Well, yeah, but that’s epic poetry for you. It’s “arma virumque cano”, not “arma virosque”, let alone “arma testudinemque”
I wouldn’t mind a duel of heroes, this game itself is trying to be “heroic poetry”.
If I were the designer of those battles, I’d have two phalanxes squaring off just outside of spear-throwing distance. They’d yell and jeer and insult one another (think that pre-battle scene in braveheart) and the general would ask Kassandra to go beat up their champion. After she kills him, the phalanxes would clash, while Kassandra gets out of the way, but the losing party would quickly lose heart and run away.
But that’s not how it is and the game is freaking great otherwise. Just a 9 for me, I’m docking a whole point for the bullshit nature of (army) warfare.
Perhaps in the time Homer sings about phalanx warfare wasn’t yet as it is known from the period this game is portraying. I don’t remember mentions of lines wavering and breaking in the great shoving match in the Iliad. But then it’s been ages since I read that.
Opinion is divided on that. For the Archaic period, there’s ample evidence that the Greeks didn’t fight in the tight-knot phalanx familiar from the Classical period. And even during the Classical period, things were probably a lot more fluid than many outside of academia imagine. I’ve plugged my stuff before, but if you’re interested, check out the podcast we did for Ancient World Magazine and read some of these posts.
Victor Hanson’s work is not supported by everyone. In fact, there are basically two camps when it comes to hoplite warfare, the “orthodox” (Greeks fought as hoplites in closely-packed phalanxes, probably from 700 BC onwards) and the “heretics” (Greek warfare was more varied than that, and they at least didn’t start fighting in phalanxes, and even then, the phalanx might be more fluid than is often thought). I’ll leave you to guess as to which camp I belong in (read this article about my book on the subject, based on my PhD thesis).
I wrote more extensively about some of the problems with Hanson’s book here.
The othismos is what you’re referring to (i.e. the shoving). Opinion is divided about whether or not this was literally a shoving match: Peter Krentz and others have argued persuasively (in my opinion!) that it wasn’t literal shoving, if not in the least because the weight of seven guys behind you and eight in front of you might very well crush you, and would make some of the limited tactics we read about in the historical sources simply impossible.
You should read the articles and books by Hans van Wees. His Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities should be on the reading list of everyone who’s got an interest in ancient Greek warfare.
Edit: Roel Konijnendijk wrote a PhD thesis about tactics in Classical Greek warfare, which got published as a far-too-expensive book not too long ago. Basically, he challenges various notions regarding the idea that Classical Greek battles were strictly affairs between hoplite phalanxes.
Anyway, lots to say, but I won’t bog down the thread with this. Hopefully, I can do a Let’s Play with archaeological/historical commentary of this game myself at some point down the line. ;-)
Certainly.
In Origins, many of the skills you could put points into felt like small, incremental stuff that wasn’t doing a lot. Like in the Hunter tree you could have a chance to retrieve your arrows (in Odyssey that’s just seemingly a thing you can do), or bonus XP for head shots, or carrying an extra bow. The big ability in the tree literally gives 1% extra bow damage and can be bought over and over again. Oooh!
In Odyssey, in that same skill tree, you can tame wolves, slow time when detected by enemies (and arrows fired during this time do extra damage), multi-shot, paint a target with a rain of arrows, and there is a passive that buffs your hunter damage by a huge amount (+15% bow damage at rank 1) AND also lets you not spend arrows on special abilities. The big ability in this tree let’s you shoot an arrow through a wall even!
And, in Odyssey, you can put a second and third point into each skill, and doing so feels like a huge upgrade to that skill (at the “cost” of not spending that point on a new ability). The upgrades are really big, often doubling the effect of the skill or even adding a new secondary trait as well.
I would love that!
Hey- would you say HDR is delivering what you would hope? Do you congratulate yourself on your cleverness in your choice of monitor :) I heard there was sometimes some futzing around with Windows swapping modes back and forth or something? I definitely hope to pick up an HDR monitor but I’m wondering if it’s ‘fully arrived’ yet.
That would be great fun. I actually thought about doing this but since classical greece is so popular a topic i assumes there were many far better equipped to do so than i.
I think the formation Hoplite thing comes at least partially from the impression i get that the Macedonian sarissa wasn’t that “different” in employment that the Hoplite, which may be wrong, and that close formation fighting “solves” the problem of the maniple.
Pretty clearly the sarissa couldnt be used outside of formation, and many of Alexander the Great’s original soldiers fought until they were 60, which just wouldn’t have been possible with a more athletic style of fighting. I do think there has long been this inference that since a large portion of the male citizenry was expected to fight regardless of age or talent we retroactively assume this must have meant they fought in a style that requires discipline but not skill or complex training, which is probably wrong.
And wasn’t there some evidence recently that the front “ranks” of a Hoplite formation wore heavier armor than the back ranks?
I like Origins amazing graphics and areas. Is just amazing to see the big pyramids and egyptian buildings. So much eyecandy.
But Odyssey is just fun!, they made here a fun game with many parts that work well together.
