Oh, agreed. That's why I wrote one of the reasons. It is definitely not the only reason.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Oh, agreed. That's why I wrote one of the reasons. It is definitely not the only reason.
So you did, my mistake. Yeah, high social cohesion was definitely a factor in Rome's success, but I'm wary of ascribing too much credit to it. Sure, there's a number of cultural, societal, political, and religious factors that fed in to Rome's successes and can be summarized as 'social cohesion', but people who want their state to replicate what they believe Rome to be have used it as a reason to demonize the uncohesive.
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It's a complicated story with a lot of factors, but from my understanding, a big factor is Rome being Rome, and Rome had a very special approach to both its social organization and its military organization.
Part of this might be easier to explain by pointing at what Feudal Europe lacked: a large professional administrator bureaucrat class. Feudalism developed as a means of doing without administrators, by handing off large chunks of land to vassals, who in turn hand off smaller chunks to their vassals, until you get the King-Duke-Count-Baron hierarchy system known from Crusader Kings (obviously greatly simplified) as a means of reducing how many people each guy in the system has to interact with, and how much each of those guys has to keep track of.
(Priests and merchants offered plenty of well-educated administrators, but warrior nobles were very skeptical of bringing large amounts of these other classes into power.)
Feudalism gets replaced by absolute monarchy around the time the kings can get in a bureaucrat class to do the management for them, replacing the middle vassals. Then the bureaucrat class replaces the kings in turn, producing the modern absolute republic and absolute democracy.
The Roman Republic was in a sense an early absolute republic, before becoming an absolute monarchy. "Absolute" here does not mean very republican, it means with absolute power, perhaps a better word might be "totalitarian", overseeing its subjects in great detail and extracting a lot from them in tandem with doing a lot for them. You know the Monty Python joke: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" - and the Judean People's Front is still rebelling because the Romans are still also oppressive. The Romans are engaged in what might be called intense cultivation of their population: requires more work, generates more output, compared to grazing and gathering. When this system breaks, it is not easily fixed.
Then there's the Roman Legions. Fortification-specialized heavy infantry get to dictate the pace of combat. On a tactical scale, heavy infantry beat almost every other unit commonly seen in play. (Heavy cav is numerically rare, horse archers are geographically rare.)
Light infantry: just crush them
Light cavalry: close ranks, crush them
Foot archers or slingers: shields up, crush them
On the strategic scale, states with these other units will try to pick different ploys rather than facing a legion head-on, but most of those ploys are in turn countered by the legion going "overnight fortification LOL". You want to hit them in the logistics? To get at their logistics, you have go among Roman forts, and the light infantry will have second thoughts about going anywhere that their line of retreat has an enemy fort sitting on it.
Sure, legions have drawbacks. They're slow, they're expensive, they require industry and long training, but the big advantage is that Rome got most of the choice in which fights it wanted to have, and it could recruit auxiliaries and allies to fill all the roles other than heavy infantry.
If some state with Chariots wants to have a fight, and Rome doesn't want that fight, the Legions simply sit in a fort every night and point and laugh at the inability of chariots to get over even moderately sized walls and trenches. The Legions are prepared to sit in a fort. The Chariots are not prepared for a siege.
Combined, these two things create a selection bias for small fights not happening. When the Roman Legions roll up five thousand strong into the small Example Country, and the King of Example finds them three days into fortifying on his doorstep by the time he can raise an army and muster a response, he's going to have a hard choice between 1) attacking fortified heavy infantry, plz no, 2) letting a legion of heavy infantry run around in "his" territory, plz no, 3) trying to besiege fortified heavy infantry when he brought no siege engines and the Romans can bring another legion to break the siege, plz no, or 4) become client state of Rome and he gets to keep his title.
A lot of petty kings picked 4.
They even get to pretend they're independent! They're not vassals, vassals have to bow and scrape and be utterly subjugated, King Example is a beloved ally of Rome who is merely strongly expected to send troops when Rome calls for aid because that's what allies do. Of course if he ever tries calling for aid the Romans will be very sorry they can't send anyone because they're busy fighting like 15 other wars at once.
So where medieval battles "had to" happen in a sense, for uncertainty and lack of control and unfavorable terms for everyone, the Romans got to skip a lot of that and focus on the larger battles. Everyone else bordering Rome, then, had to either muster similarly large legions any way they could, or else get stomped so hard it barely gets counted as a battle.
