Sweboz (Germans) slightly underpowered

[Frostwulf]

Why is it that allot of you on these forums think that the Celts should be as powerful as they are in respect to units? Why is it ok to have Celt elite units higher then there German counter parts not to mention the Romans!

[Watchman]

The differences between the Celt and Sweboz elites stem primarily from the level of equipement carried, which obviously is purely a factor of resources and as such has nothing to do with the warriors themselves. Complaining about that is roughly akin to complaining about the Roman heavy infantry being better armoured than most "barbarian" equivalents.

Didn't we already go this over once, anyway ?

As for the Romans, please keep in mind the differences in the whole underlying military philosophy. The whole point of the Celtic system was the creation of mighty warrior-heroes; anyone who reached the elite status was quaranteed to be one hard case indeed. The Romans, conversely, were soldiers in the modern sense; their whole way of war was based on iron discipline, seamless teamwork and well-practised drill. The actual skill of the individual soldier was somewhat secondary to his "moral fibre", ability to carry out orders posthaste and operate as part of his unit. A veteran or elite soldier produced by such system is not so much a better warrior as that much better a cog in the war machine - better able to carry out his orders and hold his nerve in the face of often quite extreme adversity.

Moreover, looking at the stats I don't really see where the Roman high-end infantry - Antesigniani, Evocatae, Praetorians (who incidentally are AFAIK statted a bit wrong, and should have a bit more armour) - are supposed to be meaningfully inferior to their Celtic peers. Anything but. They're more or less matched in stats actually, and both the Evocatae and Praetorians come in meaningfully larger units (base size 50) than the high-end Celtic units while the Antesigniani (who are not actually line troops anyway) have equal numbers. And man for man the Romans are cheaper. Oh, the 0.225 lethality of the Celtic longswords certainly beats the 0.13 of the gladius, but I'd imagine the nasty AP pila more than compensated.