Hunnic invasion: RTW Expansion?

[Rurik the Chieftain]

The Huns would be very like the Scythians (many horse archers) but man, it would be fun to seep through and pillage Europe and the Middle East. Especially as nomadic raiders

[CrackedAxe]

Master of puppets, I think Decisive Battles was a very different show, wasn't it just a documentary? whereas TC is a game show, where members of the public get to fight the battle using RTW. The Huns in that looked very different to the Scythians to me.

[Orda Khan]

Master of puppets, I think Decisive Battles was a very different show, wasn't it just a documentary? whereas TC is a game show, where members of the public get to fight the battle using RTW. The Huns in that looked very different to the Scythians to me.

Correct. They were actual Hun units, dressed in blue robes with the familiar fur rimmed pointed hats.

As for resembling the Scythians, this should not be the case. Attila's armies had changed considerably from the early Hun horse archer armies. They now included Gothic heavy cav and infantry. There are many references to Hun infantry who 'leaned on their shield' very similar to the later Mediaeval pavise. The horse archers were still there of course but they no longer made up 90% of the army. Attila also had very efficient seige craft, more so than his barbarian neighbours

.........Orda

[CrackedAxe]

Thanks for the info, Orda. This would make a fascinating expansion, I hope CA plan to take this route as I think they are.

[Watchman]

The Huns ran into the very same problem as every single nomad empire before and after them who tried to set up shop in East Europe - not enough plains. The Great Hungarian Plain is the westernmost tip of the Great Eurasian Steppe Belt, and every single nomad who stayed on it ended up settling down because there simply wasn't enough grassland to graze the herds on. Sarmatians, Huns, Avars, Hungarian-Magyars... all of them had to give up pastoralism if they stayed there (which is probably why the Golden Horde, well, didn't).

The nomads who stayed on the steppes east of the Carpathians naturally didn't have this problem, and as the Hunnic Empire was still whole by that point Attila could recruit them into his armies, but for the most part the Huns of his time fought like all the other barbarians of the Migration Period.