some information on ExRM in my sig.

They are both a lot more accurate than RTRPE and try to play as close to history as is possible - without dictating it to you.

[Parzival2211]

Great answer! Thank you very much +rep!