Factions and units - info and descriptions

[Urnamma]

One thing seems to be sure, the 'Sacred Band' Inf had large shields which suggests the use of hoplites and not pikes since as you personally and correctly suggested, using pikes meant using smaller shields.

You're right. They did indeed use long spears, not pikes. My misreading came from my mistranslation of a particular passage last year. I got the case of the nouns wrong. One was in nominative, the other in accusative, you know the story with such things... There are Greek sources other than Polybius though. Most of them are fragmentary.

Lol... man ! I think we should keep both since there was a punic civic cavalry that is missing in the game. Something alongside the 'Long Shield Cav' but with perhaps more morale. About the Heavy Iberian Cav I will have to do some more research since their description is varied. Some even say they were heavily armoured so I'll have to look better into that.

Sweet. Maybe we should get rid of long shields?

This is a problem then. If one makes as you say, it won't be able to train both types of units since we can only build one type of temple per city... and since the SB units should be only buildable in Carthage we have a problem. As I asked before... is it possible to allow building more than one temple per city? If not we should reconsider about puting both types of SB units trainable for the same temple.

We could just have the sacred band infantry trainable by barracks. That'd eliminate the problem

Ok, we can put in the Balearic skirmishers. These would have slightly more skirmishing qualities like speed, stamina and ammo (javelins) than the Iberian Caetrati (aka 'Iberian Infantry') who would have better charge and melee attack/defense stats. The Lybian javelineers would remain the lower quality skirmishers.

Indeed.

The only somewhat suspicious evidence some people base their assertions on regarding the phoenicians are the quotes from the Bible:

Nope... There are some primary texts that support it. I really don't see why sacrificial sites would increase law and order though.. In any case, it doesn't matter. Let's find something to redo the secret police crap. Who ever heard of Punic Secret Police?

I tend to disagree. The Iberian (and Numidian, greek, gallic etc) batallions were hired/recruited along with their original 'field commanders'. The carthaginian officer corps would command above these 'field commanders' but not directly with the troops in most cases. Comprehensible regarding also the different languages that all these people had. I agree that the recruited ones could be forced to an higher degree of "discipline and battle order" but also remember that that would be compensated by the fact that they were fighting for another country. Concluding, trying to avoid overcrowding of similar units which obviously means more work.

So lower morale but better discipline?

[Ranika]

Is it possible for a temple to provide a bonus to only a single troop type, but not allow the building of that soldier? That way, you could make the Carthaginian sacred bands buildable by a regular barracks, but have the proper temple provide a bonus to the bands that would be trained for it? Or perhaps, a weapon bonus for the type of weapon the band would be using (do they all use heavy?)