Best weapon of ancient war

[wolveraptor]

Perhaps I would do well to create the economic side of my empire to work with my military caste. I had imagined one with a powerful central government, that would heavily tax inheritence, such that there were no hordes of filthily rich nobles. Those who were unemployed or dissatisfied had the option of joining the army alongside the elite troops. I would try to keep welfare low, as that seems to have crippled Rome with groups of recipients contributing nothing to society.

Should I allow slavery? On the one hand, it drives up unemployment for uneducated peasants. On the other hand, I could use the extra grunts for my army. The smaller percentage of elite troops make up my army, the better they can be. Plus, it'll elevate them to a legendary status, like the Green Beret or something.

[wolveraptor]

Sorry for the double post: I had to log off the computer immediately.

Concerning brutality: my warrior's racism and contempt for the common farmer would not go so far as to hamper practicality. They know when cheap labor from such peoples can be used. Making a good example of rebellious cities would be useful though. I could kill most of them, then take survivors and lacerate their skin and drag them across the hard ground with horses. Those who survive that can be released to spread the word. The word that we're coming for you.

I can see, though, that sometimes that could be counterproductive; I might accidentally enrage those who were formerly neutral, though this can only be said to be true for warlords and such; the peasantry sure as hell aren't going to be spurred into fighting if they can hang on to life a bit longer; furthermore, farmer in my society are given subsidies (sp?) because it is known that they feed the army. As well, they could be incorporated into the lower class sections of the army.

Yes, I would do well to adapt a mixture of lower level grunts and elite mega-troops. The elites' helmets would be shaped like whitish skulls, with tatoos on the craniums; an easily recognizeable banner would make it easy for opponent's to recognize who they were dealing with, and instill panic.

[Stuart Mackey]

That is why the elite warrior class in asia could be counted in 100s of footsoldiers while in europe it could be maybe be 10s.

Uh, is that supposed to be, "That is why the elite warrior class in Europe could be counted in hundreds of footsoldiers while in Asia it could be in the tens."?

Brian

Asia had the population to support large numbers of elite troops; Europe didn't.

Ahh but could Asia keep them fed for any rasonable period of time?

[Spoonist]

Imagine what walkie-talkies could have done for battle tactics in the ancient era. Not that I'm seriously suggesting that you put walkie-talkies into your fic; it's just an amusing idea. The difficulty of co-ordinating large armies and issuing orders was a serious tactical issue.

Hence the use of flags/muic instruments/runners/smokesignals etc.
Asian and incan flag signaling was truly effecient way unless the LoS was hindered by terrain.
Trumpets or horns as celts/romans/etc used was less effecient but more reliable.

[Ford Prefect]

Best weapon of ancient war was the Welsh. Of course, I'm biased and stupid.

[tharkûn]

Perhaps I would do well to create the economic side of my empire to work with my military caste. I had imagined one with a powerful central government, that would heavily tax inheritence, such that there were no hordes of filthily rich nobles. Those who were unemployed or dissatisfied had the option of joining the army alongside the elite troops. I would try to keep welfare low, as that seems to have crippled Rome with groups of recipients contributing nothing to society.

Taxing inheritence isn't going to be all that practical. The vast majority of inheritence will be in land and that leads either to government control of most wealth production or mass land sales which leads to the wealthy being able to buy up ever increasing means of wealth generation. Most inheritences were small plots of land and there was virtually no chance that the average landowner could generate enough surplus coin to preserve his inheritence intact. On the other hand the obscenely wealthy will have enough coin to by up the taxed land of small landowners.

Should I allow slavery? On the one hand, it drives up unemployment for uneducated peasants. On the other hand, I could use the extra grunts for my army. The smaller percentage of elite troops make up my army, the better they can be. Plus, it'll elevate them to a legendary status, like the Green Beret or something.

Unemployment isn't an issue. You either work or you die. The vast majority of the population just wants to farm a small plot of land, if you are an expanding power you can always ship the indigent off to the frontier to thrive or die.

