EB2 discussions.............bigger map?

[CaesarAugustus]

With an increased limit of 30 Factions for Medieval 2, does anybody know if they are considering expanding EB2's map? I think it would be awesome if they made it stretch to the Far East, adding the Qin Dynasty................. and that would also attract a lot of people to the mod.

Just wondering if that was being discussed all.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Discussions about china aren't happening. The only current discussions I've seen with regards to this question are concerning possibly extending the map to the southeast in some way, to get enough of India to justify having an Indian faction, or "satrapy" of a bigger faction (ala Bactria), and some slight discussions of extending the map south around the upper Nile. I think it's unlikely any increases will happen (personally), *if* the province number limit stays the same. I don't think we have any indication that that has changed. It would be very difficult for us to sacrifice a lot of our current ones for additional ones further away from the center on a bigger map.

[CaesarAugustus]

Discussions about china aren't happening

Awwww.....that's too bad. However I do agree that if it comes down to having a detailed, in-depth map or sacraficing some other factions and increasing provice size just to have a bigger map, then I can live without extending my Roman Empire into China.

And besides, EB's map is already great and extrordinarily large as it is. I hope they do add an Indian faction though.

[scourgeofrome]

then I can live without extending my Roman Empire into China.

Any way China could be a special choice for Custom battles though. I alwways wondered who would win in a battle,China or Rome.

[CaesarAugustus]

Any way China could be a special choice for Custom battles though.

That's a great idea.

I alwways wondered who would win in a battle,China or Rome.

Personally I have wondered that same question............ in the timeframe of the Qin Dynasty the Chinese almost certainly would have won, since Rome was still relatively weak then, not even having totally conquered Italy. However, at the height of both Empires, I think that the overall superiority and flexibility of the Roman legions would have prevailed.

Of course, if one Empire were to invade the other the invader would lose because of the inevitable desertions, due to the long march (remember that Alexander was forced to turn back because his troops would not go further than the North of India). Also, they would have to cut their way through Persia just to reach the opposing civilization.

Rome and China did actually have some relation though. In the 100s, either Marcus Aurelius of Commodus (i think) sent emissaries to China (whom they calles the Seres), and the Chinese correctly identified Rome as being the dominant power in the far West.

If you're interested, go to Wikipedia and type "Sino-Roman Relationships" for more information.

[scourgeofrome]

That's a great idea.


Personally I have wondered that same question............ in the timeframe of the Qin Dynasty the Chinese almost certainly would have won, since Rome was still relatively weak then, not even having totally conquered Italy. However, at the height of both Empires, I think that the overall superiority and flexibility of the Roman legions would have prevailed.

Of course, if one Empire were to invade the other the invader would lose because of the inevitable desertions, due to the long march (remember that Alexander was forced to turn back because his troops would not go further than the North of India). Also, they would have to cut their way through Persia just to reach the opposing civilization.

Rome and China did actually have some relation though. In the 100s, either Marcus Aurelius of Commodus (i think) sent emissaries to China (whom they calles the Seres), and the Chinese correctly identified Rome as being the dominant power in the far West.

If you're interested, go to Wikipedia and type "Sino-Roman Relationships" for more information.

Interesting.Looks like China almost fought Rome though.Stupid Parthia.If they hadn't lied,we could have a China vs. Rome match.Rome would have kicked their butts though (biased statement).

Edit:Another thing I always wondered was who would have won,Alexander or China.

[CaesarAugustus]

Interesting.Looks like China almost fought Rome though.Stupid Parthia.If they hadn't lied,we could have a China vs. Rome match.Rome would have kicked their butts though (biased statement).

Not as biased as you might think...........the Emperor might have had some nice Chinese slaves to serve him had they made it over the Black Sea.........

Edit:Another thing I always wondered was who would have won,Alexander or China.

At that time China was not an Empire but about a dozen warring states. Alexander might have won a couple battles had he reached China, but he definetly would have been defeated at some point and he definently would not have conquered th far East! Somehow i doubt the superiority of the rigid, inflexible phalanx against waves of Chinese light infantry and crossbowmen.

[scourgeofrome]

Just to ask,with EB2 you guys might actually put China in the custom battle selection.Might have to change my opinion on what mod to use.*starts dreaming of fighting China with everyone from Kh to Rome to Pahlav to Sweboz (Lets see what China thinks after fighing real barbarians)*

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

I don't think that a war would have ever happened between Rome and China. To the north of both nations were the plains, filled with Sarmations, Scythians, and the rest for the Romans and the Xuangnu(sp) and the Mongols on the Chinese side. And no urbanized empire would want or be able to control these areas.

And to the South there is Persia and India. Say that Crassus had done a little research on his enemy and had several miracles and by 100ADish Persia was Roman, the Romans might turn toward India, but they would be so far from Rome that they would have little control and organization. The historical height of the Roman Empire was stretched to its limits.

Then there are the Himilayas.

On the China side, the Chinese were never really a conquering nation like Rome. They were rarely able to control a territory that had a different racial group in it. Nearly every generation, they had to recapture Indo-China.

The only way I could see it happening would be if China miraculously crossed over from Tibet into India and Rome miraculously took Persia, but then it would be skirmishes between Persian militia and Indian conscripts. But if you put both nations in the game you would end up with something stupid like China conquering Mongolia and the Russian plains and filling it with huge_cities and then attacking Rome through Dacia.

[Danest]

China vs. Rome probably only works as a custom battle, but it would be interesting to see even if only in that form. I assume nothing even resembling a China vs. Rome conflict ever happened. But I suspect this might require someone very knowledgeable in both China and Rome, especially with the bias that tends to follow this debate.

[Zaknafien]

I am more of a Romeophile than most, but its unlikley the Republic would win against Warring States period Chinese, whose armies were already incredibly technologically and tactically advanced. Besides, sheer numbers...

[scourgeofrome]

China vs. Rome probably only works as a custom battle, but it would be interesting to see even if only in that form.

Thats all I'm asking.Plus,you could have other ones like Sweboz vs China (lets see what China thinks about fighting real barbarians),KH vs.China,Egypt vs China,Carthage vs. China, Eperios vs China,Bactria vs China,Selucid vs China,Sarmatians vs. China.The list just keeps going and going.I mean,who wouldn't want to see the "superior"* Chinese ideal be stomped by elephants,shot by master horse archers,stabbed by hoplites,chopped by axeman,run down by kataphracts,or impaled by ballista.If this is avaible in EB 2, I will almost definately download it.It would be so much fun to do everything mentioned above.

*This is just making reference to the Chinese belief that they were advanced and everyone else was just a bunch of barbarians.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Guys, remember that EB does have an ever so slight tendancy towards realism here. We're not going to go out of our way to include chinese units. That is much more along the lines of Mummy Returns Egyptians that we know from somewhere else. Sorry.

[Laundreu]

Guys, remember that EB does have an ever so slight tendancy towards realism here. We're not going to go out of our way to include chinese units. That is much more along the lines of Mummy Returns Egyptians that we know from somewhere else. Sorry.

Sad to say you are pretty correct, man.

Besides, everybody knows that the Atlantian units take precedence.

[Asean]

Let's use simple logic. China defeated the Huns. The Huns destroyed and burnt Rome to the ground. China can as easily destroy and raize rome to the ground.

[ChewieTobbacca]

China was both more technologically advanced and numerically superior to Rome. The only way they could have warred would have been if they had been in close proximity to each other, but they were literally at the opposite ends of the world.

