Again, going for the ad hominin.
Stop it.
What you were focusing on was if camels were armoured or not. The topic was on melee camels existing or not.
I brought up the Sassanid ones because I wasn’t going to take a massive amount of time out of my day to find a ton of different sources. I’m not writing a paper here, it’s a conversation about an abstract element in a video game.
? What is ad hominem about that? I just doubt your expertise in the field of history. Or more precisely to see what you can actually conclude from single sources. And I made various points on why I don’t share your interpretations and assess that you can’t conclude them from these sources.
The right response would be to either acknowledge the critique or bring forward additional points or sources that are more explicit and reliable to support your initial statements. But instead you attack me. And to make it very clear:
Are explicit or implicite ad hominem attacks, alleging some general generalist questionable behavior from my side I precisely DIDN’T. I was actually very specific why I questioned the source and the very specific interpretation on it. And I also treated the other, more reliable sources accordingly to their implicated meanings. I didn’t wanted to shout it from the rooftops then that you did generalize from a very specific rejection of a very specifc interpretation of a very specific source to an general treatment THEN. But now I kinda feel forced to justify myself. And THIS is actually an ad hominem attack (from your side against me), though it is an implicite one.
Maybe you could now stop these attacks, and btw alleging someone else to be ad hominem when he/she isn’t is also an ad hominem attack.
Doubting someone else experience in a field isn’t an ad hominem attack. It’s just a normal response if you see someone making obvious mistakes when they (implicitely) claim to be experts or at least would get to the “right/true” results. I was doubted various times on various subjects and I never reacted offended or assaulted. The best way to reat to that is just to show the expertise IF you have it. Accusing the other of “assaulting” you generally only makes things worse, showing that you are actually NOT as confident in the subject as you tried to impose earlier. Ofc sometimes the accusations are so weird that you can’t even respond to them. But then you don’t have to.
But the points you are trying to make here are very specific and against the common knowledge of camel warfare. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, but we need more than one very unreliable source from someone who wrote it down years later and only got indirect information himself. It’s not built on a very firm ground. That’s what I try to explain to you. I’m sorry if you had to spend a lot of time to only find an unreliable source for that. But that’s maybe because the thing you are looking for was just not the common use of camels in warfare.
I also want to remind you that, though you forced me to react to your accusations you still haven’t brought out a single point against my takes about the general utilization of camels in warfare. Which is in respect to melee engagements that they were usually only used for transport and dismounted before the “riders” engaged in battle.
However, the sources of @Estevao9543 are way more specific and possibly more reliable. So if it’s ok I would lie to respond to them now.
Especially the second one is interesting.
This is very interesting indeed. One possible interpretation from the common knowledge that usually the camel riders dismounted to engage in melee battle it could be seen as an act of courage to NOT dismount. It’s surely not the only way to interpret that source, but definitely one possible.
Which means in respect to the game that Borno/Sudanese could get a Camel UU with extra armor, designed to be a more “tanky” variant of the comonly used camel riders. This could be an interesting addition to the game with actual reliable historic sources to justify the design and artistic representation in the game.
I find this very interesting and insidefuly historic source that gave me additional and usable information about the utilization of camels. Especially in Africa. And I’m looking forward if you can find more.
You could have left it at the critique and let me come up with a response. But instead you added the bit mocking me in it. That wasn’t necessary.
And let me make it very clear, you are the one who has accused me of being in some grand conspiracy theory before. So I am not fully confident that anything I come up with will satisfy you.
You could have returned to the topic at any given moment here. But for some reason you decide to continue attacking me personally with defaming, ad hominem and also ridiculing allegations. Which is irritating to me because in part you are accusing me to do so, though I can’t really follow them. Some of them now are becoming even weird in a way I don’t want to engage in any form in.
Part of that is also that you don’'t really refer many of them so at best I only could guess what you actually refer to, which is hard if I don’t have a real clue… And I don’t think it’s my responsibility to find the references for your allegations against me, especially if I can’t follow them.
TBH I don’t see any reason why this has to be made publically. Send me a PM if you feel mocked by me. I didn’t mean to. But if you continue with these defaming allegations against me I HAVE to repel, because I feel misrepresented. If you contacted me privately I could have tried to figure out how you get that feeling of mockery and seen if I can adjust how I phrase things.
Though I also have to assess that you yourself aren’t a stranger to attempted mockery/ridiculing in this Forum. It’s actually very common and if it happens to me I usually just ignore it. It’s not worth to engage with that in any form. But for reference:
Is an attempt to ridicule me. And false representation aswell.
As I said it’s very common and usually I just ignore it. Because if I wouldn’t it would be almost impossible to get to ANY on topic discussion here. Spoken of.
PS: Still there is no point made against the common use of camels in melee warfare as merely a transport and the “riders” usually dismount before engaging in the melee battle. I would like to continue from here and ofc don’t want to undermine the on topic comment of @Estevao9543 that was unfortunately pushed away because of the altercation i had with @Tyranno13 .
That wasn’t aimed at you. It was at the general topic of melee camels never existing that seemed ridiculous (which you didn’t raise).
Anyway:
I think we’re done here. Let’s move on to the actual topic of the thread.
This is some serious nitpicking here. The Persian Grivpanvar IS the OG Cataphract. The Romans (Eastern Romans in this case) did not make use of heavy cavalry at the time like you say they do, as they still preferred their disciplined infantry armies. They adopted them much later. The names Cataphract, Clibanarii and Grivpanvar were used to identify the same type of cavalry in different languages.
