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thecoldembrace
Sage
I have world where Romans from 140 A.D. transfer to world where Dwarfs, Trolls, Goblins and Elfs. Where is Magic. And Have some questions.
1. Does any pre Gunpowder army be difficult enemy for Roman Legion?
I want know does my Humans could easy conquer the World. Does any tactics/strategy/army/unite will be hard to counter for Romans?
Hello, Bortasz, thank you for this question.
So you have the Roman Legion in it's prime, awesome.
Throughout the history of the Roman Empire, the legion always struggled greatly in three scenarios.
1.) Legionaries are molded to fight a specific way, that is to say as a cohesive unit with room to maneuver. When this is not achieved we can see time and time again the slaughter that occurs. In the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 C.E. against the Germanic tribes and the Battle of Adrianople in 378 against the Goths are two moments where the ability to maneuver was taken away. The legion was flanked and pressed together, unable to pivot to meet new challenges.
2.) In moments when the legion is denied the ability to fight as a whole cohesive unit, i.e. using guerrilla tactics, forcing the legionaries to range out from their more expansive units where they are forced to fight one on one the losses will be significantly higher and statistically the chance of defeat will be immensely high. To go along with this to deny the Roman legion the ability to fight a pitched infantry battle will deny them their greatest strength. If you can keep them at a distance and whittle away at them with hit and run tactics or shower them with arrows you can effectively nullify their military strength.
3.) The final scenario was proven time and time again as a heavy weakness of the Roman war machine, the heavy cavalryman. From Hannibal at Cannae, the Parthians at Carrhae, to Attila and his Huns. Rome severely lacked the ability to field and deal with large amounts of enemy cavalry, especially heavy lanced cavalry employed by Parthia.
2. Do you know any think that could easy stop or nullify Gunpowder?
My main Character is from 21 century. So he know that some stuff is possible, even if he just know that he must use coal, sulfer and nitrate, he have chance to create pretty good guns. I wonder how create something that will keep battlefield in the pre Gunpowder times.
So there are several ways to limit or nullify the use of gunpowder. One initial way is to simply limit the ability to gather the resources necessary to produce gunpowder. However, this would only limit it, my solution: he needs to be an expert to produce actual guns. A random joe smoe will not know how to produce a gun that can work well with black powder. Casting barrels is an art form that even the best in the early days failed at, resulting in a lot of documented moments of disaster, often involving the death of the gunsmith during trials.
3. Does something like modern Special Forces exist in ancient Rome?
Rome did not have anything that we could really consider equivalent to modern special forces. Almost any type of soldier could be picked out for special assignment, but in terms of what we deal with nowadays they really didn't have anything "special."
Someone might throw the Batavi at you, saying they were Rome's Navy SEALS, but they were extremely limited, and only operated in very, very, very specific times in Roman history. They were specialists in two things, swimming across rivers that others thought impassible to strike against an enemy on the other side, and training their mounts to swim the same waters, giving them an edge with sudden cavalry attacks. Other than them, theres not much else.
I hope this information helps out.
-Cold