> Mike Doolittle:
"Quick Draw Pete" has, as ever, replied well and pretty fully to this before I'd even read the original post! I'd just add one other point. It's not simply a question of whether the local terrain is suited to phalanxes (which need not be armoured - Sun County types may be lobsters, by if we go back to the classical model, by the time of the Peloponnesian War, hoplites were largely unarmoured), but social organisation.
Where you have Sun Dome Temples, then you can assume that there will be whole communities which have accepted the Yelmalian style of social organisation, which means a full militia, Sun County style. I don't mean to suggest that this applies to Aggar as a whole, just the immediate cultural hinterland and lands of the temples. Phalanxes require a critical mass of trained troops to operate effectively.
But if you go to an Orlanthi village and just make the Elmali Yelmalians and expect them to be phalangists, this just doesn't work. A village might have a half-dozen Elmali weaponthanes at most. Still, that's enough, in effect, to have two on watch round the clock (or one with down-time, illness, duty off guarding the local merchant, etc). But a six-man phalanx is not exactly viable - put them in a conventional Orlanthi high-manoeuvre skirmish and they are sitting durulz.
So, it's a question of what works for local needs. Around SDTs, where there is that critical mass, you have militias. In the river valley communities of Tarsh, where militias (and mercenaries) are beginning to supplant the traditional notion of the fyrd, there is again a role for Yelmalians, not least because they have much less of a day-to-day cattle raider/trolls from the hills/etc problem, and the main role of these forces is muster in time of war. However, go to the fringes, where there is much more banditry, raiding, etc, then the cultural niche is much more suited to Elmal. And anyway, they are more likely to be the sort who would spit on Yelmalio precisely because Furthest approves of him!
Mark
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