But he was specific about mentioning that the Camels used as Cataphracts had soft padded feet, a factor which led to their defeat by the Romans due to their deployment of caltrops. You can’t make up specifics like that. Since the argument is that camels were used in melee combat, this evidence still holds. And Persians did indeed field both camels and horses in that battle, since their armies always had horse cavalry.
The only thing this indicates is that these leaders wanted suitable horses for battle, not that they were preferred for battle over camels. Camels were still the standard battle mounts because it’s like you said, they could more easily field camels which were already well adapted to the conditions, whereas they had to import or breed horses more selectively for that purpose.
But the above post by Tyranno13 seems to have more decisive evidence so I’ll leave it at that.
Honestly I’m really surprised not to see any Light Cav bonus for Saracens yet. Early Islamic conquest/expansions had some famous Light Cavalry manoeuvre.
Would 30% refund for both villagers and monks at the reverse price 100f/200g will be okay? You need to lose 7 villagers and 7 monks to return the investment.
True, maybe a Fursan unique unit?
The fact is Saracens already have one of the widest tech tree and barely any missing unit and tech (except some big ones like Cavaliers, Halberdiers and heavy Scorpions), bonuses in siege, camelry, navy, archers, economy… that’s because they’re supposed to cover the entire Muslim world, from pre Islamic Arabia to the Egyptian Mameluke caliphate.
Really they’re one of those civs that could use a nice split in a dedicated dlc with some classic campaigns for different characters in their history.
Given Madrassah wasn’t worthwhile when it needed 3 monks to return gold investment, not particularly. The refund for villagers is even less useful as by the time you can afford to lose villagers, food is abundant. Until that point, the main cost of villagers is TC time, something not included in the refund.
We have deviated from the topic. I’ll just end it with that a new LC UU with small tweak won’t hurt the balance. Worth to note, LC lose 0.05 movement speed over scout. So new Saracens LC UU may keep the speed but lose some other stat like 5 HP or 1 attack.
Thanks for the feedback. Maybe I should return to the gimmick -
Or maybe buff the return price. 50% sounds okay to me. 8 dead villagers to return.
Can we give Bengalis a second unique unit?
I don’t understand why Bengalis have to go through the trash cans of other civs to get any new bonus or techs.
This is my final list>
Change 1: Effect of Mahanyana as a bonus
Villagers and Monks take up -10% population spaceChange 2: Team bonus: “Trade gives 10% food in addition to gold" →
Cavalry units +2 attack vs Skirmishers.Change 3: Castle age Unique tech - Mahayana -
Monastries and TCs work 100% fasterChange 4: Imperial age Unique tech - Paiks -
Elephants attack 20% fasterRatha Change - Ratha ROF changed to 1.8
Arbelast - Arbelast upgrade removed, Thumb ring added.
Sorry for the delay. My research on camels in warfare is still ongoing, but I’ll post what I found so I don’t forget.
Due to the difficulty in finding studies dedicated exclusively to camel warfare, I privately requested sources from the user Hand_Me_Down_Genes from the link posted by @bigbossbro08, and he recommended the book Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, which luckily (since it doesn’t have a digital version) I had bought a year ago but hadn’t read yet. This user is a military historian and almost all of his comments are very interesting.
While waiting for his answer, I found this article (PDF) Was There a “Bedouinization of Arabia”? which summarizes well the current evidence for the use of camels in warfare. The relevant part to us is from the subtitle “Dostal, the shadad, and Camels in Warfare” onwards, although the previous section on saddles is also useful. It’s a simple article to understand, and it discusses the three examples of battles already mentioned in this thread. The author’s conclusion is that camels were generally used only as transport to and from battle, and the fastest way over uneven terrain.
That said, the author doesn’t discuss cases beyond the Middle East, his area of expertise, which is sad because I found two contrary cases in sub-Saharan Africa that, as far as I know, are not studied by anyone.
The first case concerns the Berbers of North Africa. The screenshots are from Corpus:
Al-Bakri on the veiled Almoravids
Ibn Khaldun on the veiled Berbers in general: Lantunas, Sanhaja, Gudala etc.
There are other mentions of camel use in war, but these are the clearest. It is also interesting that those Berbers in the passage about Bornu are Tuareg, who are descended from these veiled people, making it more likely that they fought on camels.
I found the second example by chance when I researched the term “nujub/najib” for camels. These are passages talking about the Beja people of northeast Africa (Egypt/Nubia/Ethiopia). I found the first one and others on the wonderful website medievalnubia.info:
The Beja […] ride camels and fight in a sitting position as if they were mounted on horseback: they throw their javelins without missing the target. — al-Ya’qubi, 9th century.
Other passages from MedNub mention Beja camel riders armed with shields and pikes/spears/javelins/swords, but this one is the clearest. If you guys want to take a look, just let me know and I’ll list all the authors I found.
This is from Ibn Selim el-Aswani (10th century), available here or on MedNub cited by al-Maqrizi.
Perhaps these examples are the exception to the rule, since they refer to nomads. But given that (1) both served as mercenaries and regulars in various Afro-Asian sultanates and (2) the aoe2 camel rider is a regional unit (on a dromedary, specifically), I find its representation in the game valid.
