Recent content by nijis

Thanks for taking so much time to put these together and highlight the errors. I'll get started making fixes for a coming update.

If I understood rightly, what about other toponyms? I can't translate them correctly without the Arabic alphabet

And also who is Hans Wehr?

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Sorry - Hans Wehr is the main English-Arabic dictionary.

I think the main place names are Ezbat (Estate), Kafr (Village), Askar (Camp), Husn (Castle), Qalat (Citadel, qala'a), Bir (well) and Ain (spring). Nakhl is "palm tree." For the rest, they are just personal names or layered names, with no "right" answer. Husn Fulq for example is Fulq's Castle.

Any information about a Brazilian translation?

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I can't really speak to the translation schedule. Sorry about that.

I can't really do all of them. All the languages in the game have been tweaked a bit so there's not necessarily a right answer.

1) Personal names and clan names are mostly based off pre-Islamic or early Islamic names.
2) There are some Arabic toponyms - Husn for castle, Ain for spring, Bir for well, Ezba/t for estate (that might be an anachronism, though), Kafr for village. You can probably work those out with a Hans Wehr.
3) Some other places - ie, Iyakis - are supposed to reflect that modern Arabic toponymy is often very layered. Ie, a place in Egypt might be ancient Egyptian/Coptic => Greek => Arabic. Every transliteration changes the word slightly, so if the final transliteration into Korean is a little "off," that actually adds to the authenticity.

Hi find123 - it's based on fusha but without case nunation. There's no 1:1 correspondence between vowels and consonants, though, and the 'ain and hamza are usually just not shown. Ie, Aserai is like this: عصراءي, "of Asera." So there's not really a system.

Bluehawk said:

I'm not aware of any formal ratio for levies before the Code of Service of 1556, which obliged a landowner to produce a man, "on horse and in armour complete" for every 100 chetvert's of land they own, something like 5000 square meters. Actually the definition of a chetvert' as a unit of area was variable so it's not very helpful, but the ratio would be much lower than 1:10. But with the adoption of this code, more landowners were being called on to raise soldiers than before, which relaxed the burden on the state treasury.

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Five thousand square meters is a little over an acre. I'm seeing a huge range of estimates for what a chetvert was, but 500,000 m2 = 120 acres should support six households, or 30 people, on reasonably fertile ground. Six households of poor tenants, that is -- 40 acres would be an ideal size for a freeholder. So, three to six households maybe? - but less if the land is marginal.

Note also that in the Anglo-Saxon system, acres represented a fixed unit of crop yield but variable land. So, three area acres of land could go down in the documents as one fiscal acre.

In the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, I believe, normally households would pool their resources to contribute one reasonably well-equipped and trained warrior to the host at the ratio of five households to one warrior. Cavalry cost more. In the 11th century Byzantine system, different troop types were given differently-sized estates to support them. A cataphract had an estate that would normally support 30 families. A lighter cavalryman had an estate that supported 15 families.

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To sum up, I'd say that most levy systems were designed to encourage a group of farmers to find their biggest, most aggressive member, have him practice a lot between campaigns, and send him off with decent equipment and maybe even a horse, rather than send a half dozen guys with no aptitude for fighting.

There are good operational reasons for this. Medieval armies tended to cap out at 10,000 to 30,000 men, often much less, because anything larger could not sustain itself by foraging along the line of march. Bigger armies take longer to form up for battle and longer to leave camp.

If an army in a battle has a lot of untrained peasants, they're probably from nearby and fighting in defense of their homes, or are camp followers.

The vast majority of know pre-modern assassinations -- until the 1584 pistol-murder of William the Silent -- were with edged weapons. Bows were simply not that accurate (their field accuracy is far less than target shooting accuracy, and no assassination target is going to be standing around motionless) nor are they reliably lethal. Even in the 20th century, assassins had far more luck with handguns at pointblank range than with high-powered weapons at a difference. Everyone knows Lee Harvey Oswald but it's much more the exception than the rule.

Anecdotally, I'd say the archetypal medieval assassination would be something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazzi_conspiracy. The would-be assassins used blades against targets in a public place (no Assassins' Creed-style sneaking), made little effort to hide their identity, and expected to get away with it because the assassination would change the political balance in their city. It's about as far away from the fantasy archetype of an assassination as you can get.

This should give an idea of what the game is about.

http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=329&t=63015&sid=0743f98b1699a79be89436ac80c27ca2

It's true the game is fairly light on content, but thanks to the random maps, there's still a lot of replayability. I kind of like that development approach - make the game cheap but challenging, with an idea toward expanding later on.

"Lost Patrol" looks like a pretty cool game, especially for its time, and Mud & Blood also looks worth a trial. Their squad's-eye-view is clearly a very different treatment of the war.

The full collection with all DLCs is on sale for $11.24 thanks to the sale. Just bought. Looking forward to see what the expansions add.

Mos def buy.

I never played any of the expansions. Vanilla has a lot of flaws, in particular when the AI conducts any operation other than a straightforward land offensive, but my campaign as the Commonwealth holding the line against Germany and Italy in western France and Republican Spain was one of the most intense strategic game experiences I ever had. Two years of see-saw warfare. I was constantly rushing half-exhausted divisions up and down the line to seize an opportunity or stave off a crisis.

Two bits of advice: use counters with NATO symbols, not the sprites. Makes it much easier to see what you have in a province. And micromanage your land battles.

I don't maintain the multiplayer aspects of this recently, but there's a ship-to-ship "scenario" in the multiplayer where you can either man a galley and chase pirates, or man a pirate and chase merchants. It's based on the Klabautermann scripts, with some adaptions. Ram a boat to board it; shoot at the oarsmen to slow it down.

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,242485.0.html

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that the Mongols' string of near-unbroken victories really only ran for the generation of Chingis and Subotai and maybe one generation after that. This would suggest that it was leadership - not tactical sense per se, but the ability of these leaders to enforce the kind of organization and training regimen that allowed the Mongols to coordinate so well together on the battlefield.

Great collection of images.

Note that no state in the medieval era is going to have a distinct national appearance. It's a game convention to have different visual styles for different "factions" but actual appearance seems to have been a lot more of a melting pot.

Everyone borrowed clothing styles and weapons from each other and from the great empires. So, 13th century Armenians are going to look like 13 century Georgians, Russians and Kipchaks might share a taste for sabres, lamellar, and facemask helmets, and even Byzantines are likely to sport a few turban or felt hat styles that they picked up from the Caliphate or from the steppe.

The pictures clearly bring that out, but I was just tossing that in.