China really had no true massive organized enemies to fight against in most of its time, so its hard to judge how they would have warred. Some interesting facts:

The Chinese had developed the crossbow and repeating crossbow (chu ko nu commonly known) by the height of the Roman empire.
The Chinese also developed a variant of the halberd (the Ji) long before they appeared in Europe, and was a common infantry weapon. In fact, they have been dated as early as the Shang era (1766BC-1050 BC).
I know this is more medieval history, but the peace time standing armies of England and France in peacetime were in the tens of thousands (40 to 50 thousands). China during the Ming Dynasty had a peacetime standing army of over 1 million

It would be interesting to see a virtual China vs. Rome battle, but that definitely would not be realistic, and in all honesty, the technological and numerical superiority would be hard to illustrate in a game.

[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.

[Urnamma]

Let's use simple logic. China defeated the Huns. The Huns destroyed and burnt Rome to the ground. China can as easily destroy and raize rome to the ground.

Simple logic how? That's post hoc ergo propter hoc if I've ever seen it.. Your logic is silly.

Rome during the time of the Huns was a different beast to Rome at the time of the high Empire, or the late Republic.

The huns didn't do a god damned thing to Rome either. The Visigoths sacked it.

Let's reduce your logic:

Afghanistan defeated Russia. Russia defeated Germany. Therefore, Afghanistan will defeat Germany.

Umm...

[Anthony]

The halberd isn't much of a weapon and is built around specific types of combat; it came into bigger play in Europe during a time when shields had been phasing out, and was used largely in what were more or less single duels (much like how the period Chinese would have fought). Urnamma mentions some good weapons the Chinese didn't have; the armor splitting falx for one would be an utter nightmare. The falcata too. The way the Chinese fought was vastly out-dated in the west. Celts had once fought a similar way, but had long since dropped it. Why? Because organized units and regimentalism made individual combat irrelevant. While duels still happened, mass combat was no longer based around it, because it was completely inappropriate for fighting a regiment working as a unit (so we see then Celts introducing their standards, horns for commands, etc.). Until then, we see Celts expansions almost stop utterly, even against enemies they were superior in number to. After they began using then-modern regiment tactics, they conquer the Po valley, obliterate early Roman armies and sack the city, and marched into Greece and beat the tar out of Hellenic armies (and totally annihilated the army of Macedonia) the whole way to Delphi (at times larger than their own), fighting largely the way they always had, but now supporting one another more effectively. Lack of organized units and focusing on personal combat would render them ineffective in a melee against most ancient western armies. Ultimately, without historical evidence of any combat between the two, predicting an outcome is dicey at best. There are far too many factors; morale, supply, quality of equipment, allies/mercenaries (like either one went so far to an opposing territory with no aide? No pathfinders, no local mercenary companies, etc.), tactics, skill of the commanders, individual skill and experience of soldiers, etc. The whole argument is completely asinine.

[Urnamma]

Note that the Arabs, while technologically far inferior to Hellenistic or Roman states, did defeat the chinese, largely because of their emphasis on group versus individual combat.

[Darkarbiter]

Regardless of all else as stated above the chinese revolved around individual duels so could not be represented on the RTW game engine which uses units.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

The Arabs fought the Chinese?

[Obelics]

china was in my dreams too, but now that i think on, it could be very hard to implement, cause game mechanics, for example, how to implement the passage from the warring states (ZhanGuo) to the first empire (Qin)? and then the passage from this first "legist" empire to the strictly confucian "Western Han"?
and then in the 9 a.C. there were a brief interreign of the Xin ("New") dinasty by the usurper WangMang until 25 a.C.

regarding the Arabs, pheraphs he is referring to some islamized city-states in the "Chinese Turkestan" (XinJiang=New Province, they had some defeats on traying to control this lands) but it not regard the EB time frame, I only recall of plenty of Arabs merchants as well as Christians Nestorians under the Tang dinasty. And there was even the last Sassanid Successor in exile at the court of the Tang, but the chineses never organized an expedition to take back Persia to the Sassanids.
If you want to call "China" that lands at that time (what is today the Chinese Turkenstan), then you can do, but at that times, it was a wild territory, that changed often from a chinese occupation to an indipendence, to an occupation by western kingdom and so on... anyway today this chinese province has an official national minority, who profess the Islamic religion.

