Sat Feb 04, 2012 8:56 pm
Not sure which idea you're referring to. I'm assuming you mean an ancients game, because der Alte Fritz is covered by ROP.
But apart from that, yes, the AGEOD engine seems very well adapted for pre-modern periods, and I can't think of any reason why it couldn't work for antiquity.
The one caveat is that armies need to be able to take refuge in cities. For anything involving ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C., siege warfare needs to be spectacularly ineffective -- with a few clumsy and not very successful exceptions, walled fortifications were almost alway reduced by starvation, a very long slow process. What passed for 'modern' siege warfare was introduced during the course of the fourth century, and you can still feel the gee-whizz astonishment in the descriptions of someone being systematic about using all the tricks. But it wasn't that effective, because that general was Demetrius Poliorcetes ("the Besieger"), but despite of his nickname, very few of his sieges were successful. A hundred or so years later the Romans picked up more advanced techniques from the Hellenistic engineers, and eventually managed to get siege warfare down to a science. But it was still very, very slow. (Having said that, sieges did not go on for years and years the way they do in some games).
If an ancients game covered something other or older than Greeks, several civilizations in the Near East developed the engineering skills to make them far less incompetant than the Greeks. The Assyrians in particular were less advanced than first century Romans, but walled cities didn't stop them and they had the skills and the manpower to be able to resort to more than a mere blockade. Many of these techniques were passed on to other groups in the area: the Babylonian capitivity followed the aftermath of a successful siege, and Persian siegecraft had no trouble overwhelming the defense of the Acropolis of Athens during the Persian Wars. Early on the Greeks' lack of skill in this area was really rooted in the cultural basis of why and how they waged war with each other, and only the experience of the fifth and fourth centuries forced them to rethink their approach along more cold-blooded scientific and ultimately successful lines. (To get a sense of just how laughable early Greek siegecraft was, read Thucydides' description of the Athenian siegeworks at Syracuse -- then ask yourself how they could possibly have expected to win with an approach like that).
leure:
