FAQ and historical inaccuracies: some odd comments

[Hurin_Rules]

Ok, the tone of my post was a bit bitter--sorry for that--but come on, you're twisting the facts here and being rather misleading:

Carroballistae didn't fire on the move? Maybe, maybe not. The basic design certainly wouldn't have made it easy or accurate, but you can bet they tried to use the weapon that way from time to time (sheer terror is the mother of many desperate tactics).

No, they didn't. Even tanks in WWII usually stopped to fire. This was with suspensions, rubber and advanced tracking systems. If you can site a single source saying carroballistae were fired on the move, I'll stand corrected. This isn't just about a game, its about historical accuracy. You're perfectly free to design whatever you want in a game, so long as you don't assert it as fact. I might even agree with your playability/fun argument. But pseudo-historical arguments produce only pseudo-histories. Please don't misinform people. As a professor of history, I have to deal with the consequences in my classrooms.

Tattoos, facial scarification, piercings and generally slapping yourself with woad was common. The Huns were regarded as particularly scary people because they did go in an extreme 'look'. It was all about being as terrifying as possible before you engaged with the enemy. Better to stab a man in the back while he's running away than actually have to fight him!

So you are asserting that Vercingetorix wore woad? What sources are you citing in defense of this revolutionary thesis? (Ack, sorry, being exessively sarcastic again; but you get my point.)

Barbarians are not morons. Barbarians are barbarous. This doesn't imply thick, dim, stupid, moronic or lax in any mental department. It does imply a lack of civilized accomplisments, such as an organised military structure or a staff college producing field manuals. It's the exceptional barbarian commanders who did understand that tactics were important who are remembered: Vercingetorix, Attila, Alaric the Goth and so on. The average commander had a loud voice...

Fair enough. But your characterization of barbarian warfare--viz., ''most barbarian battles consisted of both sides screaming 'charge' and then fighting until a victor emerged'--is highly speculative and indicative more of Roman (and Hollywood) attitudes to 'barbarians' than of the barbarians themselves.

And finally, thanks for your good wishes on the success of Spartan: Total Warrior. Just to correct a couple of misconceptions, though: it's not an FPS, and it's not like Halo.

Ok, that was a bit unfair-- I don't really hope the game tanks. But you must realize that many RTW players are intensely concerned that STW represents a reorientation of CA's priorities. This is a genuine concern, given some of the design decisions of RTW. It seems that CA is appealing to a somewhat different audience with both RTW and STW. If you can allay our concerns, please do.

[Barbarossa82]

If you can site a single source saying carroballistae were fired on the move, I'll stand corrected. This isn't just about a game, its about historical accuracy. You're perfectly free to design whatever you want in a game, so long as you don't assert it as fact. I might even agree with your playability/fun argument. But pseudo-historical arguments produce only pseudo-histories. Please don't misinform people. As a professor of history, I have to deal with the consequences in my classrooms.

We don't have a single source to suggest that the ancient Britons could swim either, or that the residents of Carthage were not immune to the common cold. That doesn't make either of those things an unreasonable inference to draw from known facts (i.e. that they were human). If a "known fact" is that carroballistae existed, I can't really see how it's an unreasonable inference that they at least experimented with firing on the move.

If you could find a source saying that, it still wouldn't prove it was true, only support it. And the absence of a source doesn't disprove it, it just makes it less certain.

I appreciate you probably spend your days frustrated and wacky, unsupported theories inspired by popular culture which have germinated in your students' heads, but with respect, you shouldn't fall back on the source as the be-all and end-all of historical inquiry.

[Ciaran]

Well said, Barbarossa
And let´s not forget there´s only so much realism that can be implemented in a game even if we knew what actually is real - which we do not and never will.
Or would anyone like to give up the nice camera sweeping over the battlefield, watching the action close up in favour of a stationary (or almost stationary) first-person view down a hill, having to speak commands (in Latin, or ancient Greek - if realism, then all the way, after all) to a messenger who might or not reach the designated unit that may obey or not... I hope you get my point.