In definitive, coming back to the EB timeframe, it could be an Hell of a work to implement a Chinese faction, if you want to be historical correct.
It could be done more easy, if you call that faction just "China" or "ZhongGuo", but it is not in the style of EB i think...

EDIT: what happened to this forum? is just my browser, or this are the definitive colours?

[Numahr]

The Arabs fought the Chinese?

Yes, the battle of Talas, in nowdays Uzkekistan, in 751. Easternmost Arabian army vs Westernmost Tang incursion in Central Asia. The Arabs indeed won, although this says nothing about their alleged military superiority.

As a result Central Asia definitely staid in the Arabic-Persian-Turkic cultural area.

An other important consequence of this encounter lies in that Chinese prisoneers taught the usage of paper in Samarkand, allowing the technology to spread in the Muslim and then later on Christian worlds, ushering in a major technologic revolution comparable to the press printing.

[Dumbass]

So much for EB2 discussion, anyway about the map.

I love the look of RTR's new map, maybe something as glossy, similar sized as that would be good.

[Lovejoy]

Dumbass: Yeah.

Do not make the map any bigger please! I can't see how an indian faction would do any good. Did they have ANY effect on the faction of that era? Don't thinks so. And besides, what would the faction do? Just sit there?

Instead focus on the area we got, and take away as many repel-factions as possible.

Just my two cents...

[Teleklos Archelaou]

If a faction would have three big provinces, even on our current map, we have to think about it. Especially since we have a lot of units for them already, and so many of our factions had serous interaction with them (seleukids, bactria, saka, parthians). If we are given 9 or 10 new faction slots, it's hard not to think about a way to make that work.

[Lovejoy]

The main problem for me about India, is the fact that it would be a half faction. (The same problem I got with Yuzhi-something(cant remember) I do not simply like faction right on the border of the map. It feels "wrong". It is wrong :P

I do rather see you make the map smaller to not feel the need to include such factions. Even if indian-troops is sweet. Have them as AAR troops.

[QwertyMIDX]

India had a huge effect on most of the factions in the east of EB's map. First Seleukid relations with the Mauryans and later smaller states was fairly intense (including a couple of wars, a famous marriage alliance, and a number of other events). Second the buddist missions sent out under Ashoka were fairly succesful in converting some eastern greeks to buddism, including a Baktrian king who was quite a buddist scholar. Third there are the large greek populations in northern India (also converts of buddism through the work of Ashoka). Fouth there are the succesion of Indo-____ Kingdoms that EB factions turn into; Indo-Baktrian, Indo-Saka, Indo-Parthian. Fifth, soley as the source of elephants in most hellenistic armies India was was a place that was often in the thoughts of the great powers of the near east and ancient mediterranean.

[iberus_generalis]

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.

well everyone talks about Crossbows and all, and say they are the best missile weapons since the invention of the Whell..that's not true you know.... a bunch of trained slingers could have wiped out the crossbowmen with little work, as from all of the roman man used armament, the slingshot was the one with bigger damage, and longer range, some estimates say that they could kill people at 400 meters(really long range), outdoing archers, and of course crossbows.... as for Archers..they too could cap crossbow's ass...because a trained archer can kill at 278(+-)meters. while a crossbow can only hit and kill at 147(+-) meters.... of course crossbows were also good cuz they didn't need much training...but alas, a trained force of archers or slingers...could be the end of an army with crossbowmen...

as for the Halberds and other polearms.... all i can say is that i pity the guys who would use them against the roman legions...they wouldn't stand a chance against the cohesive roman manipules, and fighting technics... i even say more...had the roman fighting technics been know to any faction of the Medieval Era. they would be virtually invincible....imagine portugal, a small country...if it had been able to use the legionary tactics and techniques, they would have swept across all of europe, as armies of the time relied on the duel tactics, and the steamroller tactic to destroy the incoming armies.... a bunch of men fighting as one would have changed the face of Medieval Warfare...