Sources for Factions

[Hetairos]

Hi guys,

I am looking to create a mod for Rome II that follows the spirit of RSII (sorry, DeI and others, but those are not nearly close to RSII). One of my problems is that for certain factions I have more than enough historical sources, but for others I have nothing. e.g. for the Roman and Greek (partly Eastern) world I have very detailed sources about units, buildings etc. BUT for carthage, suebi and all other tribes I heavily lack sources. The only unit I could find for carthage is their mercenaries and the sacred band. Now I wonder where all the native names come from. Dork'im etc. Saka Rauka and more. When you google most of the native names the only websites that appear are either total war sites OR there is no result at all. When asking other Rome II overhauls like DeI everybody claims to be historically accurate, but when I investigate further nobody knows about the resources and where those names units buildings come from. Hence I assume they do use EB and RSII material mainly. Hence my question:

Where do you guys take your informations from? Could you share the sources in a open source style so i can dig into them and work on integrating those informations into Rome II? Also, if there are no sources for unit names for example carthaginian (as almost no primary source survived over the course of the history) how did you define them? Was it made by a native speaker. or somebody who knew or studied punic / phoenician / berber? So in that case it would not be names from historical sources, but a linguistic effort.

I would thank you a 1000 times if you could help me and share in the name of open source and make Rome II a better game as well (just like RSII!)

Thanks for the great mod, which i still prefer over Rome II's current state and mods!

Alec

[Tyblitz]

EB does have its own "dedicated historians" in the team; I think I read that in the description.
Not a historian msyself, but I've wondered about this question too and thought about some sources, hopefully they will help you somehow.

I've focused on carthage for a lil test search too...

• I remember some libraries (yes, books!) contained quite a lot of information about historic units & their equipments, e.g. the French encyclopedia 'Encyclopedia Universalis' http://www.universalis.fr is quite a good one I think.
• As a military miniature fan, I love to get inspiration from these for names/ visuals (not historically accurate though). Have a look at http://www.zvezda.org.ru (Historic) or http://www.italeri.com/categoria.asp?idCategoria=34
• Even National Geographic has some info apparently: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ng...geographic.com
• Google books shows some promising previews, eg. http://books.google.be/books?id=cki8...page&q&f=false tells us that the Carthaginian armies were often a heterogeneous mass. From wikipedia:

  The most distinct feature of the Carthaginian army was it composition. Contrary to most other states in the Mediterranean at the time, the army was composed almost exclusively of foreign mercenary units while its navy was manned by citizens. Carthage lacked a history of citizen infantry forces, requiring its army be composed mainly of foreign troops, particularly Libyans, Numidians, Iberians, Gauls, and Greeks.

I think your easiest shot is to have a look at the EB unit lists on their website though, then look up the unit names in Google..
I believe the info in EB was assembled or deduced from different sources, articles into coherent descriptions, and that it took a hell load of time,
but correct me if I'm wrong.