At the end of the Middle Ages you saw several states building professional (or at least non-aristocratic) armies and then successfully taking on the rest of Europe, often at the same time, in a single generation. For example, the Black Army and the Hussites both integrated handguns at unprecedented rates and kept winning absurd victories, but despite massive military success they both ended up moving away from those models as a consequence of the economic and social conditions changing to re-empower aristocrats. Existential threats preventing that seems very reasonable.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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I would argue that the major difference is that unlike the Roman Empire, Sigmar's Empire benefits from the fact that it has substantial backing from other institutions as well. The Cults, cannon, firearms, Wizards, lots of Knightly Orders, the Imperial army for some circumstances, crossbows to give rapidly-trained peasants substantial ranged firepower on top of just wielding spears, and foreign allies and allies of circumstance for when times get really dire (rather than an outside threat like the Mongols sacking Rome, you'd get foreign allies who would rather that not happen and deciding to help out).
We kind of saw this in action in the Great War Against Chaos, where the Karaz Ankor came to help in force, Teclis and two other archmages helped raise makeshift Battle Wizards, the Cults helped out in force, and the Knightly Orders came together, and the combined forced decided to march to meet the great enemy at the gates of Kislev rather than Altdorf.
Magnus was by no means guaranteed and he pulled off a miracle, but the building blocks are there. And it does mean a lot that Kislev also has allies that recognize the importance of coming to Kislev's aid rather than letting Kislev be destroyed, giving Kislev some much-needed help when times are really tough.
It does go to show the importance of technological, industrial, economic, and infrastructural development for the Order factions, though. It's kind of necessary for them to stand a chance--you can't just bring back the Norse Dwarves, while Chaos never suffers permanent losses.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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Probably the main thing that Chaos just flat-out can't replace is Dragon Ogres- the price for immortality was infertility, so every Dragon Ogre killed is a permanent victory.
Social cohesion (at least against outsiders, romans looved their civil wars) in that way is a super important factor. The issue is that it's an intermediate factor, nothing fundamental. So it immediately poses the question of "what produced that cohesion" and the honest answer is "I dunno, here's a least of things that might have contributed, but we don't rightly know how much or how they interacted". But it's politically tempting to fill in whatever thing you'd like to see. A more refined version of "X is cool, they did Y, so we have to do Y to be cool".
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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Not as much at the time of the Punic Wars though.
Later on they went civil war crazy of course.
The Karaz Ankor also seems to be kinda stuck mid-transition. Every adult Dawi is expected to be capable of taking up arms is defence of the Hold. And even marching out to aid other Holds or allies should it be required. However there are clans dedicated to warfare and nothing else. Or to engineering almost all of which is geared towards warfare.
No clue about the Eonir. We have seen basically nothing of how they actually go about organising their military.
Oh, a history buff convention! Can I join? 
A nitpick here but by the time of Punic war roman legion was middle army with only triple axis formation and only triarii using thrusting spears similar to those of hoplites. And that is before getting into the apparent debate on whether or not romans or other italics actually used phalanx or merely hoplite gear copied from greeks.
To be fair, romans were very good at integrating conquered people into their system. Which was part of the reasons Hannibal failed in second punic war: majority of Rome's italian allies stuck with them even with romans taking a loss after a loss and Hannibal running around seemingly uncontested
So long as he wasn't calling for aid in a war he started, they'd probably show up, actually.
Showing up "on the side of" one of several feuding parties, using that as an excuse to conquer all of them, and then telling them all to sit down, shut up, if they need to go out fighting wars for loot they can damned well do it as part of the Roman Army, against Rome's enemies... was actually a pretty damned good deal, from the viewpoint of the Socii.
So good a deal that most of the civil wars Rome had during the Republic were the various Socii demanding to be officially Roman.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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Part of the issue with the Karaz Ankor is its small population. 1 million is, frankly, very tiny compared to the population of the greenskins, beastmen, and skaven, all of whom are in abundance and can only ever be locally culled (and recover their populations quite quickly even then).
It's kind of an ongoing headscratcher, where even the skaven can seem to largely handwave their logistics and infrastructure away. How the skaven feed their absurd population is incomprehensible considering they live almost exclusively underground and have a society that involves constant scheming, sabotage, and backstabbing. Warpstone cheats can only go so far. Beastmen should be very few in number even in the Empire, because their dietary requirements would ensure that they would either run out of food quickly from hunting everything in the forests into extinction quickly, or their numbers would have to be very small in general to avoid that. Greenskins seem to be capable of getting by just fine without eating very much at all, even when spending most of their lives underground and in huge numbers.
The fact that there are tons of greenskins just fighting each other in the Badlands is more than absurd, as there's little to eat other than each other, and that raises the question of how they have enough food to grow large enough to be worth eating in the first place. The thirty years it takes for a dwarf to reach adulthood (and fact that even if dwarves had eight children on average, that wouldn't be nearly enough to compensate) while it takes skaven like a year or two to mature enough to fight (while being born in the dozens) just exacerbates the problem.
