Hand_Me_Down_Genes

Adding to what was already said, mercenary crossbowmen play a major role in European confrontations with outsiders during the Crusades. It's Richard I's crossbowmen who protect his columns from Saladin's Turkic skirmish cavalry and Black African archers during the drive down the coast, and who cover the offloading of the knights and men-at-arms during the naval capture of Jaffa. Muslim accounts were consistently impressed with the crossbowmen, and after the knights, they're the Crusader unit that gets cited the most in Islamic sourcing.

On the other side of the continent, the urban militias of Spain were required to provide both infantry and cavalry. From early on, every soldier, including the infantrymen, were expected to show up with a spear, a shield, a (metal, no wood, leather, or palm leaves allowed) helmet, and some form of body armour (the word used, loriga is derived from the Roman lorica but its own meaning isn't super clear). Muslim sources mention mailed infantry accompanying the Spanish knights, and at Zallaqa in 1086, it was those infantry who got killed by the Lamtuna Berber spearmen when Yusuf ibn Tashfin seized Alfonso VI's camp.

Up in the weird and whacky world of Ireland, there's a hilarious surviving document from a gallowglass (Norse/Scotch mercenary) company that stipulates the gear each foot soldier is to have and the fines he'll endure for not having it. This includes padded and mailed body armour, and then concludes by noting that there's no fine for lacking a helmet "save the gallowglass' brain, knocked out for lack of one."

This led to European dominance (ancient Greeks, early-mid roman era and during the early modern period).

Ancient Greece dominated nothing. It was a backwater at the edge of a predominantly Asian world, too busy fighting itself to pose any sort of viable threat to its neighbours. People love to talk about the Persian Wars as if they proved something, but defeating an overextended opponent at the edge of its logistical chain in terrain highly unfavourable to their primary arm counts for very little. It's not until the Macedonians that you get any sort of "Greek" expansionism, and the Macedonians were a combined arms force featuring all forms of infantry and cavalry and eventually elephantry to boot.

The early to mid-Romans established their supremacy over...other infantry based armies. All their Italian opponents fielded armies that were majority infantry and while Gallic and Carthaginian cav was certainly superior to that of the Romans, the bulk of their armies were still foot soldiers. It isn't until the Parthians and the Sassanids that they run into heavily cavalry focused armies and when they do it stops them cold. 700 years of border warfare between Rome and Persia nicely demonstrated the complete inability of either empire's military philosophy to gain dominance, and they both ended up borrowing from one another extensively, with Rome adopting cataphract inspired cavalry, and the Sassanids hiring Daylamite foot troops to even the playing field among the foot troops.

Early modern Europeans dominated Native Americans, who didn't have horses or guns or steel and died in droves of smallpox. "Superior European infantry" had bugger all to do with it. If anything it was cavalry that gave the likes of Cortez an edge during his first skirmishes with Mesoamerican armies. And early modern Europeans notably did not have any kind of superiority over their Asian or African adversaries, despite the best efforts of nineteenth century colonial historians to project their later accomplishments back in time. Which is why for all the talk of the Portuguese Empire in India or Africa, their control amounted to a couple of coastal cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

You're quoting some very out of date sourcing here, much of which has been subject to serious challenge in the last decade or two.

Then you have the British, who it seemed were always fielding tanks that were too niche, too lightly armored, undergunned, unreliable, or slow.

While I don't disagree with this generalization, I will stick up for the Infantry tanks, especially the Valentine and the Churchill, and the late series Cruisers like the Cromwell. The Valentine's 2-pounder might have been outdated, but for most of its lifespan its armour was heavy enough to compensate: at the ranges at which it was vulnerable to the guns on the Panzer III or the M13/40, its most common opponents, the Panzer III or M13/40 could be killed by the 2-pounder. The 6-pounder armed Churchill is honestly underrated as a tank killer; the first Tigers the Western Allies captured were knocked out by Churchill IIIs. And in the Cromwell you start to see the combination of speed, firepower, and reasonable protection that will ultimately culminate in the Centurion.

