How long did Roman era battles last?

**screwtype** · 02-18-2005, 17:05

I just thought I'd post this because there's been a debate going on about how long battles lasted in this era.

There are some people here who say that RTW battle speeds are "realistic" because people hyped up on adrenalin can only fight for a few seconds or minutes at most before they become exhausted.

In doing a little research on the Roman gladius, however, I came across a couple of articles on Roman infantry tactics.

Both said that Roman centurians had a rotational method of fighting. A man would stand and fight for a few minutes until he became tired, then he would move to the back of the century and a fresh man would take his place. This rotational method enabled the Romans to outlast many of their less organized opponents.

According to one source, the rotation occurred once every fifteen minutes, according to the second, it occurred once every twenty minutes.

Whatever the case, it should well and truly put to rest the notion that battles were over within a few minutes of the protagonists meeting in melee.

BTW In order to help put the scale of RTW into perspective, a Roman century consisted of about 80 men, and there were some 59 centuries to a legion, for a total of roughly 5000 men.

This means that in order to simulate command of one Roman legion, you would need to control almost three full army stacks of 80 man units

**Byzantine Prince** · 02-18-2005, 18:05

I reality these battles could last days on end. The shortest ones I have ever heard of where something like 30 minutes. I don't see anything wrong with the game speed though. Most battles in the game have a very small nuber of soldiers so off course they are gonna end fast.

**The Stranger** · 02-18-2005, 18:11

yes indeed in reality they had like 5 early legions (4000 men in each legion)
and in the game you can't even go over 4000 with the romans
and not over 5000 with 20x240 units.

**lars573** · 02-18-2005, 18:13

Actually the list strength of a legion was something like 6000 men. You see a centuria (latin for century) had 80 combat troops and 20 non-combat troops. Think along the lines of the signifer and the centurion. In regards to battle length consider that when they say a battle took all day you have remember that it would take a long time, several hour anyway, to get 5000 men aranged for a battle. And the bigger the army the longer it's going to take right. So you have 6 hours of preparation for 30 minutes of combat an hour tops. Not counting if you have reserves you can bring up to keep the offensive going.

**The Stranger** · 02-18-2005, 18:22

eh yes that were the late legions after augustus

**Byzantine Prince** · 02-18-2005, 18:30

You CAN have 5000 men and even more. But you have to have a pretty good computer or else it won't allow it. Once you have a capable computer you'll need to retype some of the files to make it correspond to how many you can have. I don't think there's a real limit to the number you could have.

**The Stranger** · 02-18-2005, 18:35

i have a good PC, tell me. i really like to have huge units on the battlefield
more than 240 a unit i couldn't get till now. so please tell me

**Khorak** · 02-18-2005, 18:47

Not to mention battles were not like in RTW anyway. Formations would clash with each other, being repelled or breaking the enemy and forcing them to fall back or flee. Several times formations of men could clash and then fall back from each other to do it again a while later.

In RTW everyone just mobs up, picks a target and goes at it like a giant riot.