Animals in warfare

[Copperknickers]

My case for including animals (other than elephants and horses) in EB and/or EB2. To introduce the subject; animals have been used in combat for millenia, and there are some extremely good justifications for including them in you excellent mod.

1.'Incendiary' pigs. It is widely accepted that Roman pigs covered in tar and pitch were set alight and sent into enemy lines to disrupt them and specifically to scare elephants on at least one occasion.

2. Wardogs. Even more so, dogs were used as a psychological weapon and to cut down routing soldiers. ALmost every faction in EB used them, most notably the Celts, Epeirotes and Romans. the Brittainic tribes even had their own native breed, the Ancient British Mastiff.

And now for something a little more EB 2 oriented (bearing in mind the effect of the dead cows in med2)

"The Scythians and some other steppe people are believed to have collaborated a mixture of decaying/decomposing adder Vipera pontica,V. berus, V. berani, V. Nikoloskii (snake) bodies, human blood and various animal faeces into large vats, where they would be left to combine and become a feral disgusting bacteria ridden load of sludgy liquid. This mixture would then be applied to arrow tips of the Horse Archers. The results after being hit by one of these poisoned arrows were horrid. Your Central Nervous System would begin to dysfunction, going haywire due to the toxins, deeming the Peripheral Nervous System unable to communicate effectively with the brain and Central Nervous System. Respiratory Paralysis usually followed shortly after, while the Bacteria attacked the Blood Cells and rapidly ate away at your flesh from the inside out"

I hope you consider these points for including more animals in your game, if only to improve on perfection.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Do I read a catch between the lines?

[Dhampir]

The time has come. You cannot deny it, EB team. Animals were used in combat, and there are extremely good justifications for including them.

1.'Incendiary' pigs. It is a known fact that Roman pigs covered in tar and pitch were set alight and sent into enemy lines to disrupt them and specifically to scsre elephants on at least one occasion. So why don't you have them?

2. Wardogs. Even more so, dogs were used as a psychological weapon and to cut down routing soldiers. ALmost every faction in EB used them, most notably the Celts, Epeirotes and Romans. the Brittainic tribes even had their own native breed, the Ancient British Mastiff. So again i ask, what possible reason do you have for not including them?

And now for something a little more EB 2 oriented bearing the effect of the dead cows.

"The Scythians and some other steppe people are believed to have collaborated a mixture of decaying/decomposing adder Vipera pontica,V. berus, V. berani, V. Nikoloskii (snake) bodies, human blood and various animal faeces into large vats, where they would be left to combine and become a feral disgusting bacteria ridden load of sludgy liquid. This mixture would then be applied to arrow tips of the Horse Archers. The results after being hit by one of these poisoned arrows were horrid. Your Central Nervous System would begin to dysfunction, going haywire due to the toxins, deeming the Peripheral Nervous System unable to communicate effectively with the brain and Central Nervous System. Respiratory Paralysis usually followed shortly after, while the Bacteria attacked the Blood Cells and rapidly ate away at your flesh from the inside out"

I hope you consider animals in your game, if only to improve on perfection.

The text you quote doesn't mention any live animals, just dead ones and the feces of animals and the combination used to poison the tips of arrows- apparently to inflict a case of necrotizing fasciitis of similar aggressive infection.

While it does not contradict your argument, it also does not strengthen it.

[Copperknickers]

Its not supposed to strengthen it, just as an additional representation of historical warfare.

[Foot]

Is this a serious request.

Romans once used stilts to travel across marshy land. Should we include a new roman unit for that as well?

Foot

[Watchman]

Hannibal at least once used a captured herd of cattle to distrupt a Roman blocking force before his strike force went in, too.

And the inhabitants of one city in the Levant at least once used bees to harass Roman troops.

But such one-off weird-ass improvisations, no matter how brilliant (and they backfired every now and then too), can hardly be reasonably represented in an engine as limited as RTW's. Rather they should simply be assumed to form a part of the bonuses a good leader gives his troops.