They know when cheap labor from such peoples can be used. Making a good example of rebellious cities would be useful though. I could kill most of them, then take survivors and lacerate their skin and drag them across the hard ground with horses. Those who survive that can be released to spread the word. The word that we're coming for you.

You want the word to be "Submit or die". In any event killing the populace wholesale is bad longterm. You'd be far better ahead to institute slavery and get good monetary return.

furthermore, farmer in my society are given subsidies (sp?) because it is known that they feed the army. As well, they could be incorporated into the lower class sections of the army.

Not going to happen. The vast bulk of your economy is going to be based off agriculture for every non-farmer in your society you had at least 20 people working agriculture unless you were in a ridiciously fertile region (think the earliest fish harvest or the Nile floodplain). You can't give handouts to the farmers, they are the backbone of your revenue generation.

As far as ancient signaling, do recall that pyrotechnics were ridiciously expensive even in later eras. Also once the dust comes up they are worthless. Flags are likewise hampered, further recall that this is well before optics so you are limited to the resolution of the human eye. Once battle is joined visual signals are useless for anyone but commanders above the fray (think generals on hilltops). Even there it becomes quite trivial for cavalry to kick up enough dust to obscure their view. Audio signals were used because the grunts could hear them and react without having to look away from their opponents (which could prove fatal). Such signals were still lousy, but you only needed a handful of grunts to hear the signal and pass word along the line.

Walkie Talkies would be decisive. No LOS restriction, essentially unlimited bandwidth, "private" communication, and massive range - you could easily march around your enemy and stage much better "suprise" attacks.

[wolveraptor]

Couldn't I institute a law against nobles buying land on the frontier? That way, peasants could be shipped off to populate the newly conquered territory. In fact, it could be the incentive to join the army. Any farmer who wants a new plot of land can join the military and recieve whatever plunder he can grab and free land, as well as a government-constructed house (which would usually just be a hut and hay beds).

The government would be a massive employer, with a heavy demand for blacksmiths, masons etc.

[tharkûn]

Couldn't I institute a law against nobles buying land on the frontier?

Sure you could make any laws you like about land ownership. I was merely pointing out that ancient economies were agrarian and pretty close to zero sum. Most people are going to leave the world no wealthier than they entered it. Small landowners rarely sold out if they had any other choice, every time one of them dies during a bad crop year the extremely wealthy will be able to buy up the tax.

If you want a workable model to prevent land consolidation you might try the Biblical Jewish model. Every 50 years land reverts to its ancestral owner (i.e. if gramps sold the family plot 45 years ago his son or grandson gets it back when the next 50th year comes along); land thus drops in value on a 50 year cycle. If you couple this with some type of primogeniture law you should be able to preserve distributed land ownership and have incentive for younger sons to join the army and head for the frontier.

Any farmer who wants a new plot of land can join the military and recieve whatever plunder he can grab and free land, as well as a government-constructed house (which would usually just be a hut and hay beds).

No need for that. Just enslave the old inhabitants and turn their house over to your settler. Government provided housing is nothing compared to the value of the land itself. Anyone who is heading for truly virgin territory is going to be able to build their own house or aren't going to be able to hack carving out new farmland.

[wolveraptor]

As a bonus, original inhabitants who were enslaved could be offered freedom in return for acting as a guide for my soldiers, who would be unfamiliar with the landscape. As a rule, the warrior caste would share its language with no one, so as to preserve a sense of cultural identity, and so that enemy troops would never eventually learn to decipher troop commands.

Back to weapons: recruited grunts would be given spears with shields; they're easy to wield, require little special training, and are, as always, effective weapons. Ideally, before being released onto the field, they'd be given some months training to familiarize themselves to my army's tactics and weaponry. The bow, a weapons familiar to local hunters, would also be equipped. Bows, while requiring some training, are still more easily learned than the sword and shield combo, or the two-handed sword. The average unit deployed would consist of peasant infantry commanded by small battallions of elites, supported by elite cavalrymen.

