Romans are hobbits!!!

[Kroakie]

Is it just me or do the models of your units look a tad too small? Just go into battle and walk into a forest. See how big that tree is compared to your troops? It looks like a bloody skyscraper besides your men. A war elephant would look like Godzilla. Or view your city in 3D mode and compare your plebians to your buildings. A single step of a staircase would reach up to their knee. It's kind of distracting when the rest of the game aims so much at realism.

[Sinner]

Yah, it's something I noticed and just sighed about, ticking it off as another oddity of the game.

Of course, if the Romans were hobbits it would explain their preference for infantry... getting up on horseback would be quite difficult without ladders.

[Lord Ovaat]

Actually, I'm rather impressed with the authenticity of the "huge" trees. Remember, this would have been all virgin forest--uncut, 500-1000 years old. I've been in stands of native American Sugar Maple, Hemlock, White Pine, White Oak, etc. The boles (trunks) are straight as a poker, without any branches, for the first 100 feet or so in height, then the branches form the canopy that lets in almost no sunlight. The boles, by the way, are often five or more feet in DIAMETER. Now, these aren't Giant Redwoods, just normal Hemlocks that have survived for 500 years. But it is a real treat to see something like that. It reminds me of being in a cathedral, but far more spiritual. Yeah, I like the "big" trees. Good job, CA. (It was probably a mistake, and the devs are saying, "Man, we really screwed-up on size. Let's use that virgin tree thingy as an explanation.")

[Tamur]

(It was probably a mistake, and the devs are saying, "Man, we really screwed-up on size. Let's use that virgin tree thingy as an explanation.")

Hehehe! I've wondered about that, but having been to several places where the "standard" tree varieties are 80-100 feet tall, they're certainly not out of the question.

[CGS]

They might be hobbits, but it seems how tall you are is not related with how much land you can conquer

[Lonewarrior]

Give them some steroids

[Medieval Assassin]

Boo-hoo, complain...

[Uesugi Kenshin]

The virgin forest thing sounds right, but if you compare roman infantry to other infantry are they shorter? Because Romans were short and their method of combat is best when used by a shorter person against a taller person. For example the Gladius, their standard stabbing short sword, much easier to stab up than down!

[Siris]

That's partely because of the tree's explained above, and because the Romans themselves were no more than 5 ft. tall generally. Yea, they were short people. And no, I'm not lying.

[Oaty]

That's partely because of the tree's explained above, and because the Romans themselves were no more than 5 ft. tall generally. Yea, they were short people. And no, I'm not lying.

So is that why the big barbarian penis intimidated them?

Actually the further north you went the more they had to rely on meat wich resulted in the taller people came from up north. Its either that or its genetics as one of the Scandanavian countries has the tallest people in the world

[Maedhros]

The tallest people in the world are now Dutch I believe. Unseating the old champions the Americans.

People of the ancient world were much smaller everywhere. Probably due to diet and more rampant sickness.


If the trees were smaller and had branches closer to the ground it would be harder to fight and direct men in the woods. The giant trees makes this task simpler without giving anything up.

[Jugurtha]

On the respective size of people. A recent study has shown that whereas 200 years ago Americans (Euorpean ones) were on average 2 inches taller than Europeans, the situation is now reversed and Europeans are, on average, 2 inches taller than Americans. Apparently it is all down to diet and the availability of medical health systems. 200 years ago Americans were getting all the excerce and good food they needed unlike in Europe. Nowadays many are eating the wrong things and European free access to health and "better" foods has reversed the situation. Furthermore, the Dutch are now the tallest in Europe, averaging 4-5 inches more than Americans, the study went on to state that his was in large part down to Holland having the best pre and post natal treatment available.

Also, on the size of the trees being down to their being "virgin", this is very suspect. I remember seeing a programme on the BBC which challenged this. Basically, it had always been assumed that until fairly reently, certainly at the time of the Roman invasions, Britain was largely covered in primordial forests. The programme went on to show that this had been largely untrue for up to a thousand years before. Humans had been interacting and having a much more significant impact on the environment than had been assumed clearing forests, copicing, etc...

[Octavius Julius]

The size of the trees doesn't bother me. There are pine trees and they do grow very large anyhow.

