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The army of Mordor took a wrong turn and goes up against the Roman Empire at its height.. by Mikay55in whowouldwin
[–]JimButcher 1 point an hour ago

Spoiler:

Let's say you have an elf a thousand years old. He's kind of a young one, because he doesn't even remember the Last Alliance. From age 15 or so, he is combat training. Not a lot of combat training, because Elves are basically hippies who would rather drink wine and smoke weed and spout poetry and sing elven karaoke. Let's call it hobby level training. 4 hours per week. Saturday afternoons, they go out and work with swords.

In a year, he has (52x4) 208 hours of training under his belt.

In a thousand years, he has (208X1000) 208,000 hours of training in combat.

Some Saturdays it rained. Or there was a moon festival or something. Call it 200,000 hours of training, to make it simple.

For argument's sake, your average roman Legionary starts training at age 15. He trains daily until the peak of his experience and physical ability, around age 40. 25 years of infantry knowhow.

For simplicity's sake, we'll say that he trains in weapons 8 hours a day, seven days a week. (It won't actually be that much. He also has to march, build roads, clean and secure his camp, cook, do KP, tend herd animals, and dozens of other things, but for the argument's sake, he spends all day learning to fight.)

At the end of the week, he's had 56 (7x8) hours of training.

At the end of the year, he's had 2912 (56x52) hours of training.

At the peak of his fighting career, after 25 years, he's had 72,800 hours of training.

The relatively young elven /hobbyist/ has three times as much training time as an absolutely peak, hardened professional roman legionary.

Never mind the elven part-time guys.

Never mind the professional elven soldiers.

Never mind the /old/ elves.

Of course, elves are neat and fictional, whereas the Romans /actually did this stuff/. Roman legions routinely fought battles outnumbered 10 to 1 by larger, stronger opponents /and routinely won them/.

It had nothing to do with how big and strong they were. It had to do with how intelligent and /disciplined/ they were. Romans worked together en masse, were extremely tough-minded, had excellent armor and discipline that has rarely been matched, historically.

Also, Romans were masters of getting places faster than their enemies could predict. Partly because of their roads, but largely because their legions trained tirelessly to walk a really long way a whole lot faster than people who weren't as crazy as legionaires could possibly do it. Speed of manuever is an absolutely critical (yet generally un-dramatic and therefore rarely highlighted) component of warfare. Ditto for supplying food to your army, an issue which Mordor really gets to largely ignore as a fantasy army.

In a more logistically realistic world, how the hell are orcs surviving longer than a few months? They don't raise animals, except for the damned wolves. They're too dumb and undisciplined to be farmers. You /can't/ supply a large army with sufficient food to have strength to march and fight by hunting all your food. For an orc force that large to assemble and stay together, they'd have to be constantly moving forward, constantly grabbing (and eating) their enemies, constantly raiding new grain silos and cattle ranches.

If you stop them in their tracks, they begin to starve. They can only have so much hobbit-jerky on them. They can only eat so many of their own before their already fragile morale begins to fall to bits and the horde disperses, exactly like barbarian hordes did repeatedly throughout history when confronted with the well-supplied and well-disciplined Roman legions.

Rome wouldn't /have/ to win a series of epic battles against Mordor. All they'd have to do would be to to find a bottleneck (of which Italy offers lots of nice ones), wall the orcs off (Romans were /good/ at that) and starve them out, the same way they starved out Hannibal when he was on the loose in Italy, the same way they starved out Spartacus and his army.

Romans weren't afraid of a fair fight, or even an unfair one, but they didn't see the point in going into one straight up when they could wear you down and take you on in a weakened condition first. Ceasar was particularly good at that kind of thing.

What made the Legions so successful was how good they were /at every phase of warfare/. A legion was a mini-Rome walking, able to build fortifications and cities, to forge and repair and create its own weapons and gear, to plant, raise, and defend its own crops, to tend to its own herds, to build roads and bridges and a miniature Roman civilization wherever it went.

Roman legions didn't just defeat the barbarians because they were badasses. They did it because they had /civilization/ in their pocket. That's a resource that the orcs, by definition, do not have and will never have.

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The army of Mordor took a wrong turn and goes up against the Roman Empire at its height.. by Mikay55in whowouldwin

[–]JimButcher 2 points an hour ago

The Spartans got a comic book and an epic movie. Plus their king dropped one of the very first recorded Action Hero Badass quotes.

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The army of Mordor took a wrong turn and goes up against the Roman Empire at its height.. by Mikay55in whowouldwin

[–]JimButcher 3 points an hour ago

You kidding? Troll is like five feet taller than the average roman. They'd just drop a lance through its upper chest or neck and never endanger their own formation.

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The army of Mordor took a wrong turn and goes up against the Roman Empire at its height.. by Mikay55in whowouldwin

[–]JimButcher 3 points an hour ago

Aragorn fought the troll for like fifteen seconds and it stomped him in that time. His personal strength, slightly stronger than peak human (questionable, there's no demonstration of that in the novels) or not, it doesn't matter if you're a weightlifter or a cross-country runner when you're wrestling a rhinocerous. The rhino wins.

What Aragorn had that let him stand up to the troll for a very limited amount of time was skill and courage. The Romans had plenty of that. Yeah, a legionaire might die holding that troll still for five or six seconds (instead of fifteen) but they had a whole lot of legionaires. A roman squad could pin the troll down long enough for a ballista crew to put a six-foot lance through its chest, even if it took losses doing so. It's not much different than a WWII infantry squad confronting a tank. Some members draw its attention, and quite possibly get killed, while the guy with the rocket launcher takes the opportunity to aim and fire. You pay a price, but you kill the tank.

Troll isn't much different. But probably smellier.

Spoiler: