Erik Sieurin has brought me in the fold. His vision of different humakti clearly shows all MGF while keeping them human. It also shows that living campaings still produce some of the best gloranthan material.
And now some things military:
Our resident Uz fan, James Frusetta, feels wounded by David Dunham.
James, when David complains of calling the Tarantulas cavalry, is in the battlefield term. You will not field a whole unit of Tarantula Riders, as they are rare, and valuable. And your calculation was in the heart of Aranea territory, with a spider demigoddess (CragSpider). Other trolls will not even know how a tarantula tastes.
Troll heroes in Tarantulas, perhaps. The 1st Troll Arachnid Armored Division, no.
Chris Lemens gives a quite adequate account of how roman infantry
beat every infantry in sight. However you forget that romans never (I
think) could beat a cavalry army (unless in the defensive). And that is why
(and not that decadence thing) the Empire army became each time more
"cavalry-heavy", as the cavalry enemies increased. At the end you have the
"golden byzantine age (from Belisarius to Manzikert), where their army was
mostly cavalry and at the end they defeated anything in sight, usually
other cavalry armies.
Carmania is for me the place to find this perfectly trained kataphracthoi. In the good times, a horseman should be a good lancer, good archer on the move, good swordsman, and skilled with darts, to have a missile weapon while wearing a shield. They wore lamellar or scale armor, and rode armored horses. And this kind of rider is modelled on the clibanarii, the main cavalry of the Sassanid persians, so you keep the Persia-Carmania connection. Just trained to fight in groups, and hundred of special maneuvers to use all the tactical possibilities this walking arsenals have.
And that would be (for me) the best all around battlefield cavalry.
Jose
Powered by hypermail