"Antiquity: Total War" - going back even FURTHER (thoughts?)

[Comrade Alexeo]

I'm not entirely sure why, but for some reason I've always had the thought in the back of my mind of a game that doesn't make you fight 60 years ago or 600 year ago, but 6,000 years ago.

Maybe its because of the "Old Kingdom" style of the Egyptians in vanilla RTW. Maybe its because I read too much military history. Maybe I should just blame Troy: Total War

The idea of an "Assyria: Total War" or even a "Sumer: Total War" ("Civilization: Total War" is sexy but might cause some lawsuits )is appealing to me, and I guess I want to see if you guys think there's any merit to this as well.


Some of my thoughts:

1) There's a certain limit to how far back you can go to have a reasonably playable game. We can't do a "Sumer: Total War" because you'd only be fighting scattered peasant rabble... Clearly, when you're the first and only civilization, things can get pretty lonely In order to have something to actually do, you need a starting point... perhaps the rise of Sargon the Great, in 2334 BCE? Going until, vaguely the fall of Assyria in 609 BCE?

2) I'm hardly an expert going back this far, but civilizations could perhaps include...
-Sumer
-Akkadia
-Babylonia
-Elam
-Hurrians
-Hittites
-Egypt
-Urartu
-Mycenae
-Greeks?
-Medes?
-Persians?

Somebody who knows more... enlighten me, please?

3) Armies are more and less advanced than you think they are.
-The Sumerians wore copper helmets (which, while weaker than bronze, is better than nothing) and heavy cloaks, which were sometimes studded with metal (which is, again, not great but better than nothing). It was actually the Egyptians who were lax in armoring their soldiers.

-Weapons of the period included spears, axes, and slings. There were also bows, but only simple ones until about 1500 BCE.

-Generally, weapons were made of iron (stone persisted in Egypt though) because iron is hard, armour was made of copper or bronze because they are lighter and can be cold-cast, and shields were wood and leather affairs. This stuff obviously evolved though.

-Big, clunky, two- and four-wheeled warcarts drawn by asses were used as early as the Sumerians, but they were too slow for combat - they were used for leaders. The kind of chariots we're more familiar with show up around 2000 BCE, and I've read that they were brought in by steppe tribes living on the fringes of civilization - kinda like early barbarian hordes. Chariots were extremely powerful but also extremely expensive weapons of war when they arrived.

-It was the Assyrians who evolved cavalry, but I'm not sure at what point they did so (though it was definitely after chariots, counter-intuitive as that seems) - that's what research is for ! As I recall from John Keegan's A History of Warfare, early cavalry was basically "charioteering without the chariot"; that is to say, they were more skirmishers than shock troops (though they may have had thrusting spears), and a major reason for their success was simply that getting horses AND chariots is much more expensive then just getting horses.

-There was some measure of siege warfare, as there are already stone walls by this time. The trick is making assaults - there are no catapults for a long time to come, and battering rams don't show up until 1900 BCE. Ladders, sapping, or simple starvation are the way to go.

-Warfare, especially early on when it was just infantry, did often consist of mobs of men fighting in no discernably organized fashion. However, Sargon's men did march in a proto-phalanx, and the concepts of flanking and envelopment were already long established - after all, dealing with herds of men is surely little different than dealing with a herd of cows or sheep! (Indeed, it has been suggested that the first warriors proper were not hunter-gatherer's, as we might expect - because thats really more skirmishing - but shepherds and the like, because they were used to up-close slaughter and dealing with masses. Anyway.)


I'm not sure how it can all be done in a realistic and historic yet entertaining and intriguing fashion, or even if it can be done. "Antiquity: Total War" (I'm open to better suggestions than that title) could either be excruciatingly slow and boring and repetitive ("Yay! More chaotic mobs beating each other up!")... or thought-provoking and amusing in a "Hey look at that" sort of way ("Rams? I can build RAMS? DEAR GOD YES! Wait...")

How do you assault a fortified city with nothing better than ladders and some elbow grease? How do you survive in battle wearing little bronze studs on a cloak instead of lorica segmentata? How the bloody hell do you flank without cavalry?


Meritous idea? Or idea without merit?