Plus, I for one remember the vanilla wardogs and flaming pigs. Both sucked hard already as interaction with units went - the fact the wardogs themselves, once unleashed, could not be targeted being only the most egregious detail.

[Copperknickers]

All of these things were used once or twice, they were not actual battlefield soldiers like the dogs. What is wrong with in particualr the wardogs? Thats like missing out helvetii just because they were defeated before all the others. You people are...animalist.

[MiniMe]

me heard egyptian marines were using hippopotamidae as amphibian landing vehicle
not to mention persian assault rhinocerotidae. terrific beastie and quite efficient contrary to some stupid movies depiction

post 444
more bs to follow
sooner or later

[Sarcasm]

Whatever the initial poster's having, I'm having. Make it two, actually.

[Tellos Athenaios]

All of these things were used once or twice, they were not actual battlefield soldiers like the dogs. What is wrong with in particualr the wardogs? Thats like missing out helvetii just because they were defeated before all the others. You people are...animalist.

where's that welcome to the club smiley? That one with a big, broad grin and an unhealthy blue teint?

Anyways: the bee-squad is a common enough feature of battelfields - it appears all peoples of all times seem to have used the 'tactic' (which as noted, could backfire just as easily) at least once. Same for the wardogs. In fact, wardogs are well attested as late as WW I! Though as messengers that is.

However that in itself is not really a reason to include them, as for all intents and purposes the use of a unit in the TW games is to actually fight rather than be some tactical salient/pitfall. And if you think about it: what self-respecting farmer would not have owned some nasty bitey animal to keep unwanted people and animals from his crops? But, right you are, those animals would hardly be a 'war'-dog would they? Indeed: the dog would be much more scared by the noise and the rather unfriendly welcome of the enemy soldiers (not to mention their sheer numbers and hideous equipment largely involving lots of things that can hurt a dog one way or another) than any disciplined enemy ever would be of them.

[The Persian Cataphract]

Actually, the idea of incorporating poison for archers on set-piece battles is not too shabby at all; The problem would of course be any supposed implementation of this feature. It stands out as one of the more feasible ideas, because in difference to dogs and hogs, it is a more reasonable feature which may either be toggled or manipulated by the ability/traits of the commander, or as an alternative for certain foot-archers or noble horse-archers (Not very agile for Cantabrian circle) to get some form of improvement for static archery.

Certainly it was common enough, as a historical feature, to consider discussing, but I am afraid the representation of vipers or the aforementioned vats of toxic waste is out of the question.

[Watchman]

It's also an unnecessarily complicated recipe. Good old crap is already pretty good for giving the poor sod hit by the arrow problems with potential tetanus infection down the road...

Files under "nasty shit people liked to inflict on their fellow man for fun and profit". Beats me how you're going to affect the post-battle recovery of the enemy's casualties from missile fire though, since that's pretty much what this kind of stuff does.

[Tiberius Nero]

1.'Incendiary' pigs. It is widely accepted that Roman pigs covered in tar and pitch were set alight and sent into enemy lines to disrupt them and specifically to scare elephants on at least one occasion.

I have always been curious to find out if there was any sort of historical merit to including the flaming pigs in vanilla (I had concluded that the devs must have gotten the idea from Hannibal's trick with the flaming cows), but I have never encountered a mention of them in any source; could you tell me please what source there is for pigs being used in this way on the ancient battlefield?

[Watchman]

IIRC Scipio used them to mess with Carthaginian elephants. Bit of an one-off that, though.

[russia almighty]

Curious but, wasn't driving cattle and other large animals into your enemy's line a somewhat common tactic? I know the West Africans of Songhai in the early modern Era LOVED the tactic; but, was it used in the ancient world often?

[Watchman]

It has the fairly obvious disadvantage it's probably not all that difficult to send the herd stampede the other way... plus armies didn't normally wander around with herds of cows. They usually just ate those of local peasants.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Then again the described herds probably belonged to an army made up of local peasants...

[Watchman]

Fair enough, but in most sedentary societies peasants had only a few each - and guarded them quite jealously due to their very concrete value. You know where the Latin word for money comes from, right ?