I can't even think of a single time a skaven city has been attacked in canon. Ever. And Skavenblight is literally just there in the open, in a known location, without any natural defenses other than being in a dhar-poisoned swamp (which shouldn't be able to grow any food either, so how does Skavenblight survive without any food?) that doesn't trade with anyone. A skaven society that views trust as a weakness and unity as a temporary thing only given by the rare divine decree should be backstabbing itself into ruin without end, yet it is somehow incredibly strong and advanced despite this.
The Dawi-Zharr are the most interesting evil faction to me, because they actually seem the most realistic (even for a fantasy setting). They have economics, logistics, culture, a society that could plausibly sustain itself, flaws that clearly manifest themselves as weaknesses rather than serve as superficial flavor (the Druuchi should not be able to feed themselves, and no amount of slave labor can compensate for a lack of viable agriculture and a society of backstabbing schemers), all while not being an inherently existential threat because they aren't arbitrarily powerful kept from world domination by just...not feeling like it, I guess. Their culture of domination and hierarchy means that a society can actually function.
The skaven are the worst offender, though. Despite having a culture and society and biology that should doom them to being very numerous but extremely primitive and prone to starving themselves out quickly from overpopulation (to the point where they shouldn't be able to rise to such high population in the first place because of a lack of food), they also have powerful wizardry, technology, biological weapons, chemical weapons, a massive empire that somehow achieves underground networks far larger than the dwarves ever managed, and even have bullshit dhar resistance that makes zero sense in the setting.
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To be a bit of a pedant about it: Yes, but also no. You describe pretty well how the Roman Empire works from Augustus onwards, but the Roman Republic does its recruitment differently. The long form of this argument can be found here.
The short form goes something like this:
A: The Roman Republic did not have a sophisticated bueraucracy. They went by with 2 consuls, 6 praetors, 4 Aedils, 10 tribunes of the Plebs and 10 Quaestors (and a Censor), and most of them weren't involved in the raising of the army. Instead, there was a 5-yearly census conducted by the censor (otherwise responsible for maintaing the rolls of the Senate), where the citizen who qualified were recorded (categories were mainly wealth and age).
B: Then, in spring, all citizen eligable for draft were called to the Field of Mars outside Rome, where so many were recruited to fill up the numbers for the legions. (Typically 2 consular armies of 2 legions á 5000 men each, matched by the same numbers recruited from the Socii, so 20000 citizen in total). Then everyone was sent home with a date on which the drafted had to appear next, with their arms and armor.
C: At this point the the Socii also show up, with their own complement, as demanded in the first meeting. This is crucial: The Socii only got a number, and that many show up a month later in full gear. The only time when this doesn't happen is during during the 2nd Punic War, when a few (and it really is a few) Socii ally with Hannibal (and get crushed), and in the First century, when demands for greater political participation leads to the Social Wars.
The same for the citizens. Draft dodging is very rare, and for good reason, as a refusal of the draft meant that you lost your citizenship and had all your belongings sold of (and possibly yourself into slavery). For the Romans, military service and citizenship were insepererable.
D: And of course, this was very profitable for all parties involved: Those who fought in the army got a share of the spoils (importantly, the Socii got the same as the Romans for the same commitment), and the Romans generally won, so there was a certaijn security.
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Number of days since we last discussed the Roman Empire: 0
Evil factions get to ignore logistics.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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And the societal damage from backstabbing, no-trust culture, a lack of industry, a lack of infrastructure, a lack of food in general, any threats to their cities at all, dhar poisoning, demographics, and attrition beyond a short-term purely-local level. (Except the Fire Dwarves.)
It really sucks when the enemy factions can't lose, they can only fail to win. Makes the stakes feel hollow at times.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
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The AI doesn't actually have to actually mine Tiberium to churn out units constantly, we've known that for at least thirty years now.
Is that a DL thing? I don't think the romans are perennial favorite topics. Though IRL history with maybe some distant connections to Warhammer does come up semi-frequently.
pucflek
Verified simpleton
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I don´t know about you but i think about Roman Empire at least once a day.
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It was an Instagram/TikTok trend back in September, started by a Swedish influencer, where women would ask their male partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire, and would get answers ranging from "once a week" to "at least once per day". The meme got reported on widely, including articles in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News, Cosmo, People magazine, Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Today Show, Time Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald, Buzzfeed, Wired, The Daily Mail, etc, etc.
It's not really true, but it was a fun quirky trend that a lot of people would play along with and gave people who wanted a social media post some content that would get responses. At the trivial cost of like a minute's effort of asking one question.
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It's kinda of a nerd thing in general. The Romans were kinda expansive and influential, and are also quite widely known in the present, even by those who are not that into history, so it's easy for conversations to end up circling back to them.
It's kinda like how Wikipedia articles link back to philosophy—all conversations lead to Rome.
Edit: ducked by autocorrect.
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as someone also viscerally offended by the normal evil side logistical status quo, which is to say, "it just works," i greatly appreciate how boney has invested such effort into exploring the topic (with greenskins and skaven and chaos dwarves for examples) and then making it matter in the story. we've encountered greenskin hunting parties and scavengers, seen their fungus farms and how their spores seep into the soil and make it unusable for anything else, and having to burn them out of places and repurposing their farms did come up. skaven infighting was an eminently exploitable weakness that we used to basically purge them out of multiple strongholds. along with how they artificially inflate the birthrate and how that creates a single point of failure that we attacked. so at least in this version, logistics and other related subjects are coming up with semiregularity/importance. heck, even the travel time of armies is a consistent problem, like when we needed to march the kislevite forces to fight drycha using rite of way because we had a timelimit and the roads were bad.
all in all, logistics are completely ignored in cannon but they arent here and that's part of what makes the story so good. when the rules make sense, you can use them to make inferences and derive other information and feel a deeper connection to the work through that.
on the topic of how exactly greenskins feed themselves, im of the mind that the green fungus people can collectively photosynthesize. they can probably get enough energy (if not nutrients) to subsist from just the sun individually. but the real kicker to that is that they are all connected by the Whaagh and that the greenskins arent just an army, they are an ecosystem. i dont think their spores are just for reproduction. they also sink into the soil (choking out all competition) and soak up the sunlight. their subordinate organisms like squigs arent just mounts, theyre livestock that eat the things the orcs wont (like pigs) and then get eaten by them. all that energy is then as available to the orcs in the area as the orcs are available for fighting. this network/connection likely extends far beneath the surface. just as fungi extend their tendrils far deeper into the earth than plants do, greenskin networks probably go as far down or deeper than the worldroots, even if they cant be (that we know of) used for transportation. into the caverns and tunnels they're always fighting the skaven in. how else would they have so much energy in places nearly devoid of light and life?
the badlands are another example, while it wouldnt make sense for an army of animals in a desert to survive as the greenskins do, one has to understand that since they've supplanted the local ecosystem, basically all of the previously and currently available biomass is in orcs now. when one dies, it just transfers into other orcs. its a closed market. they will vary in size as biomass enters or leaves the system via raiding and Whaaaaaghing, but it should be mostly consistent. they've always been big. they were bif when they came in. they're big when they leave for a good krump or two.
all in all, logistics are completely ignored in cannon but they arent here and that's part of what makes the story so good. when the rules make sense, you can use them to make inferences and derive other information and feel a deeper connection to the work through that.
on the topic of how exactly greenskins feed themselves, im of the mind that the green fungus people can collectively photosynthesize. they can probably get enough energy (if not nutrients) to subsist from just the sun individually. but the real kicker to that is that they are all connected by the Whaagh and that the greenskins arent just an army, they are an ecosystem. i dont think their spores are just for reproduction. they also sink into the soil (choking out all competition) and soak up the sunlight. their subordinate organisms like squigs arent just mounts, theyre livestock that eat the things the orcs wont (like pigs) and then get eaten by them. all that energy is then as available to the orcs in the area as the orcs are available for fighting. this network/connection likely extends far beneath the surface. just as fungi extend their tendrils far deeper into the earth than plants do, greenskin networks probably go as far down or deeper than the worldroots, even if they cant be (that we know of) used for transportation. into the caverns and tunnels they're always fighting the skaven in. how else would they have so much energy in places nearly devoid of light and life?
the badlands are another example, while it wouldnt make sense for an army of animals in a desert to survive as the greenskins do, one has to understand that since they've supplanted the local ecosystem, basically all of the previously and currently available biomass is in orcs now. when one dies, it just transfers into other orcs. its a closed market. they will vary in size as biomass enters or leaves the system via raiding and Whaaaaaghing, but it should be mostly consistent. they've always been big. they were bif when they came in. they're big when they leave for a good krump or two.
MiracleGrow
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Pretty much how I always seen Orcs. I often compared them directly to those fancy little sealed terrarium bottles. Where its a self perpetuating ecosystem that only needs minor outside substance. Once it gets setup, it just keep going.
Sorry for literally repeating your point. I just think Sealed Terrariums are super cool 🥺