Nothing better than some knowledge from Gamespew!
https://www.gamespew.com/2018/10/how-to-be-successful-at-naval-combat-in-assassins-creed-odyssey/
From a gameplay point of view, this sounds kind of redundant to me. There’s already a plethora in one-on-one duels with tough enemies in the form of Mercenaries, I think turning battles into the same thing would not really make them feel distinguishable in any way.
I think this is a case where gameplay considerations won out over historical authenticity. In some games that might bother me, but this is a game where I can jump off the highest cliffs with no lasting injury, wield a magic spear, and guide arrows like a tomahawk cruise missile. I can also imagine that the battle scene I start out in is after the phalanxes have clashed, leaders have died, and things have devolved into a bloody melee or something.
Homer writing about single combat was before the age of the phalanx. It would have been cool to see some form of that in the game, but probably not very fun. You would just be another hoplite in the line, and as likely to die as anyone else.
Frank Adcock published a book in the 1950s called The Greek and Macedonian Art of War, where he basically says that a phalanx – in the sense of a tight-knit formation of spear/pikemen – is “properly” applied to the Macedonian phalanx rather than the Greek one.
But even back then (1940s and 1950s) there were people comparing phalanx warfare with rugby scrimmage (!), and mixing up the Archaic and Classical sense of phalanx (since Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon uses those terms) with the Macedonian phalanx. For a long time, it was also thought that Greek warfare was highly ritualized and therefore “civilized”, but we know that wasn’t at all the case (Greek warfare is actually highly destructive, as it virtually always is). It’s only in the last three decades or so that people are really starting to untangle this mess.
Yeah, this is a good way of looking at it. The funny thing is that e.g. hypaspists are thought to have been equipped as “hoplites” (which in this era means just a guy with a shield and a spear), and they were supposedly highly mobile.
Supposition, not evidence. Eero Jarva in his book on (Archaic!) Greek body-armour puts forward the idea that since there’s an uneven distribution in types of armour (greaves, arm guard, cuirasses, corslets, helmets, ankle-guards, etc.) that not everyone wore a full panoply. He then posits that only the ones in the front ranks wore full armour, since they were wealthy, had to show off their expensive equipment (remember: as a rule, you had to supply your own kit!), and because they were likely to be leaders of the community needed to be seen to do their bit.
It’s a good hypothesis, but it’s not without its problems, key of which is the argument, brought forward by myself and others, that in the Archaic period there really weren’t any “poor” hoplites who couldn’t afford the full kit. By the time of the Classical period, most pieces of armour have been dispensed with, and the base has been widened (especially in Athens and similar city-states) so that hoplites were relatively wealthy people instead of mostly the (aristocratic) elite who went to battle using a shield, spear and a fairly simple pilos helmet rather than the full bronze panoply with Corinthian (or similar) helmets, bronze-sheeted shields, greaves, and so on.
They key here is that Greek warfare wasn’t static, but dynamic, changing with the times. A “hoplite” in ca. 650 BC looked very differently from one in ca. 425 BC. They weren’t even called “hoplites” until the fifth century BC (typically, they were just referred to as “spearmen”; the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus calls them panoploi or “armoured men”).
Actually, the place of honour was fighting in front of the rest of the army (or the “front rank”) as a promachos (a beautiful term used from Homer onwards to denote a “front (or forward) fighter”), as that was the place where you were most likely to die. The further away from the fighting you were, the easier it was to run away. And the goal of most ancient battles was to rout the enemy.
Herodotus actually adds some Homeric flourishes to his descriptions of battle, listing people who performed particularly well. His description of the battle over Leonidas’ body at Thermopylae reads like something straight out of Homer.
well, I got accepted into the Project Stream alpha, we’ll see if my browser can run the game better than my PC :P
Goddamn sum’bich! :P
I applied but no dice (yet!) I’d be interested to hear how it runs, if you get a chance let us know.
My Kassandra has hit her stride, at level 14 she can kick almost any ass she meets fairly effortlessly. a one-tier difference isnt as bad if it means less than 10% difference, unlike the 100% at lvl2.
But then she met her match. A pretty girl (and Kassandra being a huge lech is a sucker for those, also for pretty men) asked her to take on a pig. a pig?! sure ill slaughter your piggy if it gets me in your panties, hot stuff!
That was one hell of a bossfight lol. The pig was bigger than a fucking bear and at certain intervals in getting its huge amount of hitpoints worn down would call in squads of normal wild pigs to fuck up Kassandra’s dance routine.
I had to reload that like three times until I got it right. Use specialist equipment and all! It was great.
Of course Kassandra didn’t get laid. There’s seven more beasties all over Greece that need slayin’ before there can be any layin’. #greeklife
Yeah, that boar fight was fun. Just hunted down my second Beastie and I know the location of a third but haven’t wanted to take it on yet. It didn’t look very friendly.
Great Stream by Tom. Can I confess? I had to learn to fight on my Kassandra by watching him stream.
Because I am terrible.
Was this posted?
The Atlantis stuff might be worth getting the Season pass.
Yes, the boar fight was rough. Ended up respeccing my skills to make it through the fight. Then respecced back to my regular lineup afterwards.