Alexander VS Qin dynasty

zraver said:

300 not 3000, the rest of the allied contingent was sent home by Leonidas. your not going to stuff 3000 men onto a path 15-30m wide. The Spartans on that type of terrain were an almost ideal force. No one else in world, possibly ever in the world was as well trained, highly motivated and innurred to hardship. The youngest a Sparten warrior could have been would be 20 as that was the minimum age to get into a mess. By this time he has been drilling with weapons for at least 8 years. However most were probably between 20-and 29. Men at their physical peak but not yet old enough to marry since there is evidence the Spartan's considered it a suicide mission.



What about all the other cities that the Persians sacked, and all the other peoples that rebelled?



If the Ionians didn't want to be free at some level it would not have worked. Those Ionian cities were Greek in language, culture and religion. Greece (the Greek world) was a large area- parts of the black sea coast, parts of Thrace, the Ionian Coast, the Aegean Islands, parts of Dalmatia, Sicily, Southern Italy, a city in Egypt and several major Mediterranean islands.

Darius and Xerxes would both have been quite content to destroy Greece if it gave them control of the trade flowing back and forth between the Black Sea and Med, and removed the Greek competition for trade with Carthage and Africa.



You claimed he was a great builder when in fact he was more of a finisher.



300 killed over the course of 3 days is not mowed down.

Click to expand...

Will you please drop the 300 crap from that movie?
That is pure fanfiction, no mainstream historian support it.

So the Persians are just like the Greeks.
What's your point?

People don't want to be mistreated, that's a known fact, my point was had Darius been made aware of the situation he would have removed the local official and helped the people.
If you want to talk about other rebellions then be specific, but I'd prefer you don't because it's off topic.

How is he not?
In the case of building it is far easier to start something than to finish it.

No, on the last day of battle 2000-3000 Greeks were killed within hours, stop making stupid claims, or at least do some background research and come up with something more sensible.

My point is that the phalanx is overrated, what they achieved is not phenomenal.

xywdx said:

Now you need to stop getting your information from that stupid movie.
There were at least 300 Spartans, but they had several thousands of other Greek troops who fought and died with them.

The battle saved nothing, Persia never tried to destroy Greece, Ahasuerus merely wanted to rule Greece in name.
In fact, history has it that Ahasuerus destroyed many corrupted rulers, and brought democracy and freedom to many oppressed people.

Click to expand...

True. Ashaerus, as portrayed in the Hebrew and Catholic Bible, was a good king, and one who tolerated different religions and allowed them to flourish. All in the Book of Esther. Yes, the Jewish Queen Esther was his wife.

zraver said:

bad reading comprehension + time compression= bad

You claimed the crossbow would and I quote, " mow them down". That claim is bullshit. Breeds Hills is an almsot text example of the defense having every advantage and the loss rate per advance was less than 1 in 4. 4 or 5 of them merely wounded not dead. This is with completely unarmored troops advancing uphill against slow firing firearms and they didn't get mowed down. If you add body armor, helms and shields that cuts the effective range of the missiles significantly your going to have even fewer losses. Make the terrain somewhat fair so the infantry can advance faster and the loses will also be less.

Click to expand...

ROFL.... Dude, you might want to look up the word "casualty" in the dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Then again, a lot of things aren't what you think they are, but that obviously isn't stopping you from making your claims.

After reading through some of the text online, I also found something interesting... Alexandra and his father Philip, never actually use phalanx as their arm of choice. They basically use them as a force to hold opponent in place while they crush their opponent using their heavy cavalry.

Thus if the enemy's focus was on the cavalry and not on the phalanx then everything will be quite different.

The reason for the victory of Alexandra over other forces boils down to this:

1) incapable commanders for opposing units.
2) wrong tactic use against Alexandra's force
3) Alexandra is a great commander and an excellent tactician.
4) Many of Alexandra's opponents are not regular army, they are conscripts and they do not have the same training nor experience as Alexandra's troops.

As writen in text (readily on line) you can actually see that Phalanx plays not as important a role as many had hoped for. The main victory came when Alexandra uses combine arms tactics, in which Qin Army was also using.

Thus unlike many of the opponents that Alexandra faced, the Qin Army had very well trained and experience troops, capable commanders, making use of combine arms tactics, huge amount of personnel and no lacking of manpower... thus if Alexandra was facing this type of army... it really is very difficult to say who will win and who won't.

Finally like I have pointed out times and again... it is not always the people who won the war... it is the people who know how to make use of the terrain who will win the war...

With that say, I think to merely blow the Qin army aside saying that their weapons will have little effect on Alex's troop... it is too arrogant a claim. But actually the studies do not just boils down to individual tactics, weapons and formation, but many other elements should be taken into account.

Therefore I wouldn't say that the Qin had a definite advantage over Alex... but I wouldn't claim that Alex had a definite advantage over Qin too.

zraver was right:

article said:

After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learned in drills.

When the fighting ended bodies lay all over the highway ? and more were floating in a nearby river. Nine rebels were captured.

Click to expand...

If kevlar-armored infantry with bayonets can charge and defeat dug-in troops with mortars and assault rifles five times their number, then this obviously proves that macedonian phalanx can charge in and skewer the Qin crossbowmen!

solarz said:

zraver was right:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

If kevlar-armored infantry with bayonets can charge and defeat dug-in troops with mortars and assault rifles five times their number, then this obviously proves that macedonian phalanx can charge in and skewer the Qin crossbowmen!

Click to expand...

The assumption is that the Qin troops are not as well trained as the Macedonian phalanx... which as established many times, was not the case... and also the assumption of Qin's crossbow are ineffective against the phalanx. Also if that the Qin army are only using crossbows but not other weapons.

As we know, and had been established by my previous posts, Qin do not just have 1 single missile troops or other troops, they have multiple different arms.

Plus I do not know why everyone is so impressed with the phalanx formation... obviously even Alex is not that impress with the phalanx and do not actually use them as decisive blow on opponents' unit.

rhino123 said:

The assumption is that the Qin troops are not as well trained as the Macedonian phalanx... which as established many times, was not the case... and also the assumption of Qin's crossbow are ineffective against the phalanx. Also if that the Qin army are only using crossbows but not other weapons.

As we know, and had been established by my previous posts, Qin do not just have 1 single missile troops or other troops, they have multiple different arms.

Plus I do not know why everyone is so impressed with the phalanx formation... obviously even Alex is not that impress with the phalanx and do not actually use them as decisive blow on opponents' unit.

Click to expand...

You know, I was just being facetious...

solarz said:

You know, I was just being facetious...

Click to expand...

Oh... sorry... too much coffee and a coming test make me a bit jumpy.:rofl:

May I enquire what the "morale" in the Qin army usually was?
Qin Shi Huang seems to be rather heavy handed in what I got of his history, and may or may not face significant domestic unrest (given the gross disparity in terms of manpower, Alexander would not have much fun if the Qin army/state works as it is supposed to, however, highly centralised states are "brittle"..).
If the war drags on long enough, I am quite sure that the Qin would come up with some "hard counters" towards Phalanxes, it also seems that "shoot the crap out of them!" is a tactic the Qin are quite good at.
I know significantly more about the Swiss pikes, and shooting at them from fortified positions worked quite well.



P.S. with "Highly centralised states are brittle", I mean that, while defeating a centralised state in the first place is comparibly more difficult, each defeat it suffers has a much bigger adverse effect on it than it would have on a not so centralised one. An example for "decentralised resilance" could be France in the 100 years war, lost a lot of battles but did not care that much about it in the end. Timur Lengs empire (where power was centralised on him and noone else), was incredibly hard to defeat, but once it fell it never came back.

Back on the topic, it is a good question wether Alexander or Qin Shi Huang dieing would have a bigger adverse effect on their forces.

Mightypeon said:

P.S. with "Highly centralised states are brittle", I mean that, while defeating a centralised state in the first place is comparibly more difficult, each defeat it suffers has a much bigger adverse effect on it than it would have on a not so centralised one. An example for "decentralised resilance" could be France in the 100 years war, lost a lot of battles but did not care that much about it in the end. Timur Lengs empire (where power was centralised on him and noone else), was incredibly hard to defeat, but once it fell it never came back.

Back on the topic, it is a good question wether Alexander or Qin Shi Huang dieing would have a bigger adverse effect on their forces.

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that you're talking about China. Every Chinese dynasty could be described as more or less centralized, and it has always been able to bounce back as a nation after suffering conquests and defeats. Yes, dynasties change, but really, that's just a change in whose clan is the emperor.

When Alexander died, his entire empire collapsed. When Qin Shihuang died, rival factions rose and duked it out. The winner forged a new, more powerful, empire.