(Vaguely guesses the aforementioned Africans were chiefly pastoralists.)

[Tellos Athenaios]

AFAIK the cattle herding population of the Sahel and such, including western Africa was at least semi-nomadic - being on the move for the better part of the year? (With no other option to sustain a substantially large herd due to the local climate.)

[caeser44]

those flaming pigs sure would be a lot of pork roasts, just put some marinade on them!lol

[Dhampir]

those flaming pigs sure would be a lot of pork roasts, just put some marinade on them!lol

You get hungry after a battle and a pig roast soothes the savage beast.

[Turnus]

Would it be possible to have a single Wardog (i.e. as an 'officer') in certain units? This could represent their presence in small numbers.

[fenix3279]

Would it be possible to have a single Wardog (i.e. as an 'officer') in certain units? This could represent their presence in small numbers.

It's possible but I think the men might be rather uncomfortable under the command of someone who drools, profusely.

[clibanarii immortal]

I think what he means is that a special unit (like the guy with the sword and the other guy with the banner on a mistophoroi phalangitai or something like that)

2. Wardogs. Even more so, dogs were used as a psychological weapon and to cut down routing soldiers. ALmost every faction in EB used them, most notably the Celts, Epeirotes and Romans. the Brittainic tribes even had their own native breed, the Ancient British Mastiff.

the way Wardogs act in vanilla is rather stupid, in one battle I fought against bruttii, after the whole enemy has routed I find that one of my cavalry units was still taking damage, I zoomed in on the unit and found that there was a wardog (without a keeper) attacking my cavalry, and my cavalry can't even attack that stupid dog

[sycander]

Sorry, but mastiff was used by asian tribes as wardogs, not by english! It only appeared in England few century ago, (16/17th).

[Maeran]

The Romans were writing of mastiff type dogs from Britain in the first years of the 1st century AD. Also, the famous Mollossian hounds of Epirus are regarded as having been Mastiff type dogs.

It is true that most modern breeds do date from the 18th-19th centuries when selective breeding of domesticated animals reached a new level of creativity, but this does not mean that the ancestors of those breeds were completely different dogs.

------------------------------------------

Even an 'officer' dog attached to a unit (which would look nice and not be inappropriate if more recent history of dogs and other animals in war are anything to go by) would use up an entire unit slot. There is only a limited number of these, even if modders' ingenuity has stretched them out a lot. So do you want war dogs or Indian longbowmen? Harassing bees rather than Casse champions?

That is a trade off.


This bit by Watchman interested me.

But such one-off weird-ass improvisations, no matter how brilliant (and they backfired every now and then too), can hardly be reasonably represented in an engine as limited as RTW's. Rather they should simply be assumed to form a part of the bonuses a good leader gives his troops.

Is there any way of linking ancillary effects and traits? So perhaps an intelligent general with an inventor and a beastmaster could get an extra boost because he's more likely to use animals in such a way?

[Strategy]

I have always been curious to find out if there was any sort of historical merit to including the flaming pigs in vanilla (I had concluded that the devs must have gotten the idea from Hannibal's trick with the flaming cows), but I have never encountered a mention of them in any source; could you tell me please what source there is for pigs being used in this way on the ancient battlefield?

There are several records in the ancient sources (not with Scipio, though).

Pliny the Elder in The Natural History, Book VIII:

The very least sound, however, of the grunting of the hog terrifies them; and when wounded and frightened, they always give ground

Aelian, in de Natura Animalum, i,38:

It was by these squealing pigs, they say, that the Romans turned to flight the elephants of Pyrrhus and won a glorious victory.

There is also an episode (also in Aelian XVI, 36) where Antigonos Gonatas has his elephants routed by the squealing of barbecued pigs while besieging Megara.

From there to an actual battlefield weapon is a long stretch, though. We're talking about a one-off stratagem - not a battlefield weapon. And while there is little reason to disbelieve the story, neither Aelian nor Pliny were particularly rigorous about where they got their stories...


As for the whole wardog thing - the less said on that, the better.

