Quintus Sertorius' Guide to Conduct Becoming of a True Roman (Redux for EB)

[socal_infidel]

This is a great guide by the way. Thanks for the effort. I had never played Romani before, in part because I wasn't at all familiar with their historical expansion timeline, army composition, etc.

But with this Guide as a, well guide, I've been enjoying my first Romani campaign. So thanks! I'm just not sure how long I can keep up this facade of the First Punic War. It's only 259 and Carthage really has no army in Sicily worth fighting. I could destroy the army they have camped outside Lilibeo rather easily, but am hoping they get something a bit larger together before acting. In any event, cheers!

[QuintusSertorius]

At that time I switched to using BI as my executable, and Sicily and Sardinia both got invaded a few times, sometimes with pretty big stacks. Otherwise I kept using the console to give them money. At around 257BC a second family member appears in Lilibeo, and then ventures out and hires mercs. It's worth waiting for. In the real war there weren't that many set piece battles, it was mostly lots of raids, skirmishes and sieges of small communities, along with some major naval battles.

[lobf]

Question, Quintus-

For your Quincunx, do you have your principes close the line between the hastati before fighting begins?

[QuintusSertorius]

Question, Quintus-

For your Quincunx, do you have your principes close the line between the hastati before fighting begins?

Nope, I wait until the hastati are engaged before directing them to one side or other. Sure my hastati get chewed up a bit (they're always on Guard mode, indeed all my line troops always are), but then when the principes get stuck in the enemy is worn out. Or sometimes I just let the enemy flow into the gaps and meet the principes, where they get muellered.

Here's an example of what my formation tends to look like:

[J.Alco]

There's one thing about the formation system that bugs me. Obviously EB is still, at the end of it all, a game and it's impossible to be 100% accurate in a game but I've always felt that replicating the Quincux in the way shown above makes the formation appear more like a sieve than a firm battle-line. I remember reading that a Roman republican battle-line would be arranged thus (this is just a quick example):

Ally---Hast---Hast---Ally
---Ally---Hast---Hast---Ally

and so on and so forth for the 2nd and 3rd lines. Meaning that when the enemy line came closer to the Roman army the line would re-arrange itself thusly:

Ally-Ally-Hast-Hast-Hast-Hast-Ally-Ally

I'm wondering, is it possible to simulate this historical unit composition in EB in the following manner:

Ally---Hast
---Hast---Ally

And stretch out the units so that they cover the same ground as when the units are seperated as in the example above. Thus when the enemy army comes close, a little repositioning results in:

Ally-Hast-Hast-Ally

Is this realistically possible? Or would it result be that the units would turn out far too thin and stretched out to be effective in close combat? Would it even be worth the trouble?

[QuintusSertorius]

Re-arranging your formation on contact with the enemy is a recipe for chaos and defeat. It took hours just to line up in the quincunx in the first place. I agree with Goldsworthy when he says the Romans fought in the quincunx, with the gaps in it. In any case, we don't have enough units to collapse lines on contact.

In real life most lines weren't literal solid lines, there were gaps between units because an unbroken one was impossible to hold when marching, it's just that the spaces in a Roman line were bigger than those other peoples might have.

Given the limitations of how many units you can have in a stack, I think it's better to use one line of units to represent the entirety of that line, rather than several. There simply aren't enough units to have multiple hastati maniples in the first line, multiple principes maniples in the second and so on.

The formation you see in the screenshot has worked time and again, against everything I've thrown it at. The first line always gets badly mauled, they tend to take the bulk of any casualties, but then when the second line gets involved the enemy is worn out. The only annoyance comes with the default formation files, sometimes when you try to move the whole army, it completely messes up the formation pulling them all into one line.

[J.Alco]

Allright, I'll take your word for it as you've thoroughly tested that formation so if it works, it works.

Out of curiosity, what's the title of Goldsworthy's book you mentioned? Would I be able to find it on Amazon?