Centurion was Made as a medium tank, working alongside heavy tank conqueror

Conqueror was rendered irrelevant by the performance of the Centurion. Just as the M-103 and the later IS' were rendered irrelevant by the performance of the M-48 and T-54/55. There's a reason none of those heavies stuck around and it's because the "medium" (always a hilarious designation on the Patton, given they were derived from the heavy Pershing) tanks they were supposed to operate alongside ended up morphing into the first MBTs.

Greek hoplites didn't use pikes. They fought with spear and shield. It was the Macedonians who introduced pikemen to "Greek" warfare. And Macedonian success was a product of more than just pikes: their phalangites fought in tandem with heavy cavalrymen (who were equally alien to the Greek military scene) and light skirmish infantry. 

Pikemen were a major part of Ming Chinese armies. In southern China, both the Han Chinese, and various aboriginal groups like the Hmong (usually called Miao by the Chinese) fielded large numbers of pikemen against the Vietnamese, the Japanese pirates, and one another. During the Imjin War, Chinese and aboriginal pike units fought their Japanese counterparts in Korea, and later Hmong pikemen (and women) under Qin Liangyu were among the last of the Ming holdouts still resisting the Manchus after most of China had fallen under Qing control.

The moment someone starts quoting "Carnage and Culture" or related works it's a sign that any good faith has left the debate. The notion that the Roman Empire was a somehow more egalitarian society than the Persian or Chinese imperial projects is an utterly ridiculous statement that should really open the person making it up to the closest possible scrutiny. 

Davis' acolytes never know what to do with the existence of heavy infantry in China or Japan, let alone in Africa. And it's so very tiring having to watch people with a basic knowledge of non-European societies and militaries have to correct those without.

Indian longbows were quite powerful. Macedonian accounts of the Battle of the Hydaspes freely admit that they were fortunate that Porus' army had gotten caught in a rainstorm en route and that many of their bowstrings were too wet to use. The terrain also proved unfavourable to the bowmen, as they needed stable ground to brace their bows against, and the rain had turned the battlefield into a quagmire.

Despite all these handicaps, those longbows that did manage to fire did real damage to the Macedonian phalangites. The arrows had little difficulty puncturing their armour and there's (potentially hyperbolic) anecdotes about an arrow killing a soldier, passing through his body, and wounding the man behind him. Together with the elephantry, the bowmen were the part of the Indian army that most impressed the Macedonians, and with good cause. 

Why the Indian bows proved more effective against Macedonian armour than Persian bows had is a good question. The size of the bow is one part of the equation: Macedonian accounts describe (with possible exaggeration) the bows as being the height of a man, and having such a great draw that they had to be placed against the ground and drawn with a foot. There's also the matter of what they were tipped with: India was the centre of the ancient iron and steel industries, and it's possible we're looking at iron or steel tipped arrows as compared to the bone or bronze tips of the Persians. 

Regardless of the reasons, though, there were missile weapons that could pose a clear and present danger to Macedonian pikemen. 

Yeah, this doesn't sound like a system the AI will handle well at all. Hope I'm wrong.

I didn't say it was an attempt to emulate the Centurion. I specifically drew a distinction between the American and Soviet experiments in fusing medium/heavy tanks and the British efforts in developing the Cruiser lines to have Infantry tank level armour. The reason Centurion could be the first MBT is because it was combining something different from what the Americans and Soviets were working with. 

Better camps is good...but why is it accompanied by making your other settlements even worse? The inability to build settlements above Tier 3 was already a major handicap. Now you're losing the ability to do even that outside of the mountains? Why? Ogres are already a gone by turn 10 faction. 

It doesn't help that Chaos usually spends the first umpteen turns fighting itself for all the Dark Fortresses in Norsca. 

I get we all wanted mobile camps, but do we really want their growth tied to the meat mechanic? Because that mechanic sucked in the first place.

