Mongols vs Romans

Who would fair better in combat. Mongol hordes or Roman Legions?

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Well, Here's the thing. Hunnic Horse archers proved a match for the Late Roman Empire, but Rome did win that fight eventually. If we're talking peak Vs. peak, I think the empire under Trajan could have eventually beaten back the Mongols, though the Mongols would be indisputably the superior military force.

Okay we have a "president" for this. The Parthians vs Crassus.

> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae

really, it all depends on the location of the battle.

Romans typically stuck to tight formations of infantry/archers with cavalry to flank enemy armies and ballistas/onagers as artillery/support, which is most reliable in mixed terrain with only limited room for maneuvering.

The Mongols stuck to highly mobile warfare with horse archers and other mounted troops to run circles around soldiers who are on foot, which worked miracles for the mongols on flat terrain which was most of their empire, but the mongols were notoriously bad at fighting on unfavorable terrain, and avoided such battles that didn't favor soldiers on horseback.

Where the romans would shine though is siege warfare such as fortresses and cities, where historical mongol advantages can't be put to use, suffice to say the Mongols would never be able to siege cities like Constantinople.

Though if I had to say, the Mongols would be able to tear Roman legions apart in open field battles, but in turn Romans would hold their cities and win battles from behind walls and other terrain, winning city sieges and naval battles.

Except the Parthians got wrekt far worse later on by the Romans multiple times via Trajan and other generals. Crassus was a fucking ding dong seeking imperium and decided to invade at a incredibly innopportune time.

The Parthians may have defeated the legions, but the legions sacked the main cities of Parthia and destroyed the capital.

This was about the Mongols fighting against Romans, why the hell are you talking about the capture of Ctesiphon?

Look at the post I was referring to fucknut

Not that user but your comparison with the Parthians makes no fucking sense with the Mongols. The Mongolia isn't going to be fucking invaded by the Romans and they hardly had static positions of their major urban centers anywhere close to Roman lands.

How exactly are the Romans going to fuck them up? Especially since they have gunpowder and explosive siege weapons?

The Mongols consistently won sieges, though. And if they felt like it took too long, they'd rape and murder 99% of the populace to encourage the next city to be more forthcoming.

Mongols barely fucking used gunpowder and guns

The peak of the Empire wasn't the peak of the Roman Army. The Roman army was at its peak in terms of ability and size in the late fourth century, even though the empire as a political entity was declining rapidly.

Plus Late Romans were far more capable of dealing with cavalry than their predecessors were. And don't forget that they had great cavalry and even horse archers of their own.

>The Parthians may have defeated the legions, but the legions sacked the main cities of Parthia and destroyed the capital.
The Legions also went home and got murdered along the way.

Mongols

I mean seriously:
>Rome
>Cavalry

the group later in history will always have a technology advantage, plus horses got bigger throughout history so that's always an advantage the later army would have. Better weapons and armor isn't a guaranteed win but they also have hindsight and their armies have evolved to deal with ever-changing tactics and strategy so the mongols would have both a strategic and tactical advantage over the romans. Contemporary horse archers were the biggest threat rome ever faced, mongols are like the ultimate form of that with even better equipment, tactics, logistics, etc.

Later Roman cavalry was very good

With the accurate horse size their feet should be just slightly above the ground.

For a short while until the Byzantines made them suck again.

too slow, only reason the mamuluks and knights managed to do some damage was because they were light enough to actually catch them to some degree, the byzantine cataphracts basically trotted into battle they were so heavily armored the horse literally couldn't run at a reasonable pace. They amassed these guys into probably the tightest horse formation ever conceived and slowly smashed their way into the enemy, that sort of cavalry is meant to take on other melee cavalry and infantry, it can't keep up with light horse archers. They did have bows but it was more of a "shoot before the charge" thing rather than a skirmishing force.

Their horses would be no match to the gengis' horses

It's all about the era really, romans probably wouldn't be able to fight the mongols head on

The not him but Romans literally lifted Cataphracts from the Steppenigger/Parthian/Sassanid Playbook. Along with horse archers.

of course they did but they had two distinct types of cavalry in their armies with distinct roles: heavy and light. The mongols likewise had both heavy and light cavalry, whereas the byzantines couldn't even hope to match the mongols or their contemporaries in light cavalry. The byzantines focused too much on slow, heavy cavalry to be a match for a horsearcher hordes, their armies were built to defeat other balanced civilized armies and they never faced the sort of threat from the steppes that the mongols represent, their experience is with small wandering groups and even they gave them a lot of trouble.

>what is siege of baghdad (1258)

>muh horse archers

Hun had an a LOT of infantry marching with them when they went to war, user.

Hunnic cavalry raids actively avoided getting into tough fights.

And then they proceeded to wreck the pathian capital multiple times over.

Roman fortifications were not usually very good.

>plus horses got bigger throughout history
Mongols were literally riding ponies, user.

>Contemporary horse archers were the biggest threat rome ever faced
No they weren't. The sassanids were, and the sassanids had a combined arms force with horse archers, shock cavalry, and infantry.

Horse archers alone are not a war winning force unless you are fighting people who are either incompetent, of who have no experience fightign horse archers.

No.

And guess what they were supported by?

Horse archers and lighter cavalry. In later periods their wedge woudl literally have horse archers in the center riding with the lancers.

You're also missing the part where the mongols had heavy lancers of their own and relied on them as a key fucking element in battle.

>They did have bows but it was more of a "shoot before the charge" thing rather than a skirmishing force.
They'd just sit in formation and fucking hammer you. This is literally how you deal with steppeniggers.

Put on armor and shoot it out. Attrition favors the armored men, and staying in ranks means you can saturate and area and quickly mount charges to dispese or kill anything oyu cna cath.

Roman horse archers did the same thing, and were armed to shoot or charge as the situation merited, if later byzantine formations are any indication.

They literally adopted the large scale use of horse archers to defeat a horde from the steppe, you absolute fucking retard.

Stop talking about shit you don't understand.

>their armies were built to defeat other balanced civilized armies and they never faced the sort of threat from the steppes that the mongols represent
THE FUCKING AVARS LITERALLY HAD BETTER CAVALRY, BETTER SIEGE WEAPONS, AND SIEGED CONSTANTINOPLE, COMPLETE WITH A FUCKING ARMY OF SLAVIC AUXILIARIES.

Kill yourself. You know nothing about the subject.

large scale from the byzantine perspective is nothing compared to what the mongols field. Likewise the fucking avars are nothing compared to the mongols, who are literally riding around with guns and trebuchets, which goes back to the point I made which was that even relatively minor tribes like the avars can smash their way through a byzantine army that according to you has an answer for that because they "adopted horse archers" as if you can even replicate the real deal without living that life. You're the one looking at history through a tunnel to prove your point, you don't even realize you've undermined your own. If the avars can make their way to the walls of constantinople, there's no way the byzantines are prepared for the mongols just because theyve got some cataphracts and shitty civilized horse archers.

If they were so good at fighting horse archers they wouldn't get smashed by small tribes of horse archers all the time, now would they? You proved my point yourself.

>Roman fortifications were not usually very good.

how fast do you want your double enveloping wall senpai

It all depends on what era of Rome you mean. Late Romans and Byzantines made extensive use of horse archers themelves.

>large scale from the byzantine perspective is nothing compared to what the mongols field. Likewise the fucking avars are nothing compared to the mongols, who are literally riding around with guns and trebuchets,


Avars literally introduced the trebuchet to the west, you idiot, wher eit circulated and was improved upon. The counterweight trebuchet got introduced to the mongols by the Persians as a result of this.

>muh trebuchets
Is meaningless, because when the mongols came west, they didn't use counterweight machines, meaning they were on par with something the Byzantines had in the 600s.

Mongols made no use of guns in their western campaigns, and didn't make significant use of gunpowder for anything else.

>I made which was that even relatively minor tribes like the avars can smash their way through a byzantine army that
Was embroiled in a
>according to you has an answer for that because they "adopted horse archers" as if you can even replicate the real deal without living that life.
They didn't need to, nor did they want to do so.
Wear armor, stay in formation, shoot the poor steppe bastards. Integrate foot archers into your infantry.

As long as you don't break formation and pursue any retreat-something they specifically wrote about NOT doing-there's nothing light horse archers can now do. they can't close with either force, and they will lose the arrow exchange by simple virtue of not being armored and not ebing able to close in and engage in the kinds of shooting fight they are accosted to. If they try, they get shot up on the way and your cavalry comes at them with lances. They either run or die, and then the cycle repeats.
Building something fast, and building a well designed fortification are two different things. Romans put very little effort into the actual design of most of their walls, and that didn't change until the the huns came along and shit on a few fortified cities.

typical byzantine army might have a couple thousand horsearchers max, there's only so many horses a civilized society can support.