[khelvan]

Anyway, that's my long-winded way of saying that Rome Total Realism should be replaced by Rome Total More Plausible And Better Supported Conjecture. Before anyone bites my head off, I recommend they do what I did and sit down with an old person to watch/read a historical account of something within their living memory, for example World War II. You'll quickly start to read history more critically.

Your excellent argument would hold more weight if it were wholly appropriate to the circumstances. There is a difference between the acceptance that no source can be 100% accurate, and the disregard for period sources altogether. There is a thing one might call due diligence when creating a game that is advertised as not "inspired by," not "loosely based on," but "set in" the time of the Roman Empire, to "bring the world of ancient Rome to life," to "recreate Europe."

So you see, more than other things, this is a question of truth in advertising. Either the game is an attempt to "recreate" an historical time, or it is not. Either it is an historical strategy game, or it is a strategy game loosely based on history. R:TW is advertised as an historical strategy game. Therefore, when I purchased the game, I expected better than to find a faction depicted 1000 years out of period, for instance. This means that either the marketing or the research of the game is off.

If the game had been billed as a whimsical RTS romp through a world loosely based on ancient Roman times, no one would have cared, except perhaps for about a dozen people who can't get past how many bands the first iteration of lorica segmentata was built with.

It is rather akin to, as you say, buying a historical wargame close to our own time and finding anachronistic things. For instance, buying a WWII wargame and finding that the "America" faction has been split in two, into the "Union" and the "Confederacy," which must duke it out while the rest of Europe fights a generally more accurate WWII, because this provides more balance and fun to the game, and is more "cool." And, to follow a VERY appropriate analogy, to describe the military of France (read: Celts/Gaul) as being disorganized, lacking in technology, and having perhaps one leader in a generation who was a grasp on strategy and does more than "shouts loudly."

You see, no one who has truly studied World War II would say that France's army was so horribly bad, that its technology was inferior, or that perhaps one out of all its generals knew the importance of strategy. They were soundly trounced by the Germans for different reasons, not for having a shoddy military. Nor would anyone say those things who has truly examined all of the textual and archaeological evidence available describing the Gauls, and the Celts in general. The Celtic history was just as rich and powerful as that of France, with a Brennus for a Napoleon, with a sack of Rome for the conquering of Europe. Yet the Gauls were soundly trounced by Caesar, and it seems some are content to assume this is because they were "barbarians," rather than to truly examine why they lost.

So; is there something to be said for toning down the rhetoric nitpicking historical inaccuracy? Certainly. The EB team, for instance, doesn't go about stating how bad it is that this tactic or that piece of armor exist in RTW. We are quietly fixing what we can safely fix based on available evidence, and we think the end result will be a mod that has more "cool" and diverse units than vanilla RTW - AND be more accurate. Now, our fans have a tendency to nitpick everything they see, but please don't mistake us for doing the same thing. Rather than bitch about it, we're making RTW into the game we had hoped it was from the beginning, and we DO welcome people to nitpick our choices, as we rather enjoy learning details about history.

[KSEG]

Your excellent argument would hold more weight if it were wholly appropriate to the circumstances. There is a difference between the acceptance that no source can be 100% accurate, and the disregard for period sources altogether. There is a thing one might call due diligence when creating a game that is advertised as not "inspired by," not "loosely based on," but "set in" the time of the Roman Empire, to "bring the world of ancient Rome to life," to "recreate Europe."

So you see, more than other things, this is a question of truth in advertising. Either the game is an attempt to "recreate" an historical time, or it is not. Either it is an historical strategy game, or it is a strategy game loosely based on history. R:TW is advertised as an historical strategy game. Therefore, when I purchased the game, I expected better than to find a faction depicted 1000 years out of period, for instance. This means that either the marketing or the research of the game is off.