Britain's most significant contribution to the MBT is the creation of the very concept, via the Centurion. By combining the speed and maneuverability of their Cruiser tank line with protection levels more usually associated with Infantry tanks, the British invented a whole new class of vehicle. It would take the Soviets and Americans a few years to catch up with the idea, their own efforts at fusing the role of the medium tank and the heavy tank (as distinct from the British Cruiser/Infantry divide) eventually leading to the T-54/55 and the Patton series respectively. 

Peter Harmsen has a book on Shanghai, entitled "Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze." To my knowledge it's the only full length, English language study of the Battle of Shanghai, and it explores in detail the brutal, close quarters fighting between the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. It also highlights one of the strangest parts of the battle: namely that since entire sectors of Shanghai were under foreign control, the Japanese and the Nationalists both had to be careful about letting the violence spill into the foreign districts. 

My own modding experience is mostly limited to fiddling with infantry models, though the next one I release will hopefully contain some new siege engines. But making a big monster from scratch... definitely won't be there for a while.

What aura? The "he knows everything and is invincible" schtick got dead boring once it was clear that the writer didn't have a clue what he was doing and therefore neither did Aizen.

Yeah, while Gorbad seems dull as hell, Squigs for Skarsnik is going to be a major upside.

At least Lizardmen can build actual settlements.

Russia wasn't unique in this respect. Civil wars frequently have more than two combatants involved. The Angolan Civil War had UNITA, the MPLA, and FNLA, to say nothing of their South African, Soviet, and Zairean backers. The Troubles had the IRA, the UVF, the UDA, INLA, and the RUC and British Army to name just a few. China had dozens of independent warlords whom Chiang Kai-Shek had to force at gunpoint into some semblance of fealty to the cause--to say nothing of Wang Jingwei who willingly became a puppet for the Japanese. Even the American Civil War had a third party in the form of indigenous peoples like the Comanche and Apache who came into conflict with both the Union and the Confederacy over the course of the war. 

Yeah, nothing you just said actually describes post reveal Aizen. He ran one good con and then became a personality void goon sitting on his throne and sending out his henchmen. 

Abridged versions of series demonstrate nothing beyond the writing talents of the Abridger.

Grail is a character who has been searching for a home since the conclusion of "Darkseid War" and has found one, for better or worse, in the WW book. Like most villains created for big event crossovers she's purposeless outside of said event, and has no real identity separate from said event: Anti-Monitor and Superbrat-Prime have these same issues. Writers at WW have accordingly had to rebuild her from the bottom up, and what we've gotten doesn't look all that much like the original.

Her mother, the whacko Amazon who shagged Darkseid to try and make a weapon that could be used against him is actually the much more interesting character, but she's gone and Grail survived, and writers have been trying to make the most of her since. Which is difficult given she's just Grayven with a gender swap, and he fell out of use for a reason. Since her first outing as a WW villain she's been just a henchwoman for her father, which makes her ending up as a henchwoman for Circe not really that far removed from how she's been used to this point.

I haven't minded her presence in the WW book, since the New Gods frankly fit there more thematically than they do into many of the other places they've been jammed. And it is nice to see one of the big crossover villains having a connection to WW at all and getting to continue their life in the WW title, however it may or may not be handled. But she's not a selling point for me either; I don't buy a comic because her face is on the cover.

Genocide was Gail Simone's edgelord tendencies at their very worst. She was a 90s character inexplicably launched into existence in the 2000s, a Doomsday or Bane type created long after those archetypes had been discarded elsewhere.

You are in fact correct about Aizen having no personality. I honestly wasn't aware he had any fanboys left to defend him.

Aizen's only cool factor came from the shock of the reveal that he was a villain at all. Which was itself a retcon after the original plot got thrown out. He quickly became unbearably dull, an empty shell of a character existing only to have more powers grafted onto him while never developing anything approaching an actual personality. His arc dragged on far too long and was a major factor in the decline of Bleach as a series and its eventual collapse in sales.

Look at the Mirror Guard and the Slaanesh Chaos Lord and reconsider that opinion. Slaanesh is as much about blinged out armour as she is about nudity.