Quote Originally Posted by WinsingtonIII View Post
Who says the Chinese would be invading the Roman Empire? If anything, given the expansionist tendencies of the Romans it would more likely be the other way around, and in my opinion the defender has the inherent advantage here. With two massive entities like this, it's not going to come down to tactics, weaponry or generals, it's going to come down to attrition. In the expanses of the Western Chinese steppe, it doesn't necessarily matter if the Romans win battle after battle, they still have to keep marching forward into hostile, unforgiving territory inhabited by a hostile population. Plus, I do not doubt the nomads would take the opportunity to raid the supplies of both sides, but the Chinese do not have as far to go to resupply. By the time the Romans reached the major population centers further East they would be demoralized, exhausted, starving, and their forces would be depleted from the toils of the journey and nomadic raids. The Central Asian Steppe is simply not the kind of terrain you march an army across and expect them to come out on the other side ready to fight (unless your forces are nomadic and used to that lifestyle). As such, if the Chinese were the ones to attack, they would most likely lose as well. But in my opinion, if this were to ever happen (very unlikely in the first place), it would have been the Romans doing the attacking, not the other way around.
Rome once tried to fight a much smaller and much less powerfull opponent, the south Arabians, this way. With much smaller a distance, which was often traversed by travelling merchant (incense route), with much less plundering nomads on their path. And of course Arabia wasn't the most forgiving terrain, but the path to China has it's fair share of extreme climates and terrains as well. Perhaps even much more so than Arabia. Considering they had much less knowledge on the far east than Arabia the path must have been even more difficult to walk. And as Rome failed to overcome in South arabia from divided people with much less resources and in no way a comparible army, I fail to see how they could have ever made a succesfull invasion of the more resourcefull, advanced, much more populous, distanced,... Chinese.