If the game had been billed as a whimsical RTS romp through a world loosely based on ancient Roman times, no one would have cared, except perhaps for about a dozen people who can't get past how many bands the first iteration of lorica segmentata was built with.

It is rather akin to, as you say, buying a historical wargame close to our own time and finding anachronistic things. For instance, buying a WWII wargame and finding that the "America" faction has been split in two, into the "Union" and the "Confederacy," which must duke it out while the rest of Europe fights a generally more accurate WWII, because this provides more balance and fun to the game, and is more "cool." And, to follow a VERY appropriate analogy, to describe the military of France (read: Celts/Gaul) as being disorganized, lacking in technology, and having perhaps one leader in a generation who was a grasp on strategy and does more than "shouts loudly."

You see, no one who has truly studied World War II would say that France's army was so horribly bad, that its technology was inferior, or that perhaps one out of all its generals knew the importance of strategy. They were soundly trounced by the Germans for different reasons, not for having a shoddy military. Nor would anyone say those things who has truly examined all of the textual and archaeological evidence available describing the Gauls, and the Celts in general. The Celtic history was just as rich and powerful as that of France, with a Brennus for a Napoleon, with a sack of Rome for the conquering of Europe. Yet the Gauls were soundly trounced by Caesar, and it seems some are content to assume this is because they were "barbarians," rather than to truly examine why they lost.

So; is there something to be said for toning down the rhetoric nitpicking historical inaccuracy? Certainly. The EB team, for instance, doesn't go about stating how bad it is that this tactic or that piece of armor exist in RTW. We are quietly fixing what we can safely fix based on available evidence, and we think the end result will be a mod that has more "cool" and diverse units than vanilla RTW - AND be more accurate. Now, our fans have a tendency to nitpick everything they see, but please don't mistake us for doing the same thing. Rather than bitch about it, we're making RTW into the game we had hoped it was from the beginning, and we DO welcome people to nitpick our choices, as we rather enjoy learning details about history.

When exactly was RTW advertised as "historical strategy game"?
I'm curious.
On my RTW box, there isn't a single mention about " this game is historical strategy game set in Ancient Roman times".
In fact, there is even mentions about "Roman wardogs" and "armys led by Hannibal and Caesar clash on the battlefield".
So where did you heard this?
Did CA sayed something like that on their website before the release or something?

[SMZ]

There is a thing one might call due diligence when creating a game that is advertised as not "inspired by," not "loosely based on," but "set in" the time of the Roman Empire, to "bring the world of ancient Rome to life," to "recreate Europe."

Your post was very well stated, with the exception of this bit of hedging at the outset. To say something is "set in" a time period does not imply that it will be a verbatim recreation of said time period. The word "set" refers to an actors stage. Any play, movie, or apparently game, which draws it's inspiration from a setting builds and refines upon that basis to fit its audience and the forms supplied by the medium.

Their quote regarding bringing "the world of ancient Rome to life" referred to the games graphic quality, as the context clearly shows. A portion of the game which even its most rabid opponents are forced to concede is well crafted. Likewise, when they proclaim that they have "re-created Europe", the surrounding words once again show that the intent of this statement is quite clear. It refers to the mechanism that ties each portion of the strategy map to its own battle map. Another feature which I find to be quite enjoyable.

In short although I find your efforts most laudable, I think it suffers somewhat when you stoop to misquoting the creators. In my opinion, taking a very small excerpt of a thought and assigning a meaning to it completely different from it's original is somewhat trite.

[khelvan]

RTW has been previewed, interviewed, and advertised throughout as being historically accurate. Forgive me for working with what I had on their website today, but too many interviews have been done with CA where they talk about how the game, how various units, and this and that are historically accurate. I'm mis-quoting no one.

It is revisionist history to say that because the -specific- quotes I chose are not ones that accurately reflect the words they used in interviews about their game, specificaly, that they never said so. I apologize if I chose bad examples, but there are plenty more where they came from.