I would prefer though if there were more varieties of trees. For example, if you fight a battle in Brittania or Hibernia, there were no pine trees there at the time of the Roman invasions. These trees were imported from Scandinavia and continental Europe for the purposes of producing timber for lumber mills.

Anyhow, the size of the trees needs to be large because if they were small and tighly planted as they might appear in reality, then it would be really difficult trying to see and manage your troops.

Forest battles are the hardest to fight in my opinion.

[CBR]

5 feet?? I have not seen any studies mentioning average height to be so low.

The Mediterranean people are a bit shorter than north Europeans but two thousand years they were still about an average of 165 centimeters tall (5'5") for males.


CBR

[Nelson]

Nowadays many are eating the wrong things and European free access to health and "better" foods has reversed the situation. Furthermore, the Dutch are now the tallest in Europe, averaging 4-5 inches more than Americans, the study went on to state that his was in large part down to Holland having the best pre and post natal treatment available.

Well Jugurtha, assuming that your stats are correct, I doubt that health care and diet are the big reasons. The USA has millions of recent latino and Asian immigrants that would pull down the average height. Black and white Americans are plenty tall. If a big wave of Central American people arrived in Holland the average size would plummet.

I also agree with CBR. Romans were taller than 5'. They might not have typically been as big as Germans but they were not tiny.

[CBR]

An increase in the Hispanic population would make up for part of the difference but diet means something too. There is a difference in height between upper and lower social classes and USA has a bigger gap compared to northern European countries.


CBR

[Lord Ovaat]

Point of fact is that large scale deforestation didn't occur do to farming, except in some areas where intensive slave labor may have been used. Farms were generally small and tended by a handful of folks. What started dwindling the forests was ore smelting. This, of course, would have started earlier than our period in question, but when one considers the vast size of Europe, the majority of the forest would still have been virgin. Prior to smelting, the only reasons to cut trees were for fuel and land clearance for farming. That would only have affected small areas. Smelting was the culprit. When the trees became harder to come by, someone figured out that you could use "coke" by pre-burning coal. That started intensive coal mining. England, being rather isolated, would probably have felt the effects of deforestation before those living on the continent. For whatever reason, England seems to have been settled earlier than a lot of the mainland. Don't believe the archeologists have yet found a reason for this. Maybe, once they got there, they couldn't leave. OK. Sorry.

And yes, the Romans were notorously small in stature. Hobbits? No. If you've spent your life living among folks who average 5' to 5 1/2', imagine coming across Germans who averaged six inches taller? Any wonder the Romans feared the Black Forest? And as for the average size of American's getting shorter, that can only be explained by the huge influx every year of illegal aliens. Estimates run 1 to 3 million per year. Most whites of European decent and most blacks in the US are not shrinking. Lord, they're all taller than I am! But, alas, we do "shrink" as we get older. So, maybe that's my problem.

[CBR]

Some links about average height through the ages:


http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...ist/height.htm

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-mfe090104.php

http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/wwl/...omillennia.pdf

http://www.nber.org/~confer/2002/si2002/steckel.pdf


CBR

[MadKow]

Portugal used to have the shortest population of Europe, on average, but not anymore. I believe the average height increased over 3 inches (9cm) during last century, and from those, 2 inches during the last 30-40 years.
The main causes are certainly better pre and post natal care, and general wealth of the population, and correspondent changes in food habits, namely the inclusion of calcium rich dairy products in children diet.
You may find it hard to believe but it would be common in poor rural areas some 40 years ago to feed children with a soup made of bread soaked in wine. That didn't produce tall, handsome, smart adults, for sure...

[Silver Rusher]

Remember, at this time the Romans were smaller, no, MUCH smaller than Italians are now. Back then, their health wasn't as artificial as it is now (what I mean is, they didn't know as much about drinking milk and stuff to be tall, and that kind of thing)

[TheDuck]

On the respective size of people. A recent study has shown that whereas 200 years ago Americans (Euorpean ones) were on average 2 inches taller than Europeans, the situation is now reversed and Europeans are, on average, 2 inches taller than Americans. Apparently it is all down to diet and the availability of medical health systems. 200 years ago Americans were getting all the excerce and good food they needed unlike in Europe. Nowadays many are eating the wrong things and European free access to health and "better" foods has reversed the situation. Furthermore, the Dutch are now the tallest in Europe, averaging 4-5 inches more than Americans, the study went on to state that his was in large part down to Holland having the best pre and post natal treatment available.