A question: were maces really only useful for breaking armor, or would they find use during my time period?

[Duckie]

Be careful not to bog down your warriors with this "Chosen Caste" and "Cultural Exclusivity" stuff too much. Don't let them go Sardaukar- all the fancy traditions and history in the world won't keep them alive, the fighting will.

[The Yosemite Bear]

And another thing? Weren't the spears of Spartans made totally of bronze? Or was that just their shields?

neither


there was a lot of wood involved in both

[wolveraptor]

Be careful not to bog down your warriors with this "Chosen Caste" and "Cultural Exclusivity" stuff too much. Don't let them go Sardaukar- all the fancy traditions and history in the world won't keep them alive, the fighting will.

The whole racism thing is intended to ensure that no foreign blood comes in and screws up generations of breeding that produced men slightly but noticeably above the norm in average battle-skills; how much strength, reflex-speed or dexterity that involves is not completely clear, but there remains no doubt of their superiority. Also, their culture of training till birth can only remain effective if they cut off outside cultures. Their only contact with the civillians is in the peasantry who join the army. Their culture is so extremely warfare centered, they even stick thing but penetrating needles into their children from an early age solely for the purpose of deadening the nerves, increasing the body's endorphin response to pain, and causing an overall resistance to physical discomfort. Such effects have been observed in proffesional "torture kings".

I tried not to include any traditions besides funeral rites and spirtual beliefs, which were not shown in this thread due to lack of relavency.

[Duckie]

If they're extremely war-centered to the abandon of everything else, how do they deal with the administrative tasks of running an Empire? Mongol-style burn and graze?

[wolveraptor]

They don't administer the Empire. They're simply the warrior caste, part of a greater society. No one else in the world may bear children by the warriors' women. This rule does not apply to the civillians (who are still permitted to join the army), so they can fuck who they want.

Part of the warrior's culture is the responsibility to protect the people from abuses in the government, such as ignoring term limits (which I have not elaborated on in this thread).

What stops them from taking over completely? They know that all knowledge of the making and forging of effective weaponry lies in the brains of the civillians. Without out their fearsome arms, they would quickly be defeated. Furthermore, they know that they would not be able to conquer vast tracts of land if there were no people to settle it. The comparison between battling for the sake of battling and battling for the sake of conquest would be like the comparison between playing a game of football with your friends or playing in a proffesional game.

One might think they'd use their influential position to nudge the government in one way or another. However, they remain largely detached from politics and know little of it; they're only perspective is a military one. In fact, they would not even come to the rescue of people abused by the government if the elected leaders of "counties" did not address them (I have not examined how the governmental system is divided, so how high up "counties" are in the federal scale is as of yet unknown).

[General Brock]

They don't administer the Empire. They're simply the warrior caste, part of a greater society. No one else in the world may bear children by the warriors' women. This rule does not apply to the civillians (who are still permitted to join the army), so they can fuck who they want.

Part of the warrior's culture is the responsibility to protect the people from abuses in the government, such as ignoring term limits (which I have not elaborated on in this thread).

What stops them from taking over completely? They know that all knowledge of the making and forging of effective weaponry lies in the brains of the civillians. Without out their fearsome arms, they would quickly be defeated. Furthermore, they know that they would not be able to conquer vast tracts of land if there were no people to settle it. The comparison between battling for the sake of battling and battling for the sake of conquest would be like the comparison between playing a game of football with your friends or playing in a proffesional game.

One might think they'd use their influential position to nudge the government in one way or another. However, they remain largely detached from politics and know little of it; they're only perspective is a military one. In fact, they would not even come to the rescue of people abused by the government if the elected leaders of "counties" did not address them (I have not examined how the governmental system is divided, so how high up "counties" are in the federal scale is as of yet unknown).

Er, OK. Does this novel examine how does this inbred warrior caste deals with inbreeding, attrition, and the problem of talented candidates occuring outside their limited gene pool, unscrupulous politicians determined to use them for their own ends or remove them, developing a workable and mature social ethic while isolated and insulated from their own greater society, function effectively as stratigests while having no clue about politics, get fed and paid fairly and on time, and all those other great sub-plot ideas? It is an interesting idea, a caste of elite enforcers bred and trained to narrowly specific purposes and discrete levers and channels of power, but making it believable, while not impossible, will be a challenge. Even assuming people are reasonable can be quite a leap if not spun right.

[Spoonist]

Should I allow slavery? On the one hand, it drives up unemployment for uneducated peasants. On the other hand, I could use the extra grunts for my army. The smaller percentage of elite troops make up my army, the better they can be. Plus, it'll elevate them to a legendary status, like the Green Beret or something.

Slavery is only costefficient when you have manpower shortage. For instance when rome saw a huge influx in available workers the slavetrade dissapeared because people where willing to work for less than it cost to keep slaves.

[Spoonist]

Their culture is so extremely warfare centered, they even stick thing but penetrating needles into their children from an early age solely for the purpose of deadening the nerves, increasing the body's endorphin response to pain, and causing an overall resistance to physical discomfort. Such effects have been observed in proffesional "torture kings".

This is not extreme at all. It's rather mundane in ancient times. That's why you started with stick fighting age 3-4 in roman times. That's why you started riding at age 2 as hun or mongol. Even barbarians like celts and norse where reported to train their (usually the male) children in warfgames from the time they could walk. The feudal system would let certain families (the rich) know that their offspring would need to know how to fight so they had special trainers that took care of them as soon as they left the wetnurse.
Again something that we today think of as "wow why didn't they think of that" which was part of everyday life back then.

[Spoonist]

I had imagined one with a powerful central government, that would heavily tax inheritence, such that there were no hordes of filthily rich nobles.

Bad idea. Usually its the rich who provide the armies with prime soldier material. You wouldn't want the unemployed since that meant starving in ancient times unless you build your culture in some sort of utopian city state. Poverty back then meant malnutrition. Those wouldn't be fit to fight as anything but fodder.
In ancient times you could see the actual difference of the well of and the poor. It was about 10cm (4 inches) and a complete difference in bone quality and muscle mass.

I would try to keep welfare low, as that seems to have crippled Rome with groups of recipients contributing nothing to society.

Wellfare? Roman? I must have missed something, please enlighten me. =)
I knew about the alimenta which was designed to increase the population by aiding farmers and thereby decreasing child fatality rates, but didn't know about a crippling wellfare system. Would this be in the later era?
On the other hand I've seen theories about the effect of christianity on roman culture as creating a larger % of society that didn't produce something.

[wolveraptor]

I figured inbreeding wouldn't be a problem if I got a large enough base population. My original scheme involved 10,000 youths below the age of 2 being forcibly taken from a random selection of the populace. These formed the basis of the caste. There is no marriage in this society, but only a male who has proven himself in battle may father children. Women were expected to start giving birth at age 16. Parenting was done by the entire village, except during times of war, when it was solely the responsibility of women. This created an effective sytem of preventing chieftans from choosing only their relatives to succeed them; they didn't know who their mothers or fathers were.

The children of the mother were not the ones she raised, though. They were always taken by midwives to a random selection of any of the other villages (which were dotted througout the frontier of the Empire). This was to create an effective mixing of genes.

Because they were not the only members of the army, attrition could be avoided; there was always a yearly census of the warrior villages by government officials to make sure their valuable ranks were not dwindling. On the other hand, the frequent genetic bottlenecking through battle-deaths created a strong evolutionary advantage towards warriors who could survive battles. This meant that the liklihood of better warriors appearing outside their caste grew smaller every generation. By the time these warriors began their conquest of the ancient world, they had been in training against the armies of the small warlords of the Indus River valley for nearly 1000 years. During times of peace, gladiatorial fights were held against up to 3 soldiers against a single Suthras: my current term for the elite warrior caste (it is intended to be the root for the real-life warrior/king caste in India, the Ksathriyas). As I said before, no man could father children without proving himself in this way.

