Roman Legions seem too weak

[mcantu]

Doesn't sound like you have battle difficulty set to medium...

[CaesarAugustus]

Never use wall fights as in indicator of how good a unit is,... besides taking forever the attacker usually takes many more casulaties than usual... I prefer to sap myself.

[konny]

A unit of Camillan Hastati will cut a unit Peltastai to pieces (suffering many loses for sure), so that should be true for Imperial Legions as well. Wall fights have their own rules.

Amongst the Iberi units, there are some that look like nothing but have AP swords. I had really started to fear these guys and prefer to encounter any stack of Carthagian heavy spearmen with Sacred Band cavalry than facing one of these units Iberi holding a gate, or simillar situations with them.

[Parkev]

Ran a few tests a while ago as the Casse in custom battle.
Cohors Reformata beat Rycalawre
Polybian Principes beat Rycalawre unless you get lucky (3 deep seemed to work only if you busted the middle of the Roman line).

And then look at the cost ratios; something like 1:2 per man (Roman:Casse) and after that conclude that Roman troops are pretty good.

[Frostwulf]

Roman troops were hardly the end-all of infantry. In fact, they only became the tremendous fighting force we know them as under a few select generals. Most of the time their victories came from the use of sheer force, an unrelenting drive, and a nearly complete lack of care for casualties.

The Roman infantry was among the best in the world, especially by the time Marius made his changes(most likely started prior to Marius). A combination of arms,armor,training,discipline and triplex acies made them very formidable.

[HFox]

The Marian reforms were made because the Romans kept loosing battles and were on the brink of being destroyed....hence the use of the word reforms, not improvement, not cpd, not anything else which indicates building on something thats almost perfect already.

'very formidable' describes my mother in law.......now if only she could be reformed.... :)

[Frostwulf]

The Marian reforms were made because the Romans kept loosing battles and were on the brink of being destroyed....hence the use of the word reforms, not improvement, not cpd, not anything else which indicates building on something thats almost perfect already.

Without going into much detail:
496-418 Roman wins 17/ Roman losses:3
391-302 Roman wins 40+/ Roman losses:5
298-265 Roman wins 15/ Roman losses: 4
264-241(First Punic War) Roman wins 12/ Roman losses 6
225-219 Roman wins 4/ Roman losses 1
218-202(Second Punic War) Roman wins 30/ Roman losses 16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Punic_War
201-200 Roman wins 2/ losses 0
200-197(Second Macedonian War) Roman wins 4/ Roman losses 0
197-195 Roman wins 3/ losses 0
195 (Spanish Wars) Roman wins 3/ losses 0
194-192 Roman wins 5/ losses 0
191-190(War against Antiochus) Roman wins 6/losses 0

The above list is basic and it didn't go into some of the minor battles/skirmishes, yet in others it did. It certainly gives you a good idea of who won or lost most of the battles. I don't have time to continue but it is along the same lines. The Romans certainly lost huge numbers against Hannibal but eventually with good commanders finally defeated him. The above list should be considered to be slightly off on the win/loss columns by a potential of 2-3, I was rushing.

[abou]

The Roman infantry was among the best in the world, especially by the time Marius made his changes(most likely started prior to Marius). A combination of arms,armor,training,discipline and triplex acies made them very formidable.

Frostwulf, go home. If you want to ignore something like three or four discussions in recent history on the topic then be my guest. I don't want to see this collapse into the same miasma of suck that you turned the German and Celtic threads into.

[russia almighty]

WTF did he do in the topic's ? If he is that annoying I'm sure you can make something to his posting abilities .

[Intranetusa]

The Roman infantry was among the best in the world, especially by the time Marius made his changes(most likely started prior to Marius). A combination of arms,armor,training,discipline and triplex acies made them very formidable.

Actually, the quality of Roman arms and armor was often lower than their opponents. Their weapons/armor was cheap and produced in mass.

Their weapons and armor (chainmail, and later the famous 2nd century CE iron band armor) were made of carburized iron of varying quality. Roman metallurgical skills were actually quite poor compared to other civilizations at the time and they never developed steel.

[Starforge]

Actually, the quality of Roman arms and armor was often lower than their opponents. Their weapons/armor was cheap and produced in mass.

Their weapons and armor (chainmail, and later the famous 2nd century CE iron band armor) were made of carburized iron of varying quality. Roman metallurgical skills were actually quite poor compared to other civilizations at the time and they never developed steel.

Just out of curiosity - how much did the consistency of the metalworking vary from province to province (say Iberia to Italy to Anatolia) given a particular time period? Just wondering how much local raw materials and the availability of local craftsmen played with the quality of Roman armor.

Heh...So a completely random list supported by a wikipedia article that's awfully biased *for* the romans you believe? Fine. Good for you.

My opinion that the list was bullshit was not because I'm prejudiced towards the Romans - thank you very much for passing judgement without really knowing a thing about me. To portray them as something that they were not is to do them a disservice really. They won, indeed, and their victory is even more impressive the more due credit you give to their opponents and realize that they were not super-men. Think about it.

That list, not only is largely arbitrary, it ignores that an extremely large number of the casualties the Romans suffered were not in set piece battles, and is basically prejudiced (now there's a good use for the word) towards those cultures that chose not to resort to field battles as their main way to stop them. Though even those cultures did confront them in them, and to the contrary of what it says in that post, they did won plenty of battles.

Thanks for being a bit more detailed. Simply saying "bullshit" and moving on makes it easy for one to draw possible misconceptions regarding your motives and prejudices :).

As stated in my on-topic comment, I don't believe that they should be supermen. I also firmly believe that there's a lot more than quality of troops involved in determining who wins a battle (something that you can't really portray in R:TW all too accurately.) Set battles and those mostly garnered from Roman sources are (I'm going out on a limb here) what we have to go on. Argueing that guerilla warfare happened and would skew the numbers since many cultures couldn't fight a set battle might very well be true - but simply not important to the discussion here on a TW forum wherein there is no real guerilla fighting going on in game (and in many cases likely a bit of speculation going on.)