The mongols meanwhile, if we've talking hypothetically with everything they could muster without dealing with china, they'd have 100-200k horsearchers, and that's just the horse archers. A byzantine army could find itself overwhelmed by its contemporary's cavalry many times throughout history, and they never once faced something as massive as a mongol horde. All they got were small expeditions, like how a European power during colonial times might send 10-20k troops to some shithole in South America now and then to see if they can make some gains, that's exactly how the mongols interacted with europe. If they sent a real army, like the ones they sent to china, the byzantines are done.

That's wrong. They carted around a fuck ton of Chinese engineers once they really started expanding beyond China.

You've got a really weird romanticised view of how the Mongols conducted warfare.
>they "adopted horse archers" as if you can even replicate the real deal without living that life
This is embarrassing, did you even read this before you posted it?

>they were so good at fighting horse archers
They were
>they wouldn't get smashed by small tribes of horse archers all the time
The one time this happened they were also dealing with a mass migration of slavs. All of the slavs. At once. Who then got pressed into the avar army. Even then, the Byzantines beat the absolute shit out of them, and only allowed them to continue existing because the sassanids invaded. This meant every soldier who could march went east, leaving them free to build and army and attack constantinople.

Nor where the avars a "small" tribe. They were at LEAST two distinct people, and given the nature of ethnogenesis on the steppes, may have been fucking massive.

A full third of their men were mounted in the 600s or so, and that doesn't really change.

Unless the army had recently been wiped out, they virtually always had tens of thousands of horsemen in active service.

>A byzantine army could find itself overwhelmed by its contemporary's cavalry many times throughout history
Except they didn't. This literally isn't a thing that occurred. They might lose battles, but it wasn't a result of some lack of cavalry, they were utterly obsessive about the raising of men and horses for the task.


>If they sent a real army, like the ones they sent to china, the byzantines are done.
If we're looking at both empires at their strongest, the Byzantines are going to field somewhere from 120-360k men, and that's without recruiting more troops or disbanding the navy.


Who didn't seem do a whole lot with gunpowder. They're recorded as building catapults in russia and hungary.

>As long as you don't break formation and pursue any retreat-something they specifically wrote about NOT doing-there's nothing light horse archers can now do. they can't close with either force, and they will lose the arrow exchange by simple virtue of not being armored and not ebing able to close in and engage in the kinds of shooting fight they are accosted to. If they try, they get shot up on the way and your cavalry comes at them with lances. They either run or die, and then the cycle repeats.

You pretend to know what you're talking about, as if you're not just LARPing right now, but then you say shit like this and the stupidity shows. The mongols wouldn't lose an arrow exchange with the byzantines, they'd never run out of arrows because they cycled groups and kept getting more, they can literally fight you endlessly for days and even weeks, can you stand in formation for that long while the greatest shots in the world shoot at you? You might beat back a smaller, evenly sized force, and it's true that what you describe happened on occasion with lesser threats, but this is the mongols we're talking about: the peak horse archer tactics and strategy. These guys would wear down and slaughter a byzantine army, they did the same thing to your big bad Persians.

>they can literally fight you endlessly for days and even weeks
okay he's trolling this confirms it

>You pretend to know what you're talking about, as if you're not just LARPing right now, but then you say shit like this and the stupidity shows.
This is literally what the strategkion tells you to do.

A period source written by a man who did exactly what I am describing, and won.

I'd like to think that, but people really do ride mongol dick this hard.

>they'd never run out of arrows because they cycled groups and kept getting more, they can literally fight you endlessly for days and even weeks

>fight you endlessly for days and even weeks
user I want you to go out and rent a horse and I want you to ride that horse to full gallop for about five minutes and see how you feel afterwards

>they can literally fight you endlessly for days and even weeks,

>they'd never run out of arrows because they cycled groups and kept getting more, they can literally fight you endlessly for days and even weeks, can you stand in formation for that long while the greatest shots in the world shoot at you

mongols have +7 stamina when mounted

Of course someone says something so ridiculous everyone stares in disbelief

The OP picture had the Roman Empire and Mongol Empire at their greatest extent, so how about we compare those specific armies?

