Rome vs Han China

IDonT said:

Mongols were the best pre-firearms army in the world.
They were disciplined and was one of the first armies to used manuever warfare.

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Mongol army was not the best pre-firearms army and were not disciplined until Genghis Khan became their leader. They were like a box of scattered sand before Genghis Khan's time and they were not united, everyone fought for their own benefits (women, etc) instead of the whole Mongol race. they were seens as weak barbarians by all the empires around them.

im surprised that this thread is still alive, lol. :nana:

T-U-P said:

Mongol army was not the best pre-firearms army and were not disciplined until Genghis Khan became their leader. They were like a box of scattered sand before Genghis Khan's time and they were not united, everyone fought for their own benefits (women, etc) instead of the whole Mongol race. they were seens as weak barbarians by all the empires around them.

im surprised that this thread is still alive, lol. :nana:

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That's what I mean, post Genghis Khan.

This one of those threads that go on forever....:nana:

IDonT said:

We are discussing this for fun!!!!

Although numbers can make a huge difference, they can also be a liability. Large armies are expensive, unweildy, and slow.

Outnumbering an enemy does not always guarantee victory.
Alexander the Great conquered Persia with just 50,000 troops.
Qin were outnumbered by the other warring states and it conquered them.

Mongols were the best pre-firearms army in the world.
They were disciplined and was one of the first armies to used manuever warfare.

Click to expand...

Actually, the one thing that is consistently ignored about Qenghis khan is his strategies. He actually would not have defeated the two dynasties governing northern and southern china that time if he didn't do the maneouvering that he did. Actually, even the later Mongol rulers were good at this. This is how they kept on ruling Russia for so long even after their demise in China.

As for their armies abilities, it could be argued that they easily had the most fearsome army in the pre-firearm days. The reason is because the speed that they come at you with the knights and crossbowmen on horses is so fast that most armies just don't know how to deal with them in an open battlefield. That's why the great wall was built. As strong and technologically advanced as Han was, even it had trouble defending the Mongols with a wall in front of it.

Personally, I would've liked to see the Huns vs the pre-100AD roman soldiers go at it or seeing at Alexander the great army vs Hannibal lead army.

tphuang said:

That's why the great wall was built. As strong and technologically advanced as Han was, even it had trouble defending the Mongols with a wall in front of it.

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i don't think the great wall extended all the way to mongol at the time of the invasion. the 2 dynasties that are mainly responsible for the great walls are the Qin and the Ming. the Qin dynasty's great wall was far smaller than what we see today. it was Ming that extended the great wall to the size today, and Ming comes after Yuan (the dynasty mongols created).

I somewhat stick to my belief that Han would have discipline problems, that a Han army would be more prone to breaking and fleeing than a Roman Legion.

The ZGN is also marginal in effect, it has a horrible armor piercing ability, and also has horrible range. It was mostly a civilian weapon that had limited uses in defending besieged towns.

the ZGN is mostly used in ambushes, where a lot of close quater combats occurs. zhu ge lian invented it because he is a master of strategies and he usually use ambushes to destroy both the enemy and their spirit. if han was to clash with the romans, ZGN would not be the only thing they would use. they would only use it in close range (the han commanders are not stupid), while they would use calvary archers, other crossbowman, and perhaps some crossbow siege weapons at long range.

from what i see, the hans would be better at various strategies while the romans would be better at head to head combat.

The ZGN has no AP, or so I'm told. It would be interesting if we could get a test that would explain whether or not the ZGN would be able to pierce Roman Legionnaire armor at close range.

It's already a point of some dispute as to whether Han Crossbows could break the Tetsudo formation also, so it might be doubtful whether the ZGN, which is suppoesd to be significantly inferior in armor piercing, could break through Roman heavy shields at that range.

Also, like everyone else here, I'm interested in the combat properties of siege crossbows. These don't seem to be mentioned a lot, though, according to Liang Jieming's thread, these were obsoleted by heavier siege weapons.

there is a record of a roman legion serving as mercenary to the huns, who lost horribily. around caesar's time one of the roman forces was eliminated and only about a legion manage to escape, but record of this legion disappeared, it never returned to rome, but record of Han's conquest of huns mentions an army of mercenary that fits the discription of a roman legion.

since Qin the chinese army used scorpions(like from age of empire2) and lots of them too, range 500 meters, and is a far superior sized army. it's impossible since terran is an important part of war, thus making this scinario impossible to judge.

how could the Huns have gotten a Roman legion to fight Han china. Huns didn't go west until they got their butt kicked in china by the han. when they were defeated, they left the steeps and didn't look back, and went west slowly, they didn't get there overnight, and come back to fight again, they went to europe and eventually settled down.

I read some of yous saying Roman legions are very organized...etc, obviously people who said that have not really study ancient Chinese military army organizations. If Roman vs Han, I would vote China would win the fight, one simple evidence, see how brilliant of ancient Chinese generals during war. 6 schools of militarism (only Sun Tzu left to present time), 36 strategies, psychological warfare..etc are all common knowledge and practices to Chinese generals. On the other hand, I don't see Roman or Western military ever achieved such level.