|
E! I love Carthage and the idea of a narrative LP in an anti-roman world is a very, very tempting one.
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2022 08:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:23 |
|
|
I'm here to canvass for more E/Carthage votes. Come on, people, although we may be shifting nations, the first one we choose will put history on it's course for the entirety of the megalp. I think we should do Carthage first because it'll move the political and cultural centre of gravity to a place seldom seen as interesting in paradox games and paradox LPs, but one that has a rich and deeply unappreciated history and importance in the world: North Africa.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2022 20:36
|
|
|
I'll admit that geographical considerations also play into my voting for Carthage. Kush is essentially squeezed into a corner, versus Carthage having more ability to do things in every direction.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2022 22:07
|
|
|
Too late, too late. I can see that this Hashim LP is already off to a great start in terms of goon voting.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2022 01:57
|
|
|
God drat, that egypt. We would have stood no chance with that in the way.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2022 02:57
|
|
|
Aw, crap, that's a hell of a Rome. Are they supposed to take the peninsula this fast?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2022 01:00
|
|
|
This kind of makes me glad I pushed hard for Carthage first: without a player at the helm to stop them Rome looks like it's going to grow out of control and make everything all regular historical.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2022 04:19
|
|
|
hashashash posted:where do you think we sent our explorer? Sunset Invasion -1: This time, it's Toltecs!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2022 20:49
|
|
|
....Holy crap that's an intense set of battles. Seriously, getting the early advantage here is good, but Rome is far, far from down for the count.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2022 00:04
|
|
|
hashashash posted:yeah, i was quite suprised at the numbers Rome could repeatedly bring to battle, even after killing hundreds of thousands of them ...You know, this is completely historical. What won the war for Rome was their complete inability to stop fighting no matter how many of them were killed: they just kept throwing more bodies into it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2022 01:04
|
|
|
Yes. The only thing Rome respects is being kicked in the grill.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2022 01:44
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:You guys remember less than a page ago when we were talking about Rome's unique ability to absorb battlefield losses seemingly endlessly, and how their greatest enemy always seem to collapse them in times of relative stability when the rot sets in internally? Well, that's in real history, you know. While this is a paradox game.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2022 22:25
|
|
|
And people were saying we should maybe wait: nope, Rome is scarier every day.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2022 00:21
|
|
|
This shall be the day! We stand at the precipice of a new history.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2023 14:45
|
|
|
I feel like we kind of had to start as Carthage in retrospect then, because otherwise Rome would make playing as anywhere in western europe unviable past a certain point if it really felt like that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2023 18:17
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:Rome somehow ate itself in the Scythian LP without any player intervention. That's because that one was unmodded. This one's using a mod that among adding loads of content to a sadly abandoned game, also apparently ups the amount of buffs rome gets gigantically?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2023 18:44
|
|
|
Well, that was a hell of a fight. But now Carthage is the uncontested ruler! Shame about burning the place down. I would have kept it as a trophy.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2023 07:42
|
|
|
Oooh, tough choice. Still, I'll settle on A.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2023 08:55
|
|
|
By popular demand posted:First poster to tell an interesting fact about the Phoenicians gets to tell me what to vote. Carthage was actually less of an empire and more of an alliance of colonies. These colonies would actually be built just offshore, on tiny inlets and islands, before expanding to the "mainland" of an island and there were hundreds of them. Vote C.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2023 12:35
|
|
|
On the subject of child sacrifice: it was by accounts, a thing that the elite did and not the poor. Why? Because to sacrifice something, what you sacrifice has to be worth something.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2023 18:19
|
|
|
I really have to wonder about a lot of foundational things like infrastructure and architecture that descended from the roman empire in western europe and how the carthaginian empire differs in such things here.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2023 23:54
|
|
|
It really is crazy though how things like roman jurisprudence, infrastructure and similar ended up informing much of the development of western European history: so many of the "barbarian" successors to Rome adapted their societies to roman institutions. That's not even mentioning how so much colonization and the like was informed by how romans built forts, where they built forts and similar. Plus how the roman army and it's evolution and contact with germanic peoples directly lead to warfare in the medieval era. It's a shame our knowledge of punic civilization is so scarce or otherwise we could get up to some real theorycrafting here.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2023 03:11
|
|
|
One of the big things that I have to note is true here is that there is no big centralizing factor that a land based empire would give. Instead things like law codes, civil society, trade standards and building standards would be incredibly heterodox unless the carthaginian empire makes a concerted effort to rationalize and standardize across the colonies. This is not a good thing. Without these factors punic civilization is likely to splinter quite badly and colonies that are overcome may prove to have surprisingly little staying power when it comes to cultural influence. I think there should be some equivalent to the reorganizations roman society went through with punic civilizations: concerted efforts to create a single unit of weights and measures, for instance. The kind of stuff that happened both in Rome and China and helped build the idea of a place that survived past the original inhabitants.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2023 23:59
|
|
|
On the subject of urbanization: cities in this period grow way larger than later ones for a very simple reason: the creation of large polities that can effectively control the importation and distribution of grain combined with sanitation engineering. The question is: do we have both of these things? The answer is kind of. We have north africa and sicily, which are huge producers, but we miss out on the single largest one of the ancient world: Egypt. On the one hand, this means Carthage never gets as big as Rome. On the other hand, this also means that the network of food production is more stable. This means that many of the cities of Carthage might remain more urbanized than they did in the Roman Empire, but never achieve the size the Roman cities did. However, reliance on seaborne infrastructure leads to a very nasty problem: plagues. They'll hit us, they'll hit us so, so bad. Also? It's far more easy to be independent when your road is the sea. Isolation between colonies will be a bad, terrible issue. But on the plus side, the onus on the sea means that germanic peoples will likely be unable to migrate to the british isles, meaning that england can never exist. Unfortunately, France is likely to happen much sooner because, as mentioned before, inland migration has no giant roman empire in the way to stop it, as we stick to the coasts.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2023 09:26
|
|
|
Oh yeah, one big thing, one big, terrible thing: because of how colonies are administered in being self-governed and having their main point of contact being sea routes, when one of them decides they don't want to play ball, it's easy to stamp down. But when civil war breaks out? It's just as bad as roman style generals choosing sides. Maybe even worse. Imagine each city-colony declaring for itself and you can see how badly the whole thing can break.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2023 11:29
|
|
|
SirPhoebos posted:I'd actually be really curious if an "everything is going to poo poo" grand strategy game has wider appeal. FrostPunk shows that you can have ever-tightening recourses and worsening options on a city-builder level, so can it work on a larger scale? This was kind of the draw of Total War - Attila and all things aside, that game was good and did good. So possibly?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2023 20:44
|
|
|
That would explain several things. So, things that can lead to the breakup of carthage: 1. Plagues, oh god, the plagues, spreading along sea routes and leading both to massive depopulation and also the shattering of the empire due to the breakdown in vital inter-colonial networks of trade and communication. 2. Struggles between the central cities like Carthage and the colonies based on a need for centralizing of power leading to civil war. 3. Colonial Autonomy leading to the breakdown of empire through institutional rot. 4. Grain shortages for various reasons in the sicilian and libyan provinces causing urbanization to become unsustainable. 5. Climactic and population pressure induced migration in Europe and North Africa. 6. Religious strife caused by the introduction of new cults and theological practices causing colonies to turn on each other and cut each other off. 7. Problems with the expansion of the franchise, the definition of citizenship, who can be a citizen, how the city is governed, how the empire is governed, ect, manifesting in a hell of a lot of potential problems. All the way from citizen versus oligarch wars to client peoples getting angry about their subjugation and wanting inclusion in the political processes of cities.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2023 00:42
|
|
|
Except for some of the most well known epic poetry of all time, most beautiful manuscripts, extremely beautiful and sophisticated gold and silver working, devotional architecture, ect. Not to mention the explosion in agricultural technology, from the heavy plough to the three-field system, the development of windmills and the wide expansion of ironworking techniques, the founding of the first universities. Plus the Merovingian kingdoms actually had the most unrestricted peasantry for a very long time either before or after. Reading some recent stuff on Merovingian government and it's very surprising how individual people on even the lowest strata at the time had a freedom of movement and an inclination to use it that wasn't seen before or since for a while in either direction. I mean not to go too far in the other direction, mind, but as far as history goes it doesn't really seem to have been "worse" both in terms of technological development and art and as far as life quality goes for the average person, it was about the same.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2023 05:06
