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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Machetaso" data-source="post: 3585165" data-attributes="member: 52854">Thanks, nice to have an ally here <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Agreed, the Romans were brilliant adapting whatever they found to their own purpsoes, and they didn't steal everything either, concrete is a pretty big invention <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  They were also absolute masters as seige warfare.  Hiding on a hill?  The Romans build their own hill to reach you.  Hiding in an impenetrable forest?  The Romans cut it down.  Hiding across an impassable river ?  The Roman army builds the first ever bridge across it and goes over without even really breaking stride...  Hiding on the other side of the Mediterranian protected by your huge, unbeatable naval fleet?  The Romans capture one of your ships, make 500 copies of it, improve the design with ingenious siege weapons, and pretty soon your city is plowed under with salt...Agreed, all the way 'round.  Also, two biggies you left out:  1) Armor, the Celts may have invented it, but the Romans put it on every single one of their heavy infantry.  Armor is much more valuable in real life than it is in D&D (or just about any RPG) This 'staying power' Caesar talked about so much in his Gallic Wars was largely due to the fact that hardly any of the Celts had armor and the Romans did.  2)  Tribal societies didn't fight war on the same terms.  When the Celts sacked Rome, they took a big ransom and left.  That is what happened just about every single time the Celts beat them in Spain or Britain or Gaul too.  Same for the Germanic tribes later for the most part.  The Romans lost over and over and over in Spain against Virathus.  But they only have to win once.  If the Romans win, they might make you into a client state, but if they are irritated at you or think you are a threat, they also routinely depopulate your entire country, kill all the warriors and take away everyone else as slaves, resettle the lands with veterans from the Legions.  game over.   Either way your are finished though, if they make you a Client state, they appoint puppet 'kings', send all your able bodied men to go fight thousands of miles away in some backwater like Britain, get everybody strung out on wine, confiscate the weapons and put 90% of the people to work on the big Latifundia (farms) as Serfs or slaves, and the rest form the new ruling class.Wine, by the way, is another major reason why the Romans conquered the Barbarians.  The Celts had problems with it not very different from the Native Americans in the 19th century...  Of course though, in the long run, it was the Romans who were conquered.  Or were they.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Again, you beat me to it.  Salt was indeed quite literally a treasure in many parts of the ancient world, for a long time, especially for the Celts and the Norse.  They talk about it all the time in the Sagas.They also of course smoked a lot of meat and fish.  Another big one is honey.  They preserved Alexander the Great's head in it when they had to bring it back from India.  If you think about it, remember when jam and jelly used to be called 'preserves'?  Mixing fruit with honey (or later, sugar) was part of how they literally preserved some of the summer fruit harvest for eating later, often much later, all the way up to the 19th century and the early 20th.  Also consider the climate.  This isn't Miami we are talking about here.  Basically they harvest fruit and meat and fish in the summer, then they dry it, and when winter comes, it stays fresh-frozen in the cellar somewhere through the winter.  Then when summer comes again they can hunt, harvest, fish etc..  But there is even more to it than that, I don't think we have figured out all their secrets yet.  The Vikings were really into fruit, so much so that they apparently had it imported from pretty far away, straberries for example from the Mediterranian.  They must have had other tricks for preserving fruit on trade missions that far.EDIT: I just remembered another good one, i once saw a History channel show about how these re-enactors were trying to figure out how the Celts stored wheat sealed in these underground holes, kind of mini-cellars.  Given the local climate, the wheat should have rotted.  So they tried it.  What happend was that some of the wheat germinated, sucked up all the oxygen in the hole, then bascially you had anerobic conditions, and nothing rotted.  I think if I remember like 3/4 of the underground wheat caches lasted three months without rotting (wheras they would only last like a week above ground)  The key turned out to be to use this type of clay so the 'cellars' ended up air tight.Not me, I'm rooting for Brutus all the way <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Machetaso</blockquote>

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