Also, on the size of the trees being down to their being "virgin", this is very suspect. I remember seeing a programme on the BBC which challenged this. Basically, it had always been assumed that until fairly reently, certainly at the time of the Roman invasions, Britain was largely covered in primordial forests. The programme went on to show that this had been largely untrue for up to a thousand years before. Humans had been interacting and having a much more significant impact on the environment than had been assumed clearing forests, copicing, etc...

Height differences due to diet are about not getting enough to eat during childhood of the types of foods required to sustain growth (I believe its a shortage of protein based foods, but its been a long time since I read about this) and/or a a general food shortage. Chinese immigrants to the US were on the average quite short during the 1800s, but their descendents have all tended to be very tall, right up to and including the present day. And note that when the descendents of the Chinese in the US grew to a natural tall height, medicine in the US was atrocious, but availability of good food choices in enough quantity did exist..

There may be health issues around some dietary choices for folks living in the present day, but not growing to a normal size just isn't one of them. I'd be very interested to know where this study is published. It sounds like psuedo-scientific clap-trap (aimed at justifying political goals rather than discovering real truth).

And remember.. medicine in many ways is like history. In history, a single document about an event proves nothing. Multiple documents/accounts lend authenticity since they come from different points of view and it becomes easier to discriminate between truth and fiction. Medical studies should be treated the same way. One study proves absolutely nothing. Many studies that agree point to truth (assuming they are all performed independently).

[Sleepy]

Some factors believed to influence your height are: Your grandparents height, your parents height, your diet in the first 2 years of life, genetics, general health, luck.

[Maedhros]

I suspect luck plays little or no role. Probably just unpredictable how people turn out. Genetics is a I think huge, and diet and medical care are important as well.

If you take the height of my mothers brothers and father, add in the height of my father and his brothers and father and average it all together....you come up with 5'10"

I'm 5'11" and had much better medical care, a balanced diet and grew up in the country where I was fairly active running and climbing.

If I hadn't been born with a heart defect and spent much of my first 7 years in hospitals I'd probably be taller yet.

[bmolsson]

People are getting lazy and only live on social wellfare, of course they get taller..... The old Romans they had to work to survive......

[LordKhaine]

I'm just happy in the knowledge that at 6'3", I'd scare a lot of romans.

[Jugurtha]

He he he, more political clap trap

"New research has shown some unexpected disparities between statures of Americans and Europeans, indicating that recent social changes and diet are major influences on adult height.

For British men, too, are outstripping their transatlantic rivals. At the time of the American Revolution, the average US male was two inches taller than his British counterpart. Today he is almost half an inch shorter.

America has eight million people with no job, 40 million individuals with no health insurance, 35 million living below the poverty line, and a population that exists mainly on junk food. There, the rise in average height that marked its progress as a nation through the 19th and 20th centuries has stopped and has actually reversed - albeit very slightly - in recent years. Many Americans are rich and do well anatomically as a result, but there is a large underclass that is starting to drag the country down the stature charts.

This discovery, which has been revealed through research that Komlos has assembled over decades, amounts to an assault on the values of the free market economy espoused by Americans and provides powerful support for those who back European ideas about universal healthcare.

Fluctuations in human stature are not new and have occurred regularly throughout history. Our early hunter-gatherer ancestors were tall and lean. Later, as farming spread across the world, dense populations learnt to live on only a few standard crops and suffered considerable nutritional neglect. The result was a decline in stature.

Similarly, climatic changes have had a profound effect on human height - a physical attribute that is now regarded by historians, scientists and economists as a key indicator of the health of any group of people living at any particular time and place. For example, during the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plummeted across the world between 1300 and the mid-19th century, there was a noticeable decrease in human stature.

'There are two possible mechanisms for this observation,' said Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum. 'Firstly, all mammals get shorter and rounder when climates cool. It is a physiological response to cold. Short, round bodies preserve heat better than tall cool ones.