Trite? Please. Here is another:

After reading about some of the strange little things that were acceptable in the ancient world, we put several dozen new vices into Rome: Total War. Without historical research, however, we'd just have done the same as some other games companies and "made some stuff up." As it turned out, our research ended up determining nearly all the game content: units and buildings in the tech tree, tactical abilities for units like the Roman testudo or tortoise formation, nations that we included, and so on.

Need I find more, or is this, too, taken out of context and twisted around by yours truly?

Edit: Here is another, though this is given by Peggy Kim, from Decisive Battles, on why they chose Rome Total War:

One of the the great thigns they've done with that game and with the concepts behind it is made it a historical game which is completely in line with what we're doing. Everything from the look to the way the battlefield is laid out to what the soldiers would have been wearing, all of that armament, they're tried very hard to make everything historically accurate. That's very attractive to us.

From IGN, on CA's presentation to them at ECTN:

Creative Assembly were particularly keen to stress the amount of research that went into ensuring a historically accurate representation; including consultation with experts on the time-period. Wherever it doesn't have a detrimental effect on gameplay, the game is as historically accurate as possible, from the types of units available to each faction, the formations available (such as the famous Roman "tortoise"), and the terrain, which has been accurately mapped into the game, covering most of Europe and North Africa.

I can't find any pre-release interviews with CA, but certainly they pitched the game to the media as historically accurate, who then portrayed it often and always that way to us. Surely you can recall the press that couldn't keep the words "historical" or "historically accurate" out of their previews? I can recall words from CA as well, more strong than those above. I just can't find them at the moment. After all, the game has been out for almost a year.

[player1]

But it is historically accurate...
Compared to other games.

[KSEG]

RTW has been previewed, interviewed, and advertised throughout as being historically accurate. Forgive me for working with what I had on their website today, but too many interviews have been done with CA where they talk about how the game, how various units, and this and that are historically accurate. I'm mis-quoting no one.

It is revisionist history to say that because the -specific- quotes I chose are not ones that accurately reflect the words they used in interviews about their game, specificaly, that they never said so. I apologize if I chose bad examples, but there are plenty more where they came from.

Trite? Please. Here is another:
Need I find more, or is this, too, taken out of context and twisted around by yours truly?

Edit: Here is another, though this is given by Peggy Kim, from Decisive Battles, on why they chose Rome Total War:

From IGN, on CA's presentation to them at ECTN:

I can't find any pre-release interviews with CA, but certainly they pitched the game to the media as historically accurate, who then portrayed it often and always that way to us. Surely you can recall the press that couldn't keep the words "historical" or "historically accurate" out of their previews? I can recall words from CA as well, more strong than those above. I just can't find them at the moment. After all, the game has been out for almost a year.

Thanks

[SMZ]

Need I find more, or is this, too, taken out of context and twisted around by yours truly?

No, your point is well made with those quotes. However it's a question of degree. To you, mayhaps 95% accuracy or more in the game is the goal. Personally I find that interesting, and I'll be sure to download the EB mod when it's completed. To CA, maybe 65% accuracy was the goal. They make some compromises for gameplay, and to please the majority of their customers, but try to work the history in a good bit as well. For the most part the game is a decent approximant. And at the very least it applies itself to historical elements more than is traditional for games placed on the mass market. I'm sure the more thorough research being done by your team will be vastly enjoyed. But I'm also sure that CA did indeed put a good bit of research into the game. Maybe not for all factions, but based on the product, they worked at it. Could they have worked harder? Yes, but I find the game enjoyable, and a whole heap of people share that opinion.

[Flavius Clemens]

Or would anyone like to give up the nice camera sweeping over the battlefield, watching the action close up in favour of a stationary (or almost stationary) first-person view down a hill, having to speak commands (in Latin, or ancient Greek - if realism, then all the way, after all) to a messenger who might or not reach the designated unit that may obey or not... I hope you get my point.