Pay is a non-issure. The cultural values of the Suthran include a relatively poor life. They only desired glory in battle, immortality in death and victory over their opponents. Their main cost would be weaponry and food. Which leads me to a question: were there any good sources of vegetarian protein? Eating animals is far more expensive, and I want to cut down on cost.

I wouldn't say the unemployed make horrible soldiers. After all, didn't Marius attempt to employ them as a force of proffessional soldiers? The expense of bringing them back to good health would be offset by length of their military service. Also, the unemployed would make up a relatively small portion of those enlisted. Anyone in a rough financial situation (i.e. most peasants) could use the army as an escape mechanism; it would be free land and housing out on the frontier, where nobles with vast tracts of land and slaves could sell food for much cheaper.

Wellfare? Roman? I must have missed something, please enlighten me. =)

I've read that during the later years of Pax Romana, the jobless roamed the streets, surviving on grain handouts, and doing nothing but enjoying the entertainment the city provided; they were the bums of the ancient world, watching gladiatorial events and contributing nothing to society. It got to the point where welfare was hereditary, providing no incentive to begin work. My welfare system would be such that the size of the hand outs decreased over a 1 year period, until they were denied altogether.

Many cultures may have begun training their young from birth, but none I can think of inflicted torture on 5 year-olds, or had an effective breeding system in place.

The Suthran are the symbols of this Empire; their horned skull emblem becomes a sign of hope for allies and fear for enemies.

[wolveraptor]

A question about fencing swords: since they're only used for thrusting, doesn't that mean one could come up up close and grapple, possibly taking the sword away? Doesn't that render the entire system useless? Hell, some of the swords are fragile enough to ruin if one bends them the wrong way. That's why I always found those floppy swords used by those dudes in "The Three Musketeers" to be without function.

[The Yosemite Bear]

A question about fencing swords: since they're only used for thrusting, doesn't that mean one could come up up close and grapple, possibly taking the sword away? Doesn't that render the entire system useless? Hell, some of the swords are fragile enough to ruin if one bends them the wrong way. That's why I always found those floppy swords used by those dudes in "The Three Musketeers" to be without function.

Their designed for dueling, the mainstay of the time was the saber, which had a curved blade, and a hand guard that made a good solid club in close quarter's battle. Then again, a military raipier also had a solid hand guard, observable by the fact that Edward "Blackbeard" Teech died from 20+ raipier thrusts without ever being able to get a single blow on his adversary when armed with a much shorter saber.

[wolveraptor]

I generally consider thrusting to be more effective than slicing, so that rapiers out did sabres is not surpring...unless I'm missing something about rapiers. Were they as fragile as foils or eppes (sp?)?

[Keevan_Colton]

A question about fencing swords: since they're only used for thrusting, doesn't that mean one could come up up close and grapple, possibly taking the sword away? Doesn't that render the entire system useless? Hell, some of the swords are fragile enough to ruin if one bends them the wrong way. That's why I always found those floppy swords used by those dudes in "The Three Musketeers" to be without function.

Basically they are useless.

Rapiers have their uses, as do court swords...which both have some connection with the evolution of fencing weapons and styles. Both however are also more rigid and edged...

Grappling techniques are disallowed in fencing and also in the SCA...you are not allowed to take your opponents blade from them as it would be dishonourable.

I personally would suggest that a swordsman of skill ought to be able to hold onto their blade and that to challange someone without even that level of skill is dishonourable and an insult to their opponent in itself.

[Keevan_Colton]

I generally consider thrusting to be more effective than slicing, so that rapiers out did sabres is not surpring...unless I'm missing something about rapiers. Were they as fragile as foils or eppes (sp?)?

In a word, no.

Thrusting has it's place, but so too does an effective cut...to elevate one of the other is to artificially cripple yourself.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Personally I love my calvary saber, length be damned