Goidils

[oudysseos]

Cyclops, your reasoning is sound, but incomplete: our goal is to represent the whole of the world covered by our map as best as is possible, given all the limits of the game engine and our knowledge of the peoples involved. Now, obviously, the peoples of the British Isles (just as an example) have much less information available for the time period in question, so the task of recreating their societies and trying to make a viable faction is very much harder than it is for, say, the Romans. This does not necessarily mean that there won't be any faction(s) there. It would be very unrealistic for such a large part of the map to be "empty", when we know that there was a lot going on there, even if we don't have very many details. But we don't want to fill up the map just 'cos it's empty: there is a minimum amount of information that we need to make something work.


'Goidils', by the way, is kinda meaningless. 'Goidelic' is a term used in the past to group together the Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx languages, but as nomenclature is pretty old-fashioned. There is no evidence that there was ever a group of people who called themselves 'Goidils', and particularly not in the EB time frame (the word dates to somewhere in the 6th century AD, I believe). The 'Invasions' model of Irish pre-history has also been by and large abandoned, so you're not gonna hear many modern academics talking about 'Goidils' at all.

So if the OP is interested in seeing a native Irish faction in EB, he needs to do a little more research. Too bad he won't have time before the Occulti remove his internal organs and replace them with Cheez Wiz as a warning to others.

Oh, Alsatia? No, you shouldn't.

[Cyclops]

Cyclops ...

Thank you for responding so courteously and promptly. For some reason I felt there should be hostility between us, but Nobody can tell me why.

...Cheez Wiz...

Mmmmmmmm...cheez wiz...

Well its better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. Dang, why does that ring a bell?

[oudysseos]

Well, I can do hostility, if you really want.

But seriously, there is a conundrum for us that is both frustrating and fascinating. Sticking with Britain as our examplar, Cunliffe's massive body of work gives us a lot of archaeological material to work with, and we can can broadly identify at least two "cultures" that could fit well into the EB framework: the Arras Culture to the north (maybe the Parisi, or the Brigantes) and the Aylesford-Swarling Culture to the south (the Cassi and others mentioned in Caesar). From these sources we have weapons, chariots, horse architecture, household goods, votive offerings and settlement patterns. A lot, really. What we don't have is any written history until 200 years or so after EB begins, and since we don't do emergent factions, that's a real problem. There is a lot of coinage that gives us the names of Kings/Chieftains and indirectly indicates some of the political history, but these don't appear until maybe 150 years after our starting date, and are anyway probably a result of increasing Belgic influence (not invasion) in the southeast of the island, something which, in an alternative timeline, might not have happened as it did.

Bugger.

So what should we do? Clearly, there were people there deserving a faction, and probably more than one (if we had no hard-coded limits, of course). But we don't have most of the information that we would really need to be historically accurate as per our mission statement. We don't even really for sure know the names that the tribes called themselves in the 3rd century BCE, although 'Casse' is a damn good guess. We don't have any real battle narratives, so we have only a vague idea of what kind of units to model/skin: we have to retroject from Caesar and extrapolate from the physical remains. Which is fun, of course, but a lot more work than some of the Hellenic factions with (relatively) a lot of textual support.

Multiply this problem by every other area of the EB world besides Rome and the Diodachoi and you may begin to see why it's not done yet.

Oh, Cyclops, your poke in the eye with a burnt stick is on the way. With love from the Occulti.
Bwaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

[Cyclops]

Well, I can do hostility, if you really want. ...

Sorry its a sort of extended pun on our names...but you probably knew that..same with the burnt stick reference...and the "Nobody" line...I was going to say "Oddysseos, he's a Nobody" but I thought it might sound aggressive rather than humorous.

I must say I love the inclusion of the Casse, I really missed an insular faction in RTR (when that was a going concern). I realise they embody a serious historical argument, but I also appreciate them for gameplay reasons.

Certainly in ancient narratives culture movements were often retold as invasions. To flip that, given the amount of casual warfare in pre-modern societies I would be surprised if any culture shift/transimission/whatever occured without a ripple of associated conflicts.

Tha Galatian move into Cappadocia was a mighty raid, and perhaps atypical of the other Celtic movements into Britain and Iberia, but the later celtic culture included somewhat militarised princedoms. I reckon they loved a biff, as well as a good poem-off-and-dance-with-a-druid. I mean the irish records (imaginative as they are) take for granted a background level of raiding and fighting, so any culture change could have involved a level of conflict not inconsistant with the way RTW models warfare.

Might it match the narrative pattern of EB to have the Casse even begin in Belgium with a stack in rebel held SE Britain, as a way of modelling the "infiltration/transmission " of continental Celtism into the insular world?

Just speculatin'.

I love the possibility of more insulars, but I realise there are better documented areas as you say (and as I posted earlier in my nifty spoilered post-love those spoiler wraps).

[Alsatia]

Oh, Alsatia? No, you shouldn't.

Sorry. Didn't read that post.

So sorry. Honest!

It is hard to do ancient Britain as Odysseous said, there are few sourcers and they only get the information when Caesar invaded. Before then, it seems Britain is a dark world.

[Irishmafia2020]

Here's a vote for another British faction... whether they are called "Goidils" "Caledonians" or some more specific name doesn't matter to me especially, although i do applaud the historical accuracy attempted, but from a gameplay perspective, another faction would really spice up the isles, and the Goidilic unit roster (however inaccurate) was nearly complete in EB1.

[Ludens]

Here's a vote for another British faction... whether they are called "Goidils" "Caledonians" or some more specific name doesn't matter to me especially, although i do applaud the historical accuracy attempted, but from a gameplay perspective, another faction would really spice up the isles, and the Goidilic unit roster (however inaccurate) was nearly complete in EB1.

EB is all about accuracy, so it does matter to them.

[Phalanx300]

Makes me wonder how they even got the units to look that way if they weren't historical in the first place, must have been some sources right?

[Ludens]

Makes me wonder how they even got the units to look that way if they weren't historical in the first place, must have been some sources right?

The problem is Ranika and Anthony haven't mentioned their sources, so they can't be found. For the record, though, that does not mean it doesn't exist. I get the impression that early-Celtic Irish archaeology is an obscure field even for historians. A lot of Celtic material hasn't even been translated yet, simply because there is no one to work on it.

[oudysseos]

I get the impression that early-Celtic Irish archaeology is an obscure field even for historians.

Sadly, this is all too true. While there is (a lot) more to it than this, a great deal of what Anthony and Ranika put together was extrapolated from much later textual sources or based on older scholarship that has now come under increasing scrutiny.

Of course, almost everything in EB is conjecture in some degree: even for the military units that everyone here thinks they know all about, like the Romans, there is in fact very very little concrete, unequivocal evidence. The new work being done on the Celtic units (just as an example) is still interpretation and guess-work: somewhat better documented guesswork we hope, but we will never truly know very much about the warriors of the ancient world. Most of what we have is third-hand opinions recycled as 'fact' by over-enthusiastic fanboys. We are doing our best to root our interpretations in referenced archaeology and texts, that's all.

[Elmetiacos]

The problem is Ranika and Anthony haven't mentioned their sources, so they can't be found. For the record, though, that does not mean it doesn't exist. I get the impression that early-Celtic Irish archaeology is an obscure field even for historians. A lot of Celtic material hasn't even been translated yet, simply because there is no one to work on it.

Yes it has. It is, however, of very marginal interest for EBII because it all dates from the 6th Century AD at the very earliest. Ireland is an interesting place up to the Middle Bronze Age and from the Dark Ages, but in the early 3rd Century BC it's a bit of a dismal backwater with poor material technology and a low population.