Seems like it'd be kinda hard to do that when you're just travelling past the walls occationally to kill everything that moves. Like you said, they're not really conducting a siege in the traditional sense of the word.
Yeah, but sieges in the traditional sense of the word aren't really
quite a thing until professional armies, because keeping a whole force in front of a city and using all kinds of crazy siege engines is a little later.
Are you telling me we're not able to transport an expedition of men to Kymai? Sure, we're not Athens with their Sicilian Expedition but I don't see why we wouldn't be able to transport 1,000-2,000 light infantry and a smattering of cavalry to Kymai with enough preparation.
Oh, I mean, you can, that's just really dangerous and you'd need to ask the Peuketii to help, which is a big ask. So far they've been involved with lucrative expeditions with you, not becoming your cannon fodder. You have your own
psilloi, but
psilloi does not equate to skirmisher- it's any kind of light infantry the city has. Only a portion are really very good, which is why there's so many of them but they're not called up as much; many of them are literally just poor people. A mob of poor people are light infantry only in a semantic sense. At the very beginning of this quest, and historically, Athenai rallied a massive force of like 13,000 men, but most of them were poor people that Perikles told to let loose on the Megarid, and the force only really existed for like a week.
Obviously they're going to be a morale problem with a force of Peuketii and poor people far from home with some cavalry, facing a much superior Oscan force as much as three times their size.
Okay, that tile-tax is an ingenious approach to urban property taxation.
Inspired by a similar Roman scheme. Those Romans were good at taxing I'll tell ya that much! In 18th century France, there was also a window tax which worked on similar principles, though sometimes people would try to cop out by reducing the number of windows in their house.
No, but that actually makes it easier. They won't have as many people guarding each individual smaller herd as they would one large one, and our cavalry can move to hit each herd faster than the Oscans can move to protect them.
As for finding the herds, again, advantage of cavalry is that we can cover more ground to search. Also livestock are pretty distinctive looking, and they can't hide the way people can.
We don't want to commit hoplites to this campaign, obviously. Just horsemen.
They have their own cavalry though. They're not just footmen, and as soon as it becomes clear you're hunting after their herds, they'll just drive them away from you. It can definitely divert them from the siege, but you're in unfamiliar territory here and the Oscans have been campaigning here for a few years. It's risky but it could work.
One option is to see if Kymai would be amenable to some kind of vassalization under Rhegion. They wouldn't like the idea, I'm sure, but it sure beats getting sacked by Oscans. That would probably secure the blessing of Rhegion, if we could swing it, and might even get us enough troops to eject the Oscans from the area wholesale. That said, I don't know how practical that is, diplomatically speaking.
People do need to keep in mind that it keeps being imagined that people will drive out or defeat the Oscans. This is not actually a very easy feat. It is in fact a very hard feat. It was impossible even for Taras, with the support of Italiotes, to do. It was difficult for the Epirotes to do before Alexander of Epirus was killed.
I'm not really saying "you can never defeat them", only that it's beyond your resources to do so right now. That's not necessarily that you can't temporarily defeat this particular force, but the Oscans are dangerous for a reason. They are shepherds with mobile food sources who can retreat into the mountains if things become too hot and you can't go after them. It took Rome
ages to subdue them.
Now, I don't really care for, say, sending at you an Oscan invasion every other year because the OSCANS ARE SCARY and IT'LL BE A CHALLENGE. That's dumb. But like Athenai or Sparta they're not really a realistic defeatable target for a while, but at the same time I'm not going to send them straight at you as some kind of punishment. You can cripple them for a generation and halt any advance but it'll be difficult to hold onto their territory without a really big force. Pyrrhus of Epirus could potentially have managed it with his 30,000 if he was fighting Lucani rather than Romans.
Now, can you potentially send a force to chase them away from Kymai and buy you some time, but that contains a lot of risk for you.
@Cetashwayo what are the demographics of these 7,500 metics going to be like, if a huge portion of the adult men of Kymai have been wiped out? Would it be predominantly women and children we'd be evacuating?
The old, the young, the weak, the ill, the injured. It's not that lopsided, though. I said 20%, and there were prior losses at another battle, but that still leaves a good portion of the men left alive. This isn't a Paraguay situation.
