"What if" scenarios I would love to play...

[Thucydides]

This is a challenge...

This thread is for speculation. That is "What if" scenarios we would love to play in a game like Caesar IV.

What if Anthony and Cleopatra had won and the Roman Empire never formed but we saw a Roman-Egyptian Republic emerge instead.

What if Varus had not lost his three legions in Northern Germany, but had conquered the Northern plains and Roman civilisation had reached much further into Northern Europe.

What if the IX legion had not vanished into the wilds of Northern Scotland, but had returned victorious, crushing the picts as the Romans had done with so many troublesome tribes beforehand... and suddenly Rome does not need to build Hadrian's wall but can send its spare legions elsewhere to conquer some other land...

So let the what if speculation begin! Where would YOU like to build a Roman city? North America??? The only criteria is that the What if has to be vaguely credible.

[Thucydides]

What if the Romans had conquered Arabia.

They tried. Emperor Augustus commanded his prefect of Egypt, Cornelius Gallus, to do exactly that. Conquer Arabia... or rather what we think of Sheba (yes, as in Queen of Sheba) or modern-day Yemen.

In Roman times Sheba was incredibly rich, and, more importantly, sat across the trade route from India to the Roman Empire. Augustus, who was a conservative Emperor and did not wage many wars for expansionary purposes, did seek to conquer Arabia.

Augustus wanted to secure the all-important sea silk road to India and China, rather than allow Arabia to act as a potential block to this trade. In 25 AD Gallus was given the job to carve out a new Roman province and 10,000 troops (equivalent to two legions, although these troops were a mixed force of legionaires, auxiliaries and allied forces) to do it with.

The long and short of it is that Gallus botched the job.

Instead of ferrying his forces from the closest Roman controlled port (The port of Berenice in what is modern day Eritrea on the Eastern side of the Red Sea) and conducting a potentially opposed landing in Yemen, Gallus landed them much further up the Arabian coast and marched his forces for a month through the desert before attacking the Arabians. The Romans easily won every battle against the Arabians and captured many Arabian cities, but gave up the campaign for lack of water and provisions. What a fool Gallus was. He could have won the campaign handsomly if he simply landed his forces further South.

So what if Gallus had of succeeded as he so easily could have done? Rome would have commanded the Arabian peninsular. More importantly it would have commanded Yemen and directly dominated the sea route to India. Don't forget that at the time Rome had 120 merchant vessels ploughing the trade route between Berenice and India.

With a secure base in Arabia it is not unimaginable that Rome could have contemplated invading India and controlling the resources it so admired there directly. Think this is unlikely? This is exactly the strategy the British Empire followed 1500 years later when it conquered India.

So, ultimately, my first "What if" is the Roman Empire expanding into India...

[King Faticus]

I was reading (and watching documentaries) about the war between Augustus and Antony and most sources seem to agree if Antony had won the Roman republic would have been split in two (this gap would have increased over time) and eventually it would have faded away entirely.
But I think the prospect of hypothetical scenarios are really cool (Im sure some people would hate it though) Another good one is What if the romans didn't lose the battle of adrianople.

[Thucydides]

any more suggested "What if"s out there???

[sitearm]

What if... Queen Boadicea wins...

Between AD 61 and AD 63 Boadicea led her Iceni people to a glorious but bloody war against the Romans. The Iceni Celts had submitted their kingdom in East Anglia to the conquering Romans and the rule of Emperor Claudius in AD 43. In AD 61, Prasutagus, Boadicea's husband and King of the Iceni died. A dispute followed during which Boadicea, was publicly beaten by the soldiers of the emperor, and her two daughters raped. The Iceni were insulted and rose in revolt led by their queen Boadicea. So successful was the uprising that the Romans were almost defeated. Unfortunately for the Iceni and their allies, the military skill of the Roman army finally led to the crushing of the rebellion.After the revolt, Roman rule was re-established. For almost two glorious years, Boadicea pillaged the Roman settlements; she remains to this day, the greatest of the heroines of Britain.

Originally Posted by Thucydides

any more suggested "What if"s out there???

[Thucydides]

Originally Posted by sitearm

What if... Queen Boadicea wins...

Great one! Its good to wonder whether Rome's conquest of Britain made strategic sence. A free Britain would never have been able to seriously challenge Rome's interest in Gaul. In invading Britain, Rome was committed to maintaining a sizable permament miliary there. Did Britain ever produce income for Rome worthy of this effort? If Rome had been able to deploy its legions elsewhere would it have been able to survive the onslaught in later years across the Rhine? If Boadicea had won could Rome have withdrawn its troops and strengthened its borders more usefully elsewhere? Its great to ponder these what ifs...

Thanks Sitearm for entering into the spirit of the challenge! Any other takers out there???

[Schmophit]

"What if....."

Hadrian's wall had never been built?

QUOTE : www.aboutscotland.com/hadrian/

One of the greatest monuments to the power - and limitations - of the Roman Empire,

Hadrian's Wall ran for 73 miles across open country.
Why was it built?
At the time of Julius Ceasar's first small invasion of the south coast of Britain in 55 BC, the British Isles, like much of mainland Europe was inhabited by many Celtic tribes loosely united by a similar language and culture but nevertheless each distinct. He returned the next year and encountered the 4000 war chariots of the Catevellauni in a land "protected by forests and marshes, and filled with a great number of men and cattle." He defeated the Catevellauni and then withdrew, though not before establishing treaties and alliances. Thus began the Roman occupation of Britain.

Nearly 100 years later, in 43 AD, the Emperor Claudius sent Aulus Plautius and about 24,000 soldiers to Britain, this time to establish control under a military presence. Although subjugation of southern Britain proceeded fairly smoothly by a combination of military might and clever diplomacy, and by 79 AD what is now England and Wales were firmly under control, the far North remained a problem. However, the Emperor Vespasian decided that what is now Scotland should also be incorporated into the Roman Empire. Under his instructions the governor of Britian, Julius Agricola, subdued the Southern Scottish tribal clans, the Selgovae, Novantae and Votadini by 81 AD. Further to the North lived loose associations of clans known collectively as the Caledonians. Agricola tried to provoke them into battle by marching an army into the Highlands eventually forcing a battle with the Caledonian leader Calgacus in present day Aberdeenshire at a place called Mons Graupius. 30,000 Caledonians were killed, but the Roman victory was a hollow one, for the next day the surviving clansmen melted away into the hills, and were to remain fiercely resistant and independent.


By the time Hadrian became Emperor in 117 AD the Roman Empire had ceased to expand. Hadrian was concerned to consolidate his boundaries. He visited Britain in 122 AD, and ordered a wall to be built between the Solway Firth in the West and the River Tyne in the east "to separate Romans from Barbarians". UNQUOTE

Just wondered what would have happened, had it not been built, even though the Roman Empire had reached its limits?

[sitearm]

That wall smack across the (now) United Kingdom makes it looks like North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, or East and West Germany... and we all know how well those worked... * ironic eye roll *

Originally Posted by Schmophit

One of the greatest monuments to the power - and limitations - of the Roman Empire, Hadrian's Wall ran for 73 miles across open country.

[CaitGrey]

What if the Roman presence in my home city of Noviomagum (Nijmegen) continued on well into the Middle Ages or even later?
Or (in a more general sense) what would Europe look like if the Roman Empire had kept going for a good bit longer than it did?

Originally Posted by Thucydides

my first "What if" is the Roman Empire expanding into India

Don't stop in India! (* sorry * you did specify "vaguely plausible", but I couldn't resist this one.)
What if you could stabilize your supply lines once the Empire got it's hooks into India?
What if you could actually keep going 'till you ran into China?

[wodinoneeye]

"What if" Spartacus had had a Piper Cub (small airplane)........

[Deaghaidh]

Don't know if it's been mentioned, but there's a town in China that claims to have been founded by Romans. Supossedly they were veterans of a failed campaign against the Parthians or Persians who sold them to the chinese who in turn used them to garrison part of their frontier. That could make for an interesting scenario, maybe.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Deaghaidh

Don't know if it's been mentioned, but there's a town in China that claims to have been founded by Romans. Supossedly they were veterans of a failed campaign against the Parthians or Persians who sold them to the chinese who in turn used them to garrison part of their frontier. That could make for an interesting scenario, maybe.

Interesting, because in my internet wanderings last night while checking out agriculture and economy in the Roman Empire, the information I saw stated that the Romans had no direct dealings with the likes of China or India, but they did trade with them through intermediary countries that also traded with those countries.

[Robert Roy MacGregor]

Well they did have direct trades.

There have been records of Roman ships in the ports of Macau ( or however it is called, I am referring to that port near HongKong, it was a former colony of the Potugese ).

That only happened until the time of Antonius Pius. ( 140 AD - 165 AD approx. ) Before that, they traded with India, that was trading with China also.

[Baba Hotep]

Originally Posted by Thucydides

any more suggested "What if"s out there???

What if Romans advanced far south in Africa?

I don't know much about which civilizations were at that time below the Roman lines, but i know that if Romans followed the Nile counter-current they would have found the Nubian civilizations, and if they followed even more, they would have arrived in modern-day Kenya! And in Western Africa, i guess there were Numidian tribes. They even battled against Romans several times. Going more over South, maybe they would have found the Mali Empire (If it did exist- pardon my ignorance ), and could have arrived to the Guinea Gulf. But why stop there? Keep going downwards 'til modern-day Cape Town! Find out that sailing North from there, you get to India! Possibilities in Africa are limitless! I still wonder why Romans didn't try their way there.

Of course, i'm not the best person to tell who were in Africa at that times, but... that would make a nice campaign, wouldn't it? Please, skilled people come and give suggestions!

[Deaghaidh]

The Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa with basically the same seafaring technology, so I guess there's no technical reason that Romans couldn't do the same. But there was little, if any, motivation to do so, except I suppose for Glory. There weren't much in the way of trading partners in the far south. In the north-east they could reach them through Egypt and and the Red Sea, which was their launching point into the Indian Ocean trade.

They did however supposedly send expeditions up the Nile in search of it's source and consider invading Nubia at some point. But there probably wasn't enough protential reward to justify the expense in African expansion. Rome had a nicely stable southern frontier in the Sahara, a neat border. I'm pretty sure Mali was still some time in the future but there may have been a precurser empire in the region at that time.

However an invasion of Nubia is hardly unthinkable.

[Deaghaidh]

On the Romans in China theory:

http://www.meta-religion.com/Archaeo...s_in_china.htm

It's far from conclusive but also not entirely farfetched. Stranger things have happened in real life. Certainly enough to base a Cesear scenario on.

Or, for that matter, an Emperor one!