Dev Diary - War and Conquest (Part I - Concept)

“The highest ambition of our magistrates and generals was to defend our provinces and allies with justice and honour. And so our government could be called more accurately a protectorate of the world than a dominion. ”

Cicero, De Officiis, 2.27

Hi, Lucas here! In this diary I will talk about war and how I'm expecting to represent it in Historia Realis. Hope you enjoy!

Today I'll focus more on war & conquest in general, but it's worth sharing a few points on how I expect you might be able to interact with war:

• You can be a junior officer doing smaller duties in an army.

• You can be a legate doing more important duties for a commander.

• You can be the commander yourself (usually a Consul or Praetor, or a promagistrate).

• You can be a Senator who voted "yes" to start the war, but never took part in it.

• You can be a Senator who begins a vote to recall a commander who is doing poorly, or who prosecutes a returning commander for their unjust war, or rewards them with a Triumph.

And you can be all of those things at different stages of your life. There's no linear progression; it all emerges from the simulation.

That said, I will not be focusing here on what the player can do, but on war more broadly.

War in Games

Ah, war. One of the most well-trodden aspects of history in games.

This is both good and bad. Good, because we have tried many things, and so I can look at what has worked and hasn’t, and build upon the foundation. Bad, because we’ve established conventions that have no grounding in history or reality, and breaking free from these long-standing traditions will probably cause some weirdness, even if it’s accurate.

For example, in war games we are used to building bigger and bigger armies. You expand, you get more income, and now you can afford bigger armies. So you increase your army size. Makes sense, right? That’s how history worked, right?

Well, no. It really wasn’t. Let’s look at the number of legions Rome had at its service from 200 to 95 BC, a period of great expansion of Roman power in the Mediterranean:

(From: War and society in the Roman world, John Rich and Graham Shipley, 1993, 2002 edition)

We see a few spikes, but also valleys, and, on average, a reduction in the number of legions over the 2nd century BC. If this graph were to extend backwards and forwards a bit, we would see another interesting thing: two huge spikes, one at the beginning due to the 2nd Punic War, and one at the end due to the Social War.

What we definitely don’t see is steady growth, or even a trend towards growth, which is how games often do things. But games just do that to make you feel like you’re making progress and getting stronger, not to accurately portray history.

And that’s not the only aspect that needs some serious looking into. Let’s compare how games often represent war versus how the Romans during the Republic actually did war: