Let's settle this once and for all. Roman Empire vs The Han Dynasty in an all out war. Both at their height of power

>implying the Romans would genocide the Chins
Rome would win, Rome just has way more Auxiliaries to make up for lack of raw manpower as well as Chinese tactics.
Romans would have had access to numerous Steppe peoples by promising them great rewards, same with La Tene and Foederati.
Rome could employ every type of counter to whatever the Chinese had, also Rome was the master at siege warfare, the Chinese have tech but the Romans have logistics.
The Chinese might be able to win a defensive war for a time but Rome would overcome.
China is just too wealthy to remain untouched.

If the fighting is on Roman turf? Rome could very narrowly hold off a Chinese invasion assuming they make it there without a hitch
If the fighting is on Chinese turf? Total blowout victory for China.

In any case, Roman tech wasnt so superior to China that it would be able to counter the massive numbers advantage China has.

Rome

They just copy all the Chinese good stuff and do it better

Rome would end up playing the long game and slowly build up ally's on the path to china

Rome basically genocided the Gauls.

because they were uncivilized barbarians. There is no reasonable way the romans can observe chinese culture, civility, look at the bureaucracy of their government, see their art, and not see civilized people. They would be on the level with the Greeks; even if they were enslaved, they would be sought after as intelligent and civilized slaves. They would realize they have much to learn from their culture, art, and traditions. Much as they would with the Persians, had they ever conquered them. I think a Sino-Roman state would have been pretty cool, as romans always copied the favorable parts of cultures they conquered. The whole mandate of heaven thing? That would be applied to the Emperor, of course, beyond just Augustus.

>all these Romaboos

One word, faggots: crossbows. Also, the Chinese were way better at getting steppe peoples to do shit for them. Rome had the foederati, but China had the Xiongnu, which could pop up in Central Europe and tie up Roman legions and client kingdoms while the bulk of the Chinese force invaded through Anatolia. Since near easterners and Greeks were butthurt at Roman rule, they would've welcomed the Chinese with open arms.

Of course, in this scenario it would depend on Parthia and Bactria taking China's side. In fact, in any scenario the whole outcome would rest on who Parthia ended up supporting.

>people thinking china had a one billion population at 0 AD itt

>crossbows
>somehow being useful against romans

Dude what. first off what's going to happen is chinese crossbowman are going to try to harass the heavy infrantry, whereupon they'll be fucked by a volley of pilae and probable a light cavalry charge. All while these bolts are being stopped by shields (which chinese didn't use or fight vs people who did use them), and roman legionary armor was a lot better than what the chinese were wearing at the time, which was mostly bronze on their HI. When romans got up close they would absolutely shred the chinese. and unless you want to keep the crossbows out in front you're going to have to shoot through your own ranks in order to get a shot in at the romans, who are very well-protected as is.

>One word, faggots: crossbows.

say again?

>Han vs Roman
The Eastern Han would be contemporary with the Romans Empire. Not the armor shown in OP.

>Whole thread full of memers
Neither side would cross the Taklamakan desert without significant casualties. Look how many men the Han lost in invading Ferghana.

>Rome just has way more Auxiliaries to make up for lack of raw manpower as well as Chinese tactics
The Han employed auxiliaries as varied as the Qiang,Yue,Xiongnu,Cong,Man etc.

The theoretical output for the average footdrawn crossbow is pretty damn impressive.

Typical 6 stone strength Han crossbow's power = 387 lbs draw weight * ~19 inch powerstroke * ~.70 efficiency/2 = 2573.6 inch lbs = 291 Joules

> roman legionary armor was a lot better than what the chinese were wearing at the time
Source. The Han used blast furnaces,forge folding etc. to produce wrought iron/steel lamellar/scale armors.

>Pila range =/= crossbow range
>light cavalry < wagon forts

Also

>Supply depots > supply trains

>Romans have logistics
>sailing around the Mediterranean is hard
If there was anything the Chinese really excelled in, it was logistics

>crossbows
>not fucking destroying anything that came in their path with an unstoppable volley of bolts

the Romans had enough trouble dealing with compound bows and horse archers.

>implying manuballista=crossbow
wut

>Han armor was bronze

HAHANOPE.
>>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age_China

Idiot.

>the Romans had enough trouble dealing with compound bows and horse archers.

very little after a while.

>"They had iron, therefore they made iron armor!"

maybe a little, but check out the section on han china here. They didn't mass-produce iron or steel until medieval china, whereas Romans were using iron armor and steel pilae/gladii.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_armour

Further, horse archers are a different deal entirely. By the 200's Rome was absolutely using horse archers, both equites and foederati. The only reason horse archers gave them trouble was because they could run in, shoot, then fall back without any risk. Once rome started using horse archers it evened out.

You don't know much about crossbows, do you? They don't fire arrows, they fire quarrels, meaning they have more inertia the closer you shoot them from, whereas with bows you get inertia at the start *and* end of the arc. Crossbows are most useful at close range, under 50 yards.

Further, this implies the romans would engage the chinese in a defensive position of their choosing.... I mean, maybe if you had fucking Varus or Crassus, but any actual competent general wouldn't do such a thing. the only way Rome would fight was in a pitched battle.

>like the yang to its yin
Actually, in contemporary Han cosmology, it would have been yin to its yang.

really? I'd admit I'm less familiar with China than I am rome, but I did know they sort of saw it as almost like the "opposite world" or "nega-hero" like you'd see on a cartoon. Not necessarily evil or anything, just an alternate version of ostensibly the same thing.

in open battle romans would win most of the time due to superior tactics and unit diversity and organization... But in a war of attrition the Han would wreck the Romans. according to sources of the time (around 100 A.D) the chinese could raise and sustain around 200.000-300.000 horsemen and had breeding facilities for horses, furthermome they were able to raise huge armies in the 200.000 and even the 800.000 mark, but then again the romans themselves could easily replace lost legions in no time... so i guess it comes down to who's invading who? and both are incapable of not only conquering but merely getting their armies to enemy terittory would almost certainly guarantee the army's destruction through lack of supplies due to overextension,dessertion,unknown and unhospitable lands etc.

Did Han China have zhugenu? How would that play into this?

>Further, horse archers are a different deal entirely. By the 200's Rome was absolutely using horse archers, both equites and foederati. The only reason horse archers gave them trouble was because they could run in, shoot, then fall back without any risk. Once rome started using horse archers it evened out.

The Romans never gained the upper hand against the steppe nomads because the logistics and difficulty of fighting in the steppes. Instead like the Chinese they resorted to bribing tribes to go away or playing them against one another.

>You don't know much about crossbows, do you? They don't fire arrows, they fire quarrels, meaning they have more inertia the closer you shoot them from, whereas with bows you get inertia at the start *and* end of the arc. Crossbows are most useful at close range, under 50 yards.

You don't know anything about Han crossbows. They had large draws and fired long arrows that could not only fly farther but more accurately than their Medieval European counterparts. There are accounts of Han crossbowmen sniping and killing Xiongnu chieftains from hundreds of yards away.

Point 1: THat's because the nomads could just retreat into the endless steppe. On the battlefield their archers were no better than the roman ones. They just had home field advantage.

Point 2: I'd like to see a source. But there are also accounts of people seeing dragons and whatnot.

It was a meme weapon with very low draw weight that is pretty much useless except shooting at guys on siege ladders.
The repeating crossbow had the earliest designs from the Spring and Autumn period but was never really adopted for any serious military use.

> THat's because the nomads could just retreat into the endless steppe. On the battlefield their archers were no better than the roman ones. They just had home field advantage.

Don't kid yourself. The Romans couldn't go toe to toe with nomads in archery and often employed nomadic auxiliaries and mercenaries to counter them in case their foot archers could not gain the advantage.

>I'd like to see a source. But there are also accounts of people seeing dragons and whatnot.

Records of the Grand Historian. Do some reading before shit posting like every faggot on this site.

No it was used by local militia for fighting bandits and the arrows were poisoned to make up for the lack of draw weight so it was actually useful, however that being said due to the fact that arrows needed to be poisoned it wasn't used in a professional capacity.

Trajan tried that, it didn't go so well for him.

Rome would have superior foot archers.

>maybe a little, but check out the section on han china here. They didn't mass-produce iron or steel until medieval china, whereas Romans were using iron armor and steel pilae/gladii.
You are retarded,the blast furnace was already invented during the Warring States.

Han iron production would dwarf the Romans. If you want even more proof look up the Donghai military inventory.

/thread

Muh dik

That looks nice

>battle robe

just like in my fantasy videogames

Could the >H>R>E have beaten the Han Chinese in an all out war?

The Chinese would just need to drag the roman forces into Vietnam - the white man's nightmare.

Han+Vietnamese jungle monkeys gorilla war= all romans die.

Just this is true just google the roman campaigns in german forests. The vietnamese jungle would easily top that.

>Just this is true just google the roman campaigns in german forests.

a completely one sided genocide for the germans?

>Chinese fought mostly with spears and missile weapons,
No. The main fighting force of the Han Chinese where cavalry, which something the Romain were fairly weak against.

depends on the terrain

>a completely one sided genocide for the germans?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

If Alexander the Great a man that has actually managed to get into India vowed to never return back then what chances do the Romans have?

Romans weren't useless in forest, their failure was mainly due to Arminius leading them into a pre-prepared ambush. Were it Caesar he would have flooded the area in front of him with scouts if he had no knowledge of the terrain.

One small counter-point. Romans never fought against Chinese crossbows.

They would have been utterly destroyed.

>The use of the modern crossbow in European warfare dates back to Roman times. According to R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, in 36 BC a Han empire expedition into central Asia encountered and defeated a contingent of Roman legionaries. The Romans were suggested to have been part of Antony's campaign against Parthia. Chinese victory was based on their crossbows, whose bolts and darts seem to "have penetrated Roman shields and armor." The theory is that the Chinese crossbow was transmitted to the Roman world through this encounter.

Wiki, but you get he point.

German forests are rough for logistics and all that, and the Germanic tribes are good at having a shitfit.

Romaboos get really salty about Germania, it's pretty funny.

same with Indian bowman.

>The fighting style of Porus' soldiers was described in detail by Arriam: "The foot soldiers carry a bow made of equal length with the man who bears it. This they rest upon the ground, and pressing against it with their left foot thus discharges the arrow, having drawn the string far backwards for the shaft they use is little short for three yards long, and there is nothing can resist an Indian archer's shot, neither shield nor breast plate, nor any stronger defence if such there be."

>He doesn't know about Germanicus

You're a fucking tard.

Caesar led several punitive expeditions against them at the behest of others, Tiberius showed they weren't invulnerable, and Germanicus literally raped the Rhine for several years.

Look, let's be honest. The Roman army at its peak would have destroyed any other army for another 1000 years after the Western Empire collapsed.

>Marcomanni damage control

Generally the one that was defending would win, If somehow most of Eurasia disappeared and China and Rome were left next to each other then probably China, but not without horrendous casualties.

Wanna hear a joke?
>Roman
>Cavalry

They look ridiculous.

Just look at their faces, hahaha

Extras aren't professional actors. You try keeping the grins and smiles off people told to put up costumes and act badass.

Same people asked who would win between the british empire and the qing dynasty before the opium wars.

Chinks seriously over exaggerate the strength of the chinese military. Historically, the chinese only ever participated in wars that were necessary, but for europeans wars became a sport and a contest, especially for europeans like alexander the great, caesar and napoleon to name a few.

I believe that Augustus held the largest number of Legions at any one time in either side of the Empire with a whopping 60 at his disposal. However we know that Rome could have pulled together far more than that. I struggle to imagine what a war consisting 60+ legions under the command of a Scipio or a Marius or a Caesar. It would have probably been fucking insane.

The argument of sword vs spear is a tired and stupid one. The arms one side uses does not give victory. Victory is achieved through more quantifiable means.

Production is what matters. Numbers. Pyrrhus proved Greek sarissa phalanx could defeat the roman swordsmen. It just took casualties he could not replace but the roman civil and military organization could.

With the Han dynasty Rome would be meeting its numerical equal. The war would come down to generalship. So I have to ask the thread, which side consistently produced competent professional military officers and which one consistently put politicians in the army?

Both.

>which something the Romain were fairly weak against
Maybe in 100BC. By the time of the empire the Romans were masters of counter-cavalry tactics, easily demonstrated at how they fucking cleaned house every time those steppenigger Sarmations tried to invade. The only Cavalry oriented empire the Romans had trouble with were the Parthians, but that was because the Parthians were able to retreat across a desert any time they were beaten in battle (which they were just about every time except for Carrhae).

>X vs Y
>guaranteedreplies.txt

Did they have personnel with the experience that Rome did? Soldiers or commanders?

There's no way that any Germanic tribe was going to win a """real""" war against Rome, but rather the one time they tried actually conquering the place they ate it and then resorted to just metaphorically punching them in the nose for it.

Depends on the time period.

>The war would come down to generalship. So I have to ask the thread, which side consistently produced competent professional military officers and which one consistently put politicians in the army?

Rome produced good commanders for the region and the type of warfare they engaged in but military thought in Europe at the time was quite primitive. Roman writers loved to gush over generals like Hannibal and Pyrrhus but by Chinese standards they were mediocre commanders. A general who knows how to win battles but not wars is nothing to write about.

I'd argue Pyrrhus knew how to win a war he just couldn't. It's why he ended his campaigns early, he knew he was missing something in order to win it. In Italy it was reliable allies in Sicily it was loyalty. Hannibal on the other hand was just plain misguided.

Hannibal was crippled by the Carthaginian senate constantly working against him and denying him the aid he required.

Pyrrhus was good at making things up on the fly but that doesn't necessarily lead to good results. He was constantly biting off more than he could chew, that's why he got his ass handed to him in Greece and was forced to look to Italy to expand his domains and there he couldn't even deal with the Romans before he took on the Carthaginians. As I said good with battles, terrible at war.

He thought the Italian allies of Rome would go turncoat and he could win the war with their help. It was a misguided belief.

But he knew a lost cause when he saw one which implies he knew what he needed to win.

I remember having this debate a year or so back

I started off believing the Han would have the advantage with higher manpower but with a few sources I can't remember someone showed they were essentially around the same strength military

despite the memes I think Chinese tacticians have been by and large idiots so I'd give the guys who figured out how to conquer a wide array of different armies in different terrains the upper hand, Rome

kys

The Qing Dynasty was a Malthusian shithole that was obsolete in every respect of its era while the Han dynasty was the exact opposite

>Historically, the chinese only ever participated in wars that were necessary

Like the Han-Xiongnu war amrite

One point everyone in this thread is missing is bureaucracy; the Roman Empire barely had control over large swathes of its' Empire while the Han Dynasty had a multilevel bureaucracy and thus a much, much stronger fiscal house. The Chinese would be able to mobilise much more constantly throughout the war

Read the whole thread with no knowledge of either side's specific size, tech, or other factors at the time (besides the Rome meme-collage assembled in my head from TV and shit). I'm still not convinced of either side. Could Rome handle endless cavalry and the dopest crossbows in all the land?

What the fuck is this shit? It's funny how morons get uppity about germanics and Arminius but they forget the romans did still genocide about half of the germanic tribes before pacifying on them.

Romans. Definitely romans.

A few significant ones like the Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites did. With more men, funds and supplies he would have ahd greater success in persuading more to join until they tipped the advantage in his favor. Instead the senate tried to broker peace deals with the Romans and allowed them to shift the war into their territory in Hispania and Africa.

agreed

He didn't even understand the Romans. In that above all else he was misguided in thinking they would surrender without at the very least a direct multi-year siege of Rome itself

fpbp

>with a few sources I can't remember someone showed they were essentially around the same strength military

Mind telling me how exactly those sources determined that?

>Roman Empire population 200 AD
>48-50 million, many of which were slaves and feoderati.
>Han Dynasty 200 AD
>200 million, most of which were freemen and farmers

Those are bullshit numbers.

>despite the memes I think Chinese tacticians have been by and large idiots so I'd give the guys who figured out how to conquer a wide array of different armies in different terrains the upper hand, Rome

Spoken like someone who doesn't know shit Chinese warfare or even know any Chinese commanders. China is extremely diverse not only in geography but also in population which meant that any ruling dynasty often had an equally flexible and diverse military that was equipped to fight in according to their environment. Also at the time Chinese military thought was far more developed and sophisticated than it was in Europe.

>Chinese military thought was far more developed and sophisticated than it was in Europe.
lol what? not even him, but how so?

Read any military texts from the Han period and before, then compare them to contemporary Roman military texts. Romans limited their thinking to the battlespace, the Chinese saw the big picture and pondered on how to organize the state socially, politically and economically in order to consistently win conflicts or avoid them completely.

Han china had a pop of 57 mil according to census taken at the time

its way more than the faces that are highlighted

You realize everything you just said stuff that every general does??? The Romans decided what course of action was better for them, the Romans pondered strategy, diplomacy...emperors weighed the economic costs and benefits of war...like literally what the fuck are you trying to say? The only difference is the type of record keeping that was kept and preserved retard.

Not true, the Romans never partook in genocide. They did mass murder but only for the sake of subjugation but never for the sake of "ethnic cleansing". Take the Jews of Judea for example. They had art, beauracracy, nobility, and a great deal of civility yet resisted Roman rule and constantly revolted therefore a massive amount of Jews were slaughtered by the Romans.
The number of barbarians killed doesn't even come to what the Romans did to the Jews as the barbarians accepted Roman rule rather well.
>inb4 muh kikes!

Also the population under Roman rule can reach estimates as high as 60 million, or 1/4th the world population at the time.

>le chinese waged war in 100000 dimmensions
>le rome only fought battles
You're fucking retarded.

This. The Sinoboos on this board are worse than most.

>Extras aren't professional actors
Yes they are. They don't get extras off the streets. Actual actors have to apply for extra roles. A lot of times, actors join certain agencies that specifically do extra work so they can get enough screen time to become eligible to join union. There are even separate directors that specifically work with extras on the set.

They are smiling and laughing because they don't give a shit. They've probably been on set for hours and hours and are bored to tears. The DP just decided to use a shot with a blooper because he also doesnt give a fuck.

>le gooks fought in 10000 times folded universes and saw realities no one ever thought of thus they were invincible.

Kek.

You don't know fuck all about Roman history. Rome was a boxer who only knew how to punch, even Hannibal understood this fact. When political prestige and advancement is directly tied to military service and winning battles it created an narrow approach to warfare. It was only towards the late empire with the decline of Roman power that we witness texts that talk about multiple dimensions of war and grand strategy like the Strategikon.

Because that's largely what they did dumbass.

>y-you just don't know enough about Chinese history! They were the bestest in the world