Yes - dogs are sharp-teethed creatures. Yes - dogs no doubt followed their masters to war. Not surprising - dogs are excellent for guard duty, shepherding, and hunting (all activities that may be useful in an army on the march). From there to "war dogs" is a huge stretch though... the number of ancient sources I've encountered that mention the use of dogs in connection with warfare is approximately even lower than those that mention pigs; and I've yet to encounter any ancient source that actually discuss them as being used in battle/siege.

[Strategy]

The Romans were writing of mastiff type dogs from Britain in the first years of the 1st century AD.

Grattius discusses British dogs, in his poem on hunting.

What if you visit the straits of the Morini, tide-swept by a wayward sea, and choose to penetrate even among the Britons? O how great your reward, how great your gain beyond any outlays! If you are not bent on looks and deceptive graces (this is the one defect of the British whelps), at any rate when serious work has come, when bravery must be shown, and the impetuous War-god calls in the utmost hazard, then you could not admire the renowned Molossians so much.

Strabo says:

These things, accordingly, are exported from the island[Brittain], as also hides, and slaves, and dogs that are by nature suited to the purposes of the chase; the Celti, however, use both these and the native dogs for the purposes of war too.

Neither of these sources indicate that the British dogs being Mastiffs. It simply says the Britons breed some nice (albeit ugly) dogs. (Note, incidentally, one of the very few ancient claims to the use of dogs in war. Surprisingly, Caesar who fought Celts for 10 years and meticulously recorded skirmishes and battles doesn't mention a single instance of war dogs).

Also, the famous Mollossian hounds of Epirus are regarded as having been Mastiff type dogs.

No depictions that can be confirmed to be Mollosians survive. However, given that descriptions of them refer to them as hunting dogs, that mastiff-type are pretty much entirely absent from Roman iconography of the period and that we know (from the ancient literary sources) that Mollosians were bred for running (speed), it is extremely unlikely that Mollosians were mastiff type dogs. Wishful thinking by over-eager dog owners.

[Cyclops]

I'm pretty sure there's a simple explanantion for the incendiary pigs: when Pyhrrus saw his elephants were scared by porkers he exclaimed (in his broad cockney accent) "flamin' pigs!" giving rise to the RTW developers hilarious wrong conclusion. The unit should be called "Pigs o' Fear" and come with a "crackling" button.

Likewise the talk of adder venom mentioned above is a misunderstanding on the use of snakes. The Skythians probably adopted the Atlantean trick of using actual snakes as arrows. I propose a Skuda Fat Thulsa Doomoi unit to represent this obscure aspect of steppe warrior culture.

May I also suggest that many have misunderstood the actual battlefield role of canines. Its quite possible small puppies were released into battle to lower the aggressiveness of enemies through endorphin release and the "awwwwww" effect. If we could re-scale the wardog model to a much smaller size, add a bow and give them a de-beserking effect, we'd be much closer to the truth than the inital post.

[Maeran]

I'm going to have to back down on the English Mastiff thing.

I was basing my assertions on what is widely considered the case by dog breeders (which includes the idea that the mastiff is the oldest recorded English breed), plus Grattius (attributed to around 8AD).

Having devoted about half an hour of vaguely historical research (i.e. looking for evidence) I've come to the conclusion that there is no ready evidence for mastiffs in Britain before 1800.

There may be evidence of them going to America on the Mayflower, but since they don't appear again in the Americas until the late 19th century, this may not in fact be the case.

Then there is the story of Sir Peers Legh at Agincourt, being guarded by his mastiff. But I could find no sources for this and it may be the product of 19th century dog lovers (there are so many stories of loyal dogs).

Even the etymology of the name is disagreed upon. So, fair enough, I can't say with any certainty that mastiff precursors were present in Britain, or indeed Europe ('Mollossers' being also disputed) prior to the period around 1800.

Although, interestingly, if anyone actually does know a lot about dogs here; what I have read suggests that by modern breeding standards there may have been two types of Mollossian hound. There is a large and strong one that is much admired as a sheepdog, and a smaller faster type used for hunting.