What if it was just 1 mongol and 1 Roman Legionnaire?

Likely goes badly for rome. Fortifications aren't up to the task, the armies are structurally unsuited to fighting the mongols, and they have no experience with a real steppe incursion.

It depends on the period, what kind of soldier you're talking about, etc.

Both at their prime would work

At their best in terms of military and the Mongol horse archer vs a Roman Legionnaire

I'd say the Romans were probably at their strongest militarily in the 4th century but I don't know enough about the Mongols to comment on them.

why couldn't gookmoot just make /gorillabear/ instead of /bant/ so we could actually discuss real questions like this

The Roman with the rectangular shield right?

That would be a bad idea for the Roman, later period Romans were far better at 1 on 1 fighting and also better at fighting cavalry

Are you forgetting that Mongols were actually really fucking good at siege warfare? That's what set them apart from the Huns or Scythians or whoever else. They were able to get through walls and into cities. They simply captured siege technicians from conquered people, and put them into their army. Like half of the great "mongol" figures were basically people that were given the option "serve or die", and ended up happily serving for the winning team.

>That's what set them apart from the Huns or Scythians or whoever else.
They weren't the first Horseniggers to master the ways of settled-people warfare like siege.

The various Turkics that flooded the middle east during the last centuries of the Abbasids were pretty handy with siege themselves.

>the group later in history will always have a technology advantage
I would bet anything that if Cortes landed in Mexico 200 years earlier, they still would've wiped the fucking floor with the aztecs. Hell, Chinese technology was way more advanced than mongols at the beginning.
Later time periods haven't always necessarily corellated to better technology.

>implying some legionnaire that gets a horse and a bow handed to him is comparable to steppe nomad horse archers
Shooting from horseback is like all the steppe people did. They would've been the medieval equivalent of those crazy old bastards on the discovery channel who shoot 10 clay pigeons out of the air, while holding their gun behind their backs.

First of all its "legionary", a "legionnaire" is a 19th century French infantryman.

Second
>implying some legionnaire that gets a horse and a bow handed to him is comparable to steppe nomad horse archers
That's not what happened. They recruited Huns and Alans and Scythians into the Roman Army in addition to using trained Roman troops.

>Rome= infantry-based army
>Mongols= massive cavalry + horse archers+ primitive handguns+bombs
What do you think then?

It's literally been proved by history ,even by Romans themselves, that infantry based tactics cannot best highly skillful mobile horse archers. Like Han dynasty in China literally had to adapt full Calvary tactics to defeat Xiongnu back then.

Not him, and his "weeks" claim is dumb. But I learned to ride horse at like 4 years old, and they have really good stamina. That's kind of why they've been utilized by every society everywhere. Plus, mongols regularly went on campaign with 3-4 remounts per warrior.

>Mongols made no use of guns in their western campaigns, and didn't make significant use of gunpowder for anything else.

In the battle of Legnica ok 1241 large group of Poles was terrified and put to flight by some smoke-producing devices. It is now thought that those were gunpowder-based contraptions, most likely primitive bombs.

>being pedantic and correcting mistakes where both parties know what I mean
I believe the question was "mongol hordes vs Roman legions" not "mongol hordes vs Roman legions and whichever mercenaries they could hire to fight for them".
The Chinese liked to hire other steppe horse archers to help against the mongols, too. Didn't work for them, either.

>Rome= infantry-based army
This isn't true. By the end of the third century there was a horseman for every three infantry troops in a Roman Legion. A massive amount of the late Roman Army was made up of cavalry. Not to mention that by the 5th century their legionaries were specifically equipped to deal with cavalry and ranged cavalry.

>mongol hordes vs Roman legions and whichever mercenaries they could hire to fight for them".
But they weren't mercenaries, they were part of the Roman legions.

I know a lot of guys here have a boner for Rome, but Mongols would win, no doubt about it.
Hunns totally wrecked Rome, and they were an inferiour version of Mongols

>president

>Hunns totally wrecked Rome
This is literally the opposite of what happened

>Atilla plunders and loots freely in the Roman Empire while the Romans hide in Constantinopel and Rome
>g-guys we are winning

>i-its not fair that mongols don't fight on our terms
>REEEEE
Mongols advantage were not just horse and mobility. It was organizational and intelligence. Their spy system was the most developed in the world of the time. Their supplyline were well kept. Their warfare was the most advanced of its time due to not only gunpowder, but grenades, cannons, information warfare, psychological warfare, etc.

