In praise of carriage ballistae

Knowing how useless normal ballistae are I avoided buying the mobile variety for some time. Having now used them I believe they are the saving of the western Empire. Just one of them, accompanied by a General, can dispose of most rebels and quickly earn experience points for itself and the General, especially as the odds are always heavily against the Romans numerically.

They are effectively invulnerable as long as you keep them well away from archers and light cavalry, or charge such units down first with the General. I've also found they provide an unpleasant surprise of besieging armies.

No doubt they are another of RTW's anachronisms, but they're great fun and very useful. I recommend them to any discerning Roman Emperors!

I would like this unit if it couldn't fire until you stopped moving, but as a mobile weapons platform, I find it a little silly to take seriously. Reminds of something out of the A-Team really, except without Mr. T, Murdock and chums. Obviously it has it's uses though and probably can be fun at times.

I actually quite like the normal ballistae, well the Scorpions and Repeating ballistae, but only if I increase the number of artillery pieces to 3 or 4 per unit. That way when attacking an AI on the defense, you can slowly but surely pepper them with your artillery, but you have to protect it from cavalry and infantry charges. Whilst on the defense yourself, unless you have a very steep hill, I mostly find ballistae useless again.

In point of fact, those are not anachronistic, though the games implementation may be incorrect. Small scorpions mounted on mule carts were an integral part of the roman legions in the empire. I don't know a lot about the miltary of the later empire, though, so I don't know if they were still in use by the time period of the game.

I'll bet they didn't have the effect of mobile machine guns though!

Probably not, no. But, there are figures on Trajan's Column showing them shooting over the heads of the legionarii. They wouldn't have been the most accurate things anyway, but I don't see any reason why they would not be able to fire while moving. I don't think they would have fired (or moved for that matter) at the speed of a chariot in battle, though. I only used them once in BI, and discovered that they weren't very effective at firing over the heads of a line of troops in front; they shot through them instead, with tremendous casualties as a result.

Yes, that's quite true, they do often cause friendly casualties. However, if stationed in front of other troops and to the side of the enemy they are devastating. Rebels with no archers are easy meat!