Theory Crafting: non-Roman army names (non-stupid)

[Tim_Ward]

Ok, so to my knowladge the Romans were the only Culture of this time period to develop permanent standing formations which they went to the trouble of giving names, and even had a standardised naming convention for those formations, this being

Legio [x] [placename or badass sounding thing]


Since Total War is about alternative history, if you play a faction other than Rome you're going to end up with an empire comparable in scale to the Roman one, and perhaps your empire would need a similarly formalised military structure and perhaps it would develop it's own naming convention for it's standing forces. I don't believe anyone back then would have had an army called "The Badass Motherers" or "Extra-Killy Warriors" or whatever is in CAs list of default army names.

I don't really know much about other cultures though. All I got is that Greek cultures would probably have something like Stratia Alpha, Stratia Beta and so on, maybe with some religious or geographical references thrown in. Does anyone who knows more about the other cultures in the game and their languages have any better ideas?

[Keyser]

Most other culture/state wouldn't have large formations such as legions to name. The closest, yet very different, would be a spartan lochos (1000 men), named from one of the five districts of Sparta, later the tactical units changed and the mora (equivalent to a roman cohort) replaced the lochos, there were 6 mora, i don't know if they were named. There are also hellenistic sub-units composing the pikemen phalanx, i guess they would have been named too (by the commander's name, or by garrison district (or place of origin)).

Now regarding a full army, it's a different matter, the roman themselves never deployed a legion alone (in the republic at least) and as far as i know they didn't name their army. The name of the commander would have been enough to dismiss any confusion.
It's the same for the other faction. Few factions actually used more than a field army at once and if they did, they probably refered to them by the name of the commander.
I guess another possibility would be to name the army according to it's area of operation, like it was often done later.

CA's idea is nice, but not really realistic in fact.

[Jester]

in Jack s walkthrough you can see that one of his macedonian army is called 'Odysseus Wanderers'

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Name them after famous kings?

[Marcus Aemilius Lepidus]

I call at least one Army Royal Macedonian Lifeguard, and others problably after famous Generals of mine, so that they are Remembered. Like Antigonos's Wrath or something like that.

[geala]

The legions were named very late in the R2TW time period. In contrast to the Hellenistic kingdoms Rome had more or less no standing professional units, all were just militia. The standing units of the other states had names, for example the professional core unit of Antigonid Macedon were the "peltasts", numbering about 5000. Part of the peltasts were the "agema", an even more elite unit, numbering probably about 2000. Other units were also named, parts of the sarisai phalanges were the "chalkaspides" (bronze shields) and "leukaspides" (white shields). These bigger units were subdivided in several smaler divisons, like chiliarchies, together they formed the whole phalanx. Wether the peltasts and the agema also fought with sarisai/pikes or were armed differently is not exactly known. Naming whole armies is another theme. I would give them fantasy names because I don't know about actual ancient names. For example I would name one army "Army of the West" or "Army of the Syrenaike" or "Army of the Transdanubian" or something like this. If I would play a Celitc or Germanic faction I would name them after the leaders.