Warriors vs Heavy Foot

[RogerCooper]

I have seen in games that Warriors seems to have the edge over Heavy Foot. The one point advantage of Heavy Foot is more than compensated by the ability to shatter units without doubling them. Am I missing something? Barbarians shouldn't have an edge over Roman Legions.

[Brummbär]

One possibility: try thinking Roman and send in the Auxilliary first to disrupt them.
Afterwards finish them off with your legions.

[David Kuijt]

I have seen in games that Warriors seems to have the edge over Heavy Foot. The one point advantage of Heavy Foot is more than compensated by the ability to shatter units without doubling them. Am I missing something?

Roman legions are Elite Foot, not Heavy Foot.

Barbarians shouldn't have an edge over Roman Legions.

Should they not? According to the historical record written up by the Romans, who were writing their histories entirely for political reasons, for the home audience of Rome? Who wrote that they were outnumbered in every battle? In spite of the fact that Rome was concentrating an advanced logistics train to support an army based upon 1/4 or more of the largest empire of the time (and one of the largest of all time), fighting against at most a temporary force mustered from a few tribes grouped together with no advanced logistics and therefore little ability to support a tenth of the numbers that the Roman histories pretend were there?

Without the Socratic questions, though, let me just say that estimating numbers in Ancient battles is very difficult, and it is likely that Roman armies outnumbered their barbarian opponents in most of their battles. Just like the Mongol armies were probably outnumbered by their foes in most of their battles (in spite of the word "Horde").

And the barbarians were a tremendous threat to Rome. The reforms of Marius happened why? Because the Gauls broke a number of Roman armies in a row and were likely to conquer Rome. And the real huge expansion of Rome happened with the Early Imperial Roman army, where Auxilia (Raiders) were as important a part of the army as Legio (Elite Foot).

The army lists in Triumph reflect that. If you line up puff up your chest and try to fight a frontal battle in massive lines, you might win, but the barbs might easily break you as well. As happened many times in history. If you fight smart, and use all your other troops (especially your auxilia) and force the barbs to fight in a more complex battle, rather than matching their most common troop type against their best target, you will have the advantage.

[David Kuijt]

One possibility: try thinking Roman and send in the Auxilliary first to disrupt them.
Afterwards finish them off with your legions.

Which (as I know you're aware) is entirely the historical technique -- Imperial Roman battles didn't start with the Legio, they ended with them. And sometimes ended before the Legions really got involved.