Personally I'm all for orders taking time to reach the unit concerned and be put into practice - that's an element of realism that adds to the challenge. Though it is dependent on the AI in command of the individual units being able to act reasonably in responding to circumstances - for instance if an infantry unit has orders to march on an enemy and attack it to have the sense to stop and face an ambushing cavalry unit appearing from cover.

And there of course is the rub - I don't doubt that good AI strategy / tactical programming is damn difficult and to produce a game at all CA are limited by what can reasonably be acheived within a given timescale and cost. There is a difference between a product failing to meet all the requirements that would be desireable in an ideal world and one that has bugs in the functions it does try to provide (I had a very frustrating CTD last night after a critical battle that I'll now have to refight from scratch) or a design that includes things that aren't just not 100% historically verified, but lack any serious credibility.

If it's too hard to code a barbarian unit with varying arms fair enough, make them all swordsmen, falxmen or whatever, but I don't feel comfortable with a one off unit like flaming pigs becoming a standard, or elite units becoming ten a penny once you've teched up to the right level. In that sense I want realism. So for mobile ballistas I want at least some chance that they were reasonably regularly used on the move before it becomes a game feature.

I definitely agree with the idea of building one and seeing what it's like in practice. I saw a documentary about Trajan's Column and the Dacian campaigns a few years ago, and in this they got someone to make Roman saddles based on the technology they had available at the time. They were surprised at how well they coped as a platform for melee against infantry, and made them take some of the illustrations on the column more literally than they had been inclined to. (Not an excuse for all powerful cavalry charges of course!) Try the same with the artillery - lets judge what was feasible. Not that I'm suggesting CA themselves get out the saws and planes, there are limits to how much programmers should get involved with hardware

[CBR]

If a "known fact" is that carroballistae existed, I can't really see how it's an unreasonable inference that they at least experimented with firing on the move.

And there is a long way from experimenting with firing on the move on a cart pulled by donkeys and the ultra fast sniper chariots we see in BI.


CBR

[Hurin_Rules]

We don't have a single source to suggest that the ancient Britons could swim either, or that the residents of Carthage were not immune to the common cold. That doesn't make either of those things an unreasonable inference to draw from known facts (i.e. that they were human). If a "known fact" is that carroballistae existed, I can't really see how it's an unreasonable inference that they at least experimented with firing on the move.

If you could find a source saying that, it still wouldn't prove it was true, only support it. And the absence of a source doesn't disprove it, it just makes it less certain.

I appreciate you probably spend your days frustrated and wacky, unsupported theories inspired by popular culture which have germinated in your students' heads, but with respect, you shouldn't fall back on the source as the be-all and end-all of historical inquiry.

Actually, there are sources that suggest the ancient Britons could swim and the archaeological remains of ancient Carthaginians prove they were not immune to the common cold. On the other hand, it is not a logical inference from the descriptions of carroballistae to assume they were a mobile, tank-like unit that continuously fires while moving. Moreover, there is no evidence that Germans 'chose' groups of axemen and regularly deployed them tactically as an independent unit. Now, as to the axemen, CA has admitted this is fantasy and that the game is simply better with it. I have no problems with that. But for the carroballistae and the woad and their characterizations of barbarian warfare, they are asserting the same fantasies as fact. Sorry, but that is not an historically tenable position.

Your point about not treating the sources as gospel is well taken. But you must also realize that departing from the sources altogether is equally, if not more anachronistic. The other poster's point about having an America divided into the Union and Confederacy during WWII is an apt comparison. There are many things we don't know about ancient warfare. But that does not give us license to invent freely, and claim our inventions as logical inferences.

Again, let me stress, I have no problems with fantasy itself; my objection is when teams like CA claim their fantasies as fact. That's why I originally made the post. They seemed to be defending things that were not logical inferences and perpetuating stereotypes already long discredited by historians. That deserves to be pointed out and refuted.