Quote Originally Posted by Urnamma
This discussion is largely asinine. Firstly, the Chinese were technologically different from the ancient Mediterranean, but not superior. I would certainly argue that the Hellenic kingdoms were technologically superior, and that rome was fairly similar.

You have to take it into several dimensions.

1) Logistics. Ancient Chinese states may have had armies of 1 million, what have you. They could hardly have fielded that many troops at one time. The largest army in the same place before the early modern era was at either Gaugamela or at Cannae. You cannot feed that many men in one place for long.

2) Fighting styles. Asiatic armies generally fought in a pre-military horizon style. Even the vaunted samurai still did this. They fought individual duals on the battlefield, and did not generally work as cohesive units.

3) the 'crossbow'. The Romans and Greeks had a similar device, the belly bow, and even then, it was found wanting. Crossbow bearers could fire one volley before the Romans returned fire with pila, cutting the lightly armored chinese down in kind.

Don't listen to everything you hear in video games and on the history channel. It's unbecoming and makes for horrible argument.

Also, the halberd... This is just silly. Falx, Rhomphaia, etc. There are hundreds of weapons the far east doesn't have.

Oh, and by the way. Those 'million man armies' got smashed by 30,000 or so mongols with no better technology than the ingame Sarmatians.
That was very well put Urnamma, great research. I will also add that in that general time period Chinese blacksmiths used new bronze forging methods to produce even longer blades to be used in the army. These blades of course would be horribly ineffective against the Roman scutum-and-gladius combination, which would mean heavy casualties for Chinese infantry. The Chinese also carried no shields, mostly relying on armor.


However, i do think that historical realism should come before a bigger map in EB, and China would just make it more complicated. EB already has a great amount of diverse factions, and I would rather keep the same old map and instead have it made even more detailed, using the new faction slots to fill out the rebel spaces.

One idea though is that the discovery of the new world mechanism could be used for the discovery of the Far East (unlikely), or the Mogol invasion that takes place part way through the game could be made into a Chinese/Xiongu invasion. Neither of these are really historical, i guess, but could be interesting if added.

(For example, the invading Mongol armies coul be changed in to the army of Ban Chao, who took 70 000 men all the way to the Caspian Sea before turning back in the year 97).