|
|
|
Speaking of armies... what the hell does the Carthaginian army look like? Okay, so Carthaginian Mercenaries at the start of things were basically raised to deal with a specific problem and were usually comprised of pretty much all the people in an area related to it that they could buy up. Every single mercenary army was unique. Obviously this couldn't last and had major problems. The only unifying factor to these armies was a tiny punic officer corps and a general. The thing is though, many of these "mercenaries" weren't mercenaries at all as we understand them: they were from allied peoples under treaty where they were provided to and would be paid by Carthage. In fact, Carthage first produced it's own coinage just to pay them and these coins were basically stamped with FOR MILITARY USE ONLY on the back. (It reads something like "military camp"). Of course there were also many, many of the regular kind of mercenaries. As you'd expect they tended towards woeful levels of uncoordinated tactics and tactical and strategic incompetence. In fact, it's only after they put a spartan guy in charge that they even started training the mercenaries. It was actually Hannibal Barca who transformed the army into something professional (it was even called the Barcid Reforms). Given what we know and how we won, I think that the Carthaginian army is based around combined-arms tactics that wouldn't really be enshrined in our world until later, but at the same time lacks the idea of professional citizen-soldiers that Rome implemented in it's empire. The structure might be that every colony contributes to the central forces, which are basically a professional core. In these forces, the generals handle the payment of their mercenaries and mercenary rates are standardized across the empire, with Carthage and it's mints holding the central treasury used to pay with. The major innovation here is that these rates are standardized not just in amount, but also in payment time. It's a gigantic innovation to pay your troops at a standard rate that is always met and never deferred. Every company of mercenaries is also supervised by a punic officer, not their own captains. Forces also always train together, giving them cohesion and the generals an idea of what their forces can do together. The upside of this system is a loyal, professional army capable of carrying out levels of mixed tactics seen nowhere else, an incredible and overpowering force compared to others in the ancient world. The downside is that this gives huge amounts of personal loyalty to generals, encouraging ambitous ones to do things that further fracture the empire. It also leads to massive problems if, for example, it becomes impossible to pay... So I guess there's two new problems. 8. Ambitious generals with personally loyal troops either want to be in charge or grow more attached to their native mercenaries than their government. 9. Debasement crises lead to inabilities to pay the army on time causing huge disruptions in the mercenary-professional system. Oh, wait, one more. 10. Mercenaries learn incredible, innovative tactics and carthaginian culture and take these back home, making them considerably more dangerous.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2023 06:12
|
|
|
The Carthaginian empire is also way smaller than Rome ever was: so there's liable to be much less impact on Europe. No big criss-cross of roads and monumental architecture, but also, we have to talk about what the non-punic peoples are like, then.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2023 22:27
|
|
|
You know what would be hilarious? If germany-rome ends up fusing with the carthaginian colony somehow.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2023 00:29
|
|
|
Note for those reading the epilogue: Toscana is Tuscany.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 21, 2023 02:58
|
|
|
BBA I have a weak spot for the Seleucids and want to see them do well.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2023 05:04
|
|
|
CBA
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2023 08:04
|
|
|
CCC The east is weast. Wait.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2023 03:45
|
|
|
AB Lilybaya (Carthage Colony in Britannia) Edit - Wait, can we select colonies for this, or no?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2023 21:34
|
|
|
Welp, I have no ideas linguistics-wise.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2023 07:56
|
|
|
hashashash posted:I have found a couple interesting tidbits -- like how Pretan apparently means tin, and can conflated with Prytania/Brittania Yeah, Britain was known as the "tin isles" in antiquity for the fact that it exported a fuckload of tin, through Carthaginian trade lines, actually.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2023 13:23
|
|
|
A Ragnarome, surely.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2023 01:27
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:23 |
|
|
Wait a second, I've got a good one. Roman -> romen -> nomen -> nromen -> Norman! ...Wait.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2023 06:28
|
|