Quote Originally Posted by Intranetusa
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Sarcasm
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.)