Mongols would totally dominate a slow paced Roman empire.

Someone needs to cap moments of retardation like this on Veeky Forums

>what are auxiliaries

not quite true, Han adopted "Ge and Shot". Han had crossbows, which allowed them to field a peasant army that can still throw out many many more projectiles than the Xiongnu.

It's true.

The Han/Xiongnu war literally saw some Nomadshits siding/become subjects of Han China because they hated the Xiongnu.

Besides the Chinese won that war via skilful diplomacy and combined arms. Not by having more infantry or cavalry.

Probably Mongols, but I feel this comparison is unfair. Mongols had a 1000 year technological advantage over the Romans. Sure, weapons like spears/bows didn't visibly change much over that period, but material quality and concomitant technologies that allowed better logistics did. You might as well ask whether the US army in the year 2000 could compete against whatever armies people have in the year 3000. I know technological progress isn't *that* linear, but you get my point.

On a side note: I feel like the basic concepts of guns, WMD deterrence, 4th generation warfare etc. probably won't change for centuries, either. If humanity even survives that long.

Its not only unfair, its completely one sided, Romans don't even have horse spurs, which were extremely important in medieval cavalry.

For this to be a fair fight, Roman cannot have any other enemies attacking them, and are in 4th century era, with a later roman army. Numerically the Romans number at about 300.000 in military strength, while the Mongols at 100.000. So the Romans have the numerical advantage.

Problem is, the Mongols habitually curbstomped numerically larger forces than them.

The Romans were 1000 years behind the Mongols. Pretty sure they lacked various things putting them at a disadvantage. I doubt their cavalry match the mongols and they also lacked gunpowder and maybe various innovations in steel production, arms and armor.

The Mongols themselves were ahead of their time and it wasn't for centuries that their style of warfare stopped being predominant on the steppes. The Huns got as far as Gaul and I expect the Mongols would have done better.

That number is bit incorrect.

While romans had about 300K, thats split between foreign auxiliary and their main legion. I think at 4th century, the ratio was roughly 50%.

That 100K number was during the early phase of Genghis Khan's reign. By the end of his reign (roughly 20 years), that number would be around 130K.

Once they had good chunk of China, they could easily pull ~50K+ armies regularly all across their empire in multiple simultaneous campaigns.

There were 4 main factions within mongol empire. The Golden Horde (eastern europe), the Ikhanate(Middle East), the Chagatai (central asia) and the Yuan. While central asia was mostly pacified (it was moving south), the other three were hot contested zones.

The strongest of them being the Yuan, the next being Ikhanate, and then Golden Horde and finally the Chagatai.

Roman empire would face two different mongol factions. The Ikhanate and the Golden Horde. With the riches from the Middle East, the Ikhanate could conquer much of Roman heartland. The Golden horde would conquer much of the western part of the Roman empire and the barbaric states.

However we would have to put in the human element to this. If the Mongols are divided like they were in our time, the Golden Horde would seize opportunity to attack the Ikhanate while Ikhanate would be fighting the Romans. This could backfire on the Mongol as whole and bring their downfall. The Muslim Golden Horde hates the Christian/Buddhist Ikhanate because they sacked Bagdhad.

The romans brute-forced their victory at Ctesiphon, but they still never won the wars and settled for peace after hundreds of years of failed expeditions and petty quarrel over Armenia against what essentially was a collection of tribes living on what remained of the Achaemenids.

I fucking hate posters like this.

European terrain is ill-suited to horse archery, and the Mediterranean gives the Romans the edge in maneuvering in defense, so I doubt the Mongols would make much progress invading the Roman Empire. OTOH, the Romans have virtually zero chance of invading the Mongol steppes. So I'd give it to the Mongols, albeit they'd only manage to take some small parts of the Roman territory, but "some" is better than the "none" the Romans could take from them.

>Mongols can't adapt
Woah

> Mongols would never be able to siege cities like Constantinople.
1453

What does Mongolia have to do with that?

The mongols pushed the turks into Anatolia and the turks eventually destroyed the Byzantine empire. Siege by proxy.

This really shows you are talking out of your arse

That's really retarded argument

>Are you forgetting that Mongols were actually really fucking good at siege warfare?
They really weren't.