'However, there is an alternative explanation for shrinking stature in bad weather. It means poor crops, and that in turn means malnutrition and, of course, the consequence of that is poor stature.

'Those tiny suits of armour that you see when you visit the Tower of London were worn by people who were badly nourished. During winter they would have only salt meat and a few vegetables to live on. That's not going to help you grow very well.'

Modern society now protects humans from such problems, though in recent years it has become clear that political factors are having some effect on nutrition levels and proper diet and therefore stature. And it is in this arena that Komlos has made his key discoveries.

Through painstaking investigations he has calculated the heights of men at different times over our recent historical past. This shows that, around 1850, Americans - blessed with Western technology that allowed its citizens to spread unstoppably across the United States - lived relatively fine lives that let its menfolk reach an average height of 5ft 9in. By contrast, Dutchmen were only able to reach about 5ft 7in.

By the early 20th century the average American man was still about the same height as his predecessor. But the average Dutchman had nearly caught up and was only about half an inch shorter.

But in the 20th century Americans were overtaken. The average US male is now about 5ft 10in. The average Dutchman is just over 6ft.

More importantly, the latter is continuing his rise in average height. The Americans have long since stopped growing and, according to some measures, may actually be getting smaller. 'In relative terms, Americans are certainly shrinking in comparison with Europeans,' says Komlos.

One possible explanation lies with immigration. As more Mexicans and Chinese enter the US, these individuals may lower the average height, it is argued. But statisticians dismiss this suggestion. During the 19th century the country took in millions of malnourished, and therefore small, people. Yet Americans remained the tallest people in the world at that time.

In fact, the very idea that various peoples are programmed, on average, to be short or tall is thrown into doubt by Komlos's work. Apart from a few rare races, such as African pygmies who are genetically programmed to have low stature, virtually everyone in the world has the potential to reach the same average height as the Dutch, and that includes the Mexicans, Chinese, Inuit, and other peoples who are not usually noted for their stature.

To achieve that status will require some arduous social engineering. The Dutch health service, with its magnificent support services for pregnant woman (quality of life in the womb is a key factor in determining future health and height) and its high-protein diets based on dairy food, will not be easy to emulate in a world whose population is now soaring towards seven billion."

I love clap trap, especially when it is supported by stats and research rather than conviction.

Still and all, health care systems aside, it does explain why Romans and other "civilised" peoples were generally speaking shorter than Barbarians. These were paradoxically, able to get a better diet than their more numerous and urbanised opponents. As the industrial revolution took hold it is a fact that averga height shrunk as people moved to the towns. During the first world war it was noted how much smaller British troops were than the French, not a nation renowned for their height. This was because most Britain was much more heavily industrialised than France at the time

[Lord Ovaat]

Any given set of statistics can be used to support or refute just about any arguement, depending on interpretation. For instance, the quote above,

One possible explanation lies with immigration. As more Mexicans and Chinese enter the US, these individuals may lower the average height, it is argued. But statisticians dismiss this suggestion. During the 19th century the country took in millions of malnourished, and therefore small, people. Yet Americans remained the tallest people in the world at that time.

entirely dismisses the obvious fact that the vast, vast majority of immigrants to the US during the later part of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were European, ie, Italian, German, Slav, etc. Height comparisons between an undernourished Slav and an undernourished Asia are, in the very least, misleading. And to automatically assume that you MUST be diminitive if malnourished is folly. Man, I live with these folks. My wife is of Eastern European descent. I've met her family, seen pics of the ancestors, etc. Believe me, these folks were not dwarfs. Most statisticians would close their minds to the possibility that one set of immigrants were different--in any way--from another. Sorry, but no matter how politically correct one wants to be, there's just no denying the fact that Europeans are taller than Asians and Central & South Americans--ON AVERAGE. That's not bias, or racial or ethnic preference. Just fact. But, in any event, this doesn't have much to do with the average size of a Roman circa 50 BC. Yes, BC, not BCE. Always wanted to say that somewhere, so there it is.

[Nelson]

Yes, BC, not BCE. Always wanted to say that somewhere, so there it is.

I'm an AD/BC man myself.