>It's literally been proved by history ,even by Romans themselves, that infantry based tactics cannot best highly skillful mobile horse archers.
There's literally nothing steppe niggers can do if infantry wears armor and marches in formation with archers integrated with them.

Get close, lose to the infantry. Stand off, the foot archers outrange you.

They were fucking awful at it, user. They either got subject people to do things they were bad at, or kept being bad at it.

Warmaking was cultural for most people in history, and as such adaption was an organic process and not something that was not usually guided by military leaders.

Do you think the mongols are going to abandon the tactics they'd used for thousands of years on the steppes in favor of marching to war on foot in the space of one war?

If they do, will they even be able to do it competently?

Except the steppe niggers have better bows with greater range and the benefit of mobility.

That isn't how bows work, you mongalaboo.

Bows put out what the archer puts in, whith some variation for material efficiency. Foot archers, by simple virtue of being upright and being able to plant their feet, can handle larger, stronger bows, meaning they get more range.

Unless you're fighting exceedingly primitive people with simple wooden self bows, they will outrage cavalry archers, because physics fucking hates archers who don't have solid ground under their feet.


inb4
>MUH RECURVES

Total war education

They did it with their invasion of China. Steppe warfare doesn't involve building thousands of ships. It doesn't involve infantry. It doesn't involve usage of siege warfare. It doesn't involve psychological warfare. It doesn't involve guns, cannons, grenades, etc.

Mongols has absolutely adapted to situations. Stop being a dumb retard.

They literally had entire armies of Chinese defect to them when they attacked the jin, and relied heavily on them for sieges you retard. Fuck, the song ACTIVELY AIDED THEM.

And once the jin fell, they used them as footsoldiers to defeat the song.

>It doesn't involve guns, cannons, grenades, etc.
All done by the chinese

>It doesn't involve usage of siege warfare.
Something they were fucking awful at when they couldn't bring sedentary allies along to help. Mongols suffered absolutely terrible casualties whenever they assaulted a decent (not wood) fortificaiton, up to losing a fucking khan.

>It doesn't involve psychological warfare.
...That is literally the first element of ALL war. Everywhere. And always has been.

And the steppes, where you could actually induce your enemies to ride a thousands miles away and let you have their pastures, seriously fucking encouraged it.
>Steppe warfare doesn't involve building thousands of ships.
Again, done by their Chinese subjects.

Mongol leaders were capable of learning new mehtods of war.
The actual mongols soldiers virtually never fucking changed. As I said, their way of war was ingrained by their culture. They fought how they fought, and if you wanted to do something new, you either worked around traditional steppe methods and got creative, or you made someone else do it.

>mongols subjugate the people and bring them into mongol empire
>b-but they're not Mongol-proper
k e k

So Mongols did nothing in China. The Chinese conquered China. Mongols did nothing in Middle East, the Arabs and the Turkic people did that. Mongols did nothing in Eastern Europe, it was just the local Turkic nomads joining.

Mongols did nothing. REEEEEEEEEEEEE

Follow the comment chain and figure out why you're retarded.

>Mongols did nothing in Eastern Europe, it was just the local Turkic nomads joining.
They slaughtered two field armies-something that isn't at alll unusual for steppe armies-failed entirely at taking stone castles, and destroyed poorly defended places.

Again, old hat.

They didn't adapt, as is evidenced by the beating the golden horde took when it came back.

(((They)))

If you're talking about classical Roman Legions, then it's too anachronistic a comparison to have any meaning. In fact the rise of the first Mongol Empire coincides almost exactly with the death of the ERE.

kek

no chance against the recurve bow. that armor is still paper to mongols.

Attack them where they are weak.

The use of the scorpio would become exponentially increased if they fought the mongols.

Romans would place infantry stacked and out of range defending the scorpios. Hiding behind shields as the scorpios and balistas punished the mongols from much longer range than a bow could get.

When the mongols got close they'd javelin them in waves.

Tactically Rome has a great chance of victory. The only modification to the legions would be increasing the number of scorpios from 60 to 300. But then again the money used could be pulled from cavalry.

> Conquers China, the most heavily fortified region in the world at the time, against an enemy that has gunpowder as well.

>Forgets to mention, that it took dozens of years, and was done by basically other Chinese.
So, how many European stone castles fell to Mongol invasions?